The Right and Wrong of Handheld Pinball

Back in the old days, the only way to really savor a Game Boy game at its finest wasn't to adjust any sort of contrast or even what kind of screen to have for it (after all, it only existed in spinach green upon its introduction in 1989), but to rather get some good light on the screen. Be it indoor, hanging off the back of the system like some kind of magnetic desk lamp, or outdoors, playing in the middle of a summer afternoon while I awaited my junior year in high school, light was important. And it was important for two primary reasons for the time- Tetris, a game I played rather addictively, and a little known game called Revenge of the Gator.

Revenge of the Gator was a three-level pinball game themed around alligators (the cute kind) and made by the folks at HAL Laboratories, the makers of the earlier NES pinball game Rollerball and Kirby's Adventure. The game was simple in design, and didn't even have any sort of complicated table ala High Speed or Pinbot. But, man, did it give me hours of fun. I kept trying to rack up a high score with each new round, only to watch my ball eventually land at the bottom and get swallowed by his ridiculous one-eyed gator, hanging around like a puppy dog waiting for scraps from the dinner table. It really was a good time, and it kind of made me think.

Think, that is, about what makes a handheld pinball game good and what makes it absolutely suck. It can't really be in the perspective, because I know that Revenge of the Gator uses a top-down view just like Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies, two utterly useless pinball games from GameTek. Perhaps it's just in the fun that such a game delivers. Neither of GameTek's Pinball games were that fulfilling to me. Sure, they had themes, but the designs seemed rather weak and they really came across without a desire to be played, you know? A good game designer knows that they need to have something to not only attract someone at first, but keep them hooked for the long haul, maybe even years down the road. Pinball Dreams kept me hooked for exactly 43 minutes on the Game Boy and the Game Gear COMBINED. Pinball Fantasies took even less than that.

But Gator I stuck with, and still own to this very day. It was stuck in a cluttered drawer with a bunch of other stuff from yesteryear, including such games as Flipull and, of course, Tetris. I had myself a little festival of Game Boy playing the other day on my GBA, just for the hell of it, and loved playing them again. But it's Gator that really had me going for a little over an hour, and now it's out of the drawer and sitting back in an active collection. Now that's a good pinball game.

Hopefully, the new pinball games on the rise, including one for N-Gage (Mile High Pinball) and Pinball Hall of Fame for the PSP, I'm sure, will manage to addict like Gator did and not fall in the same rut as GameTek's faulted offerings. I guess we'll just have to wait it out and see if it's something to flip out to, or if we have to resort to the good ol' days of just tracking down a pinball machine and popping a quarter in.

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When You Want Dragon's Lair Done Right!

When it comes to the subject of old-school gaming, I'm all over it quicker than Ted Kennedy topples a Washington bar. I've been into it for some time, and, over the years, I've garnered a few favorites that stick out in my mind. One of those favorites is Dragon's Lair, a 1983 arcade game that's basically an interactive cartoon at best. Produced by the folks at Cinematronics and put together by animators Gary Goldman and Don Bluth, the game turned out to be a whopping success, as gamers would lead the speechless Dirk the Daring through a castle of traps and monsters in order to face the evil Singe the Dragon and rescue the darling Princess Daphne from captivity.

Hey, Dragon's Lair and I go way back, back to the days of a Celebrity Sports Center tournament in '83 and me actually getting told by my dad that he was worried about me spending so much time on it and the homemade guide my friend Steve made. I told him not to worry, as I would eventually move on to Space Ace, released the same year from the same team. Dragon's Lair II: Timewarp came out in 1991 and rekindled my love for the franchise, and immediately solidified itself as a superb sequel with even bigger scenarios and a more dramatic conclusion.

Ah, but ask me how the home versions of Dragon's Lair fared. Whatever. In 1983, Colecovision attempted to release the game in all its arcade glory with their ADAM tape system, and it failed miserably, shortly followed by the demise of the gaming market. Nintendo came back years later, introducing the NES and Game Boy, and they too would see Dragon's Lair come around in some kind of ruptured form. The NES version, produced by Sony Imagesoft, was completely unplayable, attempting to recreate the game's scenarios into a side-scrolling format and completely forgetting to add play control or appealing graphics. The result? Bomb.

But then we come to the Game Boy version, also by Sony, which took a different approach. Instead of focusing on the swordplay that the arcade game is known for, it instead let Dirk travel through level after level, collecting gems and avoiding traps. Sure, it was more fun than the Dragon's Lair game on the NES, but it simply wasn't Dragon's Lair. Collecting blocks is not exactly Dirk the Daring's forte', if you catch my drift.

So would anyone do Dragon's Lair right for the handheld format? Or any format, for that matter? Well, Digital Leisure did release a DVD version of the arcade classic that's pristine, as well as a 20th anniversary arcade game to mark the occasion. But the real surprise came from Digital Eclipse and Capcom, who, in 2001, did the unthinkable. They reproduced the arcade feeling into a handheld format- for the Game Boy Color, no less.

Dragon's Lair was created by Digital Eclipse's team back in 2000, and it showed the dedication the company was putting into the project. The game closely followed the format of the arcade game, recreating the scenarios and allowing you control of your movements. Go the wrong way, a buzz indicated so. Go the right way, and a sort of "token" sound indicated you could continue. But the way the graphics were done, at the time, were astounding, as even the crumbling Dirk skeleton animation made the cut. Arcade perfect it wasn't, but it came closer than any Dragon's Lair port before it, that's for damn sure.

Dragon's Lair, to this day, remains one of my favorite Game Boy Color games, and I'll probably never get rid of it, keeping it alongside my Dragon's Lair lunchbox and autographed poster for some time to come. Granted, I'll beat it to death every time, but sometimes you just have to have an uninterrupted arcade experience in the palm of your hand to reassure our progress. Plus those Giddy Goons are fun to cut up.

See you next time on Into the Past!

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