Game 457: Pinball Quest (1989)

     

Pinball Quest

Japan

Tose Co, Ltd. (developer), Jaleco Ltd. (Japanese publisher), Jaleco USA, Inc. (U.S. publisher)

Released 1989 in Japan and 1990 in U.S. for NES

Date Started: 24 April 2022

Date Ended: 26 April 2022

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5), but I suck at pinball

Final Rating: 13

Ranking at Time of Posting: 57/460 (12%)

      

Pinball has always slightly mystified me. I've seen the tables in bars and arcades all my life; I've played them a few times; and I've always suspected I was missing something. The machines are so complicated, full of bumpers, holes, flags, tunnels, and targets, each of which offers an inscrutable number of points. There are a seizure-inducing number of lights, music clips, and digitized voices on some of the machines. And to control all of this sound and fury, you have . . . two buttons. And while I know there's some skill to timing the buttons just right so you angle the ball in a certain direction or whatever, you have to admit that much of what happens on a pinball table is random. I've never scored 20,000 points by hitting some target and felt it was because I did something particularly skillful. I'm sure some people are more skilled than others, but even the most skilled pinball players don't have any more recourse than I do when the ball shoots cleanly between the flippers, or goes in the gutter. Do they? Are there secret additional buttons?

    

Pinball Quest suggests no. The only controls are the left and right flappers and the plunger, plus a button to nudge the table that never seems to do anything productive. I understand that nudging the table in real-life is an actual strategy, but it just seems wrong to me. Try that with any other game and see how quickly you get thrown out of the bar.

        

Only one mode of Pinball Quest is an "RPG." The other modes offer regular games of pinball on different backdrops.

     

I saw Pinball Quest on my console list when I drew Dragon Ball, and I thought it would be fun to check out. I didn't expect it would be a real RPG, and of course it's not, but this is one of those situations in which you just roll with it. It's a clever idea. The game is really a pinball simulator, offering three types of machines for up to four players. But then it also has an "RPG mode" in which a series of fantasy-themed pinball backdrops are integrated into a story about rescuing a princess. It reminds me of how I used to invent epic stories to go along with my otherwise-boring games of Space Invaders or Solitaire.

     

The Pinball Quest main menu, designed by Magnitude.

     

RPG mode starts with a cute cinematic of three goons bursting into a castle throne room and kidnapping the princess from her chair. Two of the goons rush off with the princess while one tangles with a castle guard. The "guard" is a round silver ball with a face on it--your "character" for the rest of the adventure. The ball hurries out of the castle after the kidnappers.

       

The princess is kidnapped while the ball protagonist fights a guard in the northeast.

    

Six scenarios follow, each with multiple screens. Your goal on the bottom screen is generally to knock the ball into the path upward (this usually involves smashing a door first). As you kick the ball to the next screen up, you can move your flippers up to a new base; if the ball falls downward past the flippers, you can move the flippers back down to the old location. But if the ball goes into the gutter on the bottom screen, it falls back to the previous scenario and you have to play it over again.

    

There are a couple of "RPG elements." As you destroy monsters, you increase the power of your ball, as depicted in a series of ovals on the bottom of the screen. But if you lose the ball to the previous level, that power is cut in half. Second, as you defeat enemies and scenarios, you gain points that can be spent in between scenarios like gold. After every scenario, you can stop in a shop and purchase different types of stoppers, which under certain circumstances can stop the ball from being lost, and more powerful flippers. There's even an option to steal from the shop if you don't have enough money. I didn't try it.

     

Purchasing flippers in the final store.

      

Scenario 1 begins in a graveyard, with grass, trees, and headstones. Two fenced-in areas serve as bumpers. A ghost comes out of the first headstone knocked down and offers some unnecessary instructions. Ultimately, the player must knock the ball through a gate to the next screen upward. There, amid more headstones and trees, skeletons appear. Once they're pinballed out of existence, their bones coalesce into a giant armored skeleton with 18 hit points. It takes a few hits to kill him and then launch the ball through the final gate to the next scenario.

      

I was doing that already.

      

Scenario 2 takes place on a gray, paved surface with concrete blocks and posts. A witch named Ziffroo (according to the manual) patrols the northernmost of two screens with a bunch of cats. Hitting them enough times opens the door to the next shop and then Scenario 3.

       

The witch and her cats. I knocked the ball up here from the lower screen but haven't moved my flippers up to the next station yet.

     

Scenario 3 has, I guess, a nautical theme. The action starts at the stern of a ship, with the player's goal to move the ball past walls and posts to the helm. A little "buggy" on the left-hand wall helps in that regard, pushing the ball forward every time it enters its "lane." Little goblins roam the map (until you kill them). If they can grab the ball, some will hurl it back to you and some will take it to the buggy. Nine goblins and a large goblin king guard the bow end of the ship and must be knocked away .

     

The boss of this level. I'm not sure why my ball is red.

       

Scenario 4 is the most abstract of the lot, and I'm not sure if it really has a theme. Tusked turtles roam around, if that helps. The ball must be knocked into a hole, which starts it on an automated journey from hole to hole, down a passage, around a spiral, and into a boat, which ferries it to the top of the map. Getting it knocked down to the bottom of the level is a huge pain because you have to watch the whole sequence every time you kick it back up. At the top of the level are six "dark knights" that attack one at a time and must be hit several times to destroy. They can attack the flippers and paralyze them for a few moments. Once they're gone, the ball automatically escapes out of the northwest exit.

         

They don't look all that "dark" to me.

           

Scenario 5 depicts the kidnapped princess's bedchamber. You must maneuver the ball up and down a couple of corridors full of flippers and stoppers to the northwest section. There, the princess jumps off her chair and periodically (and inexplicably) turns into a vampire. (I don't know, maybe the vampire is just disguising herself as a princess.) It must be killed. Then, the chair must be hit to reveal a secret door beneath it, leading to the final scenario.

       

Except for the manual, I wouldn't have known that was a vampire.

     

Scenario 6 uses the same kind of backdrop as Scenario 2. The ball is knocked north past a pit of skulls to the upper area, where Beezelbub holds the princess hostage. You have to hit him repeatedly with the ball. He spews skulls periodically, and if the ball takes enough damage from the skulls, it and the flippers turn red and get knocked down to the previous scenario. I think if you hit the candles on the edges of the screen, it increases your own damage.

     

I had a lot of trouble with the interface. By default, the left and right flippers are mapped to the left arrow on the control pad and the A button, respectively. At first, I thought that was crazy. Why not just map them to the left and right arrows? But after I tried that, I understood. I couldn't get anywhere with the game unless I was controlling the two flippers with separate hands. There must be some Psychology 101 reason for that. I ultimately mapped them to the two SHIFT keys, and I was all set.

   

Winning the "quest" takes maybe 30 minutes if you're any good and infinity if you're me. The problem is getting kicked back to the previous level every time you lose the ball. I put up with that about twice and then started using save states a lot more liberally. Even then, it took me a couple of hours. The final scenario is particularly fiendish because you can "lose" and have to replay the previous scenario even if you don't actually lose the ball.

   

Nailing "Beezlebub."

       

Once you defeat the big boss, the smiling ball triumphantly circles the princess a few times and leads her around the room before both escape through a floor hatch. Then, for some reason, the ball and princess encounter a giant magnet, half-grey, half-red. The ball hits the red side, which causes the entire thing to crack apart and collapse.

      

I have no idea what's happening here.

     

The final screen depicts an idyllic castle and what looks like the ball introducing the princess to his ball family. I could be misinterpreting.

     

The pinball appears to have a little Band-Aid.

     

I can't say I found it "fun," but it was much more a pinball game than an RPG. It was cute. I give it 13 on the GIMLET, nothing exceeding 2. There's really no point in analyzing the GIMLET for a game like this.

 

Thus concludes one of the more bizarre hybrids we've seen. Surprisingly, it's apparently not the only pinball-RPG hybrid. MobyGames lists two more, but Barbaric: The Golden Hero (2016) is only for iOS. Brave Pinball (2020) had a Windows release, but I won't be getting to it any time soon.