Simple 2000 Vol. 26: The Pinball X3 / Pinball Fun

Developer: HuneX
Publisher: D3 Publisher / 505 Games

Let me tell you a story - a story of pinball. This is the creative and heart warming tale of Pinball Fun, a game with a title composed of two blatant lies. Sadly, this was the first ever PAL localized "Simple 2000" game I took the confusing plunge on, not knowing anything about the series of Japanese budget games at the time. The game was called Pinball Fun, it had a cover consisting of pinball machines, and the price for this potential fun in pinball form was attractive; that was all I needed.

See, I like pinball. I like pinball in an almost sexual way. It's the enjoyment of knowing my precious tokens will last more than three and a half seconds at the arcade! "LET'S PLAY THIS WACKY JAPANESE ROBOT GAME THAT TAKES YOUR PHOTO AND THEN YOU BATTLE" "Okay!" And it's over as soon as it starts. Good way to spend three bucks. A decent pinball machine though, that can last FOREVER. Well, no, sometimes it can end pretty soon. Especially when the machine begins to taunt the player with compressed, static blasting laughing noises set on a loop. That hurts.

So Pinball Fun, is it fun? No. Review over. The game offers a whopping three different tables. Three! How can you go wrong with that? Especially when the back of the box has a pink haired anime midget girly in a bunny costume inviting you to play with her balls. Pinball Fun, that's how you go wrong. Starting the game, you're instantly slapped right across the face with gigantic borders on screen. Not only does this distort the image to appear as if an elephant sat on your television, but it makes everything flicker badly enough to prevent extended playtime. Perhaps this is actually a good thing. A shocking PAL conversion not seen since the days of 16-bit consoles or.. Final Fantasy X, which, now that I think about it, is much like a pinball machine. Well, the compressed static blasting laughing part anyway.



Three tables! Attack of the Dragon, Operation Thunderstorm and Love Songs. What sort of tricks have they got waiting for us here at the Love Songs table? Well, there's.. a stage.. and a crowd. If you rack up enough points, a little girl made of about four polygons will appear on the stage, moving back and forth, as some muffled j-pop digs screwdrivers into your ears. Also nicely drawn images of the creature in question appear on the TV screens placed in the middle of the table. These are emotional, and they'll show her crying, or a shot of her undies, or posing in a swim suit. Keep in mind that this game's been rated 3+. But aside from that, what's going on? Very little. There's nothing to try and aim for. Usually pinball has you trying to land your ball in a certain area for super hyper whatever bonus points. Video pinball especially. But here? Naaaw. The best you can do is make the awful singing begin by lighting up all four spinning lights. This doesn't really take much to do and you get no additional points, just blood from your ears. The lighting on the table constantly changes though, that's almost nice.

Operation Thunderstorm is so dull I can only dedicate a single sentence to it. Can Attack of the Dragon save us? Well maaaaa-NO. I don't even know the point of this one. A dragon will appear if you light the same three torches TWENTY TIMES over, which will then sit there and do absolutely nothing. If you hit the dragon with your ball he'll vanish. Poor, poor dragon. If you insist on bringing him back a second time, your ball will turn into a knight which will hack at him until he dies. Oh, how lovely. Then uh, that's about it. There are caves with arrows on them, which I assume are meant to be visited, but constant glitches prevent the ball from entering them.



Every table has the advanced feature of letting the ball get stuck in an endless loop of bouncing from one bumper to the other, slowly. The physics in this game resemble trying to jump in the first Virtua Fighter game. Sure, this can rack up a lot of points, but it can also give you every possible form of cancer at once. A few taps of the nudge button can usually save the day, but more often than not it'll just lead to the ball getting trapped once again.

The only 'good' part of this game is the music, the Game Over music especially. It's almost as if the developers knew this would be the best screen to view in the game and matched it with music that was just as great. The much hyped in-game tutorial the instruction manual goes on about (if only to have an excuse to make the manual three pages), is the dry icing on the garbage bin cake. A handful of GameFAQs worst goons sat in a room and threw blue pens at each other while screaming about how to unlock Knuckles in the Final Fantasy VII snowboarding mini-game. They try and teach you to play the game via static screens of the tables with insider tips such as 'press X to launch the ball'. Never mind that the ball automatically launches.

Also featured in the manual is a promise of Pinball Fun being better than real machines.









Final score:
Out of five.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

This is a much better place for these than your journal.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yeah, for now I'm just bringing them all over from there, changing small bits and pieces along the way. But new ones will only be in here from now!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Nope, game gets no Michael Jackson lovin'

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?