Like the ever-present puzzle genre, pinball games are a natural for the Game Boy. You don't have to squint at tiny scenes or get blurry-eyed at out of focus backgrounds. Plus, the position of the controls adequately simulates the left and right flipper buttons. Pokemon Pinball comes from the same folks who have done the two other really good GB pinball games - Revenge of the Gator and Kirby's Pinball Land - and Pokemon Pinball has learned how to top them.
Brewed from the imported tanks of kids franchise juggernaut Pokemon, this game has two standard looking pinball boards. The boards are two screens high each and (on the Color unit) call themselves Red and Blue. The object is to capture all the Pokemon... just like every other Pokemon-based game, except that Pokemon Pinball is the first one to include all 150 pocket monsters within the same cart (without the necessity of trading with other gamers to get them). The complete collection is divided between the two boards.
You'll also travel across the familiar Pokemon world, visiting Viridian City, Mt. Moon and all the other venues from the RPG-styled Blue, Red and Yellow games. Once you've caught some of the lowlier pokemon, you can evolve them into cooler versions. The game automatically saves your Pokedex progress each time you play.
And how does all of this happen? Just by banging that ball through the right set of bumpers and tracks at the right time. Easy to talk about, harder to do. Since pinball games rely on AI-built gravity and momentum effects, it can take a lot of flipper-bashing to point the ball in the proper direction. There's no exact science to it, no clever cheats, and no way to give advice. You just have to play pinball well. So if you're not a pinball fan, you're likely to find this game just as irritating as other pinball games, both real and simulated.
In order to catch a pokemon, you have to send the ball up the right hand ramp at least twice. (Three times for snag a rarer beast.) Once you've done that, you have to sink the ball into a specific ball trap... then a shadowed pokemon will appear on the lower half of the board. Smacking the bumpers on the upper half six times will fully reveal the little dude. Once it's out of the shell, so to speak, you have to clobber it with the ball three times... and a fourth to catch it.
Now repeat that 150 times.
Actually, you have to perform a completely different sequence to evolve and catch the second and third generation pokemon. It is similarly long. Plus, certain pokemon can only be found in certain locations, and travelling between the cities requires another weird chain of events. Expect a lot of games.
Happily, Pokemon Pinball is very free with ball saves, bonus balls, tilting and other methods of keeping the game going. And there's a nice assortment of bonus screens, power ups and slot machine goodies. Pokemon's celebrity Pikachu plays a key role as a do-it-yourself ball rebounder. When your pokeball slips into one of the out-ramps, a fully charged Pikachu will shock the escapee back up into the field.
Pokemon Pinball is also the first Game Boy cartridge to have the Rumble feature... a miniature engine inside the cart's extended frame that vibrates the Game Boy. Sometimes it's suitably rumbly; other times - like during Pikachu's ball-saving thunderjolt - it sounds like a broken hair dryer. With the infrared beamer on your Game Boy Color model, you can even trade high scores with another player... but I don't know why you'd want to do that.
Pokemon Pinball doesn't have to be enjoyed as a do-or-die catch 'em all game; it is merely pinball after all. The random physics of pinball keep it (and any pinball sim, in my opinion) from being a true classic. But it is a nice addition to the top-notch Pokemon library of games.
