011 · Pinball
In this episode of NEStalgia, we're moving to a different section of the Arcade. Get ready to flip out for Pinball! For more NEStalgia and links discussed in the episode visit NEStlagiacast.com
Pinball is a Nintendo-made table with Satoru Iwata's programming under it, and it surprised us by how much like pinball it feels. Of everything we had played so far, it was the closest to the real thing it imitates: nobody said "this is baseball, sort of," we said "this is pinball." The catch is that it is one table, and we all know where else to find pinball now.
What it gets right
- The physics. Sean was impressed that the NES could do this at all, and we all agreed the ball behaves like a ball instead of a video-game idea of one. Game A has a floaty ball that makes saves easier (and explains the higher scores), while Game B gives it weight, so it keeps dropping after a bumper hit.
- A table that feels like one place. The playfield is split across two screens, and moving between them feels natural. The little flippers up top work as a first line of defense and a mini pinball game of their own. It reminded us of the first Pokemon Pinball.
- More going on than it looks. Hold a flipper for a full swing or tap it for a half-tip. Hit the penguin, seven or three icons to lock in a slot machine, since the slots are not random. Make a straight flush with the cards and the colors change and a guard appears between the flippers. Reach 100,000 points and the flippers turn invisible (they still work) until they come back at 150,000. The game ends at 1,334,900, a number nobody could explain.
- The Mario bonus stage. Reach it through a hard-to-find hole and it turns into Breakout, with Mario in place of the flippers and a "lady" who is clearly Pauline. Lining up the colored numbers like bingo shrinks her platform. It is something a physical cabinet could never do.
Where it falls apart
- Rewards that go nowhere. Hit all the side numbers and an exit appears on a timer, but it only sends you back to the launch. When Pauline falls, she just reappears at the top.
- It gets easier the longer you last. With the center guard in, we all felt we couldn't lose if we tried.
- Just one table. Joe wanted another cabinet or round after the first and found it quick to get used to. Compared with a real machine like Black Hole or Theatre of Magic, it has no unified theme.
Beyond the game
The Vs. System arcade version has a dot-matrix style score that looks more like a pinball machine than the NES font, which struck us as odd given how much theme the NES version has. Looking ahead, PinBot may scratch the itch better.
The bottom line
Skip it, as far as the Essential Games List goes. Sean loved it but called it a five-to-ten-minute game that is not essential. Sam said later pinball games are more fun (a Pokemon one, Space Cadet, a digital Black Hole). Joe said no because it is just one cabinet. Mike, who argued for it most, still said "play it" rather than "essential" and credited it for staying pinball when early 3D games have soured. It is a very pleasant curiosity and a great showcase for Iwata, but nobody put it on the list.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Be a pinball wizard, right in your own home!
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sam. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Joe! And I'm Joe! I just love that. Joe from Venezuela. Yeah, Joe from Venezuela.
Joe, how's the weather down there? Oh, it's great. That's what I say for every time you ask me the weather anywhere. It's great. Fantastic. Do you know where you are this time? Venezuela, I guess. Okay, great. I just didn't know if you even heard us that time. That's fantastic. Let's get right into it, guys. We're talking about pinball. Pinball. Pinball has been around long before this NES game. Really? Well, yeah. Actually, pinball is like...
I want to say even the 50s is like the mainstream pinball becoming a huge thing. Which is cool because the... I want you to know that I hope you knew I was joking. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I just think like pinball kind of is older than video games. Yeah, it is. And that's kind of neat. Pinball is older than the video game of pinball. Yeah, it's like neat that Nintendo didn't invent the concept of pinball here. And that's important to note.
Yeah, they ported it from the game to real life. But this is completely made by Nintendo, this version of pinball. And Satoru Iwata did program this game as well. And Nintendo kind of loves this game. They show this a lot. It's appeared in a lot of different games of theirs throughout, you know, since its release. So I think this is something that they're pretty proud of. And for good reason, I'll bring up, you know, like this game might not look spectacular or feel spectacular anymore. But you have to remember, and I just want everybody in the podcast to kind of have this mindset.
Space Cadet wasn't around when this game launched. So that Windows XP classic that everybody has played, you know, that changed probably the way people think of pinball. That wasn't here yet. So this was kind of like your only way to play like electronic pinball in a way that worked. Otherwise, you'd be submitting quarter after quarter through continues at the arcade to keep playing pinball.
So let's get some first impressions, Sean. I actually I actually really appreciated pinball. I started in real quick. Like there are two different modes. One is just slower for, I guess, people to get used to the game. So even when I was playing the slow down version, I was really impressed by the physics simulation of this game. And I just I really didn't think that it could do this. I didn't I didn't really play pinball growing up. I mean, pinball, the NES game. But I think that the board is designed really well. It's a memorable board. I like that. It's two different sections. When you go from one to the other, it feels like nothing has changed to still feel like the same physical space.
I was really impressed with pinball. Yeah, I I agree. I it just kind of I do. I wasn't thinking about how this is an old NES game when I was playing. And I was just thinking, yeah, this is pinball. I'm having I'm playing pinball. I'm having fun. It reminded me a lot of the first Pokemon pinball that had the little, you know, the little rumble pack built into the game where it gets. It also gets split up into two screens. I completely forgot about that game. Yeah. Where it goes off the top of the first screen, goes on to the second screen. And like you said, just it feels natural. And one thing I really liked was that they had the other flippers on the top screen. So they felt like it was its own little mini pinball game up there, too.
Yeah. Kind of like your first chance, your first line of defense before you had to like really defend yourself. Yeah. And I don't know. I've never like you see the little flippers on some pinball games like that, the higher ones. But this one, I just really liked the layout of it. Yeah. Joe. Yeah, I think. So when we played, we played 10 yard fight and we played baseball. I think we all kind of said like, yeah, this is baseball or yeah, this is football. But for pinball, I think it's like the most accurate. Like this is just pinball. Like I think of all the games we played, this feels the most like what it's trying to simulate than any of the other games.
Like the physics, like like Sean was saying, the physics don't feel like a video game version of pinball. They just feel like pinball. Right. And so my initial impression is, yeah, it just works, you know, like to capitalize on Sean's point here. Game A and game B, the differences is in game B, they actually made the physics even more realistic, if you will, by making the ball actually have some weight to it.
So that's kind of the difference is like ball in game A, your balls kind of floaty and gives you the opportunity to make more saves and keep it up longer. That's probably why you're scoring a lot higher in game A, because when you hit the bumpers, they just keep knocking back into each other a lot in game B because of the weight. It continuously kind of goes down. I'm hitting a niche here for a minute because you guys are all like pinball.
You know what pinball is, but you guys wouldn't consider yourself huge pinball fans of like the physical cabinets and stuff like that. I would say that I'm not your level of pinball fan, but I seek out pinball. Okay, but here's what I meant is like I knew of like, I'll even just list games that came out before this like Black Hole, you know, like those games are much more intricate. And yes, they're physical, right? Like this is only so much limitations to a digital thing, but there's so much more elaborate than people think of pinball cabinets. Like so many people think the objective of any pinball game is just to hit targets as much as you can to score points.
There's like there are stories in these pinball games. There's complicated actions to perform. And like obviously it came a lot later, but like Tales of the Arabian Nights is like a game that I have actually successfully beat, you know, like as a pinball cabinet. And I just think that's so cool. It's such a yes, Joe. That's an that's an actual pinball physical pinball cabinet. Yes, it's a physical pinball cabinet, but like it just I'm just saying like when you know what what pinball actually has to offer.
Oh, this game does kind of feel like scaled back a little bit. Yeah, I mean, there's no like there's no box from Theater of Magic and all that. Right. Okay. Another great example. Yeah. Theater of Magic. There are like little things like you can get that.
I don't know if they were if they were trying to go for like a flush or a straight with that card. It's a straight flush. Is it a straight flush? Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. You could do that. You could. Do you know what happens when you get the straight flush? I never got that. If you get the straight flush. Joe, do you know what happens? Yeah. I'm trying to remember straight flush. That gives you the the stopper in between the end. No, no. That's the chicks.
The straight flush gives you the change of color on your cabinet. The colors will the colors will change on your cabinet to yellow. Yeah. But I thought that. So maybe I'm wrong here. I thought the chicks gave you the stoppers on the sides. But the straight flush changed it to yellow and put a little ball in between the flippers.
So you actually. Oh, yes. Yes. Sorry. I thought you were talking about the stoppers on the side. Yes. It does give you. So, yeah, there are these little objectives that are kind of, I mean, that you can aim to get, but they don't have the same unity of theme that a lot of really great pinball cabinets have. Right. But I will say that's, you know, that is outsider knowledge, you know, and if you're just a kid getting pinball and you don't have to empty out your quarters anymore, you have the ability to play it this way.
I think this is a, this is a revelation. Oh, yeah. It's time. Right. But. And also kind of to speak to the opposite of of what of what digital the limitations of digital having this game allows you to play that little that little Mario side game, which seems like something that would never be able to happen in a physical game. You know, take you to another little section of the. Yeah. It's almost like it becomes breakout. Yeah. Right. That's exactly. Yeah. That's what it reminded me of. I thought that was a great. I mean, it is kind of hard to get to that secret entrance.
Um, uh, but I thought that it was a welcome addition and it's, it's just as, I mean, maybe not fun or at least as intricate as the rest of it. But, um, I think you can, you can have just as good a time like in that bonus stage. You do get a lot of, a lot of time over there. Yeah. I'd love for you to keep going. I just want to really clear it up. It's kind of like when you have to get to like a secret zone, uh, on the lower cabinet, lower part of the cabinet, you get to, uh, put your ball into a hole essentially and go down to like a lower cabinet, which is something that happens in like a game. Like black hole. There's like another, uh, cabinet built into the pinball machine.
And on there, it's actually Mario. And like in the manual, I don't know, Sam, Emmanuel Smith, did you read the manual of his one? I skimmed it because I figured it's kind of pinball. They do reference him as Mario. So that is kind of cool. Uh, but they do not call the girl up top Pauline. Oh wait. Oh yeah. Pauline from Donkey Kong. They don't call her that. They call her lady. Hmm. Like from lady and the tramp.
It's just, it's, yeah, it's like, okay, I guess it's still Pauline. It looks close enough, but, um, that's kind of like what you do in there. And then it's like, we were talking about, it's kind of like breakout where it's still pinball. It's your pinball that went down there, but you move Mario now instead of flippers. So Sean, what were your impressions on the bonus game? I don't really know what the numbers were.
Uh, unless that was just like a combination of them was the, like the amount of points that you scored, but for getting the ball through it, it was just like a matrix. Tricks of numbers. And I was just trying to, uh, to keep the ball up as, as long as I could. I wasn't really aiming for anything because it didn't like when you hit, um, the floor that Pauline is standing on, it doesn't seem to break as you would expect. It doesn't. Yeah. So I was just, you know, having a good time hitting stuff. Yeah. But eventually it does break, but I don't think it has to do with you hitting it because eventually she falls onto your platform.
With the colors. It has to do with the colors of the numbers. Uh, they have to line up kind of like, think like a bingo. Yeah. They have to line up like that. It's really hard to do. And then basically when they line up those colors, whichever platform lady is standing on gets a little smaller and a little smaller. Right. Uh, personally, I got close enough to have her fall. The ball also was just going crazy. And unfortunately, uh, the ball, uh, the ball went out before I was able to send her. I guess I'm better at pinball than you.
The only time I got her one time and yeah, she just reappears at the top and you just keep going. I thought something would happen, but now you just keep going. Yeah. The only time I made it to the bonus round, my ball just kind of immediately started going like more side to side than up and down. And that's just, it was just a disaster. It was just rolling a lot. I was trying to roll it from one platform to the next one and it just rolled right off.
Yep. And, uh, so that's the bonus game. We mentioned the straight flush. There's also, uh, like a slots machine that you can get, uh, by going up the top left ramp. And that kind of does what I like about this slot machine though, is that it's not random. Your ball has to hit the, um, hit the icons for them to like lock into place. So you have an option of threes, sevens, or penguins. Yes. Uh, anybody want to explain why penguins? I couldn't even if I tried.
Uh, I just thought maybe, you know, it was just part of the Nintendo aesthetic. Yeah. I do have a quick question for anyone who can answer here. Um, there was, uh, once you fall down to the, to the lower level, um, there's another one of those, like try to hit them all sort of triggers. The numbers? The numbers on the side. Yeah. I was wondering about those two. If you hit all of them, an exit appears. Yes. What happens if you hit that? Nothing. You just go back into the, into the beginning and launch your ball again. Yeah. And isn't that disappointing? Yeah. I felt like I thought I was getting a reward or something. I tried really hard to get into that and nothing happened. And it's on a timer too. Like it doesn't stay open indefinitely.
So you would think that it would be something cool. It's, it's kind of like a easy way to get back up to the top because it's, if we're being real, it's kind of hard to get back up there. I felt like. Yeah. I think it's even harder to get all that to happen. It might be harder to get through that hole. Yeah. Uh, okay. And then, um, one other thing other than this, I mean, like, you know, that's already a lot. Like you got the slots, the cards, the bonus game.
Um, there were also those seals that would hit the, hit the ball. And every time would give you like a certain amount of points each time. I just thought that was like a nice little cool thing as well. And the seals, the seals might change colors with the board. If the board changes colors, I don't remember now. If you, oh, maybe. Um, I think if you go through that little loop near the top, they'll light up. Okay. Yeah.
That's all I know about it though. Uh, so I'll reveal something that I was able to do because you know me, I like pinball. Uh, does anybody know what happens when you get a hundred thousand points? No, I do not. When you get a hundred thousand points, your flippers become invisible. That's really mean. Well, your flippers become invisible.
Invisible. Okay. Yeah. That happened to me. They still work. I didn't know what was, I didn't know why it happened. I was going to ask that if that happened. That's sort of humble bragging that he got to a hundred thousand points. Yeah. That happened to me like 10 times. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Joe, 10 times. Wow. That means you almost got to a million points, which is, which is scary because at one million, three hundred and thirty four thousand nine hundred points, the game ends.
Yeah, exactly. I saw that happened to me. No, but it did happen to me when my flippers disappeared one time. I don't know if what Mike's talking about is real. That is real. The point limit. I think that was like, and that's kind of a weird number, right? Usually it lands on like a programmed overflow number, but one million three thirty four nine hundred must stand for something.
But yes, to to Joe's point there, the flippers don't like I think it's actually kind of cool. Like it's an additional challenge. Like you made it all the way to one hundred thousand and they do reappear at one hundred fifty thousand. So that's anybody's guess. But but the flippers still work. Of course, you just can't see them.
Now that would be like a nihilistic pinball game. The game is over. You've got a hundred thousand points. Leave. Here's a here's a quick question, too. When. So if you guys got the or that you get the straight flush when that middle guard is in there in between the flippers and then if you have the guards on the sides, is there any way to drop the ball? Because that's kind of what happened to me. And then I felt like I really couldn't lose.
If it hits the guards on the side. Yeah, if it hits the guards on the side, they go away. The guard in the middle never went away. It never went away from me either. I imagine it has to go away at some point because I felt like that actually made it. It was kind of like the opposite, like the longer I was. You would think it would get a lot harder and it actually got much easier after it gets rewarding. Yeah. And then it was like I felt like it was really hard to drop the ball because I had the guards on the sides. I guess eventually they do disappear when you hit them. But the guard in the middle is like, Joe, it's like you couldn't even lose if you tried.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Did anybody notice that you can do like two different kinds of things with your flippers? So you can do like a full hit or a half tip? No. Yeah, I believe it like depended on how long you held it down. Yeah, exactly. If you do a full press, if you do a full press, it goes all the way up. But if you manage to just kind of do a quick tap, it'll just flow just a little bit.
Oh, that's cool. That's really interesting. They put that in there. Yeah, I thought that again, Iwata programming so much into these games, like very impressive stuff. I'm just going to go right ahead and say that this is better than Space Cadet. I don't know. You think this is better than Space Cadet? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry, people at home. Everybody knows that like that's like that was everything.
Windows XP was like the preloaded game on Windows XP. All we had before that was Solitaire. And now all of a sudden you have Minesweeper, right? Minesweeper, come on. I mean, to be fair, I actually got really good at Minesweeper and started entering like speed tournaments. Guys. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Sean. So I'll just I'll finish this up real quick.
Obviously, you know, it's a Nintendo developed game here. It's going to have an arcade port as well. That's on the verse system arcade cabinet here. So verse pinball was a thing. Why would you play an arcade version of video game? If you're at an arcade with a pinball machine. If this was the first time I was hearing about this, I would have been like, sure, like that is weird. I would have raised that same flag as you. But you're right. I just got so used to it. Of course, it's an arcade game that Nintendo released on their verse system thing. But you're right. This is kind of weird. You got the black hole right next to you. The whole point is that you don't have to go to the arcade. Did Nintendo make like a digital skeeball game?
Yeah. Nintendo made a lot of stuff in the 70s. In fact, I think there's a blog that I'm just going to throw out there called Before Mario. And it's just like it's a great resource for everything that Nintendo released on the toy department before they ever got into video games. Very, very interesting. All right. But no digital skeeball. Yeah. But no digital skeeball. And for the record, that would be a game. Switch. There's got to be an NES skeeball game. Well, I mean, we'll get there, Joe. Yeah, that's true. I want to get ahead of myself. We got 716 to go. All right. But real fast, the verse system thing, it's the same game, but really cool.
The score on the side looked kind of like a dot matrix score instead of the like NES font kind of thing. So the score actually looked a little cool. And I thought that was nice. I was like, oh, it looks like the kind you would see on an actual pinball machine, which actually is kind of weird given how much style is put into the NES version of pinball, like to all like fit the same theme. And then they're just like, oh, but what if the score looked good?
So they did that. But that's all I have to say. Anybody have any stray thoughts on pinball? I feel like there's been a collection of stray thoughts. Yeah. I don't know. I just overall, it was very pleasant. Very pleasant. Okay.
Joe, you sounded like you had something. Yeah. I mean, as fun as it was, I guess I was a little disappointed that there was just there wasn't like another cabinet or like another like another level after this. It was just it kind of was quick to quick to get used to. So I kind of felt like I wish they, you know, programmed like another round in there, another cabinet to play. Yeah, I definitely looked ahead to see how many other pinball games we were getting on the NES. And it's going to be a while. But PinBot looks to be something that might fulfill our itch, Joe. Cool. And I'm not a pinball guy either. So this was just interesting to to play. Yeah. All right. Let's move into the essential games list.
And before we move on and talk about what the essential games list is, I just got to throw a quick shout out to Sam Smith. You know, our boy Sam over here, Sam the manual, he made the intro song and the essential game song that you just heard. So, Sam, major props for making both of those for us. Thank you. Sam makes all kinds of weird chiptude stuff. That's on a Game Boy, right? Some of those are made on a Game Boy. It's yeah, it's Game Boy. It's Game Boy software. Nice. Yeah. Very cool. OK, so let's talk about the essential games list. You know, you got your PS4, you got your Xbox One, and all of a sudden there's a Steam sale for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. And you're like, oh my gosh, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on Steam.
Not on Sega Dreamcast, not on Nintendo GameCube, on Steam. And you're like, no, I don't really want to play that. What else is out there? And you're looking and you see pinball on the NES. And you're like, whoa, I thought pinball was only allowed to be played at the arcades. I didn't know you could play it at home. Or on my iPad's P. Yeah. Right. Should I be playing this right now? Well, that's what the essential games list is going to tell you. We're going to take a vote. And by essential, we don't mean like, oh, is this like a holy grail for the NES back in the day? We're talking about like, no, does this still hold up? Is this like Duck Hunt? Because Duck Hunt right now is our reference point of what is an essential NES game.
Excitebike, well, Joe might have another story there for you. But it's on the list too. I'll tell you what's not on the list. Kung Fu Asterisk. All right. Last week's episode, which you should listen to if you didn't listen to it. That's just a plug for the show, NostalgiaCast.com. You can Twitch, Twitter, everything. All right, let's get into the essential games list. Sean. I didn't want to start this one. But I don't know. I really liked pinball. I liked the technology behind it.
I wasn't expecting it to be as good feeling as I thought it was going to be. That said, it's not what you'd associate with the NES. And I think it's great for like if you get five to ten minutes to kill or you don't have any other digital recreation of pinball available to you somehow.
So I love it, but it's not essential. All right, Sam. Yeah, I can agree with that. I think that it's a it's a it's fun. Like if you want to like if you can get your hands on it and you think this would be something that you would like to play, then you'll probably enjoy it. You know, it feels great to play. It's fun to play. But I think that there have been many other pinball video games since then that are just just more fun to play. Yeah. I think I'd rather play like the one of the Pokemon pinball games over this one. We could play a digital recreation of Black Hole. Yeah. On pinball arcade. Yeah. Or even Space Cadet pinball. I would. The freemium. I think I would put that over this one.
All right. As much as it pains me to say. Joe. Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, I'm not I'm not a pinball guy. I think if you are a big, big pinball fan, you might want to put this on your own personal essential list. But but even then, because it only has, you know, one cabinet and I wouldn't say this game's overall in general essential. I think it's interesting to play and it's fun that it that it works so well and feels so much like pinball. But in the end, it's just one pinball cabinet. So I would say no. Right. And I think that's kind of where I'm going to chime in, too.
I think Iwata programmed like the heck out of this game. Like, it's impressive. Everything that's in there for a launch NES title. But, you know, that's not the criteria for this. And I think that the limitations of the hardware and of the earliness of its development are what's holding it back from being essential here. It's definitely a game I would recommend playing. Like to Sean's point, what's the harm in five to ten minutes of checking it out? I guarantee you, you will be harmed by the first five to ten minutes of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. Okay. Especially if you're playing it on Steam.
Okay. Like people do not realize that some of those games like NES games and Super Nintendo games that matter, too. They're special. They don't, they don't like devolve in the same way that these early N64 PS1 games and Dreamcast games, the way that those have like kind of soured over time. Like pinball is still pinball at the end of the day. And that's something. I think that's cool. And that's why I'm going to say play it. But by no means should you feel obligated to. Yeah. I just want to, I'm just glad that we, we stepped away from talking about the early 3D, actually any 3D Sonic because that was giving me like Vietnam flashbacks. Absolutely. So that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time for soccer.
And be sure to go outside and play it yourself. If you have the time. For more Nostalgia, please subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen. And be sure to check us out on NostalgiaCast.com. That's N-E-S-T-A-L-G-I-A-C-A-S-T dot com. There you'll find links to the show and show notes as well as our other platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Thank you so much for your support of Nostalgia. We thank you for spending time with us and not Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter. And I'll talk to you soon. I'll talk to you soon.
