Pinball is a very common, timeless, and easily accessible game. It is energetic, kinetic, and known as good old-fashioned clean fun. Pinball machines can be found in restaurants, bars, arcades, or at any other social environment. After being a staple in all sorts of places across the world, it eventually made its leap into the video game world. Slews of pinball and pinball-themed games have been produced for video game systems dating back to the Atari 2600. More specifically, there was one developed by Sega in 1993 that fused together the simplicity and genuine fun of classic pinball with gaming’s newest hot mascot (only 2^nd to Mario at the time!) – Sonic the Hedgehog. The concepts collided onto the Sega Genesis, and Sonic Spinball was born.

        If you’re familiar, Sonic was a pretty ideal character to star in a pinball-centric game. He was known as the “blue blur”, and often enough in his own feature games could roll up into a ball and blaze about the greatly designed stages at mind-blowing speeds. Also, by 1993, Sonic was one of the hottest gaming mascots around as he was standing toe to toe with the great Super Mario and the Super Nintendo during the “console wars” of that era. Sonic had tremendous success in his debut game, Sonic The Hedgehog in 1991, and then some more in an even better sequel in 1992. So, of course, there was a call for more Sonic oriented games, and thus Spinball was a perfect diversion. And that is essentially what it is, it is a fun little diversion, not particularly deep, but a curious effort that is worth trying.

        While it may seem as an attempt to capitalize on a guaranteed successful franchise, it isn’t a bad game – however, it certainly has its fair share of issues. The gameplay itself should be faster, and since it isn’t particularly quick, or fluid, it is a tad disappointing considering Sonic and pinball are associated with pure, unadulterated speed. Suffice to say the action isn’t the sharpest, but it still can be fairly entertaining. The sound effects pop and dazzle pretty nicely, and the techno-pop music suits the action well. The controls are also fairly simple, as you control Sonic for a brief time before you jump into the pinball action, but those few moments you control him, are oddly sluggish. In the first level for example, when you fall below the pinball-flippers, you land on a little platform, and you must jump up to evade an angry metallic sea-monster, but the jump is just so slow, which is the very antithesis of Sonic himself and what he represents.

        It is certainly can be a bit more engaging than most pinball games because of its unique take on the established concept. However, that doesn’t make it better than regular pinball or even other pinball video games. While Sega tried to implement different things in this game, they could have used more time in the development stage, fixing up the repetitive action, and really hammering out all of the hiccups. I could envision this game having something of a “remember that one?” factor, but, it is pretty much forgotten by now I’m sure.

        If you ever find a copy of it out there, I’d give it a look. I personally like it, but, it could have been a lot better.

-Kurt L.

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