I finally beat Sonic Spinball. I've been playing this game every so often since it first came out. I always liked it, but I could never get past level 2. Actually, I got to level 3 once in the early 2000s, but that must have been sheer luck, because I was never able to replicate that feat. But eventually I overheard that the game only had four levels, so I sat down and forced myself to do it.
Holy hell this game is hard. Maybe I just suck at pinball games, but I like this one more because it has light platforming elements and you can actually control the ball a little bit like you can in the main Sonic games. So I kept trying. I do think the game is mostly fair, for a pinball game. I always hate that in pinball sometimes there are bounces that just seem impossible to survive, like when the ball goes directly between the flippers so you can't do anything about it. I guess the solution is to not let the ball bounce that way, but frankly, that's a ridiculous amount of super fast geometry skill that I don't have, and I can hardly imagine having. But that's every pinball game, and this one has it less than others that I've played.
So my only real complaint is the final boss. The bosses are fun, but the final one is bullshit.
>He sits in the middle of the room and is only vulnerable on top, so you need to go around him.
>That's perfectly fair, too easy, even, but he has two traps on each side that will just catch you unless you deactivate them. The second layer of traps will shoot you right out of the boss room, so you'll have to work your way back up to the top of the stage.
>There's a little button on the bottom of the boss that you need to hit multiple times to deactivate the traps.
>But the game scrolls, and you can't see the traps at the same time you can see the flippers and button
>and the game never tells you how many times you need to hit the button
>and if you hit the button after the traps are deactivated, they re-activate
>So basically you need to guess how many hits it takes to de-activate the traps, and if you guess wrong, the traps catch you, and the second layer of traps can throw you right out of the boss room.
>Even if you guess right and de-activate the traps, they're on a timer, so they'll come back after some time
>The number of times you need to hit the button the first time is different than the number of times you need to hit the button to de-activate the traps on later attempts.
If you could see the whole boss room at once, the boss would be fine, maybe even too easy. But you can't. So it's total bullshit.
That said, I do enjoy the game. I love that the levels are huge and don't feel like simple pinball tables. They feel like video game levels. I wish more pinball games would take this approach. I never understood why you'd make a pinball game that just replicates a real table. There is so much more you can do with the video game format. Sonic Adventure does slightly more with its pinball tables, but it obviously doesn't compare to how far Spinball goes with the concept. Sonic Pinball Party is just boring because it's just realistic tables. Spinball might only have four levels, but they're huge. You explore them. They feel like video game adventures. Sonic Pinball Party just has like two pinball tables. Fucking boring. I almost bought it back in the day thinking it was gonna be a sequel to Spinball. If I had bought it, I'd be pissed.
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