You have to ‘catch em all’ here, and this is Pokemon Pinball’s strong suite. No, the developers took things a step further. This isn’t just a Pokemon game in spirit. Why would you need to save your progress in a pinball title? Well, that’s where the Pokemon part of this title comes in to play. Besides this you can only pause the game and save your progress to end it which is nice for a portable title. There’s also a rumble feature built into the cartridge but it’s not particularly impressive. I don’t know how true this is to a physical pinball machine, but as far as video games go it’s a bit lacking. It simply isn’t a significant feature here. B bumps the table to the left but I was disappointed to discover the physics don’t care much about this. Up on the directional pad moves the left paddle, and A the right. Pokemon Pinball has all the typical control options that you’ll find in traditional pinball video games. This makes aiming the ball more difficult than it should be. What’s more is that almost all of the bumpers you can interact with are on the top portion of the table. I’ll try to ignore this fact for the sake of this review, but that is a huge oversight in my opinion. I realize that pinball is based on reflexes but this feels weird even by genre standards. I would have preferred less graphical details and a zoomed out view to what we have here. The ball moves fast at times so the viewpoint suddenly skews below and you can’t plan ahead as much as in other similar titles. When the ball is on the upper screen you can’t see your flippers. This makes gameplay not nearly as smooth as it should have been. Their worst offense is the fact that they consist of two screens apiece, and the view shifts between them based on where the ball is. In the meantime just know that the tables are kind of weird. Pokemon Pinball makes up for this a bit by offering different effects for these, but I’ll get to that later. The terrain is too rounded on both, and the actual obstacles you can interact with are far and few between. These feature two very different layouts, but in my opinion they’re both a bit claustrophobic. I like that this aspect harkens to the mainline games. Pokemon Pinball however stays true to it’s ‘two version’ roots by offering you two fields to play on red and blue. They’re called tables, right? That’s how little I know about pinball. Pokemon Pinball was disappointing immediately because it only has two tables.

With that said I did find Pokemon Pinball mildly enjoyable. What could go wrong, am I right? Unfortunately this didn’t make me a big fan of the genre. I’m nostalgic for all things Pokemon and so I figured this would be a trip down memory lane. It wasn’t until well over two decades later that I finally decided to add this one to my collection. No matter how much I love a franchise pinball is still a hard sell. Actually I completely passed on Pokemon Pinball when it hit the Game Boy Color in the late 90s. So how did I feel when Nintendo combined the two? Lukewarm, to say the least.

Pokemon pinball mini