A generation of Gameboy owners will likely be incredulous when I tell them that this is not just the only Pokémon game I own, but also, now, it’s the only one I’ve played.
I’m sure there are people in the world who don’t consider Pokémon Pinball a ‘real’ Pokémon game but honestly, it’s got more in common with ‘real’ Pokémon than it has with ‘real’ pinball.
I guess I missed out on the original kerfuffle thanks to being in my twenties, and after that I never caught up. I had a Game Boy pretty early on, and quite a few friends got them over the years, but I don’t remember anyone owning or playing a Pokémon game. It was all about Tetris, F1 Race, Tennis, and Super Mario Land. I lived in a Pokémon-free bubble until the cartoon turned up on TV - and even then I was baffled by its popularity.
Since then, the premise has never appealed, and the RPG stylings only serve to put me off further. The only reason I own Pokémon Pinball is because of my addiction to gimmicky video game stuff; bespoke controllers, bizarre attachments, bonkers bolt-ons… I love them all. So seeing Pokémon Pinball in a local shop with its bulbous cartridge to facilitate the rumble feature was impossible for me to resist.
For a start Pikachu is all over this. There are other Pokémon sure, but the little yellow eponymously obsessed… thing… pops up everywhere.
There are also two tables, Red and Blue to keep with what I assume is a Pokémon theme, and, most importantly of all, the game eschews the usual Pinball focus of getting a ridiculously high score for one of collecting 150 Pocket Monsters.
Luckily, if you’re a Pokémon fan at least, it’s these parts of the game that are most successful. Both of the two-screen-high tables are simple but full of Pokémon stylings, the Pokémon themselves can not only be caught but also evolve through the power of pokéball and flipper, and generally the whole vibe of Pokémon seems, to a non-fan, to be in keeping with everything else I’ve seen from the franchise.
As a pinball game though, this is pretty shoddy stuff. Ten years prior to its release, the same developer, HAL Laboratories, made ‘Revenge of the Gator’, a simple but fun pinball effort on the original Game Boy - and it has better physics than this.
Not only that, but Pokémon Pinball is lousy with glitches. In the time I played, I had the ball warp around, get stuck on, and pass right through my flippers.
Talking of flippers, there’s something not quite right about the direction the ball leaves them, and it’s always ball; singular, as Pokémon is the only pinball game, physical or digital, I’ve ever seen that doesn’t feature a multi-ball bonus.
For the non-Pokémon fan this is all a little disappointing, I’ve always thought that the Game Boy ranges’ form factor lends itself well to this type of game and - I nearly forgot - I actually quite like the rumble feature, it does just enough to add to the game without being a distraction.
But the tables aren’t interesting enough, the bonuses are focused towards catching Pokémon rather than increasing your score and, with most of the references going over my head, I’m just left with a pretty shonky pinball game.
However, and obviously I can only guess at this, I think a series fan would be pleasantly surprised with the way this game has maintained the style and themes of Pokémon in a genre so far removed from the original. The battery back-up allows a full pokedex to feature and, assuming you’re into this kind of thing, that adds a lot of longevity to the game.
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