One of the sad parts of the decline of the arcade is the decline of the pinball machine. I loved pinball, with its precision, its many different targets and goals (for many years, many more than in most video games), and its tangible goals for success (free credits are my friend). Obviously, bringing home the experience of pinball in actuality isn’t a financially sensible option. As much as I’d love an Addams Family pinball machine, I don’t have a few thousand to throw around like that. As such, video game pinball will have to do. I eat that up as well, so Capcom’s creation of Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball was just what I was waiting for. Or so I thought.
Flipnic, like many other pinball games, sets up with a series of theme tables, and you keep playing until you run out of balls and continues (the default for each is four, giving you 16 chances at a given table). You send the ball around the table, trying to hit as many targets as possible, and in general just try to rack up points. Basically, your standard pinball set-up.
Now, just like a real pinball table, it lives and dies by its layout. Some tables have incredibly cruel layouts that require a level of precision that would put a surgeon to shame. Others are too wide open and you have little in terms of targets. Flipnic tries to go all over the map with its layouts, and takes advantage of the fact that it’s a video game to regularly break the laws of physics. Can pinballs float in midair, jump of their own accord, or freeze in place without magnets? Well, in Flipnic they can. Capcom clearly tries to get in as many interesting layouts as possible.
However, this leads to one of Flipnic’s greatest problems. Because Capcom tries to fit in as many distinct tables as possible (switching between tables within a given theme by hitting certain ramps), many of the playing fields are extremely small. Considering pinball is a game of precision and the bounces of a ball, it really helps to have a large playing field unless it’s a bonus stage (and thus you don’t lose a ball should you foul that section up). The fields you play upon in Flipnic range from the smallish start area of the Biology table to the claustrophobic nightmare that makes up four separate areas in Metallurgy table. It is absurdly easy to watch your ball billiard its way around the table, take out all the stoppers you’ve acquired, and down the drop chute in under two seconds. Quite simply, small pinball tables invariably fail in real life because they’re too easy to foul up in. Flipnic overloads you with these tables, automatically insuring that a pinball player will complain about the table selection.
Another annoying aspect of the tables is that some have instant lose scenarios. For example, in one side area of the Biology table, there’s a multiball activator. However, should you not activate multiball or move to another area in the game’s time limit, you lose the ball. It doesn’t matter how well you were keeping it in play; you just lose. Excuse me, but who had the great idea of effectively making an auto-tilt if you didn’t hit the target in time? I’d love to see a real pinball machine try something like that, just so I could see it gathering dust.
One thing that seriously hurts is the gravity in the game. Now, I’ve played many variants of pinball with several different table slopes. I’ve even tried pachinko, which is similar to an upright pinball machine. And even on those machines, I have never seen a ball move as fast as it does in Flipnic. I swear, the ball in Flipnic hits terminal velocity in two seconds on regular surfaces, and will break the sound barrier if allowed to fall for any length of time. And for the sections that are vertical, like the hidden area in the Biology table, the ball is effectively teleporting around, and you more or less guess when to hit the flippers. It could be just me, but a pinball game that consists of mad flailing at the flippers to hit the ball that moves like it’s breaking light speed is not fun at all. I try to restrict my flailing to near-light speed video game objects to Dance Dance Revolution, although I’d probably get an even better workout trying to play this on a floor pad.
The game does allow you to select four tables right off the bat, each with its own theme, for standard play. Flipnic tries to go further, however, by making a mission mode. See, the game keeps track of how many goals you’ve completed within each table – each multiball, each extra ball, each bumper hit, and so forth. Once you reach a certain number of goals in mission mode, you unlock a boss fight, in which you have to slam a pinball into a boss similar to the ones found in Pokémon Pinball. Of course, once you complete that, you unlock the ability to go to the next theme table and so on until you attempt to take on the final boss on the final table – Theology. I’ll definitely give a game credit for guts, if not wisdom, in the idea of pitting someone against the creator of the entire universe in a pinball game. Good thing it’s not the real creator, then.
It’s worth noting that the Theology table, by far the most intriguing one presented in the game, is of course locked up at the beginning of the game. To unlock it, you need to play through mission mode and not only accomplish the required missions for each stage (which can be maddening, especially when you don’t know how to get to the part of the table with the mission), but beat each boss. So far as I can tell, the Theology table, the only remotely entertaining table in the game, exists solely to tempt people to run through the mind-numbing mission mode. However, after the mind-bending tedium of trying to clear some of these tables (particularly the Metallurgy monstrosity), you’d need a table capable of spitting actual gold out of the Playstation to make your trek through the game worth it.
Maybe, just maybe, I could forgive all of these problems with the game’s basic layout if it packed some solid controls. Unfortunately, the controls show a lack of pinball savvy that I thought was dead after I played Pinball Dreams on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Let’s assume, for the moment, that you actually manage to hold the ball still long enough to be able to place a shot – at best, you’ll be able to pull this off once every 15 minutes thanks to the fact that while gravity doesn’t act like normal, momentum still does. But for this example, you have the ball still, and can afford to let it roll down and place your shot. The problem? The flipper only has four real shots that it can place. The flipper is basically divided into quarters, and which quarter of the flipper hits the ball determines where the ball flies. Sure, the initial trajectory can alter this a bit. However, unless you’re capable of predicting the billiards-style movement of this game’s “drunk physicist” internal mechanics with the precision that would shame Stephen Hawking, you’ll have no way of predicting how to set up to hit a shot you want, unless the shot you want is one of those four (and just a word of advice – it’s not one of those four). For all the sophistication that this title would have you believe it packs, it gives you less shot precision than Pinball Quest back on the NES gave you. Good to see Capcom really use those extra 120 bits of processing power, isn’t it?
Also, Flipnic’s controls do involve table bumping, but this has two huge problems. The first is that it easily tilts when you hit the table. Tilts, in video game pinball, are completely inane. The tilt mechanism only existed in the first place because shaking around a pinball table exposes it to potential damage – and the title is punishment for that shaking by making you lose the ball. There’s no way to damage these tables, so there shouldn’t be any tilt. But even worse than that is the fact that shaking the table does no good at all in Flipnic. A table shake imparts no momentum on the ball and doesn’t shift the table enough to make certain targets more or less likely. The table shake buttons are almost like suicide buttons, which it seems Capcom wants you to use in real life. I was somewhat curious while playing this if the game’s budget went to the designer’s bank account in the Caymans.
Maybe that’s unfair; you can quite clearly see where all the game’s production values went. The game’s graphics are incredibly lush, and they clearly play with the fanciful and downright fantastic at every point. From the wild loops to the smooth metallic finishes on the ramps, Flipnic’s graphics are immersive and captivating. Sure, it helps that they don’t have to animate all that much. But even what is animated looks incredible (except the goofy key scene for an extra credit or unlocking a new table in mission mode). Basically, if my mind’s eye was to depict the ultimate pinball table, it would look in materials, if not design and layout, like the tables in Flipnic.
The only strange graphical touch is that for on-screen messages, like mission announcements and the game over screens, are done in a style reminiscent of watching old cellophane, like on television shows from the 70’s that haven’t been remastered digitally. I think it’s supposed to invoke the charm and style of the 1970’s, which was probably the heyday of the pinball industry. However, given the cutting-edge feel of the rest of the graphics, this retro reach feels out of place, and should have been ditched for something more appropriately thematic.
The sound is mostly forgettable, however. There are some voices, which are actually a bit muted and presented in a low-fi style also reminiscent of decayed sound reels from 30 years ago. Again, an interesting style choice in another game, but completely ill-suited for the rest of the game’s presentation. The game thankfully keeps most ambient sound to a minimum, which is one thing that the few remaining pinball machines out there may keep in mind to emulate.
I will say that the people working on Flipnic’s visuals and audio had a minor misstep or two, but went out of their way to create the best rendition of video game pinball ever. It’s such a shame, then, that everyone else associated with the game’s production fouled up so bad that Uwe Boll is considering making a Flipnic movie. The table layouts are terrible, the physics are inane, the controls are inferior to games made almost 20 years ago, and the only fun part of the game is behind so many layers of unlocking that it might as well not exist. Non-existence, in fact, perfectly sums up my hopes for Flipnic in general. I hope the graphics crew gets jobs at good games in the future, as they deserve it. Everyone else, all you’ve done is depress me. I went in missing a good game of pinball. I felt Flipnic wondering not whether pinball was dead, but if it was a good thing that it was dead now.
