Pinball of the Dead Review (Game Boy Advance, 2002)

When the Game Boy Advance launched Sega supported it in a very serious way. They clearly wanted to get all of their biggest franchises on to the thing. It’s easy to see why. The GBA was a tremendous success worldwide, and Sega was in financial disarray. One of the more curious releases was an adaptation from their House of the Dead series. Obviously the Game Boy Advance couldn’t support 3D graphics at least to the level a light gun game would require. Instead they made a spin-off. A pinball game to be exact. Pinball of the Dead wasn’t something I was really excited for. I don’t love pinball, but I am a big fan of House of the Dead. I wanted to see if the themes here save the experience. Pinball of the Dead surprised me with how enjoyable it is. Let’s take a look and suffer like G did.

There’s no story here. That’s to be expected. This is a pinball game after all. It is however based off of the aesthetic and characters from House of the Dead 2. That’s alright in my book considering it’s the best game in the series. I’ll start off by saying that Pinball of the Dead isn’t a great pinball simulation. It pretty clearly veers into video game land by presenting tables and obstacles that simply wouldn’t be possible without major concessions on a real pinball table. Luckily I’m not interested in a realistic experience. Those looking for something based on real tables or that plays more like traditional pinball will need to look elsewhere. Pinball of the Dead clearly isn’t that.

With that disclaimer out of the way let’s get right into the action. Pinball of the Dead simulates real pinball, but with a lot of over the top elements. You view the action from a skewed overhead perspective to give the illusion of 3D. Your simple goal is to rack up points to compete for the high score. That’s in normal mode at least. You basically just play until you lose all three of your balls. There are three tables to choose from and they’re all themed around areas of House of the Dead 2. These feature zombies walking around the table, and these are destroyed when your ball hits them. Each has different environmental elements such as tunnels the ball can travel through, bumpers that increase your score, and more. It’s pretty standard for pinball, aside from the moving enemies of course.

All three tables have a surprising amount of moving elements and technical hazards. One of the most moments in Pinball of the Dead is the brief mini-game at the start of each ball. You’re shown a zombie on-screen with crosshairs that move automatically. You have to press a button at just the right moment to hit them. If you’re successful you get point bonuses. If you miss nothing really happens. I thought that was a great throwback to the main games. Additionally you have hazards that can give you additional points. These are really neat. My favorite was the giant zombie heads that break through from underneath the table. Things like this make it clear the game couldn’t be replicated on a real pinball machine. What’s also interesting is that there are three different sets of bumpers on each table. This means each level is essentially three tables deep.

Pinball of the Dead even has boss fights. Yes, a pinball game with boss characters. It’s a novel idea that I was really skeptical about as first. To access these encounters you have to send the ball up specific tunnels on each table. Here you’re moved to an entire separate area where you do battle against these hulking monsters. What’s neat is they’re all based on House of the Dead 2 bosses, and are re-created with great care in the form of pre-rendered sprites. You do battle against them simply by knocking your ball into them. They don’t actually fight back in any meaningful way and the only way you’re going to lose is if your ball falls to the bottom of the table. They don’t idle however, and their movements make it difficult to aim at them.

Controls are limited, but that’s not a problem considering this is pinball. The two flippers are worked independently with each shoulder button. You can also bump the table with the face buttons but I rarely felt the need to do so. The ball actually getting stuck on something is an exceptionally rare problem. With that said there are some general issues with how this one plays. For one thing the ball is pretty floaty. It moves a slowly and feels like there’s no weight to it. Something about the way it bounces off of objects and even your flippers doesn’t feel natural at all. This is more of a problem for pinball purists however. While I did notice it didn’t take me very long at all to get used to the physics.

I’ll be honest. There isn’t a lot of content here. Three tables for a pinball game released in the 2000s is pretty disappointing. The fact that there are multiple tiers in each one does help, but for the most part you can see just about everything the game has to offer in around thirty minutes. This includes fighting each of the bosses, but I did struggle to get the ball into the right path several times. I’m definitely not a pinball wizard, to say the least. What makes up for the length is the sheer number of options. You can change the ball speed, the color of blood in the game, etc. That leads me to believe Sega didn’t just push this one out and instead put some real effort into the title.

Besides normal mode there’s also a challenge mode. This is basically the ‘story’ option where you play through each table in order, and have only three balls with which to do so. Upon completing the cemetery table you see a video of the locations burning down, and then the credits roll. It’s cool that Sega implemented some sort of structure to gameplay progression here. There’s also a boss rush mode where you face off against all of the boss characters. While I didn’t spend much time with this I did at least like there was some way to enjoy these battles without struggling to get the ball in the right section of the stages. In boss rush mode you have only three balls and fight through these guys endlessly. It’s not something I particularly liked, but I can appreciate that Sega did try to implement additional content into this package.

I think that the graphics in Pinball of the Dead are kind of a mixed bag. It’s very bright and colorful sometimes, and others it’s drab and boring to look at. The enemies are all drawn with pre-rendered digitized graphics that look really nice on the small screen, but I don’t like the basic zombie designs. Because they’re so small these guys are barely recognizable as House of the Dead foes. The boss characters fare better and you can tell who is who. Besides that small issue the game looks nice and has a lot of fantastic graphical effects. Pinball of the Dead even has full motion video. It’s not full screen or anything, but it’s still impressive given the platform. The soundtrack is also really good. It’s high energy House of the Dead rock/techno, and it really fits the action. The voice clips are impressive too.