The Odyssey² Today: Thunderball! (Odyssey²)

The name Thunderball! sounds like it belongs on an exciting game, the title helped along by the propensity of Odyssey² games to append an exclamation point to the end of their names. On its own though, the name Thunderball! doesn’t have much meaning, but it can bring to mind things like the 1965 James Bond film or just the idea of an electrifying gaming experience. Learning that Thunderball! is just a flashy name for a pinball game doesn’t necessarily mean all hope of something thrilling is lost, but ultimately the game design isn’t able to support the energy of the game’s title.

Thunderball! has all the expected features of a pinball game. One ball bounces around the screen hitting objects to rack up points and when it falls down towards your flippers, you can hit it to send it back in play or it might squeak through and lead to a loss. Your point total in Thunderball! accumulates between five rounds, play ending once you’ve lost your last ball, and you can play the game with up to four players alternating and choose whether you want the game to go fast or slow. Slow is certainly recommended if you want to have decent control over the ball, as the pinball in Thunderball! certainly has the energy to match the title, ricocheting around the play field with incredible vigor.

There is a slight deviation Thunderball! has from typical pinball formula though, in that the flippers you control can be moved slightly left and right. This mostly seems to be the game accommodating the issue with its flipper spacing though, as the area between them is large enough that the ball can fall through pretty easily without so much as clipping the flippers. It certainly doesn’t help that the bumper arrangement seems to make that central spot the most common area for the ball to bounce towards, almost as if it was magnetically drawn to trying to make the player lose. Being able to shift your flippers horizontally allows you to catch it, but it seems to be a remedy for a technical issue rather than one that enhances play. I can see moving your flippers about as a fun way to spice up virtual pinball, but here it just helps cover up the game’s unusual collision detection.

Pressing the button in Thunderball! will cause you to raise both of your flippers, but there’s something odd about the difference between a down flipper and an up flipper. Down flippers will let the ball roll across them, hardly providing any bounce if the ball makes contact with them, but as long as your flippers are up, the ball will launch upwards no matter where on the flipper it hits or when you activated the flippers in the first place. It makes it fairly easy to keep the ball bouncing around as you just need to leave the flippers up, but that boils down your involvement in the game to just moving the flippers to keep the pinball away from its suicidal fascination with the center.

Flipper quirks aside, Thunderball!’s single pinball table isn’t visually exciting or very conducive to play. Two squares and four orbs serve as your sort of traditional bumpers, bouncing the ball around as they change color and rack up points. Two small purple platforms move back and forth that don’t give points but keep the ball moving and are the only object besides your ball and flippers that change position, although there is a constantly shifting square in the top center that will spin your ball around a bit before hurling it back out. As a matter of course you’ll be spending most of your time hitting these objects, watching the ball bounce around and sometimes land in the swirling square. Leaving your flippers up and moving them properly to baby the ball back into play will earn you points gradually, but four colored panels on top serve as the only thing really worth lowering your flippers for to try and take them out. A bit more intelligence is required to hit them and they pay out with the highest points, but score is a bit of a bad motivator here. It is certainly the main aim of many pinball games, but it feels so hands-off here since it’s mostly about watching the random bounce of your ball that it barely motivates you to try to beat or even keep track of you best scores. Another thing you can expect your ball to bounce off of is, strangely enough, the indicator that lets you know which player is currently playing, a number even present during solo play. It is technically in the play area so it makes sense, but it’s a cute touch and perhaps the most interesting object since everything else is just a basic shape.

One thing that also holds back Thunderball!’s table from being interesting is its shape. The typical pinball table layout is a rectangle that is longer vertically than horizontally, objects funneling the ball towards the flippers. Thunderball!, however, takes place in a box that is wider than it is tall. While most of the bumpers will herd the ball towards the middle to try and sink it between your flippers, the ball can lose its momentum and just end up slowly rolling across the bottom of the box towards your flippers. This box shape also means the ball is often rebounding off of the floor or walls instead of your flippers, minimizing your involvement even further. Having to design wide rather than tall is likely the origin of many of Thunderball!’s issues as it certainly leads to the general disconnect with the actions on screen, your flipper ending up too little of a factor in how points are earned.

THE VERDICT: The best advantage Thunderball! has going for it is that a bad pinball game is still pinball. As long as you capture the basics, it may end up dull, repetitive, or uninvolved, but it still maintains that small appeal of hitting a ball and seeing your score go up as it bounces around. Thunderball!’s bland play field, odd physics, and visually unexciting presentation make it one of the poorest choices for virtual pinball though and one that certainly didn’t deserve such an energetic title.

And so, I give Thunderball! for the Magnavox Odyssey²…

A TERRIBLE rating. Even though Thunderball!’s visuals are uninspired, they’re pretty much the core of the game, as you spend most of your time watching the ball bounce between basic shapes and your score gradually goes up because of it. Wiggle your flippers a little to keep the ball away from the middle and sit back and watch the bouncing happen again. The only goal is to keep the ball in play, breaking the panels gets you more points but it’s hardly worth risking since just leaving your flippers up will gradually pay off anyway, and the box shape of the play field means that the ball spends much too long away from your involvement to really keep you interested. Thunderball! looks like it fared better than Odyssey²’s other pinball game Pinball! since that never coalesced beyond a prototype, but the system clearly isn’t up to snuff in providing an engaging pinball experience and thus the adaptations seem destined to be poor.

When the most exciting part of a game is it’s title, clearly something went wrong in the design department. Thunderball! only managed to bring a shell of the pinball experience to the Odyssey² with barely any of the substance that makes both physical and virtual versions of pinball fun.