Pinball Palooza: Spinball (Vectrex)

If you play a game on the Vectrex, you have to be prepared for something a bit primitive. However, even if you adjust your expectations before playing Spinball, this early attempt at adapting pinball into a video game impresses by failing so spectacularly at it.

Known also as Spin Ball or Flipper Pinball in the European market, Spinball only features one pinball table, this being one of the allowances you should make going in with the hopes it will at least be an enjoyable design for a pinball experience. However, you would be making a mistake in assuming things would play out like a real world pinball table or even a decent virtual facsimile, because the physics in Spinball are absolutely ridiculous. As soon as you launch your ball into play, you’ve unleashed what feels like a rubber ball with a life of its own. The ball in Spinball ricochets around the small play field at incredible speed and without any regard for the nature of what it hits. It makes some degree of sense that if it impacts one of the bumpers it will receive a boost of speed, but it feels like every single line rendered by the vector graphics must be a bumper then.

As you watch the ball zip around the table as it rebounds wildly off every surface it touches, you’ll soon realize that the two sets of flippers you control really aren’t contributing much even if you try to use them. The top pair can be justified more as a set to help influence the ball’s movement in the top half of the screen even if that purpose is rarely fulfilled, but the bottom pair of flippers are meant to be your means of interacting with the game to score points. However, since your ball is all too content to gain speed and change direction based on anything else it impacts, the chance it will hit your flippers is not only low, but it’s hard to predict due to the incomprehensible nature of the game’s loose definition of physics. Even if you do get your chance to hit the ball, it’s likely you’ll be sitting back for a while as it ends up doing its own thing for a while again, there being little reason to try and aim your shot or time it because of the chaotic nature of its movement and unreliability of anything you might expect from a typical interaction between pinball and flipper.

The flippers have a few other problems just to make it unlikely you’ll want to do anything besides hammer them wildly in the hopes you might be factored into the game’s pachinko-like devotion to hands-off action. The space between your bottom pair of flippers where the ball will be lost if it manages to slip through is far too wide. In a game where the ball is so difficult to exert any control over, you can routinely expect it to find its way into this large central gap, sometimes without you ever having the chance to even touch it with a flipper if the bounces play out poorly. Even if luck allows you to hit the ball sometimes, you’ll soon find the controls in Spinball are laid out in perhaps the worst way possible. The Vectrex’s four buttons all play a role, but the flipper buttons are for some reason placed as the center two in the row while the outside two play far less important roles. Your first button is the pause button, pausing the only way to actually see the score you’re passively racking up in a game all about accumulating score, and the fourth button is devoted to launching the plunger after you pull it back with the joystick. Almost any other button layout could have at least felt somewhat natural, the outside buttons perhaps being the best choice but even only having one on the edge would have allowed you to conceivably hold the controller somewhat naturally. Instead, your fingers will crowd each other as you try to play and your mind will likely slip into pressing one of the other buttons as it attempts to adjust to a more natural position. Your most important buttons are the most inconvenient to press, and they even essentially prevent you from using the nudge function tied to the joystick. You can nudge the table to try and move the sphere around a little, but it has so little influence you’ll never risk losing your ball to a tilt unless you’re really trying to force the nudge into having some noticeable impact.

Physics and control aren’t the only problems in Spinball. The play area is unassuming at first. There are a few bumpers to bounce your ball off of for points, a few drop targets to hit, and some spinners to fall through, but as we’ve already learned, your role in hitting these will be more as an audience member than an active participant. The one interesting video game aspect to the play field is a starburst that will appear in the center, the player able to split their ball into two if the ball happens to hit into it. This Ball Splitter can be triggered to appear by the drop targets or spinners, but it’s hard to do it deliberately. However, the greater sin of Spinball is that, even with your ball being as lively as a jackrabbit, the play field is too boring and utilitarian to make watching its wildness interesting. Even if you have the overlay up to add some pea green, brownish orange, and light blue to the table, the pointless jagged designs and misaligned object outlines are ugly at best and misleading at worst. The game already struggles enough with consistent hit detection, so adding in something that makes it harder to tell when the ball will touch something makes the overlay a poor addition all around.

While it can be hard to read when a ball will register contact as enough to initiate one of its wild ricochets, the only area where it actually seems outright broken in design involves the drains near the bottom flippers. One set of these gutters is adjacent to the bumpers and is meant to feed your ball down to your flippers while the ones that are further outside are meant to funnel it down to a lost ball. However, the barrier meant to separate these two styles of gutters is inconsistent to the point you can watch the ball pass right through the line and throw itself in the drain that will mean its demise. There are Ball Savers that sometimes trigger in these drains as a mercy, but the five balls you are given to play with are still likely to be lost in short order because of the many factors coming together to not only make sure your game ends quickly, but it does so in frustrating fashion after you expected to have some degree of influence over your success and score.

THE VERDICT: Spinball is such an absolute failure of a pinball game that it’s hard to point at anything it did right. The physics-defying ball spends far too much time bouncing off level geometry to give the player any sense of control over the affair and the flippers are not only rarely relevant but spaced in a way where failure is likely to happen in a way that can’t have been prevented. Even at those rare moments you can impact the action, your controls are laid out about as poorly as they can be and the outcome of a hit is hard to predict or even line up in the first place. On top of every mechanical problem, Spinball’s play field is just a complete bore that’s not helped at all by the overlay, and in a game where you have to sit back and hope for the best so often, you end up with no real reason to ever want to turn this game on in the first place.

And so, I give Spinball for the Vectrex…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Spinball’s failures are so thorough that if you wanted to make a list of positive features, turning on without error would probably be one of the few you could draw on. As soon as you launch your first ball into play you’ll start seeing the problems with its physics and how they constantly keep you from meaningfully interacting with the game, the score challenge more about what the game chooses to do rather than how you try to set up the path of your ball. It is practically taboo to tell someone to just mash their flippers wildly in pinball, but in Spinball the physics are so crazy and the ball’s path almost entirely out of your control anyway that you might as well hammer the buttons and hope that you can scrape the ball as it’s zooming past with its own agenda. Yes, the ball can slow down, and it is even possible to cradle it at times if you’re lucky, but the payoff to changes in speed or having it firmly in your possession is minimal when a high score is entirely tied to how the game’s mechanics play out independently, especially since the pinballs will inevitably exit play in a way you can rarely try to prevent.

Spinball probably would have still been somewhat boring if it had decent physics thanks to the design of the table featured, and areas like the lower region definitely need to be retooled to better allow sustained play. Unfortunately, so many elements of the game are done completely wrong that really the best course of action for creating a Vectrex pinball game would have been to scrap Spinball and start over from the beginning. Even if you were to try and excuse it all away since it’s one of the first pinball video games ever made… Raster Blaster and Thunderball! are both older than it and, despite having their own problems, are much more playable adaptations. There is no good reason that Spinball should have turned out this way, but since GCE was pretty much developing every game for the Vectrex’s library, they probably made something that could pass for pinball and moved on to other work, leaving us with one of the worst digital pinball games ever made.