Pinball Palooza: Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball (PS2)
While some gamers detest the presence of any sort of tutorial in the games they play, I have absolutely no issue with their presence. A few extra minutes spent learning the game’s systems only really serves to enhance the experience, but while I do not resent them, there are definitely ways they can be done wrong. Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball’s tutorial is entirely optional and doesn’t really reflect poorly on the game itself, but it’s such an odd approach to teaching the game that I must share this curiosity. Flipnic’s tutorial is a series of videos that take nearly 25 minutes to watch and offer no way to speed up the experience, the narrator who speaks during it carefully enunciating his words as he explains pinball as if it was an entirely new concept being introduced to the world. Admittedly, the tutorial does briefly cover some useful information like advanced flipper techniques and Flipnic’s mission system, but a large amount of it is used saying a lot of words to say information that is either easily learned organically or could be conveyed with the same quick simplicity that new controls and goals are explained during the actual gameplay. However, this tutorial that feels almost like a 1990s VHS instructional tape both in its music choices and narration direction is thankfully not an indicator of the game’s quality as a whole.
Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball is a very experimental pinball game, the game trying to keep its physics realistic and reliable at some parts but just as happy to throw out whatever rules it has to pursue some new twist on the concept. There are plenty of small pinball areas that follow the formula of needing to aim your shots and avoid having your ball plummet between the lowest set of flippers, but other areas will feature antigravity pinball where it bounces between layers of bumpers and flippers, vertical climbs where the ball drops down rather than gradually rolls across a board, and quite a few areas that practically aren’t even pinball anymore. You’ll still always be managing something like the speed and direction of your ball and its movement is reliable within the context of whatever new formula has been introduced to the current form of play, so while Flipnic is constantly changing up how you play, you rarely ever get thrown into a situation where you can’t quickly adjust and learn how to handle the shakeup.
Flipnic’s pinball tables are split into a few different categories, each one having a distinct theme that plays into how the pinball will be played. Biology focuses on animals and nature with its board, easing you into Flipnic’s changes to pinball by presenting them in a lush rainforest setting where much of the pinball action features familiar objects presented in somewhat new ways. Bumpers launch your ball around, but these bumpers might call in butterflies who can be eaten by a chameleon if you hit its bumper. Rails will carry your ball around if you hit them up the ramp, but these can take you to entirely new play areas. Score is actually deemphasized in Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball, much of the game instead about completing missions in a level to unlock new tables in the game’s single player campaign. Some missions are optional, such as playing the monkey and flamingo minigames on the Biology board, but the red missions are ones that need to be completed if you want to make the next stage available, levels often having a degree of progression to them like the waterfall in Biology being frozen over so you can break through it and do a vertical climb up its interior. In an unusual but quirky touch, the game presents the completion notifications for these missions in a strange manner similar to overly dramatic bowling alley videos.
Missions help guide the play in Flipnic and encourage a lot more thought to how you launch the ball around. For example, the Metallurgy table takes place on a metallic board in outer space and features a spider robot you need to defeat, but simply hitting it to deplete its health isn’t the only way of taking it down. You can hit other enemies to earn a multiball to make it more likely you’ll nail the boss, but in another part of the level, you can play a huge shift from the pinball gameplay where your ball rotates around pegs that you can launch it from, the player needing to navigate the grid of moving pegs properly to complete timed challenges that will weaken the spider boss. Some missions can be as simple as opening a path forward, and the optional missions can often earn you the chance to get extra balls or continues, so not every task you’re asked to engage with is a huge departure from typical pinball play, it just has a great focus on goals rather than the point tally you’re still racking up in the background.
Once you reach the Optics board, Flipnic’s impressive table design and visual flair gives way to a few realities of the experience. Optics still has a few interesting ideas to it, the board seemingly made of solid light and featuring areas like the interior of a long tube where the ball can move all around the sides and a bumper only area where your focus is on alternating which bumpers are active to propel the ball about. However, the missions will ask you to loop through all of the table’s areas repeatedly, some a little too plain to carry the time you must spend with them. The non-stop area in particular is a little weak, the area featuring no important missions and almost serving as a trap that requires repeated well-timed ball hits to escape, only for it to be quite easy to fall back into this place later. This is also the third level where you head to the anti-gravity minigame where you fight the same shapeshifting entity for the final mission. Some of the tables you unlock are just these same levels with a new coat of paint like a sunset Biology table too, meaning that Flipnic is trying to stretch some ideas a little thin, but the ambition and creative design found often enough between revisiting old concepts means it’s not too much of a bother to retread old ground in pursuit of the new stuff awaiting you after.
Theology is a strange table type that serves more like one long boss fight split up across a few small levels. Here, a giant creature seems to evolve from cell up to human over the course of the battles while also shifting into a red skull to attack with fireballs, and that strangeness can seem a little disconnected from your role of just smashing a metal sphere into this otherworldly entity over and over. Theology is a single board and almost too straightforward because of it, but to make up for the short simplicity of Theology, the final part of the game is spent with the Geometry levels, the game’s biggest departure from typical pinball practically placing you into a complex game of Breakout instead. You’ll still be bouncing a ball around to hit objects of importance and clear missions here, but you use a free-moving paddle to do so, Geometry presented with a retro look more appropriate for an Atari 2600 game than a PlayStation 2 title, although some of the missions here add twists like UFO battles and a long vertical climb to keep up the variety even within this new gameplay style.
Last of all are the multiplayer options, these not exactly bad but not too thrilling because of their propensity to boil down to flipper flailing. Playing foosball or basketball with a pinball isn’t too bad, but the play area is flooded with multiple balls to make it hard to really act reasonably. Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball is definitely at its strongest when you’re in one of the single player boards where you’re always working towards some sort of objective, some absolutely necessary to complete and others helpful or interesting diversions that help get the most out of the area design. You can even pursue points if you so wish, and there are many jackpot opportunities and tables clearly meant to provide replayability even after you’ve completed every possible objective. Whatever approach you happen to be going for at the time though, the creativity featured across the levels and the value in proper pinball technique needed to get the most out of them keeps Flipnic exciting and engaging even if it had to play the same cards a few times to try and be a somewhat longer experience.
THE VERDICT: Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball isn’t really the ultimate pinball experience, but it is a vibrant, surreal, and imaginative version of video game pinball. The mission structure encourages you to engage with all the creative reinterpretations of pinball mechanics and asks for a degree of deliberate play that makes success much more rewarding, and while it does repeat a few of its ideas and not every play area is a winner, the constant design shifts continue to draw in the player with their creativity and nearly consistent quality. Synth and bossa nova music paired with detailed table themes give Flipnic a personality all its own, the game coming together into an intriguing interpretation of what video pinball can be.
And so, I give Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball for PlayStation 2…
A GOOD rating. Had Flipnic not cheaped out and recycled some boards and missions, it could have kept its energy and imagination consistent throughout, but even with repeat visits to familiar boards, their baseline of creativity means the return visits aren’t that bad. Flipnic’s real strength is providing an experience that always feels tied to the pinball base somehow despite the huge shifts to how you interact with the ball in some areas, Geometry especially feeling like a huge break away from the core formula but just as at home as the peg rotating segment in Metallurgy or the physics defying antigravity minigame. There is still plenty of core pinball to play around with that has its own missions to overcome, and even the strangest departures always feel like an organic and easily adjusted to evolution of play. Theology could have used a more interesting design for its battle, the spider robot fight especially showing that the game has the potential to make for an interesting boss battle and one with more layers than smacking the enemy with a metal sphere, but Theology also contributes to the game’s unique aesthetic. Even its odd tutorial feels like the extension of this otherworldly interpretation of pinball, the table names even making it feel like this is some alien understanding of the world that is being experienced by the player.
Had Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball continued to innovate instead of settling into a comfort zone, it could have very easily been a consistently strong experience for both players craving constant innovation and those who wish to master the potential of every table. Completing the same goals on two nearly identical tables isn’t as compelling, but even the repeated levels can be breezed through if necessary after you’ve become so familiar with their design while trying to complete them the first go round. Flipnic is certainly a special form of video game pinball while not departing from it to such a degree it enters a new genre, and any player curious about what this version of pinball has in store will certainly be rewarded with a unique attempt to explore how pinball can evolve in the virtual realm.