Pinball Palooza: Kiss Pinball (PS1)

Kiss is one of the best selling rock bands of all time with an incredibly iconic look thanks to their unique makeup and explosive performances. Considering the many brands pinball tables began to use in the 80s and 90s, it’s little surprise they’d base a few around a band that maintained its popularity pretty well throughout that era. When I saw the PlayStation game Kiss Pinball had only two tables on offer, I figured they must be adaptations of real machines, but oddly enough that is not the case. That means, rather than having the excuse of trying to capture the layout of real hardware, all of the problems with Kiss Pinball’s design are by its own invention.

Kiss Pinball’s two tables both try to capture two different aspects of the band, one framed as a concert and the other embracing the personas associated with their makeup and iconography. Last Stop: Oblivion is, strangely enough, portrayed more like you’re a fan of Kiss or one of the roadies who help them out on tour rather than part of the band. Netherworld, on the other hand, portrays itself more like a battle with an unseen Dark Lord to claim the Kissneth as their own, although I have found no info on what a Kissneth could possibly be in game or online. The game seems to be relying on the most famous lineup of the band, Last Stop: Oblivion featuring areas devoted to Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, Paul Stanley, and Ace Frehley, but Netherworld doesn’t feature a straight adaptation of their personas for its more fanciful framework. Gene Simmons is still the Demon and Paul Stanley is The Starchild, but Peter Criss is the Beast instead of Catman and Ace’s name has been changed from The Spaceman to The Celestial. These changes were likely to make the fight against the Dark Lord seem more serious, but this excusable lack of reverence for the source material can’t compare to the more egregious sin Kiss Pinball commits: It has no Kiss music.

No matter which pinball table you’re on or how well you’re doing, you will never hear a single note of recognizable Kiss music in this game adapting the imagery of the rock band. Instead, the two tables feature constant generic guitar music that will sometimes be more dramatic or heavy depending on if you’ve activated one of the special scoring modes. I had figured it was being reserved as a potential reward for doing well, but besides a few voice lines from Gene and Paul, this game really doesn’t do much with the brand outside of putting their faces all over the boards. The concert set-up has nothing unique to their experience, and even the Netherworld board is working with the nebulous and ever-changing lore around them that could have quite easily functioned as its own demonic pinball table independent of any branding.

There is, however, one way you CAN listen to Kiss music, something the manual thinks is a perfectly good stand-in for playing tracks itself… playing a Kiss CD while you play. If you pause the game during play and pop the disc tray open, you can put a CD into the PlayStation and it will play that music natively in the game instead of the generic guitar riffs. While I do enjoy some of Kiss’s music I did not have any of their CDs to test it with, but it seemed perfectly happy to integrate most any disc you have on hand into the action, meaning you can listen to even the most unfitting types of music while playing Kiss Pinball if you so wish.

When it comes to the actual pinball play, the first and most annoying feature to consider is the fact that the game has a hard time keeping up with the ball. Both tables take up more than one screen so there is some necessary scrolling when the ball is knocked into the upper reaches, but the screen cannot actually keep up with the incredible speed your ball will often move at. All too often, the ball will fall to the bottom of the table with such speed that the transition from upper table view to lower table view can’t keep up, and since you can lose your ball if it slips between the central flippers when the ball saver is off, it is very likely you won’t be able to properly react to its many dives towards its doom. You almost have to predict your flipper movements to catch it while you can’t fully track its trajectory, meaning there are many moments where you’re tossing your ball around the board just to survive rather than angling for any important point opportunities or goals. Thankfully, most of the physics are tolerable enough so you can anticipate ball movements somewhat, although ramps feel like they resist the ball moving up them more than their height would indicate. There’s also an unfortunate necessity for table nudging to get the ball to certain places, although this is more related to the poor table design making it near impossible for the ball to naturally find itself in areas like the Celestial’s ball lock without risking a tilt.

When it comes to the actual table layout, both feature a similar problem where the table’s markings and words are so small and lacking in fidelity that I couldn’t even read some of them when blown up. You can eventually get a feel for where important board features are found, but this is certainly one of the areas where Kiss Pinball could have accepted its digital-only nature and design the boards to be more readable. The only moments the game really embraces the fact it’s not restricted to realism are some small human bouncers who appear to block you from getting an autograph in the concert board and little fiery souls that appear around the Netherworld when you’re playing one of its limited time bonus modes. There’s an odd magnetism feature in the Netherworld too that makes your ball move in improbable ways, but that only seems to negatively impact play as it can literally toss the ball between your flippers if it feels like it. The Netherworld board actually seems to be mostly better about not draining your ball, the concert table having many ramps and ball firing mechanisms that can send your ball towards the area between your flippers.

It is possible to maintain play for quite a while in the concert board though, this allowing you to work you way through the board’s different progression systems. You can earn Kiss points by hitting band member devoted areas of the board that are then redeemed in a merchandise area for big point bonuses, you can send the band on a world tour with each country asking you to engage with different parts of the board, and you can upgrade their tour vehicle to increase the multiplier applied to the timed tour bonus modes. Most of the table is devoted to targets and ramps with some bumpers sequestered off in the top left, an odd pair of flippers near that area to lightly influence the Paul and Peter portions of the playfield. The board gets pretty old quickly because of its few areas of interest, and the world tour takes so long to go through that it’s hardly worth the effort to try and complete. There are a few different modes to make it more likely you can make the full tour though. The game features a Novice mode with 5 balls and a long ball saver to start with, Regular reduces that saver and has a Powerball mode after a good run for extra points, Arcade is a simple three ball affair, and the oddly named Tournament removes randomness and the chance to earn extra balls to standardize scoring. There’s no real finale to either board’s progressions to reward persistence, so picking a mode based on whether you care about that or higher scores is less of a concern than whether you want to play the game longer or less.

Last Stop: Oblivion has the band playing a concert as its backdrop, but the Netherworld board is much more striking visually, mainly because it has large facsimiles of each band member’s head as part of a ball lock system that can engage multiball if interacted with properly. Unfortunately, while multiball is often a chaotic highlight of random scoring in pinball, the game already experiences occasional slowdown without it active and it only gets worse when there are two balls in play, and yes, the ball does seem to ignore the visual slowdown just enough to throw off attempts at timing flipper movements. Outside of the randomness of the magnetism, the steep ramps and odd movements in other areas of the board aren’t likely to send your ball hurtling towards its doom too often, but the objectives here are even more tedious to complete than Last Stop: Oblivion’s goals. The need to aim very precisely, sometimes with required nudging, and the extra flipper in the top layer having very little use towards those goals all make the action go on longer rather than helping you engage with the build-up to the battle with the Dark Lord. Surprisingly, the Dark Lord is never seen in any capacity, not even in the box at the bottom of the screen that displays scores and relevant visuals. Instead, you mostly just hear him taunt you a little and then grunt in pain as you do basic board tasks to defeat him. You do get some visual touches on this board like the Gene Simmons head lolling out his tongue for his associated ball lock and there’s one area of the board where the ball is absolutely rocketed about madly without it being a major threat, but it’s certainly not flashy enough to make the tedious play exciting enough to stick with to get to that underwhelming Dark Lord battle.

THE VERDICT: Kiss Pinball is neither a game for Kiss fans or pinball aficionados. The Kiss elements are surface level, only some board design elements and a few voice lines making it identifiably Kiss while all of their music is left out in favor of generic background guitar tracks. The two pinball tables meanwhile feature unengaging objectives that are often tedious to aim for while the boards themselves have a few means of trying to toss the ball right between your flippers for cheap losses. The biggest issues though are the moments of slowdown that upset the game rhythm and Kiss Pinball’s inability to keep the camera on the action, leading to many frustrating moments of blind luck when it comes to staying in a game that doesn’t really make you want to keep playing.

And so, I give Kiss Pinball for PlayStation…

A TERRIBLE rating. In the moments where the screen manages to keep up and the slowdown isn’t impacting the play, most of Kiss Pinball is just a very dull pinball experience with poorly designed boards. Even ignoring it’s failed attempt to appeal to fans of the rock band it’s borrowing imagery from, Kiss Pinball’s goals, point opportunities, and table features are all either dull in concept or placed in ways that make them unexciting to engage with. The autograph area where you need to hit the bouncers for example just has you hammer your flipper while it mostly bounces around this small minigame area on its own, but the ramps that are constantly necessary in Netherworld being so difficult to climb definitely drag out that table’s play instead of serving as rewarding routes to take when you can aim your shot.

Once you learn this was a ten dollar budget game back when such low price budget games were far less common though, the state of the game becomes much easier to explain. It was more about a quick turnaround here with only as much branding as necessary. Licensing the music would be more expensive and designing decent pinball tables takes time and testing. The odd part of this game’s development though is that its creators had made pinball games before and those don’t seem to be rushed cash grabs, but sometimes the push of a publisher can lead to sloppiness or mandates that weigh down the experience. There might not be much of a story here beyond this being a way to make easy cash off something that Kiss fans would probably buy and forget, but whatever lead to this game being released in such a state kept us from experiencing what could have been a glorious mixture of a band devoted heavily to its presentation and a gameplay style that often emphasizes extremely flashy visuals.