Pinball Palooza: Bumper Bash (Atari 2600)

The Atari 2600’s paddle controller allowed it to bring home the experience of many arcade games, titles based on hits like Pong and Breakout enjoying the dial-like control method that would be familiar to anyone who played those kinds of games before. Pinball machines don’t really have an analogue to the paddle controller even though some players do call the flippers “paddles” on occasion, but Bumper Bash did notice this alternate controller for the system had an advantage the simple joystick controller did not. The joystick controller only had one button, while the paddle controller has TWO.

The two buttons were a perfect fit for the two flippers you use to play a typical game of pinball, and since Bumper Bash only had the one table on offer, it might seem like you’d have all the equipment you need to play. However, there were certainly places where the game could have been better served by including the paddle from time to time. Launching your ball into play with the plunger involves raising or lowering it with the buttons when the paddle could have been more dynamic, and the game completely lacks any sort of nudging feature, something the manual assures you isn’t a problem since the game is supposedly a fair test of your reflexes. However, once you see the physics at play in Bumper Bash, you’ll quickly find the lack of nudging to be entirely detrimental to the experience.

 

Bumper Bash’s table has one major flaw that could have been fixed if you could add that extra burst of movement to a ball, that being the fact the ball can just get lodged in a spot and refuse to leave it. It’s not too common, but common enough that some play sessions will have to end prematurely as you literally have no answer to your ball coming to a dead stop. You are given five balls to try and earn the highest score you can, but you better hope a lucky run isn’t abruptly ended as the momentum of the ball immediately disappears if it hits the right spot. It’s not too surprising that sometimes the ball just seems to give up and take a break though, because during other moments in play it bounces around with little regard towards being realistic. The two purple bumpers in the center meant to send the ball flying sometimes instead seem to forget they’re meant to repel the ball, and even when they do send it flying it might not be at the most logical angle. Oddly enough, the table’s plain walls can seem bouncier than the part of the table literally designed to give the ball a burst of speed when touched, but it’s hard to claim any part of the play area is consistent in how it interacts with its most important moving part.

While it’s not as chaotic as a game like Spinball due to having some sense of control despite the pinball’s manic movement, Bumper Bash does involve a fair amount of hoping that the ball’s often unusual bounces work out in your favor. The drains on the side where you can lose a ball are left open and the space between the two flippers is wide enough for a ball to fall through without you being able to react to it, and there are definitely times where the ball will enter play and end up lost before you even had the possibility of hitting it with your flippers. The ball does seem to have some force that drags it down as it remembers it should be near your flippers occasionally, and as long as the plunger has enough force you won’t see it dropping right into the drain immediately too often, but the bounciness of the play field does make it aggravating that the game won’t give you any protection from instant loss until you can spell ACE in the top area of the table. The three yellow lanes you need to pass your ball through to spell ACE can’t be directly aimed for since the two purple bumpers and a red diamond obstruction sit between your flippers and these helpful areas, and the fact bouncing is inconsistent means these are definitely about lucking out and getting the side line protectors purely by chance.

 

If you are fortunate enough to get the side protection, you might actually get a decent stretch going where you aren’t losing your ball to bad physics. Your flippers only play a small part in the action, but you can try to do things like hit the ball through the brownish spinner near the middle for points based on the changing number beneath it, and the targets on the sides can be knocked into for points, a set of them even flashing to indicate they’re worth extra and adding a little bit of flair to a board otherwise steeped in blues, purples, and yellows. It’s certainly a board focused on form over flashiness, but that form isn’t really reliable enough to play in, especially since even your flippers are prone to problems. The way the ball reacts to your use of them is unsurprisingly unreliable, the ball sometimes treating your movement of them as if it was just another stationary wall to ricochet off of while other times it will be sent flying off in ways different than the expected flight path. Many times hitting the ball with even the tip of the flipper would oddly enough cause it to move backwards and into the funnel connected to the flipper. It seemed more likely that a ball would go where desired if the back of the flipper was used instead of the end of it, and while you can do things like cradle the ball to bring it to an incredibly abrupt stop for some aiming, that effort is wasted when the flippers can’t even stick to a consistent script.

THE VERDICT: While Bumper Bash’s physics occasionally make sense, that’s hardly the level of responsiveness you’d find in even the simplest of pinball simulations. Predicting the bounce path of your ball is a fool’s errand and prevents any degree of strategy when it comes to earning points in this primitive attempt to adapt pinball into a virtual form, and while you can sometimes get your flippers involved in the action, high scores lose their luster when you’re relying so much on the unpredictable. The single table you can play looks decent, but any enjoyment you can find when the pinball works well enough is ruined the moment it takes off and does its own thing.

 

And so, I give Bumper Bash for Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. Without taking out a notepad for some physics expert to tally every little flaw in the bounce angles of Bumper Bash, its hard to really express the odd frequency of its failures. Sometimes it will behave and let you actually try and earn some points with the targets or bumpers, others it decides it doesn’t want human intervention and will ricochet the ball around as it pleases before slamming it down the drain where you can’t touch it. Sometimes it will seem like the ball will never come to a stop, and then you play again later and you have to reset after runs end to an immediate hitching of the ball in an odd spot. That mix of randomness and predictability can be oddly interesting at times. Like catching a wild animal, you watch that ball move around in ways you can only try to predict, waiting for the chance to finally exert your influence over it. The point accumulation is mostly out of your hands, as is that all important spelling of ACE, but it does feel like you at least often get a say in keeping it in play and launching it back towards the bouncy walls that will truly determine how high your score will get.

 

Bumper Bash would definitely benefit from nudging to give you a greater sense of influence over the action and help avoid premature ends, but it could also use some other touches like greater leniency in the ball savers and of course just some more reliable physics. Even if they were boiled down to something basic they should at least be reliable, but Bumper Bash was of course one of the first pinball video games and thus trying to get down reliable physics at all was still a tall order. The movement of the ball can sometimes seem reasonable enough that you can squeak out a moment where you can interact with the table as you might expect, but Bumper Bash’s time of production inevitably meant it would fail at its attempt to provide a reasonable pinball simulation.