Pinball Palooza: Alien Crush (TurboGrafx-16)
When it comes to video game pinball, the Crush Pinball series is certainly one of the better known examples. Compile’s Crush games brought striking visuals and video game mechanics to solid original pinball tables, and when Turbografx-16 games started to hit the Wii Virtual Console, they were among some of the most commonly recommended titles from the classic system. Alien Crush was the start of this interesting little pinball series, and right out of the gate, its design approach to its singular pinball table oozes style.
Alien Crush uses a two screen pinball table that looks like it was almost entirely constructed from organic matter. The borders of the table are covered in bone, the background is a deep purple wall of flesh that looks like minced beef, and even the launch tube to put your ball into play evokes a long throat. A large brain sits in the top left corner and the bottom of the top screen contains a set of human skulls, one with still a small strip of reddish flesh still clinging to it. Definitely the most striking feature is the creature’s head on the lower screen, a multi-eyed monstrosity nestled into the meaty board texture and both reacting to and interfering with play. While there are loose aliens to be found in areas of the board and through other means, the board in Alien Crush definitely aims to feel alien self, the few metallic parts found within it being the flippers you’ll use to smash your pinball into the many monsters who inhabit this odd place.
Before the game starts, you can choose between a set of two music tracks to play and pick what you wish your ball speed to be. The slow option is certainly much more manageable but feels a bit too slow at times, especially if your ball finds itself rebounding between table parts for a while. The fast setting is not at all daunting despite being nominally harder to keep up with, and the extra degree of excitement by having your ball move around at a quicker pace doesn’t feel like it comes with a more punishing difficulty. In fact, the pinball physics at play in Alien Crush aren’t quite accurate, but that’s usually in your favor. Hitting the ball in the general area you want it to go almost always goes well despite needing some degree of skill to properly hit specific targets, but when the ball is falling down towards the drains, the game seems to cheat a little to help you out. Even when it would be justified in draining to the sides and causing you to lose one of your balls, Alien Crush seems to have it try to stay in play. It won’t pull off a miracle to do so, but even before you feel the urge to nudge the play field it might have just slipped back into a safe spot. Nudging is free to perform as you please without activating a tilt state, but the consequence of game generosity seems to be that nudging doesn’t influence the ball all too much.
Alien Crush doesn’t have any major goal outside of just getting the most points possible before you lose all your balls, but the board design and ways to play bonus games or earn jackpots help keep play active and interesting. The lower screen features two slingshot bumpers near the flippers as many tables do, but if they suffer enough abuse in a short amount of time, a bug-like alien bursts out and crawls across the table to be killed for extra points. Green heads on the left and what look like Alien’s xenomorphs on the right are targets that can be knocked down either to add to the multiplier or cause the central face to spit out a few aliens who scramble across the board. It’s fairly easy to keep your ball active in this region and aim for the targets set up for you, and when that central alien opens its mouth, you can pop your ball in there for some huge point surges or to play a bonus game. In fact, the design of the area can mean that mouth opens a bit too often if you’re good at aiming, leading to frequent starts and stops as you feed the alien, see a point bonus total up, and then have the ball sent back into play. In some ways that frequency can help though, because hitting the pinball out of the lower screen naturally is often hampered by a set of three large eyes that border the top of that screen, only extremely good shots able to get around those eyes and the barriers on the top screen as well. If you feed the head though, the ball will be shot out on the top screen, skipping the need for a skill shot.
Transitioning between screens isn’t a perfect process, the game often blacking out for a split second as the transfer is made and it being quite easy to lose your ball in the top screen but hard to get it back up there, but the top screen has plenty of interesting targets to make being up there an exciting time. A trio of bumpers in the middle can be rearranged by hitting an eyeball on the side, some arrangements great for constant high-scoring ricochet sessions. A tentacled mouth will sometimes come to life and snatch up your ball to give you a surge of points. A loop near the brain is often filled with little white slime bits that give you points and will drop you in the top lanes to try and light them up, and many mouths in the upper area can be opened up so your ball can be chomped on for extra points. The abundance of small targets that need to be coaxed into opening up here makes careful aim more important while you also have to work hard to keep your ball from dropping down below. While a bit more flexibility in cross-screen movement would probably benefit Alien Crush, it makes the upper area more of a treat to be in because of how quickly your ball can suddenly slip through the flippers and drop to the more restrictive lower area.
The top screen is also more interesting because it contains most of the ways to access the bonus games. While the lower screen has the central mouth sometimes whisk you away to these special small tables, three out of the four of them can only be accessed by interacting with parts of the upper area like the human jaw or the little alien mouth. When a yellow arrow points at one of the four points of interest, sending your ball into the opening will cause your play to briefly divert to a miniature table where you play the minigame either until its completion or until the first time your ball falls down the middle. One of the most dull is the one that’s oddly enough the hardest to get too, a little table where you need to light up bumpers not offering much besides knocking your ball around until the bounces go right, but the three other bonus games all stay on theme and offer interesting challenges. One bonus game has green aliens that almost look like Slimer from Ghostbusters move around the table surrounded by orbiting creatures, the player needing to eliminate them all for the best bonus. Another bonus game is flooded with spinning skulls and small aliens, the player needing to hit each one multiple times before they retreat and provide their bonus points. The only one that doesn’t end after a set task is done involves dark blue worm creatures that pass between holes in the table, the player able to break it into pieces and destroy it for points. This one will continue to provide new worms until you lose, the worms also less likely to move into challenging positions than the Slimers and spinning skulls and thus easier to keep going for a while.
Extra balls are provided for play at pretty high points values in Alien Crush, but thanks to some of the kindnesses in design it is pretty easy to survive for a long time once you get to know the board. A session can be maintained for quite a while, but since there’s no way to save and quit, you do have to do it all in a single sitting. Still, you can manage an impressive point tally on the game’s high score rankings with some commitment and board knowledge, but long sessions and only a single two screen board to play means Alien Crush may eventually wear out its welcome. It’s fun to come back to and play for a while and there’s definitely enough to do while playing, but the developing familiarity with the game’s single table can mean you are able to survive for a long time, the design potentially losing its luster before you’ve come close to losing your balls. This could be true of any pinball table that is easy to avoid ball drainage though, so it’s hard to fault the game too much for trying to allow you to go for huge high scores.
THE VERDICT: Alien Crush’s single two-screen table really nails its organic aesthetic, everything from the targets to hit to the borders of the play area painting a picture of fighting some sort of alien creature from within. Both screens have plenty to target with your shots and the bonus games give you both something to shoot for and serve as nice breaks from the increasingly familiar main board. Transitioning between the two screens could have been been a bit more flexible to allow for more frequent and fluid passing between them, but the game is kind enough to help keep your ball in play that you can eventually work your way up to the more rewarding upper section. A good variety of aesthetically appropriate targets ensure this extraterrestrial pinball table has plenty to interact with even if its limited scope can mean longer high score chases are a bit easy to get going without much new to keep you invested.
And so, I give Alien Crush for Turbografx-16…
A GOOD rating. A single strong board and a few bonus games is what Alien Crush aimed to make, and it did a fairly good job of it. The main board is not only distinctive and interesting from a visual perspective, but you have plenty of targets that are feasible to aim for and the bonus games motivate you to do more than just bounce your ball around in hopes of earning more points. The lower screen could do with being a little less restrictive though. It is a joy to be in the more varied upper screen with its greater point opportunities and different systems, and it already wears a design that can funnel the ball down below quite often for play down there. Perhaps the fear was that without the eyes you might too routinely escape the lower reaches, but trying to slip the ball to the left or right of the eyes and into your upper screen flippers could have been made a touch easier so that you aren’t left with the lower targets and central face as often as you are now. Other than that, the only major issue is that sustained play, an inherent goal of the game as you are trying to play as long as possible to get as many points as possible, can eventually stagnate due to the forgiving ball physics and lack of play area shakeups. This is more a longevity issue thought rather than a condemnation of a strong table design that’s appealing both in the varied point earning opportunities on offer and in the visual flair on display.
Alien Crush is a good example of a pinball table that doesn’t stray too much from reality when viewed purely for its layout but is happy to play with video game exclusive features to spice up its elements. The bonus games almost all feature animate aliens who are fun to target in battles where the possibility of losing is much higher, and the main table has a few areas that can burst open to reveal skittering creatures to try and kill before they escape. However, the targets, loops, bumpers, and border design still would work well as a physical table, just without the appeal of the kinds of animation video games can lend to their table elements. The Crush Pinball series definitely has an appealing start that blends the appeals of regular pinball and video game exclusive features without ever bending too far towards either, and perhaps that’s why this series has managed to earn such a widespread positive reputation even to this day.