Pinball Palooza: Pinball Tycoon (GBA)

There’s more to the quality of a game than going down a list of expected features. Checking off the boxes for a well-worn formula might make your game sound at least adequate on paper, but while the developers of Pinball Tycoon probably felt they’d be safe and end up serviceable by including the expected pinball elements like bumpers, ramps, and targets, the overall package is so soulless and hollow that it’s hard to justify picking it over any other pinball option on the Game Boy Advance.

Pinball Tycoon contains four pinball tables all based around the concept of becoming a tycoon in a few different lines of work. The two most appropriate ones featured would be the tables based on becoming a movie tycoon or oil tycoon, but things get a little more strained as another is based around being a mining tycoon and the final board goes for a gambling theme where it feels more like you are a player shooting for riches in Vegas whereas the others have the idea of building up your score tied to building up your business. Saying any of these really execute their idea well is a bit generous though, as the boards are all very flat in regards to presentation. All of them have a flat texture for the background, barely any flashing lights, and while the pinball sounds featured are supposedly taken from real machines, the game manages to remain rather quiet and tame even when you’re hitting the right objects. There’s a few little touches like a dripping sound for the oil tycoon board that are a nice touch, but the soundscape is almost pathetic with how digitized some sounds are and the music lies somewhere between generic and mild. Add in some ball physics that can feel slow and weightless on top of odd bounces and the presentation in general is already dragging down a game that can’t afford to be undermined.

California Gold Rush is an excellent introduction to how barren and lifeless most tables feel in Pinball Tycoon. Like most tables, it’s about two and a half screens tall, the scrolling to track the ball at least doing its job but every table feeling taller than necessary because of how sparsely they are populated. The bottom of California Gold Rush is pretty much devoted solely to the image of a donkey, and the midsection between the top screen and bottom is mostly populated with ramps and holes to shoot for that don’t even become relevant until you’ve played most of the game in the upper area. California Gold Rush’s focus is on two areas, a little alcove on the left with bumpers where you try to spell out GET GUN by hitting targets and some loops up above where you get tools for gold digging like dynamite or a shovel. There is an extra flipper near the bumpers that is pretty much going to hit the bumper directly above it, so you need to aim for upper areas from the bottom screen and hope the ramp clutter and bumper area don’t block your access to the upper loops. If you can start building up to the chance for a high scoring gold rush, it’s still underwhelming because of the subdued fanfare and the slow climb getting there. The lack of short term goals and making it difficult to even get a bonus chance going is unfortunately pretty common design in Pinball Tycoon, and it makes investing time into getting high scores feel dull because you have few benchmarks to celebrate along the way.

Black Gold is the oil tycoon table, and while slingshots near the flippers to bounce the ball around a bit are practically standard for pinball, it should be noted this is the second table without them and the lower area literally only has a single target to try and hit. A barren middle is used to show the image of an oil field that two men are staring out at, and if you get your ball up to where things worth hitting are, you’ll find ramps with tight entrance ways, bumpers squirreled away behind obstructions, and two spot that provide nothing until you activate the right bonus mode but waste your time obnoxiously telling you on the bottom bar that you shouldn’t aim for it yet if you do hit them early. Once it does eventually spit your ball back out though, you’ll realize it never said when the appropriate time to aim for it is. Black Gold is definitely the most egregious in its wasted space as it often feels like, even when aiming your best, the ball will fly off and accomplish nothing before it heads back down. You do get five balls for every table, the game taking its time depositing them in front of the starting plunger every round for some reason, but having more time to play Black Gold certainly doesn’t do it any favors.

Hollywood Mogul begins to approach something resembling serviceable design. It’s slightly more compact than the others and wisely puts a pair of flippers on the bottom and top sections of the board, and even though it could have just asked you to stay up and away from another nearly pointless bottom section, there are a few mildly hard to hit targets you can at least try for below, and an image of a movie in the background will change based on how many times you’ve completed a fairly accessible loop on the top screen. Bumpers and loops make for a crowded upper area that does at least give you stuff to do. If you can’t hit the loops, you can build up points with bumpers and targets, and the pair of flippers that can shoot for them make it less about firing the pinball to the upper screen with only hopes and dreams to guide it like the previous two tables. It’s still a bit slow due to ball speed, and the left flipper in the upper section can sometimes spend time juggling its ball against an obstructing barrier, but the fact you can actually work towards a clearer goal and more easily hit areas with point potential make it so you feel like you’re playing a pinball table with some sort of vision instead of ones that almost feel like half the parts must have been removed.

Our final table is surprisingly traditional, in that it has the slingshot bumpers near the flippers. It’s a little untraditional in that launching the ball into play involves it immediately hitting a bumper and being thrown back down the entrance tunnel, but it’s then funneled onto the table. The big lion face with a King Vegas crown breaks away from what could have otherwise been a universal California association for the game’s tables, but trimming Golden Chance would likely make people far less likely to write this off as a generic pinball game. Golden Chance isn’t exceptional or really inspired either, but it wears the mask of proper pinball best and can easily make people forget the emptiness of California Gold Rush and Black Gold. The ball physics do seem to enjoy draining your ball here most though, but at least in the upper area of this board there are four bumpers that can be hit reliably and the ramps, while a little stubborn, are something worth shooting for. Targets are littered about the bumper area, but it’s hard to deliberately hit them since your flippers mostly are used for launching the ball upwards and hoping the ricochets work out in your favor. You can nudge the table, albeit without much effect, but Golden Chance is sort of similar to the worse tables, it just masks its hollowness a little better. Your input isn’t valued very highly and going for bonuses and jackpots is a slow, tedious affair that takes too long to influence, so it’s hard to give Golden Chance a pass for simply being less awful than the two major failures of table design.

THE VERDICT: Pinball Tycoon is a soulless trick that is meant to coast by on its resemblance to pinball, but it doesn’t understand the appeal of pinball at all. Boards are lacking energy and often place their interactive elements poorly on top of wasting a lot of space with boring emptiness. The Golden Chance board at least gives you a few things to hit and Hollywood Mogul is borderline acceptable with its accessible targets and twin pair of flippers, but California Gold Rush feels more proud of its donkey picture than any gameplay ideas and Black Gold feels designed to keep you from getting your ball to anything interesting. Lacking fanfare, obfuscating objectives, and generally playing poorly due to how the drifting ball can move in strange ways, Pinball Tycoon may resemble basic pinball, but it fails to provide any of the enjoyment that draws people to the genre.

And so, I give Pinball Tycoon for the Game Boy Advance…

A TERRIBLE rating. Hollywood Mogul may not be exceptional, but it’s the closest to generic pinball on offer and pretty much what the developers of Pinball Tycoon were clearly hoping to create. The basic ideas on offer aren’t presented in an exciting manner and the board specific bonus modes often have their triggers and important areas placed with little thought for how much the player needs to interact with them, but we again look at Hollywood Mogul as an example that Pinball Tycoon could have provided something that was simply ho-hum instead of outright empty. If the ball is going to move so slowly, it shouldn’t have so much empty space to traverse, especially if the spots it needs to reach will spit it back out so quickly. Black Gold and California Gold Rush are poorly conceived even before you factor in the fact this game wants to put in the minimal amount of effort to pass for pinball. Golden Chance is the oddity of the four though, since it seems to teeter between the somewhat more competent design featured in Hollywood Mogul while still not grasping how much influence a player wants over their play field. Hitting bumpers and ramps that actually provide points and action is a nice touch, but the targets you need to hit are too independent of your control on the casino themed table to really make it the decent companion to the Hollywood table it could have been.

I’m almost upset this ended up being a pinball game I chose to highlight in Pinball Palooza. The Game Boy Advance has a lot of strange and interesting pinball games, like ones based on the Muppets, Super Mario, Pac-Man, and even House of the Dead, but I took a chance on something weird and unknown, and it turned out to be a game that was barely even trying to provide the basics. Pinball Tycoon’s box oddly jams the words Trigger Finger Challenge between the halves of its title, but the game speed, weak objectives, and poor layout means it’s less about being quick to press L and R to use your flippers and more about resisting the urge to quickly pull the power switch.