Month of Mario: Mario Pinball Land (GBA)

Kirby, Samus, Sonic, Pac-Man… when these video games heroes got their pinball spin-offs, all they had to do was curl into a ball like they had done before and they were literally ready to roll. Mario isn’t quite as easy to turn into a pinball though, tucking in his limbs leaving him fairly close to a regular curled up human that isn’t fit for knocking around with flippers. Mario Pinball Land really wants Mario to be the ball in its pinball adventure though, so its solution was literally to cram him into a ball shape and unleash him across its set of five worlds.

Mario, Princess Peach, and other residents of the Mushroom Kingdom didn’t set out for an adventure initially though, turning up at the local Fun Fair for a strange bit of entertainment. A new device called the Pinballer will squish you into a large ball shape so you can hop into the Sky Cannon. This means of opening up the human cannonball experience to everyone goes awry quickly though when some of Bowser’s minions show up right as the princess pops into the cannon, a few Goombas turning the cannon to shoot Peach right into Bowser’s castle. Mario is quick to leap into action to try and rescue her, but Bowser’s keep has been sealed up with keys held across the land. While Mario’s tackled many an adventure by now, he elects to try and save the day in pinball form this time, the Sky Cannon able to launch him to the other locations so he can gather stars and keys to save the day.

Mario Pinball Land, also known as Super Mario Ball in Europe, is truly a pinball adventure where score is barely important compared to the actual goals of the pinball play. Mario will roll around like a bouncy little pinball in some very small areas with admittedly few things to hit, but this actually suits the goal-oriented play. There are 35 stars to collect in the game of which only 15 are mandatory to face the final boss, and most stars are earned by clearing the singular challenge in one of the game’s pinball rooms. Most often this manifests as defeating all the enemies in the room which makes for an active but easily understood pinball challenge. The enemies will move around a good deal, Goombas amble about, Shy Guys will skate around on ice, and Boos will periodically turn invisible, so the challenge here is trying to aim your shots to account for their movement and dealing with any ricochets a foe may cause so the ball doesn’t slip between your flippers. In most every small area of a world, slipping between the flippers isn’t actually fatal, only the first place you find yourself in truly dangerous. Otherwise, slipping through the flippers will take you to the previous room, and while leaving an area resets whatever work you had done inside, the scope of the challenges are usually kept fairly small so it’s not too bad to make your way back into the room to try again.

Mario Pinball Land features areas like a desert and the appropriately named Frosty Frontier but your input will still almost always be just using the flippers to knock Mario around. While killing enemies is the most common method of play, the game does start to iterate and add some new conditions to make that more difficult, such as needing to ramp yourself up a pyramid to hit flying vultures or take out the snakes that are appearing in the room before any can enter the hole in the middle of the room and escape. A good handle for angling your shots is definitely required for some of the more demanding rooms and it can be rewarding to pull off the trickier tasks put forth before you, but at the same time, Mario Pinball Land does let itself down a bit with how some of its oversimplification can interfere with certain challenges. Traveling around one of the game’s worlds often involves hitting a door marked with how many stars you need to progress. After it’s open, you launch Mario on through to enter the next area, but sometimes in the chaos of combat you might need to make a suboptimal shot that ends up hurtling Mario through an open door when you don’t want him to. Similarly, the pyramid area features many switches to hit, but the moment you hit one, you activate a timed challenge that makes other switches disappear. If you already completed the challenge there’s no good reason to do it again, meaning the switches become annoying barriers you might bump accidentally while trying to corral Mario or avoid an error.

Mario Pinball Land can definitely be a bit difficult at times because you need to have pretty solid aim to clear out baddies quickly, but at other times, open doors and switches came feel like time-wasting traps, turning the experience into one a bit more tedious than it needs to be. This is particularly egregious for the game’s final boss battle against Bowser, where falling through the flippers throws you back through two rooms you’ll need to pass through while resetting what can be a fairly lengthy fight. Generally, Mario Pinball Land actually handles its boss encounters pretty well, each one having a different gimmick. The Koopa pharaoh for example will try to shrink your ball while you try to hit some pylons to grow in size so you can damage him instead, and the underwater Porcupuffer asks you to keep Mario in play as well as some explosive Bob-Ombs that you’ll also hit around like pinballs as only they can hurt that spiky fish. Bowser’s fight feels overly hard as you need to be incredible reliable in your timing and shots, but his castle is generally a rough level when it comes to game design as it features the worst offenders when it comes to accidental exits paired with Star objectives that can be slow to complete.

There are a few times where Mario Pinball Land gets a little too obtuse with what you need to do to earn a star, but you can likely earn around 27 of them without any outside knowledge or plunging into the truly tedious ones found in Bowser’s castle. Some stars found in regular levels can involve engaging with the game’s item system a bit, Mario able to collect coins or blue coins by defeating enemies with the blue ones rewarded if you manage to take out more than one foe before Mario gets hit by the flippers again. Toads will set up tents in worlds where you can buy helpful single use items like a Yoshi Egg that can serve as an extra pinball or a barrier you can put between flippers whenever you need it, and there’s even a Lightning Bolt to buy that can damage every foe on screen to help with foes who might be hard to nail. Mini Mushrooms can help you find hidden rooms when activated, most entryways that involve it not too hard to figure out once you realize the item’s potential, and because coins end up being important for helpful and required items, it can actually make taking out some enemies in a room you already cleared a bit more rewarding. Otherwise most rooms do start to be a bit annoying to traverse if there’s nothing left to do in there, Mario Pinball Land deliberately keeping them small to try and rectify this only to cause that occasional accidental exit problem as a result. Blue coins can be spent in a special shop though for some interesting minigames where you need to defeat tons of foes rather quickly, these fairly tough but quick to retry as well so long as you’ve gathered enough coins. With foes like Bullet Bills rocket across the screen at high speed or the Chain Chomps that need to be pushed back fairly far to break them, these minigames feel unique compared to the common battles where you can take your time bonking baddies with the Mario ball.

THE VERDICT: Mario Pinball Land’s simple pinball rooms start off a good thing, providing bite-sized and focused challenges that are able to feel a bit varied thanks to the range of enemies and extra conditions. However, the deeper in you get, the more you start to contend with some poor design decisions like switches that can lock you out of what you’re actually trying to do or doors that are easy to slip through by accident and thus lose your progress on a tough star goal. The same design that keeps the pinball normally pretty clean starts asking for expert accuracy to avoid the more tedious side of the experience, meaning that good foot this pinball adventure got off on swaps breezy fun for boring retries once you’re deep enough into it.

And so, I give Mario Pinball Land for Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. While every player who wants to clear Mario Pinball Land is inevitably going to face the much weaker design of the pinball rooms in Bowser’s castle, there is likely a path through the main adventure that only starts to come up short once you face off with the evil turtle king. A good deal of stars can be earned through challenges that are quick and harmless or a bit clever and unique, and perhaps unsurprisingly the best areas tend to keep their areas clear of the tedious tricks like those switches that are easy to hit by accident in the pyramid. Bosses are normally good challenges of how well you handle the ball and the tension of trying to keep Mario in play works well since they mostly play fair. The item system helps in a pinch, and while generally the pinball does expect a good degree of control so you avoid leaving the area and actually hit what you’re aiming for, that’s what gives the pinball adventure its substance since smacking the ball around and hoping to win does not a good game make. Generally, Mario Pinball Land’s stumbles just involve not properly reading the player’s intent. Bowser’s castle for example would be less of a navigation nightmare if you didn’t have to fear open star doors so often, so give the player a bit more control over whether they open those doors rather then it being automatic when you hit them. Some tougher rooms like the Bowser boss fight might have done better without resetting progress when you are forced out too. The game shouldn’t compromise too much, there are some challenges like hitting the vultures that do ask for some skill to clear that are at risk of losing their edge if the game became too accommodating, although a difficulty select could also make this a pinball adventure more inexperienced players could clear without needing to become crack shots.

Mario Pinball Land is mostly a good game, most of its stars are earned through challenges that suit its design well. Navigation between areas and what triggers a star challenge though definitely needed some more thought put into them to avoid them dragging the experience down, the punishment for a little slip-up being repetition that starts to discourage you from seeking out anything but what you need to clear the adventure. Adventure pinball is always going to need to find a way to straddle the line between how much accuracy is required to clear out its goal-oriented play, but Mario Pinball Land does approach it pretty well initially before it fizzles out because of its struggles connecting all of its pinball rooms.