Sonic Spinball
September 18th, 2023
Out of sheer boredom and a desire to spend every waking moment of my life talking about video games, I used this randomizer to pick a random retro game to write a blog post about. This is what happened next...
Pinball is one of those things that kinda looks fun to me and I kinda wanna get into, but like... how do you even get into pinball? Do you just hope that there's an arcade near you that still has pinball machines in 2023? I know there's pinball simulators out there, but the only ones I've seen are free-to-play affairs where you have to pay for each individual pinball machine. I don't wanna do that, I just wanna, like, try pinball for a little bit with no strings attached
I suppose that's what video game pinball is for, especially since there's a bunch of pinball spinoffs to classic video game franchise that you can easily emulate. Now, if I were a normal person, I probably wouldn't have picked Sonic Spinball for the Mega Drive to start with, but a) I didn't pick, I used this retro game randomizer to look for something to write about, and b) if I were a normal person, I would be doing something productive with my time like studying or learning a new skill instead of writing blog posts about fucking video games
So, while using the miracle of the modern internet to download the entire Mega Drive romset to my PC, I searched for the manual (which I thankfully found pretty quickly) and looked up the game on Wikipedia to do a little bit of research. I learned an interesting fact there: apparently, Sonic Spinball was developed by Sega's American staff while the Japanese crew were busy making Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. I also learned that the game was developed in a grand total of... 2 months. uh oh
...the what fortress?
Admittedly, for a game made in 2 months it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, I couldn't get past the first level, and the game just fucking erases all the progress you've made if you lose a single life (thanks Sega), but I don't have any complaints about the gameplay itself. It controls fine (not perfectly, but fine enough), and I like that you can slightly influence where Sonic moves in midair with the d-pad. You don't have to only rely on the flippers, which helps account for the fact that I really suck at pinball
While I don't have any major complaints, I do want to make one observation: the graphics and music feel... odd? It's not bad music at all, but it definitely doesn't sound like Sonic music. Likewise, they made an entirely new sprite for Sonic, and the sound effect for the spindash is just wrong. You can tell just from playing that this wasn't made by the real Sonic team— the level of polish you would expect from an actual classic Sonic game just isn't there. I do still have to applaud them for even making a functional game at all in 2 months, but it is pretty funny to imagine little Timmy asking his parents for a Sonic game in Christmas of 1993 and getting this instead
This has been my first impressions of Sonic Spinball. As Sonic himself would say: "Catch ya on the flipside, slowpokes!!!!" At least I think he would say that. Idk I'm not a sonic fan
