Pin Bot
Developed by: Rare
Published by: Nintendo
Release date: April 1990 (NA), Some time in 1990 (EU)
Set your phasers to stun and beam me up Scotty, because it’s time to embark on a sci-fi pinball adventure! Pin Bot is a NES pinball game based on a real-life pinball machine of the same name. If you’ve played any other pinball game in the last 30 years, you know what to expect, and to be honest, I could leave the review right there and call it a day. But then I’d feel kinda bad for phoning it in and not trying my best, y’know? So I’ll do my darndest to tell you why Pin Bot is pretty okay.
Pin Bot is as pinball as it gets. Sometimes if you pin that ball well enough, the colour of the play field will change and the difficulty will ramp up, but I’ve never made it past the third board…because I never found out how the change actually happens, and at this point, I’m too afraid to ask. The controls are nice and responsive; all there is to worry about are two flippers and tilting with the Start/Select buttons, so if they managed to mess that up we’d be in trouble.
There’s a weird hang-up I have with this game, though…and that’s the pause. Because there is no pause. Sort of. You can pause if you have a second controller plugged into your NES and you push B, but what kind of godless design choice is that? It may as well not be in the game at all. This is a big problem if you lack a second controller (like I do!) because Pin Bot easily takes around an hour of solid play to finish. I truly cannot fathom why they left this out in a game that came out in 1990.
The soundtrack is a faithful 8-bit conversion of the music that comes from the real pinball machine, which is deliciously 80’s. Something else carried over from the real machine is the voice clips of the titular Pin Bot himself! The NES’s speech playback might sound a little crunchy to our 21st century ears, but I think that the low bitrate adds to the digitized, almost unsettling vibe the robot’s voice gives off. The entire game pauses when it plays back a voice clip, which might sound like a nuisance, but any opportunity to blink my tired, bag-laden eyes in this pauseless game is more than welcome.
The only reason I managed to finish Pin Bot was because I had an uninterrupted hour to sit still while I was held captive in a lengthy phone call. That, and I guess Lady Luck was bored enough to guide me to the ending. I’ve actually made a few attempts in the past to clear this thing, and always fall short around the 6,000,000 score mark. Now’s a good a time as any to mention that the way to clear Pin Bot is to beat the default hi-score of over 9,000,000; doing so earns you a credit roll. I have no skill when it comes to games like this – I’m not even sure you can have skill when it comes to video game conversions of pinball – so it’s all down to chance for me. And on this day, the odds were ever in my favour. Which isn’t exactly a sci-fi reference, but I hope you’ll cut me some slack here.
Pin Bot is a decent pinball game to play in short bursts. It’s really not bad, but I didn’t feel all that compelled to try and sniff out any tricks or secrets that may have hid beneath the surface of this one. There are more engaging pinball titles on the NES alone, let alone others that have come out in the 30+ years since this one did! Try it out if it piques your interest, but you won’t be missing much if you decide to, uh, use the force and hyper warp away from this game. I don’t know dick about sci-fi, I’m really sorry.
Final score:
NESJunk 