The Best Pinball Game on Virtual Boy!
... Of course, that's because it's the ONLY pinball game on Virtual Boy.
Galactic Pinball gives you five different "space" themed pinball tables to choose from, each of them unique. There is a decent amount to do in each of them (such as blasting comets, collecting letters and so on), but most of them are fairly sparse with not a lot of targets to shoot at. In fact, some of the targets are disabled too, so plenty of shots will just bounce around off things without scoring at all.
One of my biggest complaints about this game is that it eschews many standard pinball features. For example, only one table has bonus rollover light-ups at the top, despite this being a standard feature on just about every modern table. I've also yet to see any multi-ball. Speaking of which, you don't even play with a ball, instead it's a "puck". I don't base that just on the appearance either, the game itself will tell you that you have two "pucks" remaining. I don't get it.
Another problem is that the physics are somewhat wonky at times, especially around your flippers, which is a real problem. "Catching" the puck with your flipper is actually TOO easy. If the puck is rolling down behind one of the bumpers and you keep your flipper held up, the puck will come to a dead stop when it hits it. In fact, even if you keep the flipper down, the puck bounces off the base of your flipper, causing it to slow down significantly. This is hard to get used to, and makes aiming somewhat harder than it should be, as you get no momentum from the falling puck.
The graphics are acceptable, as the tables are about as good looking as you can expect given the red and black graphics of the Virtual Boy. The tables don't actually look like actual pinball tables, instead they look like pinball components floating in space, so you don't get any art on the surface of the table, just a star field (Though this is probably for the best, as table art would likely just make it harder to see the puck). You get a bit of a 3D effect from the tilt of the playfield, but it's pretty minor. There are occasionally special events in the tables that will have more of a 3D effect to them... like in the Colony table, your puck will jump vertically off the table and become a turret to shoot down at oncoming comets. These events are pretty infrequent though.
Sound is pretty poor. The music sounds little better than something you'd get from a Game Boy, and the sound effects are nothing special. Plenty of other VB games have done better.
You control the flippers with either the L and R triggers, or by using the two D-Pads. A pulls the plunger, and B tilts.... which makes the two D-Pad control basically useless, since you have to take your right thumb off the D-Pad in order to tilt. In fact, tilting seems to have almost no effect anyways. It's too bad, as using the D-Pads to tilt in four directions would have been a good feature. You can't change the controls, and in fact, there are NO options in the game whatsoever beyond the automatic pause option that all VB games have. It also can't save high scores.
There are so many other, better pinball video games out there that it's hard to recommend this one. More recent games like Fantastic Journey and Time Shock have far more to offer, and even if you're looking for a more classic pinball game, Pinball Fantasies does the job much better than this. However, if you're a fan of the Virtual Boy and you like pinball, you'll probably still manage to enjoy it.Read full review
