I have a friend that I meet up with regularly to play retro games and last night we played Pinball Quest for the NES. I had seen this game featured in a few places and was curious about it, because it seemed to have a pretty lofty pitch. Pairing RPG mechanics like leveling up and buying items with a pinball game was intriguing, especially for an NES game. I’m glad to report that while it is flawed, I still had a lot of fun with Pinball Quest.
There are a few different boards available in Pinball Quest, but the main attraction is the RPG mode and that is where I immediately went last night. It has you traveling upwards through different boards, usually fighting some kind of boss in order to progress up to the next. If you fall, you are forced to go back down to the previous board, but you don’t need to beat the boss again to go back up.
This got a little frustrating, the millionth time I ended back up at the very bottom, but it never made me bounce off of the game completely. It almost had the same feeling as Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or Baby Steps, where part of the process is falling all the way down and the satisfying part is getting back up to where you were before. My friend and I didn’t quite beat Pinball Quest, but we should be able to recoup our progress the next time we meet.
