Pokemon Pinball by Stern is good

Unfortunately for the haters, they nailed this one.

Let’s not bury the lede, I’ve been to several game releases at this point and let me say : the vibes for pokemon are GOOD. It makes sense, right? It’s the biggest IP in the world (supposedly, according to Seth Davis while I was in line for sushi it’s bigger than Star Wars and Harry Potter combined), everyone loves a Jack Danger game, and, well, it seems like the general world may be ready for some joy.

That being said, let’s put things in context. It wasn’t always looking like a slam dunk. Or mega ball or whatever pokemon metaphor we wanna use. This is the game that almost broke Jack as a game designer (as we learned from a recent facebook post) the world needs joy because its in a more precarious place than its ever been (see our last couple articles) and honestly a lot of old angry boomer pinballers are probably gonna be pissed about a theme they don’t understand. Nevermind the point that WE have had to endure 18 million themes that we don’t relate to as young people not from the dust bowl era (Wizard of Oz, Elton John, uh, Wheel of Fortune)

So I wasn’t sure what I was gonna walk into. But like the many trainers before me, I sucked it up and I put on a weird little baseball cap, and I grabbed a couple of softballs that I painted half red, and drove my 2008 Prius to the toughest Poke-Gym around, Stern Pinball. Sure, they confiscated the softballs at the gate when i told them I was gonna try and catch John Borg with them — but other than that it was an all around p sick day. So let’s get into it.

The Layout

I know that the development of this game was fraught. But veteran pinball designer, George Gomez (Deadpool, a million others) and Jack Danger (Foo Fighters, X-men, etc) did create something legit fun and flowy. A throwback design that works for beginners who don’t know anything while retaining enough interesting geometry and ball returns to make it fun for the freaks who play every game (me). We weren’t really privy to the design iterations, but I know after talking to some employees that there were various mechs talked about in the game.

The fact that we have three custom sculpts that move, a bash toy, AND a playfield magnet on the premium and LE is pretty obvious to me that they didn’t skimp out. And I like the decision to keep the mechs focused on things that effect gameplay (like a magnet and movable bash toy) rather than stuff like a pokeball that catches the ball and does nothing else. People always say that they want that kinda stuff (Y NOT SHARK EAT BALL?) but the games from the 90s that did that (think Data East Waterworld) all suck ass to shoot. You don’t wanna be chained to one thing that stops the ball.

But that’s as much time as we’ll spend on mech talk because we don’t talk pinball economics or BOM or any of that shit. Because we actually PLAY pinball we don’t just look at it here, so how does it play?

It’s a really fun design that lends itself to being a flow beast, busted up by staccato fights in the “battle” arena which also doubles as where the team rocket balloon comes down to fight. It’s a surprisingly good bash toy. It feels meaty and thicc when you hit it (think gong from kong, Mandalorian ball sack, or the oft-compared Junkyard dangle) plus it has the bonus of being a giant Meowth head, the most annoying character in pokemon, so it was fun to try and smack the hell out of it.

The layout is novel. Paths don’t always go where you think they will. The left orbit leads to a clean return from a wireform to the right flipper, while the back of the battle field (in the center of the game) opens up at times to give you an orbit return to the right flipper. The left ramp has fun, figure eight returns — which were great for gameplay, since you could often cheat made shots by hitting them partially up and then having them drain down the return at the junction of the figure 8. That ramp also is where you’ll catch your pokemon.

The Code is (gonna be) good

Tanio Klyce, Josh Henderson, and Andrew Wilkening gave us a walkthrough of their outline for code for this game. These guys have basically taken the original gameboy experience and ported an extremely interesting version of it into pinball. At it’s heart, pokemon is a super simple RPG. You collect pokemon, sure, but its basically rock paper scissors with different types. That basic idea is fun to play with in pinball where multiple simple overlapping rulesets can work to bring new players in while simultaneously giving more advanced players fun stuff to work with.

Star Wars Fall of the Empire does this very well. I routinely score between 1.5 -2.5 billion on that game, but routinely come back because of how many DIFFERENT ways I can do that. For FOTE heads (we’ll work on the nickname), that game is cool because you’re doing missions, jabba modes, millenium falcon stuff, and vader modes all at once. You’re sort of always working through something (sort of like my love life).

Andrew Wilkening, alongside pinball wunderkid Raymond Davidson, were the brains behind that ruleset. So it was super fun to talk to Andrew and hear him talk about how he literally learned to read by playing Pokemon yellow. I don’t know if that’s a sweet story or a sad critique of our education system, but hey! The guy loves frickin pokemon.

We’ll have an interview with Andrew, Tanio (of Foo Fighters fame), and Josh in the future, but let’s be real and get into it.

You start the game with all four types. You’re a nondescript trainer (brutally too true to real life for this guy, but hey) who wanders through four different biomes (think Godzilla’s cities) finding new pokemon and battling your pokemon against various trainers. Just like they game! Unlike Godzilla, the different worlds (desert, ocean, forest, and uh, electric? I don’t know) will determine which pokemon populate and which battles you’ll face. Evidently, you’ll be able to travel back and forth, collecting pokemon and becoming the very best and singing that song at the top of your lungs.

Obviously, the code was in an extremely early state, but even so I can tell you that the different mode types do feel distinct and I can’t wait to explore the beautiful map.

The art

I have a feeling that Pokemon Company, the IP holder for Pokemon, are extremely particular about how Pokemon is presented. Sometimes that can be a bad thing, but in this case it resulted in art that actually gave me nostalgic butterflies in a way that surprised me. For real. When I was in maybe fifth grade, Pokemon was syndicated on tv before school for me. I was at that weird age inbetween being an adult and kid, so I’d watch a tape of an X-files episode I had while I waited for pokemon to come on. I was up, alone, eating cereal and loved getting lost in stories. That was important to me. Seeing this art brought me back to that time in my life. Like I said, I was surprised by how emotional it got me.

I could go on, but they’re already gonna call me a shill, so I might as well quit while I’m behind. Enjoy a couple more pics of charizard spinners and such. The times might be fucked up, but at least we got a pokemon pinball before the apocalypse. Now prosecute everyone associated with Epstein and let’s have a proper country. A boy can dream!