Sonic Spinball is a game I have no nostalgia for. I've seen a couple lets plays for it on Youtube but that's about it. The only pinball games I have played before this was Kirby's Pinball Land and Mario Pinball Land, both games I could never beat. But since I want to do a video review of Spinball someday, why not give it a try?

Sonic Spinball is actually interesting in the sense of it's made by people in North America, something to my knowledge was never done before. While a japan release was made and gave him a more japanese design on the cover, the game still uses a more American Sonic design and even has characters from the American cartoons.

In this game you must guide Sonic through 4 pinball tables collecting chaos emeralds and beating up bosses. Now I'm guessing the developers who made this clearly just didn't give a fuck about continuity because there are 16 Chaos emeralds in this game and they are all blue, wouldn't it make more sense to make them all green if they were going to choose one color?

Enough with the dumb nitpicks from me, how does it play? Well it's kind of a mixed bag, you can control Sonic's movement a bit as you are moving around the table and can even sometimes move on foot though the physics are very wonky and bad. In fact the game's collision as a whole is poor. On my 2nd attempt of beating the game, I clipped through a barrier that I was suppose to hit 2 objects before making them disappear and there were many times I should have died but Sonic just clips through the flipper when he's under it.

The boards themselves are for the most part fun, They aren't too hazardous and it's not too hard to get to the emeralds you need, though if you're not too good with pinball, you might get stuck on them for a while. I was actually having a good time going through 75% of this game. It's just that last board is so painful...

The Showdown is a horrible level, the beginning part of the table is what pisses me off. I usually didn't have issues with the ones in the other stages but I had moments where I would just keep dying on the sides because I didn't have the rocks out. But what makes it worse is the other sides of the table also have lava pits making it more stressful and if you die, you are back on that one part of the table I despise. This board alone made me go from a 6/10 to 5/10.

In fact I still technically haven't beaten the game the legitimate way, I used the code to take me straight to the 4th board so I guess it wasn't a true win. One day though I will do it legit and I'll make an edit to this review when I do and talk about it. I'm honestly proud I was even able to get to the last board without having to use a code for the 2nd or 3rd boards.

Besides that big complaint though, I do enjoy the other boards and they weren't too awfully designed in my opinion. Though I swear I die too much on Lava Powerhouse, it's not even hard I just am bad at it for some reason.

There's also bonus stages at the end of each stage and they are completely different from the normal gameplay. It involves Sonic playing an actual pinball machine with a different objective for each stage. The first one is breaking animal capsules rescuing characters from the SatAM show. The second one is trying to destroy Robotnik's teeth and the last one is destroying a Sonic 2 styled capsule surrounded by multiple Scratch robots. There's also a hidden one if you get every ring but sadly I wasn't able to get it, I'm also not sure what you get for winning these because I'm still trash at pinball. Now I'm thinking about it though, where is the tilt option? Isn't that suppose to be a thing in Pinball. I know Kirby's Pinball Land has it so I'm confused.

The presentation is fine, I'm not too big on the American designs though that might be because I didn't grow up with the series back then. I do like the scoreboard thing going on at the top of the screen always having something to say even if a lot of it is pretty cheesy. I don't know how to feel about the music, I think some songs have good melodies but I just hate the way they sound on this game, especially with songs like the options theme, it's so ear grating. Even some of the sound effects are awful like when you are hitting the first boss.

You know despite the issues I had with this game, I still had some fun with it? Like I notice lots of people say it's a bad game and while I can easily see why I don't really agree and I just can't put it into good words. Yeah it's a very flawed game and it's easily Sonic's worst game on the system but you could do worst honestly, it's better than Mario Pinball Land if that means anything. I'd say give it a few tries if you have never played this game, you might have some fun like I did. If I ever play another pinball game, it'll probably be one of those Compile ones on the PC Engine.

I played this one a lot when I was younger. I think I just appreciated that it was still a Sonic game but it was a change of pace! It was also a lot shorter and felt a little less “serious” so it was a good game to play more casually. For instance, I beat this game in one sitting this morning without it making much of a dent in my day.

I don’t think it really makes sense for me to go through this one in depth like I do most of the standard games given that you’re effectively just doing one thing (using pinball mechanics to collect way more Chaos Emeralds than there have ever been before or since and then fighting bosses, also with pinball mechanics) over and over. So let’s just talk about it all briefly.

The game opens with me and Sonic flying towards a scary-looking mountain with a giant Robotnik face on it in our plane, the Tornado. Robotnik’s defenses open fire on us, and I manage to bank out of the way of the first volley but the second catches the tornado in the wing, knocking Sonic down to the water below. Oh, no!

According to the instruction book some of Sonic’s animal friends save him, and he emerges wet but no worse for the wear in the first zone, Toxic Caves. Toxic Caves is a pretty great opening level, and a unique setting! It makes story sense for his infiltration of Robotnik’s fortress to start in a sewer level. And this level does what any good first level of a Sonic game does: teaches you how to play the game. Its boss is a... kind of weird giant scorpion thing with Robotnik’s face. It’s a bit unnerving, but easy to beat.

If Sonic is still wet from falling in the ocean (or lake or whatever it is) and making his way through the toxic sewers, he’s sure to dry off in Lava Powerhouse. So, yeah, Robotnik’s base is on a volcano, so a geo-thermal powerplant makes perfect sense as the next progression after the initial infiltration through the sewers. The boss for this one is kinda nightmare fuel, and I gotta say the first two bosses make way less story sense than the second two. Like, I can accept the scorpion bot even if it doesn’t 100% seem like Robotnik’s style. I kinda don’t know why he just has a boiler with giant Robotnik heads floating around in it lying around. Not sure what practical purpose that one’s supposed to serve apart from being creepy af.

As Sonic gets deeper into Robotnik’s base he next finds himself in The Machine. This one has your usual “Robotnik’s base” sorta aesthetic, everything is metal and mechanized. This zone is pretty easy but its aesthetics rule. And releasing all the animals trapped in the cells in the animal prison is very cathartic. And it has easily the best boss of the game imo. And speaking of catharsis, literally blowing up a new, more powerful roboticizer certainly fits the bill.

And lastly you have The Showdown, which is honestly kinda a letdown imo? Like, it’s not bad, I wouldn’t call anything in this game bad, I just don’t think it integrates its theme as effectively as the other levels. A lot of the mechanics and obstacles in it feel pretty arbitrary. Its aesthetics totally work, though! Like the fact that you can just look down and see craters full of lava that you need to avoid falling into. And the final boss is pretty good, too! It’s thematically appropriate, as Robotnik is preparing to try to escape in his spaceship, and it also feels appropriately difficult as a final boss.

The bonus stages in this one aren’t as essential as they usually are in terms of what they reward you with, but given that most of them allow you to free me (and some Archie characters, randomly), they’re actually crucial! Don’t leave your two-tailed foxes in (non-consensual) captivity!!

Oh yeah, and the ending is Robuttnik and Sonic falling from the sky after Sonic destroys the spaceship, and I swoop in on the Tornado to rescue Sonic!! Yay!!! Always a good way to end a Sonic game imo.

So, yeah! My understanding is a lot of people complain about this one, and I get it. It is the result of Sega rushing to have a game out for the holiday season when they realized they weren’t gonna have Sonic 3 in time. But I’ve always been a fan of this game, and still am. It’s a nice little diversion! And it’s something different.

Zones
Toxic Caves (B-Rank)
The Machine (B-Rank)
The Showdown (C-Rank)
Lava Powerhouse (C-Rank)

Bosses
Veg-O-Machine (A-Rank)
Robotnik's Ship (C-Rank)
Scorpius (C-Rank)
Robo-Boiler (C-Rank)

Soundtrack
Boss Battle (A-Rank)
Toxic Caves (B-Rank)
The Machine (B-Rank)
Special Stage (B-Rank)
Lava Powerhouse (B-Rank)
The Showdown (B-Rank)
Credits (D-Rank)

First off, I have to say: whoever came up with the idea of this deserves a prize. I grew up in an era when every successful or semi-successful show got a pinball game based on it, but Sonic is probably the one IP that actually makes sense as a pinball game. After all, it's all about rolling into a ball and bouncing around really fast right? Seems like a match made in heaven, and honestly it's not bad, but it suffered from poor execution.

The levels are sprawling, with multiple 'pinball table' setups per level, connected by a network of tunnels. The player needs to meet certain requirements (hitting targets, destroying obstacles, etc.), spread across all the tables, in order to unlock the boss area. It sounds like a good idea, but this is a case in which messing with the traditional pinball structure isn't a good thing: the fun in pinball is trying to build up a high score on a table which is chock-full of different ways to score points. By adding linear objectives and requirements and spreading them out over a very large and sparsely-populated area, the game takes away these two crucial elements of a good pinball game. Beyond the mandatory objectives, there really isn't anything to do on the tables - they're very bland. My experience of the game was roughly 10% meeting the objectives, then 90% trying to hit that one last objective, accidentally going to a different (boring) part of the map, finally returning to the right (boring) place, trying to hit the target, falling into another (boring) part of the map, etc.

The tedium might have been alleviated somewhat if I were able to play the game in small doses, but there isn't even any password or save system which means I had to slog through the entire thing in one sitting well beyond the novelty of the idea (and my patience) had worn thin.

Looking at my other negative reviews I realize most of them were frustrating or cheap in some way. This game wasn't really either, but it was extremely uninteractive and boring which is the last thing you want either a Sonic or a pinball game to be.

(This review refers to the 8-bit version, which I would have given a 1 star rating but since the vastly different 16-bit & 8-bit versions are filed under the same game, I cannot do that.)

The development meeting for this one:

“Hey guys, you know how we usually put a little bit of effort into our 8-bit ports so they have some new and different stuff in them and aren’t just the exact same game but worse in every measurable way?”
“Yeah?”
“What if we didn’t do that this time?”
“Heck yeah! Sounds great. Can we make some of the bosses way less cool, though?”
“Yeah, for sure! Make sure we keep the nightmare fuel boiler with the floating Robotnik heads, though!”
“Obviously!”


The thing that’s even more frustrating here is that the fact that the 16-bit version of Sonic Spinball is good (and it is, eat me haters) is actually kind of a miracle??? Lilke, the game is the result of Sega realizing way too late that they weren’t going to have Sonic 3 in time for the holiday season and then frantically looking around like, “Uhhhh, what do we got?” And someone nervously offering, “Uhhhh, people liked that pinball stuff in Sonic 2?” and Sega saying “Perfect!! Let’s build a whole game out of that in a very short amount of time with most of our resources still (correctly) committed to Sonic 3!!” and that somehow resulted in a great game? (Again, eat me haters.) Improbable, to say the least.

I’m just not even gonna talk about how I looked in my one appearance in the opening cutscene. (This port doesn’t show me saving Sonic, so what happens to him when he falls back to Mobius from space? Shrug!) Or the fact that they just couldn’t even be bothered to have BOSS MUSIC? A feature that checks notes literally every single other game in this series (that has bosses) has???

Just play the Genesis/Mega Drive version. There is NO REASON to play this version unless you’re a completionist or just very morbidly curious. It’s BAD.

Anyway let’s rank some stuff and get the heck out of here.

Zones
1. The Machine (D-Rank)
2. Toxic Pools (D-Rank)
3. Final Showdown (D-Rank)
4. Lava Powerhouse (D-Rank)

Bosses
1. Veg-O-Machine (B-Rank)
2. Final Showdown Boss (D-Rank)
3. Toxic Pools Boss (D-Rank)
4. Roboboiler (D-Rank)

Soundtrack
1. Final Showdown (B-Rank)
2. The Machine (C-Rank)
3. Bonus Level (C-Rank)
4. Toxic Pools (C-Rank)
5. Lava Powerhouse (C-Rank)