Pinball

One of the Nintendo Entertainment System's first-generation titles, Pinball is surprisingly enough a pinball game. The first thing you'll notice if you play a lot of pinball sims is that there is no way of tilting the table. Quite often you'll find yourself fully aware that a ball is going right between your flippers five seconds before it actually happens but you can't do anything about it. Aside from this inability to tilt, the controls are fine the D-pad acts as the left flipper and either button acts as the right flipper.

To its credit Pinball has quite a few features on its table, and if you have someone to play it against some fun can be had by seeing who can get the higher score. But the fact that there are only two screens in the whole game mean the experience will get samey pretty quickly. There's a semi-interesting bonus level where Mario will try and rescue Pauline (from Donkey Kong) in an odd breakout style mini-game, but even that gets old fast.

Pinball isn't a bad game by any means and stands head and shoulders above most other software from 1983, it's just that there have been a lot of very good Pinball games in the intervening quarter of a century. Alien Crush on the TurboGrafx-16, Psycho Pinball on the Genesis and Revenge of the Gator on the monochrome Game Boy are all far better games then this and are all available for a few bucks rendering Pinball on the NES obsolete.