 Sss casual grunt I love overly ambitious games, stuffed with big grandiose ideas with a dev team that's stuck with something like The NES as the only canvas for their work. That did not deter developer Tossey from trying to combine pinball with a role-playing game with Pinball Quest, made for The NES in June of 1990 and published by Jalisco. I should mention, however, that Pinball Quest is a pinball game first and foremost, since there's three regular pinball modes here on three different machines, with each machine having its own gimmick. The first one is called Pop Pop. It has you knocking down bowling pins to unlock a hole, hit the ball there, and suddenly you're playing a minigame on this tiny billiards table. Knock in all the red balls without scratching, and you get a points bonus. The next machine is called Viva Golf, which of course has a golf theme complete with sand traps and water hazards, and gophers popping up occasionally. The third machine is called Circus, and yep, it's a circus theme, although this one has a slot machine you can activate for bonus points and an extra minigame. Well, that's all well and good, but the real curiosity here is the RPG mode. You start out with a King and Princess pinball hanging out in the throne room when the princess gets kidnapped, and this other pinball over here gets the crap kicked out of it, I guess, although it is a pinball, so I'm not sure how much damage you're really doing to it by giving it a beatdown. The game then switches to a typical top-down adventure setting, only you're destroying tombstones and trees and stuff with your ball until you hit this ghost dude wandering around. He allows you to move further north, and what do you know, your paddles come with you, and now we've got real enemies to deal with. You smash those a few times before a boss skeleton comes and wanders out. Defeat him and you get a key to unlock the next section, which believe it or not is a shop. Yes, that's right, your pinball can buy upgrades for both flippers and stoppers to help keep your ball in play, and you buy them using the gold you earn by defeating enemies and smashing random stuff. One funny thing I got to mention about the shops is that there's an option to try and steal stuff. You just select steal and press A, and the room goes dark, and sometimes you get stuff and sometimes half your gold is missing. I'm not sure if there's any rhyme or reason to this. It seems completely random, but it's a pretty funny thing to include. You can hold up to four upgrades at once, and to use them, you press select, and in the case of stoppers, you'll occasionally get a choice as to where to put them. There's six levels total with a shop after each one. The second level has you fighting a witch with her squadron of dogs. Then you fight an army of goblins before unlocking the lead goblin. You fight a bunch of knights in this unusual level where a boat has to carry your ball up to the top each time it falls, which is kind of weird. You fight this gal who turns into a bat or a vampire or a gargoyle or something, but yeah, you get the idea. Now, this is one of the most genuinely interesting ideas I've ever seen in a video game. Pinball Quest has got to be commended for that. I've been wanting to play this one for a long time, and I'm glad I finally did. But is it actually a good game? Yeah, kind of sort of maybe, but also not entirely, I guess. I mean, let's face it. We're ultimately dealing with trying to work with pinball physics on the NES. So it's definitely something that takes some time to get used to, and even when you do, it still just feels wonky and weird. Pressing left moves the left flipper, and you have to press the A button to move the right flipper. The B button and right on the D pad tilt the table back and forth. What's neat is that pressing up or down on the D pad will move the flipper themselves up and down the table, so that's cool. The way the ball behaves, however, is really what's gonna make or break this game for you. Like I said, it's the NES, so you're not gonna get accurate pinball physics here, and that's what makes this game so frustrating. Not because it's hard, but because it's so dang repetitive. Most tables are layered in tiers, and you'll often find your ball trickling back down to the lower most part of the table, and you gotta get it back to the top again, so you gotta replay that lower part. This happens a lot. In fact, sometimes your ball will go down multiple sections that you've already completed, so you need a lot of patience to get through this game. And even then, once you get your ball where it needs to be, all you're really doing is just more pinball, hoping that your ball comes in contact with enemies or a boss or whatever. And it's kinda weird because there's so much here that's out of your control. All you can do is just keep the ball in play and whatever happens happens. There are some games that make that super fun, like Devil's Crush on TurboGrafx 16, and I'm not gonna pretend like Pinball Quest is as good as that game, but it's still interesting enough. I should mention very quickly that this game is four player compatible, but it's the kind where you pass the controller around and see who gets the highest score. Although I can't help but wonder how much fun it would be if all four players could play at once. So yeah, Pinball Quest is a fascinating idea, and it's actually reasonably well executed despite the limitations of the NES, but ultimately you're stuck playing a pinball game on NES with wonky physics, limited tables, and super repetitive gameplay. This is a good example of a game that would have been great as a rental back in 1990, but playing it now requires being aware of a lot of qualifiers ahead of time. Personally, I love the idea behind this game so much that I'm willing to give the game a pass, and that's despite how bare bones and pay-by-numbers the RPG section of this game is. Still, I would definitely recommend trying this one just to see if it's up your alley. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.