 SEGA DRUNK! Surprise, gonna start posting a Saturday video every now and then so I can get a little caught up on these requests. This one's from my longtime friend the Jesus who wants me to look at Crew Ball of all things. Yes, Crew Ball with Crew being spelled C-R-U-E as in the band Motley Crew. This game came out for the Genesis and Mega Drive in 1992, which is pretty interesting timing. Considering Motley Crew were nearing the end of their run as a noteworthy band getting any kind of airplay, their most successful album in terms of sales anyway, Dr. Feel Good had been out three years before this came along, so this definitely feels like a blatant cash-in to use someone's anyone's name to sell what is essentially a video pinball game. Now granted this is actually a pretty good video pinball game, it was originally titled Twisted Flipper and the game would have been totally fine on its own, but I guess the suits at SEGA saw an opportunity to do something else with it. Celebrity and athlete endorsements were kind of SEGA's thing back then, like Michael Jackson's Moonwalker or any number of pro athletes ranging from Joe Montana to Evander Holyfield. The thing is though, rock band pinball machines have been a thing forever, tons of bands from Guns N' Roses to AC DC to Ted Nugent to Aerosmith to Metallica. So hey, why not a rock band pinball video game for Sega Genesis? So I get why they attached a rock band to this game, I just don't get why they picked Motley Crew, maybe they were cheap, maybe they were paid in just cocaine or something, I don't know. The thing is though, when you play those authentic pinball machines in person, they're actually really creatively designed with all sorts of cool and interesting traps and triggers. So Crew Ball by comparison is really dialed back as you could imagine. For instance, they only licensed three songs for the soundtrack, Home Sweet Home Off Theater of Pain, Live Wire Off of Too Fast for Love, and the title track Off of Doctor Feel Good. And you don't hear any of the songs during the actual pinball levels, so the whole Motley Crew thing not only comes across as a dumb choice for a band, but the way their music is utilized defeats the purpose of licensing the songs in the first place. Let's be positive for a second though, here's the thing, the way the music is programmed in the game is pure Sega Genesis. If you really love that grindy distorted Genesis sound, then you're really gonna dig this game regardless of how you feel about Motley Crew, because all the music here sounds freaking great, and is as good of a showcase of what the Genesis sound should do as any game is. The actual pinball in the game is well done too, if you've played games like Alien Crush, then you get the general gist of Crew Ball. There's multi-layered sections with multiple flippers, using the ball to smash monsters, skulls, mutants, and all sorts of creatures, as well as being able to smash through a breakout style wall. For a video pinball game, the action here is pretty solid, and most importantly, the pinball physics here are fairly consistent. They're not perfect, but after playing for a while, you do get the hang of the timing and how to aim for things. There's nine levels to play through, and each one switches the table layout, and to progress through each, you either destroy all the enemies or knock down all the targets to unlock a section further up the screen so you can move the volume knob up a notch. So yeah, if you ignore the title and the whole Motley Crew aspect of the game, Crew Ball is actually a good enough video pinball game. I get why Sega went out of their way to get some StarPyro to spice up the game library or whatever, and that makes Crew Ball kind of a peculiar piece of gaming history. In the end, though, their inclusion is nothing short of half-assed and irrelevant. Still, Crew Ball was a perfectly fine video pinball game. It's nowhere near as fun as something like Alien Crush or Devil's Crush, but it's got its strengths like the sound design, and if you're into these kind of games, it's worth checking out.