POSTED 4/7/13


PINBALL HEROES: COMPLETE

Sony
Vita/PSN

Pinball’s important to us. Obviously, however, Sony don’t share our dedication.

Take eight of their IPs of varying significance, from Uncharted, Wipeout and MotorStorm down to PAIN, High Velocity Bowling and Fat Princess, then construct reasonably rudimentary pinnie tables around them. Let a silver sphere loose within them and you’ve a recipe for boingy ball brilliance, right? Nuh-uh.

While the ambitiously titled (on three fronts) Pinball Heroes: Complete may score OK in ambition – there are a handful of intriguing ideas here - it fails completely in an even amoeba-level understanding of physics. Seriously, Isaac Newton would likely be so distracted by the abject shititude of what’s going on here that he’d chuck all his apples at the programmers and forget to “discover” gravity. But it has been discovered, and it’s had its arse documented to the nth degree, despite Sony’s best attempts here to complete ignore any laws vaguely relating to it.

The last we checked, giant ball bearing-like shiny silver balls didn’t float about like balloons that have ingested helium. At least not in real life. They do here though, and it renders the entire exercise pointless, as it’s just not fun to play when immutably predictable things simply aren’t immutable or predictable.

With the mere existence of the sublime Zen Pinball games, anybody with the balls (meant that, duh) to go up against them should at the very least study what our favourite Hungarians have accomplished and absorb a reality check. If they digest the amazingtude of those efforts and still think it’s worth continuing with their own pinball project then all power, as something exciting must be in store for us all.

Sony obviously missed the memo, as despite all manner of online scoring and tournaments and shit, the game itself is shit, and shit is as shit does. Or something.

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