This post is more than a bit late… behold! My tribute to the insanity that is video pinball:
Over the years, I have amassed quite aof video pinball games. Even though I’m not much of a pinball player, I’m a huge fan of the genre, and I’ve long wanted to do a retrospective on the legendary Alien Crush.
Alien Crush game was the visual centerpiece of the TurboGrafx-16 when it was released. It was one of those games that made you think “I want this system.” However, being a pinball game, it doesn’t make for terribly compelling gameplay footage – at the end of the day, it’s just pinball.
I decided to bolster the video by adding additional pinball games. As I browsed through my library, I began to notice a pattern of… uh… “heavy metal absurdity.” A video pinball game relies quite heavily on the theme applied to its table(s) – if you’re working with a decent physics model and table design, that’s really about all that separates one game from the other. I found myself increasingly amused at the “edgy” nature of the themes developers chose; many games from the early 1990s just seem like they were designed to upset parents. In a word, they were SWEET.
So, with that in mind, I took inspiration from one of my favorite NES commercials:
https://youtu.be/FVWfjFeKi-w
I thought it would be fun to just go full sensory overload – inundate the viewer with over the top nonsense as rapidly as I could. If nothing else, I think I accomplished that goal.
FUN FACT: I had originally recorded footage from the TG-16 version of Devil’s Crush. Unfortunately, due to some hardware issues, I wasn’t able to capture it in RGB, and I wasn’t happy with how it looked next to the rest of the footage. As such, what you see in the video is actually from Devil’s Crush MD: the Japanese Genesis version of the same game. Here’s the video of the TG-16 version if you’re interested.
Catch you later, pinball wizards!