Do I Really Gotta Catch Em All?

Author's Rating:

Pros: bright colors, nice save feature and it's fun for awhile

Cons: It gets tedious very quickly

The Bottom Line: 
Rent or borrow it first, then decide if you want to shell out the bucks.

Author's Review
I believe that I was in late jr. high when Pokemon first started to appear in the United States. I didn’t pay that much attention to it but I did manage to keep myself at least a little informed because let’s face it, when you’re in school…if you don’t know about the current popular trends, you might as well stay home lest you appear to be biggest idiot around. So, I kept up to date and expected it to quickly blow over leaving me with even more useless pop culture knowledge in my head… only problem was that it didn’t go away. It just stayed there and continued to grow until finally I had no choice but to find out what the big deal was.

As with all major trends, along with popularity comes merchandise! First we had the stuffed toys (which one of my friends in high school actually carried around with him), then came all the other things that could possibly carry those cute little things’ face on them and finally came the video games, the latest of which would be Pokemon Pinball.

When I first saw the ad for this I knew that I was going to get it because I happen to love video pinball and I think that well done video pinball is a great thing. So, I got it and I played it and I have to admit that for the first few days that I had it I was hooked. It was fun and colorful. It had some nice noises and music to it for a GBA and I was pretty interested in catching them all. Then the novelty wore off pretty quick.

For a pinball game it’s not bad. It’s about as good as one would expect for a GBA. The tables aren’t entirely complicated and so after you memorize where on the flipper you have to hit the ball in order to make it go exactly where you want it to go it becomes repetitive pretty quickly and when it’s not repetitive it’s frustrating.

On the plus side though there are a few bonus levels, none of which are that challenging and all of which get so repetitive that you will end up saying ‘screw the points’ and skip it, if you’ve already found all the hidden Pokemon there are to find of which there are only a few. The rest of which you can get by hitting the ball through the loops.

All in all I only play the game now when I am really bored. There isn’t a whole lot to keep me coming back besides that. The tables are not that difficult and so it becomes rather tedious. If you’re a fan of video pinball, you might want to rent this game sometime or borrow it from a friend just so that you can see if you like it but don’t spend the money to buy it unless you’re absolutely sure that it will keep your attention for more than a few hours total or unless you’re an absolute Pokemon nut.