South Park

"A fun and complex pinball game."

We all know about South Park, the hit show on Comedy Central, which was meant for adults, but every 11-year-old in the country watched it. Anyhow, it became the theme for the new type of pinball game, and it turned out to be a pretty good and unique game, fun for almost any fan of pinball.

A noticeable thing about the table is that it is very colorful. Compared to some other pinball games, South Park had a much more colorful and drawn on board. Also, many figurines of South Park stars have been propped up on springs, usually signifying that some kind of special jackpot or something else that gives points is nearby. The flippers are a bit thinner than an average flipper, but nevertheless they are strong and can easily make the ball fly to the top of the board. During play, some typical South Park comments are heard, such as “I’m not gay!”, or you can hear the chef say “Damn woman, I just made love to you five minutes ago... are you tryin’ to kill me?”. It also has a funny way of attracting you to the machine, because you can hear Cartman say, “C’mon, even Kenny’s family has a quarter!” And there are a ton of other comments heard depending on how you earned some points, which you should not be surprised with, because they are all typical South Park phrases.

What I did not like about this pinball game is that many of the twisting pipes all seem to curve right into a side area that makes your ball roll right down into the loss zone, with no hopes of retrieving it. This tends to make you lose your balls quite fast, and you only have a given amount of three, as with most pinball games. An extra ball is earned at about 1,000,000 points, I believe, but earning this extra ball is a bit on the hard side, since I usually end with a grand total of about 300,000. This is mainly due to the problem I mentioned with the twisting pipes, and the low amount of points given even when the biggest jackpot is gained. However, the fact that the preset high score is quite high and hard to obtain is also good on another hand, because it gives you a very nice level of challenge and urges the player to keep using their quarters on this game.

I don’t know if it was just me, but the ball seemed just a little bit on the smaller side. This is not good. A large ball is much easier to work with, because it’s easier to hit with your flippers, and it doesn’t suffer from any weight problems either, so even a thin flipper can hit it strongly. But overall, this is hardly noticeable if even noticeable at all, so there is no real problems here.

Probably the biggest problem I had with this pinball game is the complexity. On one hand, a complex board is GREAT, because it’s full of twisting and turning tunnels, lots of jackpot holes, etc. However, if you put all that complexity with the extremely colorful board full of different drawings, it’s quite hard to keep track of your ball. It is not unlikely to find someone that can’t find their ball for a few seconds after they’ve sunk it into a scoring pit, but luckily most of them end up in a side pipe. These lead right to the top of a flipper, so it can easily be shot right back up to the top of the board again.

Despite some of these minor problems, South Park is a very good pinball game, which should be tried out by anyone who has one in their closest arcade. I enjoyed it and spent a few dollars on it, and I wasn’t too disappointed. You shouldn’t be disappointed either, so give it a shot.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/01, Updated 08/09/01