Mario Pinball Land

"Note to game developers: This is NOT how to make a pinball game, even if you can use Mario!"

Mario has gone into virtually every genre, right? Correct, and the Italian one has conquered in almost all of them as well. However, Mario's first foray into pinball gaming in Mario Pinball Land is disastrous to say the least, and the frustrating gameplay should also serve as a lesson to anyone in game development.

Graphically, Mario Pinball Land is beautiful. The pseudo-3-D modeling is actually well done, and is easily on par with the popular Donkey Kong Country series, which uses the same visual effect. Furthermore, the art, while not staggeringly impressive or innovative, at least reflects a solid understanding of the Mario franchise and gets the job done. You can say what you like about MPL's shoddy gameplay, but you cannot say that the game looks bad. A thumbs-up to the artists and graphical designers.

Sound-wise, the game is really nothing special, but not particularly bad either. The music in the game luckily does not get really grating, and the voice-work, while pretty much relegated to a few lines of dialogue, is decent.

Unfortunately for MPL, if the gameplay was as good as the graphics, the number in this review score would be quite different. the game basically consists of shooting Mario around a bunch of Mushroom Kingdom-themed boards to defeat enemies, collect coins, stars, and keys, and beat five seperate worlds to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser. Now, this is all well and good, but the developers make one dire mistake in how the boards are designed.

See, instead of one massive board like traditional pinball games, the designers opted for scads of tiny boards, on which the action in that particular area would take place. By hitting enemies with Mario, you can collect the aforementioned items. While the stars are used to open new microstages in the level, coins are used to purchase items from Toad that alter gameplay(such as mushrooms that affect Mario's size, or extra lives). The whole concept of microstages quickly gets tiresome, since if you leave a stage, the events that take place there reset if you leave, meaning that boss battles and difficult shots may need to be fought or taken again, which gets old fast.

Furthermore, you can't really control Mario, so battles can take forever to complete(I clocked a battle against one of the game's major bosses at nearly half an hour). If the gameplay was done better, it would be perhaps shooting a normal pinball around large boards or something similar. Perhaps the developers should have copied the more effective mechanics of Nintendo's own Pokemon Pinball games when making MPL.

In closing, MPL had tons of potential, but the finished product is more an example of how frustrating this particular brand of gameplay can be.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/07