The domino effect of that level is the ultimate buzzkill for me.. you gotta do this or that to unlock the gates and get the emeralds (and you have to be extremely accurate in that middle portion).. you have to hit the switch in the final battle like 3 times to even hit Robotnik (err, click?).. I don’t even think there’s a definitive way to determine when you can go up to hit Robotnik because it’s so random (unless I’m missing something) I’ve beaten Spinball from start to finish more than a handful of times, but Showdown can go screw itself lol
No no, I agree, Showdown is complete ass, I just meant that the first 3 levels are decently fun. Hell, usually I just turn the game off after beating The Machine, with a sarcastic OK I won yay!...
Personally, I find Spinball much more enjoyable with the speed set to "fast" in the options. Though that may be because I'm a big fan of 'real' pinball. Actually, I think Spinball may have played a big hand in that. It was sort of my bridge into playing actual pinball.
Funnily enough I actually agree with the topic premise: Spinball DOES need more recognition, and the topic hasn't been that terrible to warrant immediate trashing, so... That said, yes, the "make me a disasm plz" is entitled crap that can be ignored.
I'm not going to close the topic because I think there's something salvageable going on here. That said, I believe Steve Woita was on Retronauts several years back for unrelated reasons but mentioned Spinball was done in C for time constraint reasons... I think? I would have to go back to the episode and check. I know otherwise that team did have regular interfacing with Sonic Team.
You know, I tried really hard not to post more links to my videos because I don't want to look like a spammer, but since this topic keeps on existing, sure, why not: Mega Drive / Genesis version, Master System version. By incredible coincidence, I uploaded those videos mere days before this topic was started, I didn't make them on purpose. With that said, let me add some actual content. I never played the 16-bit version until I made that video, but I had the 8-bit version for my Game Gear. I never liked it that much and I could never beat it, not because it was too hard, but because it was too boring after a while. Even now that I played them back to back to make those videos, I still don't think Spinball is a game I want to replay anytime soon, but it's still better than Sonic CD and Chaotix.
Oddly enough, I feel like Spinball gets too much recognition. It's included in every compilation alongside Dr. Robotnik's mean bean machine and 3d Blast (the mediocre trifecta) for seemingly no other reason than "it was on the Genesis." What about all those other Sonic titles that rarely or have never been rereleased? SegaSonic Arcade (I know this one is difficult to get working so fair enough) and Chaotix, along with the Saturn version of 3D Blast. Then you have the one and done examples like Sonic the Fighters and Sonic R (Sonic the Fighters did get a 2nd rerelease around 2012 I think). IMO the games I listed are better than Spinball, but due to the ease of shoving that ROM into an emulator and calling it a day it'll keep popping up from time to time. EDIT: When I say MBM is mediocre I don't mean to shit on puyo puyo. Puyo is fine. But MBM is just a reskin, its not a Sonic game at all. So as far as Sonic games go it's mediocre.
There is a bit of nostalgia there with Sonic Spinball. I remember renting it from a Blockbuster in the early '90s and thinking I was going to play a Sonic game. It doesn't control like Sonic. It is a pinball game with a character ball and stages. Ugh. I hated it at first but still pressed onward and beat it anyway. Interesting graphics. Music is second-tier. It has some charm. I rarely play it. The only draw for me is it brings me back to that night when I was 12 or 13 trying to play it at my friend Robert's house and his mom came home from work with pizza. Very Americana. But, the game tried to tie into that lame American animated show.
But—and there's a huge BUT—the game had some character. I will give it that. And when I reintroduced myself to the game not long back, it was quite fun. Ultimately, I think fun is the key. It is fun once you get passed some things and get into it.
Something that irks me are the people who say spinball either takes place in the game universe or the aosth universe; the freedom fighters weren't in aosth (aside from sally in the Christmas special). Spinball takes place in the archie/satam world, and mean bean machine takes place in aosth. At least, unless I'm missing a huge detail, I'm 99% sure about this. I think it's cool that spinball is the only official archie/satam game ever released
It doesn't firmly fit into the world of either of the cartoons, but it does borrow more from STH than AOSTH (they only used Scratch).
It's got a mix of styles, some archie/cartoon, some that nod towards the regular games' canon, like the initial US's release's title screen music before they changed it. I'd like to be a part of an HD upgrade of the game, a la Sonic 2 HD. I'm down for drawing up and contributing graphics for something like that. At least it sounds like a fun project anyway.
Spinball was an awkward mishmash of SatAM/Archie, the games, and a bit of AOSTH. Even the character designs reflected this. Sonic's in-game sprites depicted him with American Sonic's mohawk, while the title screen and the "Emerald Get" sprite had him with multiple rows of quills. Robotnik looked like Japanese Eggman with some tweaks (including the fact he was a freakin' giant for some reason...) Sonic and Tails' plane had a weird design never seen anywhere else (the Tornado never appeared in the DiC cartoons). Looking back, Spinball epitomized the indecisive mess that were the Western Sonic media and localizations back in the day
Yeah, the game's a big mix, so it's difficult to put into one canon. Looking back at the prototypes, I think they had a plan to mix it all along to make it appeal to both Japanese and western audiences? Like here for example. Japanese Eggman with the Western's design: (Note the aosth/satam cartoon Robotnik's gloves and outfit) It explains why he is wearing gloves in his sprite work in the final boss. Yet oddly enough, only having regular Japanese Eggman sprites in the bonus stages... where Aosth and Satam characters are more focused.
It's hard to tell for sure, but ignoring the red colouring, his left arm looks almost robotic like in the cartoon, with the ball-joint shoulder. Where's this image from anyway? It's different from the version on the wiki. It's possible that DiC gave them an unfinished design... but the Archie comic series had already begun by the end of 1992, so the finalised design was out there in the world. The same can be said for Buzz Bomber though. Spinball's Buzz Bomber is clearly based on the one from the cartoon (also in the original Archie mini-series), but the design is slightly different. I'm guessing that the bonus stages had different graphic artists. The Egg Mobile is specifically the 16-bit Sonic 2 version, so they were maybe using Yasushi Yamaguchi's art as reference for Robotnik as well.
