Sonic Spinball appreciation thread

I can tell that neither Sonic 3 & Knuckles nor Sonic and the Black Knight use GEMS. : P

That aside, Spinball can be a lil' fun, I guess. Not much of a pinball-fan, I ALWAYS loose too early. xD; Music was cool, though.

 

I was also quite dissapointed with this game when it was released, as I was expecting a real sequel to Sonic 2 and Sonic CD... But after the initial letdown, I actually started to like the differences it had with the main Sonic games.

Some graphics look a bit ugly, and Sonic's lame jumping while on foot sucks pinballs, but it's quite entertaining as a pinball game, and the Special Stages are awesome.

 

Which tracks did Howard actually do for Sonic 3? I don't think a single one has actually been confirmed as his. As for Black Knight, they're nice an all, but a bit dark for my tastes, both for Sonic and in general.

 

They appear for like, 2 seconds in a bonus stage, pfft.

About the topic itself, Spinball was pretty cool. At least the Genesis version, the GG version sucked ass.
I like the game, but I rarely ever play it for that long, it's frustrating as hell, and I usually die before I make to to the second stage.
Or maybe I just suck really hard at it.

Also, options screen music = ear rape.

 

Back in the day, 15 years ago or whatever, I got within one hit of killing the final boss, before I fell out of the spaceship and lost all my lives.

For this, Spinball shall always live in a particularly spiteful corner of my brain. I only finally finished the game for real a few months ago, with judicious use of savestates. :/

 

Quick question, has anyone else besides me ever beat the game at least once? I beat it 2 times, on my actual hardware, meaning no savestates, or cheating devices. And music wise, the only songs I didn't like at all were the Options Screen, and the boss music. With that said, I also have to say that Spinball was the hardest 16 bit Sonic game, due to it's pinball like game play. But it's fun. ^^

 

I've actually managed to beat the game in one go on real hardware. Once. This summer.

Part of the reason for that is I find it hard to not use savestates in an emulator, and I didn't have a physical copy for Genesis until recently. The Smash Pack version always cut out early, so I said "eh, fuck it" and just downloaded a ROM of it.

 

I beat it once and only once, by stocking up lives in Toxic Caves. Usually when I sit down to play it, I pick one of the levels and play just it (rather than starting from the beginning and going through the whole thing), so I've beaten the levels individually several times on the real hardware, with no other cheats besides level select.

Ironically, the options music and boss music are my favourites - but I guess the harsh FM guitars aren't quite to everyone's tastes, eh? :P

 

I've beaten it on the original Genesis. Took me years and years since I never really cared for the game (Same goes for Sonic 3D Blast.)

Also, the inclusion of the SatAM characters was interesting. Since it was a spin-off game, they were allowed to do that. (The manual even refers to the world as "Mobius".) The only other game to do this in Sonic's history is Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine.

The music was... Eh. It sounded, literally, like a glorified pinball machine with a soundtrack.

 

I love sonic spinball for the megadrive, use to rent it as a kid and while I have never beaten the game on legit terms I can sit down and play spinball quite easily for a long period of time. I love the music and style of sonic also. The bonus stages are very awesome too.

 

Man I kinda liked this, but I never beat it. unfortunatly, got no drive to beat it either lol

 

I actually have beaten the game (yes, on real hardware) many times. That final boss is a bitch but it's more how long it takes to beat than how hard it is, really.

 

Sonic Spinball is one of my favourites for a specific reason, and it's one of the very first I played. I mean, I played Sonic 3D PC first sure, but that was all I had until I found RealArcade. It had Sonic 1, Sonic and Knuckles, and, yes, Sonic Spinball. I picked it, played it, I liked it, however, I never quite got past Toxic Caves. Maybe because I didn't know I could control Sonic. Oh well.

Anyway, when I later came to re-find it somehow, years later, I got a ROM, played it, got to Lava Powerhouse and well, gave up.

Then I got Mega Collection, XBOX. The Machine.

PSP, PicoDrive. Beat the game. Awesome.

 

Replaying Spinball right now.

Holy fuck, no matter how old I get The Showdown is still the most fucking difficult level ever. It's especially nerve racking when you set the "ball" speed for fast.

 

Some of it is annoying, and I don't like neither the SatAM references or the music (or Sonic's western model, yuck). Its still a fair spin-off game though, so I understand people liking it. Pinball games aren't my cup of tea (though insane as it is, I liked the NiGHTS mini-game in SA).

 

I have beaten it on several occasions... I might just want to make a 'lets play' thing of me beating it, because of how hard people think it is...
It is easy once you forget it is a Sonic game and play it more like a pinball one

Speaking of which, I wonder if anyone has ever though of doing a rom hack of a 'regular' Sonic game to re-create this one? Then we'd have a version that has "real Sonic gameplay"

 

Spinball was one of my favorites out of the classic games, seriously. Particularly because it seemed to acknowledge the cartoon in a lot of the levels and bosses.

At the same time, I actually enjoyed the gameplay, despite how frustrating it got toward those last few levels. The bosses were always neat, though I do wish there had been more levels than the default 4.

I also really liked the graphics, which leads me to this point: why haven't I seen one of you rom-monkeys use Spinball's tiles (or a suitable edit of them) in a hack yet? There's a lot of good art there.