One of the big growing pains of the third generation of video games was the longtime hi-score mechanic, or more specifically, its slow move to irrelevance. As NES games started to trend toward level variety, as opposed to gradually increasing difficulty in infinite repetition, simply finishing the game at all became the accomplishment players strived for, rather than trying to get a high score. As points stopped mattering, by the fourth generation, most games stopped bothering to include them at all, and speedruns became the standard achievement.
In most cases, simply giving up on high scores made more sense than trying to better integrate them into varied gameplay. Without the tight time, quarter-begging limits of arcade game levels, play centered around high scores just wasn’t very fun, and tended to incentivize player behavior that made little sense outside of just getting high scores for the sake of getting high scores. It certainly didn’t help that when Street Fighter II revolutionized the arcade with player versus player showdowns, the exact score of the players seemed absurdly irrelevant compared to who won and how.
Enter Kirby’s Pinball Land, a cute little title for the Game Boy that did its very best to make the hi score great again. Only the third Kirby game overall, the 1993 classic, as the name implies, has adorable art wrapped up in a pinball aesthetic. But it also has a surprisingly sophisticated scoring system, all built around the classic pinball mechanic of having to do whatever it takes to keep from losing a life.
What makes Kirby’s Pinball Land work so well as a conversion of the pinball concept is that the scoring system is transparent, and rational. Each of the three stages has three tiers, with limited opportunities for points from incidental collisions. The big risk in the first tier is simply falling all the way down to the bottom and losing a life. But the top two tiers of each stage have a warp star, the second tier taking the player to a high score potential minigame, and the third tier taking the player to a boss fight.
The boss fights aren’t difficult. Like the rest of the pinball gameplay, the risk is not that Kirby itself can be damaged. Rather, their main form of attack is paralyzing the flippers, causing Kirby to tumble down helplessly back to the third tier. Kirby’s Pinball Land has the dubious distinction of Whispy Woods, the anthropomorphic tree, going from the easiest boss fight in most Kirby games to the toughest in this one. Despite being a stationary target, Whispy Woods gives little warning before dropping spiky gordos on the flippers, and its normally underwhelming air puffs, strategically aimed right between the flippers, can likewise banish Kirby back to the third tier in a hurry- especially annoying because Whispy Woods is the most RNG dependent of all stages. Falling down to a game over is much easier than getting back up compared to the other two.
Yet going after Whispy Woods is always the smartest move, as is going after any other boss, for the simple reason that the five thousand points scored per hit is a much better, reliable return on points per second than any other strategy. True, the second-tier bonus stages can eventually get higher returns…but warp stars are much rarer than whatever the mechanism is for advancing from the second tier to the third tier. In this way, despite fundamentally being a score attack title, Kirby’s Pinball Land still rewards the player for trying to see all the game, as had become the standard by 1993.
Beating King Dedede may not yield a proper ending, (just a “here we go again” cutscene), yet repeatedly pummeling King Dedede yields so many points even compared to other bosses there simply isn’t any reason not to pick a fight with him as quickly as possible. As with the other bosses, King Dedede is less tough in his own right as he is capable of getting in a luckily timed stun at a crucial moment. Whether the game is played simply as a survival title by a casual gamer or as a serious score attack by a pinball wizard, both styles of play are well-rewarded.
Kirby’s Pinball Land hasn’t aged like a fine wine just because of this excellent merging of styles, though. It’s just really well-designed for pick-up-and-play gaming in general, much like Tetris. Newer hardware only makes the cute spritework that much better aged- the game looks fantastic in color on the Chromatic, which is little surprise given it had to be playable thirty years ago without the benefit of a backlight. It also helps that the game is really cheap- it was popular enough in its day, and forgotten enough today, that it’s quite easy to nab a cartridge for just ten bucks.
Incredibly, Nintendo isn’t actually selling Kirby’s Pinball Land today on its modern hardware at all. Although even if you could get it on the Switch, I’d probably still recommend it for original or similar hardware anyway. Kirby’s Pinball Land is a very compact experience, pinball in your pocket, if you will. And it is just so very satisfying to be able to pick it up on a whim and be bouncing around dream land in mere seconds.
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