Developed/Published by: Zen Studios / LucasArts
Released: February 19th, 2013
Completed: 25th March, 2014
Completion: It’s pinball. You can’t actually complete it, so yet again more truthfully: I just stopped playing.
Trophies / Achievements: 27%
Pinball is in a wee bit of a renaissance, recently. Not the physical machines (god no) but in video game-o-form, with FarSight Studios more or less kicking the whole thing off with their excellent digital re-creations of classic pinball tables in things like Pinball Hall of Fame and now their ongoing project The Pinball Arcade, which has enough of a following that they’ve managed to run fairly pricey Kickstarters for new tables and otherwise keep up a pretty regular run of new tables.
So people who like this—admittedly fairly niche—line of game design are well served. What I think has been so important to the whole thing is a little odd, though, considering that it’s something I pretty much hate in every other kind of game. It’s achievements.
You see, I don’t actually think it was until I went to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas that I ever really understood how to play Pinball. For pretty much my entire life up to that point, every table was an inscrutable jumble of flashing lights. You put in your 50p, and the entire aim of the game was “don’t let it go down the hole in the middle… or those holes down the side, but you can’t really do anything about that.”
Not to say I didn’t like some tables! I always loved the Data East Star Wars pinball machine (which we’ll probably never see remade, thanks to this) Twilight Zone and so on. But understand them? No. It was only by spending almost an entire day at the Pinball Hall of Fame, working my way up from the most basic tables to the most modern, that I got this gradual understanding. Tables that have one feature up to tables that have a bazillion. Started to be able to pick out what I was trying to do to make points happen. Started to learn what an incredible game design challenge a pinball machine is.
Not everyone would have this opportunity, and honestly, it still wasn’t enough. And that’s where FarSight stepped in. They added “goals” to every table, which result in achievements. Get the “Standard Goals” and you’ve basically learned the table. Get the “Wizard Goals” and you’re amazing at that table. They’re nice, granular ways to learn the table, always giving you something to aim for other than a high score, and if you’re so good that you’ve got them all, then you’re aiming for some pretty astonishing high scores and the challenge alone should be enough to keep you going. It’s really an incredible way to start to get pinball, and off the back of it I learned to really like what seemed like a confusing yet simultaneously boring table like Black Hole.
Anyway, Star Wars Pinball is a stand-alone game from Zen Studios, basically FarSight’s only competitor with Zen Pinball. They create their own tables—which are a bit more magical, more Devil’s Crush video game pinball, than strictly realistic—and they have no fucking idea how to use achievements to teach the tables or give players an interesting challenge/range of goals. There’s three per table, every one (bar one, a Yoda-based bonus on the Empire Strikes Back table) is insanely hard to do unless you are amazing; in fact the Boba Fett table’s goals are more or less “do everything on the table” and one of the Clone Wars (spit) table’s is “do this one thing flawlessly three times in a row, NO MISTAKES.”
It’s garbage.
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: What if you don’t want goals, you just want to score points on pinball tables? The tables are ok, I’d actually say they’re overcomplicated by all the video game stuff. And you are going to get SO sick of the theme. The same quotes from the movies, over and over and over again. Barf.
