Arc Style: San Goku Shi Pinball (3DS)

 In 2006, Nintendo released a strange samurai-themed voice-controlled pinball/strategy game called Odama. Unfortunately, I haven't yet been able to play Odama, but it was in my mind the whole time I was playing San Goku Shi Pinball. It doesn't have any voice controls, and it's setting is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, rather than feudal Japan, but still: olden times battlefield pinball. I doubt it was made as a deliberate mockbuster anyway, coming out six year later than Odama, and Odama not being the kind of massive hit you'd bother mockbusting anyway.

 

That doesn't mean it's just a generic pinball game with a Three Kingdoms coat of paint, though. Instead, you go through various differnt stages, each followed by a boss. The stages are all different, though they all consist of a small battlefield area, littered with soldiers, battlements, and so on. The goal in the stages is to defeat all of the enemy officers who are commanding the endlessly respawning troops, while also lighting torches and finding hidden treasures and bonus stages to score more points. 

 

The boss fights are slightly different, and all take place in a little castle courtyard area. in that courtyard, there'll be a prominent figure from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and you have to defeat them by repeadly hitting them with the ball (the one exception to this that I've ecountered was Zhang Jiao, who is defeated by extinguishing his magic purple bonfires dotted around the place. Bosses can fight back by attacking your flippers and disabling them for a couple of seconds, which is something I always hate. Taking away the player's input just seems like a cheap copout form of difficulty.

 

San Goku Shi Pinball isn't one of the greatest pinball games you'll ever seen, and it has some stiff competition on the 3DS in the form of Pinball Hall of Fame, which contains recreations of Taxi, Pinbot, and a bunch of other real-life tables. But those are recreations of real tables, and San Goku Shi is a whole new pinball videogame with all the advantages and possibilities that brings. So it's fine. If you already have Pinball Hall of Fame, and want more, less realistic pinball on your 3DS, then you wouldn't be too disappointed if you went with this one.

Brave Pinball (PC)

 

 Okay, I'll start this review with an apology: there's no screenshots other than the title screen because every time I took a screenshot in-game, the game would pause, and the screenshot would just show the pause menu. Every time, no matter what I did. After over an hour of trying different solutions, I gave up. So unfortunately, you'll have to deal with an unillustrated review, just this once.

I bought Brave Pinball a few weeks ago, as I was browsing the summer sale on DLSite, and the concept of an RPG-themed pinball game seemed pretty cute and fun. I especially like the little synergy between the main character and the concept of pinball: his swords are kind of shaped like pinball flippers, and the flippers in the game are kind of shaped like swords. Also, there isn't actually a ball in the game, as you're instead chucking a tiny version of the main character around the table to hit things with his swords.

The over-arching goal of the game, alongside the traditional pinball goal of scoring points, is to collect sixteen "pieces" of something. What the something is is a surprise. Pieces are collected in various ways: random drops from enemies in each area, reaching score thresholds, beating bosses, and so on. So, to get them all, you have to be able to explore the massive table and all its sub-tables, as well as just scoring points. Luckily, you don't have to get every piece in a single game, it's more of a long-term goal.

There's one massive flaw to the game, though, that really hampered my enjoyment of it: there's no way of nudging the ball/knight a little in the right direction. In a normal pinball game, this would be frustrating enough, as it'd cause you to lose balls down the middle with no hope of saving them far too often, but, as previously mentioned, Brave Pinball has an exploration element to it. So what this means is that you can struggle your way up the table a few areas, and in a second or two, find yourself all the way back down to the starting area. There's also little technical problems that a nudge action would have solved, like how the knight often gets stuck on objects for long, boring seconds at a time, or stuck in a loop bouncing between certain objects and the side of the table.

That's not the only flaw the game has, though. If you think back to my review of Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball, you'll remember that (in my opinion, at least) an important part of pinball is that you should have constant stimulation: ideally, every time you hit the ball up the table, and every time it hits something, there should be a noise, a flashing light, some points scored, or all of the above. In Brave Pinball, not only do the enemies only score points when they're killed, rater than every time they take damage, but there are also these wooden windmill/waterwheel things littered around the board that just get in the way, scoring no points and often proving another hurdle in the way of the game's exploration gimmick.

I admit I do feel a litle guilty giving such a damning review to a modern indie game, the developers of which obviously put a lot of love into, but I just can't recommend Brave Pinball. It's addictive, as most pinball games are, especially on PC when you can load them up and play a quick game to pass a few minutes, but unfortunately, the flaws are just insumountible. I do hope, though, that the devs go back to the drawing board and give it another try sometime, as the basic idea of an RPG-themed pinball game is really cool.

Dragonball Z (Plug and Play)

So, back in the mid-00s, there were a lot of these licensed plug and play joystick things, usually shaped like a character from a show they were based on, and more interestingly, containing one or more completely new 2D games! Though there's recently been talk of a lot of plug and plays actually being famiclones, with brand new, officially licensed Famicom games still being written because of them, as far as I can tell, these Jakks Pacific ones aren't famiclones. The games are too colourful, the sprites are too big, and so on.

This one was shaped like Shenron, and contained three games, all of which vary in both quality and thematic appropriateness. We'll get the worst and least fitting out of the way first, with "Kamehameha Assault". This is Dragonball Z-themed Pong. You pick one of five characters (Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Cell, and Buu), then you hit a green energy orb back and forth while also shooting energy blasts at each other. Each of the two characters has some of the Dragonballs behind them, and every time one of them gets hit by the green orb, it goes over to the other character's side. When one character has all seven, they win. It really is just fancy pong where you can also shoot each other a bit. It's definitely not fast or exciting enough to be considered a Windjammers-alike.

Next up is the most thematically appropriate of the three games, and while it is better than Kamehameha Assault, it's not by a great amount. Its name is Buto-Retsuden (fighting fighting legend? Am I reading that right?), and it's a fighting game. The roster is the same five characters as before, and it looks and feels like a poor imitation of the Super Butoden games. Except there's no special move inputs, beyond, say, forward+attack. Also, all the attacks, even the supers, do a pathetically tiny amount of damage and the fights feel like they last for hours. As a result, I never even managed to finish a credit of this, win or lose. By the halfway point of the second fight's first round, I was losing the will to live every time, and just quit.

Finally, we've got the best game of the three, and while it doesn't fit the theme particularly well, it's pinball, and basing pinball tables on things no matter what they are is a grand old tradition dating back to colonial times, at least. Also, the ball launch mechanism is Goku charging and firing a Kamehameha, which is a nice little touch. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Devil Crush, with the basic structure being a three-screen-tall main table, with entrances to seven bossfight bonus tables hidden around the place, and enemies marching up and down the place waiting to be smashed by the ball. Of course, every time you beat one of the bosses, the ball turns into a dragonball for you to take to goku up at the top of the table. Get them all to summon Porunga (since this table is set on Namek, during the Freeza arc) for lives and points and such.

Pinball isn't a spectacular game, but it's not awful, either, and it's a lot better than the other two games on here. Whether or not it's worth the price of admission depends on how much that price is. The going rate on ebay at the time of writing seems to be £10-20, which is far, far too much. If you see one of these for a pittance in a charity shop, though, the pinball game will give you half an hour's fun before you put the stick on a shelf, where it will at least make a fairly nice ornament forevermore.

Tsumera (PC)

I'll start out by saying that getting this game running was an ordeal. Unlike the last couple of old PC games, Graduation and Nyan Nyan Tower, which ran natively in Windows 10 with no problems, for a couple of days, I couldn't even manage to get Tsumera running in DOSBOX. Luckily, someone pointed me towards a version uploaded as part of something called the eXoDOS collection, which runs in DOSBOX no problem. So if you end up wanting to play this game, seek that out, I guess?

Anyway, it's a pinball game developed in Taiwan, which is itself pretty interesting. Is is the first Taiwanese game I've covered here? I can't actually remember. It's also very heavily influenced by the Crush games, which is no bad thing at all. Thematically, it can be considered a combination of Devil Crush and Jaki Crush, with lots European and Asian occult influences on display, though in terms of actual design, it's definitely skewed towards Devil Crush. Soome elements are shamelessly lifted from there, like the dragon whos maouth leads to a boss stage, or the hexagram surrounded by a troop of marching goons. And yes, like the Crush games, Tsumera is made up of one main table that's three screens high, with hidden portals to single-screen bossfight/bonus stages littered around the place.

Despite being pretty unoriginal, there's a lot to love about this game: it looks amazing, it's fun to play, there's a ton of mysterious things to uncover (I've played for a few hours now, and in my last credit before writing this, I was still discovering new stuff!), and it's generally a high-quality game all round. I do, however have a couple of minor issues. The first is that there's no score display while you're playing, nor is it ever made clear what exactly contributes to your end-of-ball bonuses. Obviously, this doesn't really affect play too much, but it does make learning to play the game better and make higher scores more difficult. The second, much bigger problem is also a little harder to explain: basically, there's lots of things to activate around the table. Portals to open, different monsters to summon, and so on. The problem is that whenever you leave the main table, whether it's to go to a boss screen, or even just to prematurely cash in your bonus, everything on the table resets. Because somethings are a lot less labourious to activate than others, seeing what some of the slower-activated gimmicks actually do when completed is pretty difficult!

All in all, though, these faults don't get in the way of the fact that Tsumera is an excellent little game, and it really is a shame that it's not only obscure, but also kind of inaccessible. We can only hope that whatever company owns the rights to it someday decides to cash in and put out a rerelease for modern systems. But if the idea of getting it working isn't too daunting, I definitely recommend doing so.

Family Pinball (NES)

Family Pinball, released in 1989, seems like it might have felt a little bit dated. Not only is the main table, a 2 screen high Pac-Man-themed affair, a bit simplistic when compared to real pinball tables of the late 1980s, but also compared to video pinball games on other systems. For example, Alien Crush had been released on PC Engine just a few months earlier, and while it might be a little unfair to compare games on systems with such different power levels, but while the Famicom had no chance of putting out anything that could rival Alien Crush graphically, it could definitely have played host to a pinball table that was just as complex and interesting.

I guess Namco saw the same problem in their own game, as while the Pac-Man table is the only traditional pinball table in the game, there are a bunch of other tables, that are more like pinball-inspired minigames, rather than actual tables. The first is 9-Ball. It's an odd combination of pinball and pachinko, where the aim is, like pachinko, to launch the ball at just the right speed so that it goes into one of the holes on the table. Before starting, you bet points, and winning the bet relies on getting balls in holes so that they form squares or lines. The pinball element enters proceddings in two ways: firstly, you can nudge the table to try and influence how the ball falls, and secondly, instead of a ball just falling off the bottom of the screen helplessly, there's a pair of flippers down there, so you can send it back up if you're quick enough.

The third of the minigames is battle pinball, and is also probably the most filled-out conceptually speaking, as well as the most fun to play. It's a versus pinball game, in which the aim is to get the ball past your opponent's flippers. First to three points wins. The way gravity works in this mode is a little odd, though I can't think of any better way they might have handled it: the ball will "fall" towards the nearest set of flippers, with "down" changing direction halfway up the table. (Or down it. You know what I mean.) There's three different tables in this mode, too, which would add a bit of variety if it was being played a lot (which I can actually imagine happening back in the game's heyday).

Finally, there's sports pinball, coming in soccer and ice hockey varieties (though there isn't much difference between the two as far as I can tell). This is mostly like battle pinball, with the same physics, and the same aim, but with no pinball bumpers or targets strewn about the tables, and with a much odder control scheme. Instead of activating two flippeers in front of your goal, you have a goalkeeper there, who you can move left and right, and who automatically deflects the ball, Pong-style. In the opponent's side of the table, you have one flipper, which you can also move left and right, and you can also press the buttons that activate the two flippers in other mdes to spin it clockwise or counter-clockwise. This mode feels a little half-baked, and is more fiddly than fun, especially compared to the much better battle pinball mode.

All in all, I found Family Pinball a bit of a disappointment, mainly thanks to how basic the main table is. If you have someone to regularly play against, you'll probably get decent milage out of battle mode, but otherwise, it's not a title worth bothering with.

Panic Road (Arcade)

Video pinball games make sense on home systems, as there are factors of cost and space that make keeping a pinball collection at home incredibly unrealistic for anyone but the most crooked robber barons. In arcades, though, they're a much odder prospect, since most places that have arcade machines are also places you're likely to find pinball tables, so who would bother playing an untactile facsimile when they can play the real thing? Which is probably why, off the top of my head, I can only think of two pinball arcade games: the pornographic Gals Pinball, and this one, Panic Road.

Panic Road features some early examples (maybe even the first, but I'm not sure on that) of a video pinball game having features not possible on real tables, too: there's roaming, destructible enemies in place of stationary bumpers, there's multiple tables, and were those multiscreen tables real, they'd definitely be abnormally long compared to their peers. You don't get to choose which table you play, though, as the game takes a videogamey approach to progression. Each table has a goal, which reveals a key when fulfilled. Hit the key with the ball andgo to the next table!

The problem is that the game doesn't tell you what these goals are, and they're not particularly intuitive, either. The first table's goal is to collect the numbers 1-2-3 that are in a row about midway up the table, the ocean-themed table two has you hitting every clam on the table so they open up, and though I made the key appear on table three, I still have no idea what triggered that. It just seemed to happen. At least the table's themes are varied, though: table one is in a little garden with mushrooms, strawberries and wooden fenceposts, table two is as mentioned before, in the ocean, while the third table is just an arrangement of random objects, like moles, pencils, disembodied hands and a pink mountain.

Panic Road is an okay game. The opacity of each stage's goals is a problem, as are the slightly odd ball physics (which can be forgiven considering the game's age), and it obviously doesn't hold a candle to many of the console pinball games that would come later, but it's a fun enough distraction. I imagine it wasn't very popular with arcade operators, though: my first credit with no prior practice lasted over 20 minutes, and none of those that followed were any shorter.

Dragon Beat: Legend of Pinball (Playstation)

I really like pinball games, both real tables and videogames. I think there's a lot to be learned about game design, especially for arcade-style games from playing them. It helps that most of them are pretty fun, even when they're not particularly well-designed because of some basic principles I'll get into later. Dragon Beat is definitely a useful learning experience, even among pinball games, as it's a masterclass in fundamentally bad design.

But first, I'll address a more obvious elephant in the room regarding this game: the way it looks. It's ugly. Very ugly. Everything is prerendered in a way that makes everything look very very dated. Some people talk about how the low polygon graphics seen on the Playstation and Saturn have aged poorly, and they're wrong in general, but Dragon Beat in particular is a game that would have benefitted greatly from having chunky polygon models with vibrant, brightly-coloured textures as opposed to the drab, wannabe realistic renders it has. The fact that prerendered backgrounds aren't exactly conducive to play and interaction is probably a mitigating factor in the game's mechanical faults, too.

Though it might just seem like flourish, an important part of what makes pinball fun is the constant stimulation. The whole time you're playing a pinball game, there's noise, flashing lights, numbers going up, stuff moving around and so on. For an example of this idea taken to its extreme, play Kaze's Digital Pinball series on Saturn (Last Gladiators and Necronomicon), games that constantly bombard the player with absurd levels of bombasticity, with guitar solos, booming proclamations and even surreal poetry recitations happening while the ball pings around the place.

Dragon Beat, by contrast is just plain old boring, in a way I've never seen a pinball game be before. More than half of your time is spent watching the ball just bounce off of walls, making no sound, scoring no points, having nothing happen. If you're lucky, you'll get the ball into a few holes , which will trigger events and let you see a little bit of cool pixel art and maybe also a glitchy pre-rendered sprite of a monster dancing around the table, but in the most part, this game is dull. (The whole theming of the game suggests that it was inspired by the work of husband and wife video pinball developers Littlewing, but only thematically. Littlewing's games are much more exciting, even their first, the primitive 1991 game Tristan, which you can play on the Internet Archive here.)

There's none of the audio-visual stimulation, none of the brain-pleasing numbers-going-up, there's nothing. Just a ball slowly rolling around an ugly table. And, in another bad aesthetic choice, the ball has some kind of weird sprite scaling thing going on, so that it shrinks when it goes up the screen, and grows when it comes down. It doesn't really work though, maybe due to the flatness of the tables themselves, and just looks strange.

Obviously, I don't recommend Dragon Beat - Legend of Pinball. Instead, you should play literally any other pinball game ever made, as I'm yet to encounter one that's anywhere near as bad as this.

Dragon's Revenge (Mega Drive)

So, you might remember a while back, when I reviewed Jaki Crush, the sequel to Devil Crush. Well, in a convoluted sort of way, Dragon's Revenge is also the sequel to Devil Crush. You see, it was Tengen who brought the Mega Drive port of Devil Crush to the west, and while they did so, they also changed the name to Dragon's Fury, and removed pentagrams, coffins, crosses and various other things, so as to avoid offending any 17th century witchfinders that might have bought a copy for their kids. Despite all that, the sheer quality of the game shone through and it was enough of a hit for Tengen to make this weird semi-official psuedo-sequel to their bowdlerisation of someone else's game.

So, Dragon's Revenge takes a lot from its forbear: a three screen high main table, various bonus stages, even things like having a dragon's head on the bottom screen, a woman's face in the middle and a skull on the top. Though the woman and the skull are pretty different to the ones in the first game. The woman was a regular old pixel art sprite in the first game, and gradually turned into a snake monster as you did stuff, but now she's made up of digitised photos of a real woman's face, and as you do stuff, she wakes up and starts talking and going "ooh!" like she's in a carry on film, then she kind of floats around the table at random for some reason too. The skull is still pretty much the same as it was before, functionally speaking (it's a portal to a bonus stage), but it does look like a cool demon goat skull, so that's nice.

The bonus stages are a lot like the ones in Devil Crush, too: you hit either a big monster or lots of little monsters with your ball to kill them. None of them feel as fun though, and they all have a very cheesy 80s fantasy novel cover look to them, too. I guess the one where a bunch of little goblin men stand on a waterfall and throw their endlessly-regenerating heads down the screen is funny, though. It seems that there's some kind of plot business going on regarding the bonus stages, too, as whenever you exit one, you're shown a screen where a witch and some monsters loom over a bunch of orbs (if you successfully complete one of the bonus stages, which seems to take forever, the orbs are revealed to have generic fantasy heroes trapped inside them).

You can describe a lot of things in Dragon's Revenge as being "like Devil Crush, but inferior", which probably stems from its cash-in, almost mockbuster origins. It's uglier, less fun to play and the music isn't as good, and to top it all off, it really doesn't have an identity of its own. I could go on and on listing every little thing I didn't like about it, but that wouldn't be interesting for me to write, or for you to read. I don't recommend you play it, except out of grim curiosity. Play any of the actual Crush games instead, or even Kyuutenkai Fantastic Pinball, which, other than the name and the cute theme, is essentially a fourth (fifth?) Crush game.

Battle Pinball (3DO)

Longtime readers of this blog might remember that back in the mists of antiquity, I wrote about a SNES game with the same title as this one. The two are unrelated, though. While that game was a regular pinball game themed around battles, this one is a game about battles taking place in the form of pinball scoring contests.

There's four characters (a mole, an alien, death and a gambler), each with their own table. In single player mode, you pick one, and do battle with all four characters in random order. The battles work like this: you each get three balls, and the aim is to get a higher score than your opponent. The score really is all that matters: if you lose all three balls first, but have a higher score, your opponent continues playing until they either beat your score or lose their last ball. Once you beat all four characters, you see a short FMV ending (lovingly rendered, like all the character art, in hideous early-90s CGI, the kind that they used to call "Silicon Graphics" in magazines at the time.) And that's it, pretty much.

The tables are all very simple: a few bumpers, a couple of sets of targets, a ramp or two, and that's all. No multiball or special table events or moving parts of any kind. I guess the reasons for this are twofold, though both necessities of development. I'm only theorising here, but I think it'd be a heavy strain on the hardware to have to keep track of two fully-featured, action-packed pinball tables at once. The other reason is that I assume it would be a lot harder to balance the four tables, to make sure that none of them had massive scoring advantages over any of the others, if they were full of dozens of features and gimmicks.

It's surprising that no-one's used this splitscreen "Vs. Pinball" concept since (as far as I'm aware, at least). It's a good idea, and a lot less fiddly and confusing than the turn-taking multiplayer modes that a lot of pinball games do have. A simultaneous competitive pinball game could work really well on handhelds, too. Anyway, Battle Pinball is a fun little game with a cool concept, though the single player mode is incredibly anemic, and of course, it would work a lot better on more powerful hardware.

Jaki Crush (SNES)

Everyone remembers the PC Engine and Mega Drive entries into Naxat Soft's Crush series of pinall games, right? Well, there was a Japan-only SNES entry too, that never enjoyed the same success as its forbears, and as a result, isn't remembered anywhere near as fondly. The reason it stayed in Japan is easy to figure out: while Alien Crush had a theme that was heavily inspired by the Alien movies, and Devil Crash was themed around European-style occultism and fantasy, Jaki Crush draws its look from traditional Japanese depictions of hell, and as we all know, western companies in the 1980s and 90s were inexplicably obsessed with pretending that Japan didn't exist. There was sort of another entry into the Crush series which was a western exclusive, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, if you've played any of the previous games in the series, you'll basically know what to expect from Jaki Crush: a pinball table, stretching upwards across three screens, with a pair of flippers on each screen, and various demons and monsters marching around or standing in formation or even forming part of the the table itself. There's also bonus bossfight-style mini-tables that can be accessed by opening certain holes (often the mouths of demons) and getting the ball in there.

Presentation-wise, Jaki Crush is excellent: the table is full of little details and gimmicks and various things that change over the course of a game, like a demon face on the bottom screen, that eventually turns into a set of traditional pinball bumpers, which themselves change formation a few times (in a bit of a callback to some similarly-acting bumpers that appear in Alien Crush) before eventually disappearing to be replaced with a different demon face. The colour choices are really great too, with lots of purples, greys, pinks and reds giving the game a very visceral, fleshy feel. And as is series tradition, the game has a great, energetic soundtrack to mindlessly hum along with as you play.

The game itself is good, though you'll be playing a lot of practice games if you want to get any enjoyment out of it. It's easily the most difficult pinball videogame I've ever played. The ball seems incredibly eager to go right down the middle of the flippers on the bottom screen, and the fact that the flippers on the middle screen are in some bizarre asymmetrical arrangement makes it really hard to get away from the bottom and stay there. Add this to the fact that it takes a pretty long time to get exciting things happening and portals to bonus stages open and it means it'll take quite a bit of play before you get a lot of enjoyment out of Jaki Crush. If you have the patience for it, though, it is worth it, as seeing the table changing over time is pretty satisfying, and the stuff that happens on the top screen is especially extravagant and cool-looking. There's also even multiball, which I don't think is a feature in any of the other games in the series (though it's been years since I played either of them, so I could be wrong).

So yeah, in conclusion, Jaki Crush is a worthy entry into the series, and it'll reward players who have the patience to get through it's horrific skill barrier.

GG Series Collection Plus (DS), Part 4

It's time for the final part of this long series of reviews, and it's covering the sports section of the cartridge. Don't worry, though, as apparently Genterprise are as lacking in enthusiasm for the subject as me, and some of these games really stretch the definition of a sports game.

Drift Circuit
A terrible racing game. All the cars are the exact same sprite in different colours. They aren't even properly animated, they just slide around and rotate. It's also incredibly slow-paced and tedious. The gimmick is that you can increase your speed by double-tapping a direction to drift, but this just feels awkward, and the boost isn't much, either.

Tetsubou
This is a little odd. It's a futuristic gymnastics game starring what appears to be one of the cycloids from the Street Fighter EX series. You jump to grab on to bars, then swing round them and jump to other bars, collecting gems and trying to reach the exit. It's kind of frustrating when you miss, but otherwise this is a pretty fun game.

Throw Out
A weird soccer-like game starring teams of four fat little robots. It's not particularly interesting or noteworthy in any way.

Exciting River
A kayaking game with an interesting control scheme: the shoulder buttons are each assigned to one of the paddles. Tap them rhythmically and alternately to go straight ahead, and repeatedly tap one to turn in that direction. The player simply has to get to the end of the course before time runs out, and there's a bunch of courses to play through. It's fun to play even on the strength of the controls alone.

Run & Strike
A tennis/squash game featuring a girl hitting a ball at targets on a wall. It reminds me of the bonus games in SEGA's tennis games. Though it's not a bad game, it just didn't really grab me.

Air Pinball Hockey
Like you might guess from the title, this is a weird hybrid of pinball and air hockey. The way this turns out if pretty similar to an arkanoid clone, but with a smaller paddle that can move in all directions. The stages all have different goals, like scoring a certain amount of points or destroying a bunch of targets, and you get a fresh set of lives for each stage, too. This is easily the best game n the sports section, though that does feel a little like damning with light praise.

Uchuu Race
Dissapointing, this one. You drive a spaceship round various short tracks as fast as possible, and touching the sides adds seconds onto your time. There's no opponents at all, and though it looks nice, there's not really much substance to it.
               

Kyuutenkai Fantastic Pinball (Saturn)

So, Technosoft (sometimes known as Tecnosoft, for some reason) have made a lot of excellent games, usually with excellent music. One of their better-known titles is the Mega Drive port of Devil Crush, also known as Dragon's Fury. Like Kyuutenkai, it's a pinball game, and a lot of elements from Devil Crush made their way into this game: a main table being three screens high, bonus stage/boss fight sub-tables that offer huge amounts of points upon completion, even some smaller details, like the bonus counter with its two stacking multipliers.

Being on the Saturn, Kyuutenkai has some stiff competition from Kaze's Digital Pinball games, Last Gladiators and Necronomicon, and by "stiff competition", I mean "the best pinball videogames ever". Obviously, it's not as great as those two titans of the genre, but it does at least serve as a worthy follow-up to Devil Crush.
The main (and only) table is, as I said, three screens high. Each screen has a set of flippers at the bottom of it, and the whole table has a nice theme to it, with heaven at the top, earth in the middle, and hell at the bottom. There's lots of things to hit, and gimmicks to activate on the main table, like the angel watching over the middle portion of the table who can be made to shoot laser eyes all over the place, and the little band of skeletal day of the dead mariachis who can be knocked down in hell.
Obviously, the cute fantasy visual style of this game is massively different to the heavy metal album cover-inspired look of Devil Crush, and the bonus stages follow suit: instead of smashing open coffins or fighting multi-headed dragons, the bonus stages are cuter and more imaginitive to boot. My two favourites of the few I've seen are one that takes place on a football pitch where the player has to score 4 goals past the devil goalkeepers and his mummy defenders, and another where you have to use the ball to smash up the contents of a girl's bedroom in a strict time limit.
Although Kyuutenkai isn't as good as the mighty Digital Pinball series nor does it have the excellent music you would expect from Technosoft
, it is still a lot of fun to play, as well as very fast paced and even more addictive. There's also a Playstation version which I haven't played, but I assume it's' pretty much the same as this one.