Champiyon Pinball (Plug and Play)

 Controls disclaimer: this is a plug and play with specilised controls, but I played it using a regular old saturn controller via emulation. The only photo I can find of an actual unit looks like a small rectangular controller with a couple of novelty flipper-shaped buttons, but it's not a particularly great photo, so I thought I should mention this just in case it is more than it looks like.

 

Also known as the more correctly-spelled Champion Pinball, this is a dedicated plug and play video pinball game from Tomy, released in 2003. Obviously made for a younger audience, it's still an interesting piece, and also surprisingly fully featured! There's a story mode, which tells, through the medium of cute little cutscenes (which are unfortunately unskippable), the story of two kids, sent by the pinball king to crush his enemies in various places and times. At least, that's what it looks like, there's no English language version.

 

It sees you going through a linear set of stages, each with their own simple little missions. Finish the mission, go to the next stage. For example, the first stage is in a forest, with a big tree at the back. Hit it a few times to reveal the enetrance to the boss' lair, go in and smack the boss around a bit, and you're done. Stage two is in the ocean, and takes place across three screens, and on the first two, you keep scoring points until someone (a big fish on the first screen, a mermaid on the second) appears to carry you up to the next. Then on the last screen, a whale will appear to shoot you out of their blowhole and into the next stage.The most interesting stage I've seen so far is the fifth, set in an evil robot factory, in which you've got to hit various buttons and mechanisms with the ball to make your way through.

 

As well as story mode, there's challenge mode, in which you can individually play any of the tables from story mode (though only the first three are available at the start, more are unlocked as you reach them in story mode), classic mode, which features a unique, though very bland "old school"-style pinball table. Which is actually a lot simpler and less exciting than most actual 1970s tables, unfortunately. 

 

There's also battle mode, which actually seems a little bit like a very simplified version of one of the modes in KaZe's PS2 game Akira Psychoball. There's a single table, though the bottom half is divided in two by a wall, and each of those two halves has a pit and a set of flippers. Each set of flippers is controlled by a different player, and you're just trying to keep the ball out of your pit. Hitting things on the table causes effects like making your opponent's flippers invisible and the like. It probably won't provide hoyrs of fun, but I'm sure it led to young siblings in Japan somewhere coming to blows at least once, so there's that.Finally, there's a kind of incredibly simple pachinko mode, which is barely a game at all, even by pachinko standards. Launch balls to try and get them in holes, and if you're lucky, even filling in a full line of holes. Ooh.

 

Champiyon Pinball is fine, I guess. It's not some great unsung classic of the genre, but it's a decent bit of fun. I've had a couple of hours of enjoyment out of it, anyway, and I feel like it's one I'll go back to every now and then, too. I have no idea if buying an actual unit would be expensive or not, as I can't find one for sale anywhere online. Which I guess answers the question in a different way? But you can play it in MAME, anyway.

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.