Another quick one; I mentioned earlier about rounding up the last few dregs related to the Metroid series after I played 2. Galactic Pinball of course, is a space-themed pinball game on the Virtual Boy developed by Intelligent Systems, who had by this point made Super Metroid. They inserted a minigame where you control Samus’s gunship, blasting Metroids and Skrees and some other critter who come at you.
As a game, it’s not a great pinball simulator. The forced perspective is interesting, especially on a 3D system, but you end up with very small things at the far end that are hard to see. The physics don’t feel as stable and smooth as later games like, say, Metroid Prime Pinball. It’s not even technically pinball because you’re hitting a puck.
As a Metroid game, there’s not much there besides the minigame, but we can induct any other content into the Metroid universe: with the space theme, it fits well enough. We have four boards: UFO, Colony, Cosmic, and Alien. As they stand they’re rather generic sci-fi concepts, but they all have unique layouts and gimmicks. It doesn’t say much about the larger world, though, and as I said I wasn’t blown away by the gameplay so I didn’t persist with it too long. The Virtual Boy really was a failure, wasn’t it? This is supposed to be one of the better games (out of the dozen or so released, anyway).
