I didn’t know I wanted to catch them all!

When the first Pokémon videogame arrived, I was already in the midst of my teenage years. I briefly noticed that this new game got published in 1995 and pretty quickly became a thing. Back then, my Game Boy phase was mostly behind me and the 3D videogame revolution almost objectively much more exciting. A RAM upgrade for my 486-PC had a way higher priority over whatever it was that supposedly made the already six-year-old original Game Boy interesting again. Besides, I’d finished all Super Mario Land games as well as Gargoyle’s Quest, and some others — what else could have been a worthy follow-up?

I was wrong, of course. Not in terms of myself, but of the overall relevance that Pokémon as a game series and as a brand would rise up to. It soon became a pop culture phenomenon and is now the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. At some points throughout the 30 years that followed, I tried to get in touch with it a bit. I bought a Pokémon game every once in a while (that I eventually never played). I talked to my Pokémon-playing niece about what it was that fascinated her. In the end, and even after the Pokémon Go craze in the late 2010s, it stayed something I educated myself about but that I rarely experienced or enjoyed myself. But pinball changed all that.

Every pinball machine needs to be played

It started with this year’s first new Stern machine. This is the thing with pinheads: There is almost no reason to skip playing a pinball machine that you come across. Even if it’s tacky, dumb or even a bit sexist, you try to blend out the theme, the artwork, or whatever it is that annoys you, and concentrate on the gameplay. Curiosity gets the best of us. But the pocket monsters have no ambiguity within them anyway, so I quickly enjoyed myself playing the new machine.

Stern’s Pokémon was the predictable hit it set out to become, and rightly so. It has a tidy playfield design, some easy-going basic rules, but also enough to keep better players busy for a while. And it’s ultimately a videogame pin — something that’s always enticing for me as an advocate for digital games culture and the mostly positive impact it has on us as a society.

The fact that I enjoyed the Pokémon pin wasn’t very surprising to me. But it didn’t stop there. Hard to say whether it was because of a heightened awareness for the brand or pure coincidence. In any case, last summer I came across several Pokémon and Pokémon-like pinball videogames. The two official ones, Pokémon Pinball and Pokémon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire, arrived in the early 2000s already. Recently both games received inofficial updates, thanks to ROM-hacks by enthusiasts, as the fine retrogame website Retro Dodo reports here and here. There is even a third hack. As I’m not too familiar with these games, I also haven’t tried the enhanced versions yet. Instead, I played a brand new creature catching and monster fighting pinball game!

Monsters inside my pinballs

PachiPals is a recently released Game Boy Color game, throwing us back to circa 1991 when top-down (Japanese) roleplaying games were all the rage and we got attached to cute little boxy characters. I enjoyed the start of the game, playing as a teenager who stumbles across a friendly dog “monster” that can be trapped inside a small ball. Sounds familiar?

It took me a while to encounter the pinball and pachinko parts of the game, but when I tried to get hold of my first pal, I could finally use some flippers. That’s because those monsters need to be catched during small pinball quests. Fighting on the other hand is more of a luck-based endeavor: You let go of the ball at the top of the screen while it then bounces through pins and rocks. After you drop the ball you can only hope that it hits the adversaries and not just falls straight through the trough.

This is a charming little game oscillating between nostalgic RPG storytelling and ball rolling action, although admittedly I would have enjoyed more pinball and less random pachinko encounters. Still, it definitely got me closer to a higher appreciation of pocket monsters. PachiPals was developed by Constantin Graf aka Rebusmind, and published by Incube8 Games. There is a digital version and also a boxed special edition available.

Poké posters

While all this was happening, I also went to Gamescom after a hiatus of seven years. It was amazing to be back in Cologne for the world’s biggest videogame event. During a stroll through one of the two merchandise halls, I eventually stumbled across a French artist group called Paiheme Studio. Look what I discovered — and what is now waiting to be framed.

Cool pinbally things:

• There are even more pocket pinball monsters? Indeed. Self Simulated: Pinball Anomaly is still in development, but you can wishlist it and play the demo of the main game which will be released next year.

• Legendary pinball designer Steve Ritchie retires: This man created three out of the five machines I ever owned, and he is rightly a beloved figure in the community. And just cool. Kineticist has all the facts and also a career retrospective.

• Cirqus Voltaire’s voice artist is back: Cathy Schenkelberg returned to the late 90s pinball classic for the remake and recorded old and new lines. Amazing work! Also, Cathy has quite an illustrious career.

• Pinball Expo in Chicago has wrapped up: The biggest and oldest annual pinball show went on for four days in mid-October. As always, Pinball News taped all 40+ talks and panels and put them into a neat playlist.