Hello, hello! Robert here.

Remember me? I admit, it has been pretty quiet in The Ball is Wild 🪩 towers for a while now. Last year only saw three newsletters (but long ones! insightful!) and two stories (but cool ones! in-depth!) over at the blog.

You see, the things I just cheekily wrote between those parantheses have been, in a way, the problem: Searching for a really good story, trying to make a cool piece, to deliver a lot: It’s great! But it’s also hard to push myself to do those stories because they take research, preparation and time to write, edit and produce. Then at some point you don’t do the next piece at all and feel silly.

New plan

No more! The Ball is Wild 🪩 was and is a little project that I care about. I’m doing it in my spare time and don’t want it to feel as a prolongation of my day job. So, new plan: From now on, this newsletter will deliver less content. An edition will be just a mid-sized editorial about some thing or observation that I care about or find interesting. It could also be a review of a video pinball game. And there will probably be some weblinks of more or less recent pinbally things I saw and deemed worthwhile. That’s it. That’s the newsletter.

As for the release cadence: I do have something in mind but won’t share it, so no-one knows if it doesn’t work out as planned initially. Clever, no? Perhaps there might be more editions in the same timeframe than before though. Who knows? Oh, and there will still be cool stories over at the blog from time to time. There are two very neat ones already in the pipeline. Won’t share those here as well. So secretive.

Videogame: FlippUp (Windows, Linux)

When a videogame is developed by a team that calls itself Try Again Entertainment, you are probably going to know what you are in for. At the end of 2025, I already wrote about an annoyingly hard (but also funny) climber pinball game called A Pinball Game That Makes You Mad. Needless to say, FlippUp continues this form of madness.

This game has a different vibe and look though, and is overall more fleshed out. The retro art style is cute and the level design well done. Unfortunately, there is also the silly "hardcore" philosophy that makes it necessary for the player to repeat all the sections over and over again all the time. This keeps FlippUp from achieving true greatness.

Let’s vent a bit, shall we?

I don’t know why I need to be having a bad time as a player when the game itself would — in theory — be enjoyable and challenging all the way through without being so punishing. Here, in FlippUp, you can never be sure of your progress. If you mess up or have bad luck, you might fall down again. All. The. Fricking. Way. Down. What would be the harm in including plateaus so you can't fall down further whenever you reached a certain checkpoint? Maybe only make it an option in the settings? Perhaps that still would be too friendly and non-hardcore.

Another strange thing is an explanation from the developers (stated in their Steam forums) that this wouldn't be proper pinball because it's supposed to be a tough-as-nails Foddy-like climber (platformer?) game first and foremost. But flipp is right there in the name. And FlippUp does indeed have many flippers, a lot of plungers and a ball. Selling this as not-a-pinball to mostly pinball players might be a challenge?

Having a good time still

Although I'm not in love with the perceived heavyness of the ball where you sometimes have a hard time getting it airborne properly, the physics are coherent and well learnable. Once you know the spots on the flipper in order to traverse a certain distance or reach a certain height, up you go.

All in all, FlippUp is a game that is worth checking out, but where you should play the demo first. Don’t just take it from me! The developers themselves are suggesting this cautious route to their game. Which makes them pretty likable, whatever hardcore stuff they might be throwing our way next.

Cool pinbally things:

• Pictures of pinball factory workers: In this Kineticist piece from a year ago, you see that building pinball machines is still sophisticated manual labor, even in the mid 2020s.

• Pinball history: Senior pinball programmer and designer Louis Koziarz likes to share amazing nuggets of pinball history from the 90s and early 2000s he helped shaping himself, on his Bluesky account.

• Rolling monkeys: You can now play the first two Super Monkey Ball games in your browser!

• Popcorn spinner: French legacy game developer Frédérick Raynal remade his Arkanoid-like Popcorn from 1988 for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. It comes with an amazingly looking spinner controller. The initial crowdfunding campaing was cancelled, but the project is planned to re-emerge soon.

• Balls and paddles OST: Speaking of Arkanoid, be amazed by this funny and ingenious musical piece by the New Japan BGM Philharmonic Orchestra. It features not just background music, but the whole gameplay experience!