Retro Arcade: Family Pinball (Namco, 1989)

I also played this one on the game box.  The thumbnail had a logo for "Family Guy Pinball" but that felt out of place.  The file was simply "Family Pinball", and it was confusing as all hell.  There were multiple screens to choose different pinball tables, some with flippers that moved around or did not work at all until I screwed with the buttons for a while.  The main selection screens were in Japanese, but it was fun clicking and seeing what was what anyway.


Here are a few of the only links I could find for this one: link one, link two.  I could not find the game manual in the usual online archives.

Here are some people playing it: The VideoGame Museum and Crow Continuum.

In the first choice, you get a Pac-Man themed standard pinball.  It took some fiddling to find out how to get both flippers working.  There were the LEFT and A buttons.

In the next game (Battle Flipper), you play a head-to-head pinball game, but I was the only one playing.  In another, there was the same layout with someone else's flippers at the top and yours at the bottom, but in this case, gravity changed near the top so that the ball falls toward those top flippers.  I got some shots in, but it was way too easy to fail.

One game type was a pachinko style of bouncing off a grid of pins, where you try to land the balls in holes in a grid.  There are about 6 game modes here, including 5 Ball and 10 Ball and Max Flipper, and you are supposed to bet chips somehow.  This made no sense to me at the time, but Crow gives a fine explanation.  You want to get three in a row vertically, horizontally or diagonally, OR all 4 corners.

Finally, there were two SPORTS-themed pinball tables: Soccer and Ice Hockey.  Not my thing.  I did not try those.

These are fun to explore, even if the typical game attempt is over in less than a minute.  On that game box, I can pause any game and get a photo, or save the game for a later try.  And at least I wasn't burning through a pocket full of quarters.





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