| | | I finally got this because I currently have a nostalgic weakness for old GB games, because I like pinball games, and because all the reviews on the good old internet pretty much called this one of the best pinball games in the universe.
I don't think that the people who wrote those reviews have been playing the right pinball games. RotG certainly has some charm up front, with cute little alligators on parade at various spots around the three-screen-high table, and a few mini-tables too. The ball bounces around fast and the sound effects are lively, if not really lovely.
Unfortunately the table design sucks. This is Japanese-style pinball of course, which means that it goes for multi-screen or multi-level tables with very simple scoring mechanics--exploration over game modes, basically. The problem with this is that if you run out of new places to explore with the pinball, you've run out of game--and you very quickly run out of new spots to see in RotG.
This might not be so bad if the places you could see were fun to hang around in, but they aren't. I had a bad feeling about the table design when I launched my first ball and realized that there is absolutely no point to launching the ball at different speeds, because it has to just sort of dribble out of the top of a very long vertical chute regardless. This feeling quickly turned into a certainty as I found very little to do in the main central screen of the table--basically, here you have to hit three little tabs on the left, then get the ball up a difficult ramp on the left-hand side to advance to the higher screen on the table. There is pretty much nothing else to do there. Sure, you can bonk the ball off the rebounder and hit it around a little circular loop, but those just give you a piddlesworth of points each time. Boring, way boring.
The next screen up is almost worst, actually, in that it is just a large area filled with little black things blocking your access to the next ramp up. Hit the black things out of the way and you're done. Whee. Repeat ad-nausem--and you will, because if you lose the ball while knocking out the black things, they'll all be reset once you make your way back up to that part of the table.
As if to add insult to injury, the physics are not very good--floaty and not very accurate-feeling, and the framerate in general is sluggish.
Mode options on the main menu seem to indicate that RotG has link-mode play, but I haven't tried it. |
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