Welcome to the ONLY review of this game on the internet! From a name you can
trust!
Developer: Ivolgamus
Publisher: Oxygen Games
For some erotic reason, I kind of assumed the release of Metroid Prime Pinball back in 1937 would get the ball rolling (huurrr) for pinball games on the DS. It was pretty great despite its lack of actual tables, and the two screens worked wonders. But here we are several thousand years later with that and uh.. Flipper Critters, which is more of a back spasm simulator than a pinball game. But loud, audible genuine explosion of shock, here comes Powershot Pinball Constructor! The game that was originally due out last June, just now making it onto retail shelves. Why surely with such an impressive delay, it must be worth my fun bucks! I will consume it without delay!
First impressions on the way back? Oh! This woman next to me smells like month old yogurt, I regret the window seat. Oh! No English on the back of the box, that's nice. Perhaps I will glance at the manua-Oh! Nope, no English in there either. How awkward, what with it being sold in large retail chains here in Australia, where some form of English is rather popular. But it's only pinball, who needs instructions for that? Zombies? No, even zombies understand pinball.
The game starts off with some ear bleedingly good music, and one of the most frustrating touch screen menus ever. They make you spin everything around like a demented merry-go-round, until whatever option you want is at the very front. If it's just slightly off, it won't let you select it. You may have to train yourself on Trauma Center before tackling this game. Right, off we go, into the table selection. Uh.. hmm. There's a whopping one table on offer, with another two that have badly drawn padlocks on them. Fantastical. How you go about actually gaining access to these tables, I have no idea! But that's good, three tables is way too much choice. How will I ever decide? I'll be stressing out all night. Thank you Powershot Pinball, for making my life so much easier.
The same horrendous music that vomited into my ears on the title screen is back, we're off to a great start. It's a bit like a cat caught on a fence and a Game Boy Color in the process of being hit with a sledge hammer. The table is all pre-rendered, and nicely compressed to death to the point of looking like a grainy grain factory. There's one blinking light that shows you where a ramp is (very hard to tell since it only takes up half the top screen), that's all the thrills you're going to get as far as graphical effects. The ball physics capture the feeling of playing pinball on the moon very well, but what's more impressive is the fact that the ball can clip right through the flippers, or even get itself lodged into walls. Actually wait, going back to the whole flippers thing, sometimes hitting the ball will actually make it zoom down into the depths of hell instead of you know,
up. Usually this means losing the ball, but oh no, not in Powershot Pinball! When this happens it'll bounce off an invisible barrier and hurl itself up at light speed! This is like stuff out of The Bible.
The game constantly feels the need to inform you that you're earning points. A 'BONUS SCORE' will scroll by on the top screen every now and then. Curiously, this simple text punches the frame rate in the crotch so hard it'll feel like you've just poured glue all over your DS. That's right, there are frame rate issues in a game where the only thing happening is a little grey circle bouncing about. Impressive! The fun doesn't stop there! If you've played Metroid Prime Pinball, you'll have seen how well the game handled the 'dead zone' between the two screens. Powershot Pinball does away with that nonsense and simply warps the ball across, as if there's nothing there. This is particularly fun to deal with when the ball spazzes out and goes screaming across the table because it's not sure what it's even doing. Merely LAUNCHING the ball to start in this game can cause eye rolling problems. If you launch too hard it often completely vanishes from the screen. Just like real pinball.
Right, so that was about as fun as bowel cancer, but wait! The game does have 'Constructor' in its title, might as well check this feature out. Creating your own tables is a nice idea, and the game even lets you save up to.. seven or something. Unfortunately this mode is just as half arsed, with a very limited amount of objects to place (bumpers, bumpers and more bumpers) and to top if all off, these Frankenstein's are limited to an overhead view. With a pinball the size of half a pixel. Oh dear. It's broccoli for dinner tonight.
The game offers a few other bags of diarrhea for you to smother all over your face, such as a high score table that often forgets to save high scores, and an option screen that thankfully lets you turn the music off. Also of note, all the sound effects are lifted directly from that Space Cadet pinball game that comes with Windows. Everyone enjoys those boops and blips! But what if you're strolling down the street one day, diarrhea all over your face, and you meet someone else that shares your poo passion? Why, you can play some multiplayer! Sadly I don't know of anyone else with this game to test out this action packed feature. It's almost as if Ivolgamus gave up shortly into development and just made some kind of hand motion when the publisher rocked up six months later asking where the hell the game was. It's so good the developer doesn't even list it on their own site!
Final score: 
It gets half a Michael Jackson out of five for merely being a pinball game, I guess.
Topic: Powershot Pinball Constructor, more like Powershit am I right lololol (Read 3110 times)
