Day 140 - 3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet Pinball
Pinball, Nostalgia, Arcade ·
Skeeter’s Take:
If you recognize this image, you’re almost guaranteed to recognize this next one:
That’s right! Some kind soul managed to bring Space Cadet Pinball to your browser! Yes, you! Go relive the nostalgia of computer class! Pretend that you’re pretending to work on typing exercises and pretend to hide pretend Space Cadet Pinball from your pretend teacher! Poop your pants and call your mom to tell her you’re sick because you’re too embarrassed to admit you pooped your pants and try to meet her outside the middle school so people don’t ask too many questions!
Maybe it’s the nostalgia, but this is still one of the best pinball video games I’ve played. Still found myself playing for a while despite knowing exactly what this game was.
This seems to be an extremely faithful recreation (or adaptation, perhaps?) Space Cadet Pinball is even in what I assume to be its original resolution (640x480), which on my 2k monitor looks something like this:
Thankfully, you can zoom in on the page and pretty much solve that issue:
If anyone remembers what the “bump” buttons are, send me a message at iamsamcain@gmail.com, thank you.
Recommend: Yes
Replay Percentage Chance: 220% zoom
Time Played: Played: 10 minutes
Sam’s Take:
I don’t know the history of computer-based pinball games, so I don’t know if anything that 3D Pinball Space Cadet does is necessarily innovative. What I can say is that 3DPSC does something that I’ve seen many computer pinball games fail at, and that is realize that no one is putting in quarters. Real pinball machines have to be a little bit bullshit, after all shorter play sessions mean more quarters and less kids waiting in line to play. When you’re playing on your computer though, there is no reason to have a huge middle gap, or side lines that auto-lose you ball. Even with low pinball skill you can just vibe for a while in 3DPSC, watching all the lights go nuts.
The corners of the table have these places for the ball to go and get shot back out, meaning you have to go down there twice to lose instead of just once.
The ramps and entrances are also favorably placed so that you’ll accidentally hit them a thousand times and feel like a pinball God. It’s much more forgiving than a real arcade machine and I think that went a long way in me remembering it so fondly as a kid.
There’s also a ton of things going on in this game that aren’t explicitly told to you. For example lighting up all 3 yellow dots at the top of the machine by running the ball over them will cause the bumpers to permanently change color and be worth more points.
This can seem like just a random thing, but not only can you control your power for releasing a ball to manipulate where it will land, using the flippers also rotates which ones are lit, meaning if the ball is about to fall down an already lit light, you can rotate the lights to a more advantageous positions before the ball passes through.
The screen also has a quest system on the right screen that asks you to complete certain tasks.
Completing these tasks seems to light up the middle area more.
I’m not totally sure how deep this rabbit hole goes, but it looks like there are four quests based on some old FAQs. All and all, for a free bundled Windows game, this has more designerly intent than I’d expect. Kudos you freaks.
Recommend: Yea
Replay Percentage Chance: No idea
Time Played: 15 Minutes
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