Ever ask yourself "What if HR Giger made a pinball game?"... yeah, me neither.
User Rating: 3.8 | Alien Crush TG16
Video pinball games almost always bite the big one. Sure, there have been a few exceptions to this rule, but there's a couple of reasons why you probably haven't heard of Alien Crush. The first reason is that it came out for the TG16; which had about the same impact on the American gaming public as "Manimal" had on the American television viewing public. The second reason is that Alien Crush sucks. Pinball is a distinctly analog game. A good pinball game is about more than just physics, flashy visuals and making sounds every time something touches the ball, it's about assaulting four of the five senses (if you're into tasting pinball games make sure to get a tetanus shot whacko) while you try to keep a little metal ball afloat in a fantasy landscape as you rack up a ridiculous score in a quest for the elusive "extra play". Alright, so I'm over-romanticizing it... the bottom line is that pinball has too many subtleties that don't translate well into video games. Alien Crush is a perfect example of just how dull a video pinball game can be. There is absolutely no "feel' to the ball, it behaves like the electronic dot in a game like Breakout or Pong, only faster. Backgrounds, while active, are bland. Your ball often gets sucked into what feels like purgatories where it must do penance in the form of crappy minigames which only serve to drive home the fact that you're playing a pinball game on your TV while the neighborhood arcade is going out of business because you can't be bothered to get off your lazy ass to play a game that's much better played on a real-life machine in the first place... at least that's what it felt like in 1989 when this game came out. Now, thanks to the sloth of your gaming ancestors finding a decent pinball machine is next to impossible so you're pretty much stuck with games like Alien Crush if you want to relive a golden era of gaming that didn't involve a joystick or a gamepad.
