This one was a game I couldn't help but be curious about when I first heard of it when I saw the trailer on the Sonic Jam compilation for Sega Saturn, admittedly several years after even owning a Mega Drive. I first got to play this title through Sonic Mega Collection for the Nintendo Gamecube - a game my parents bought me for Christmas when I was fifteen years old. I don't remember spending an awful lot of time on this one, but I did like the concept; Casino Night was a fun level in Sonic 2, the pinball gimmick worked well there, so a whole game based around the premise didn't seem like a bad idea.
Firstly, the plot. Robotnik has built a fortress called the Veg-O-Fortress, which is built for the purpose of roboticizing animals. It also has a very unique defense system, which was built with pinball in mind. Sonic and Tails, of course, aren't going to stand by and let Robotnik turn innocent animals into robots, so they make their way over to put a stop to it. Sonic falls into the sea and manages to infiltrate the place, but he has to make his way through the pinball defense system to put a stop to the mad doctor's evil schemes.
The gameplay is as you probably expect it to be; it's pinball. The goal here is to proceed through each of the levels, collecting Chaos Emeralds, of which there are more than seven, and then eventually defeating a boss at the end. Move onto the next level, and repeat. It sounds simple, but it really isn't.
The controls can take some getting used to. Most pinball games don't allow you much, if any, control over the ball. Well, in this game, the ball is Sonic, and you can control him. You'll never have total control, and I expected that, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't get old when you want Sonic to go a particular way and it just doesn't happen. Or maybe that's just me because I suck at pinball.
There are four levels in total, which may make the game sound extremely short, but I think four was just fine. The levels aren't too long, but they aren't short either. The difficulty for the most part is challenging but fair, though there is an unfairly harsh difficulty spike later on in the game that makes it hard to recommend to any but the most hardcore of Sonic and/or pinball players.
Graphically it looks okay, it has nice detail in each of the levels and I like the sprite work on Sonic. The game isn't as colourful as other titles, but I feel that suits the style that this game seems to be going for, and being less colourful didn't prevent the levels from being nice to look at. It's not as impressive as the mainstream titles in my opinion, but it looks just fine. As for the music; it wasn't amazing but there were a few memorable tunes in there. While I don't remember a lot of the tracks off of the top of my head, there's no real track I actively dislike.
All in all, I think it's a solid pinball title, though it does have it's flaws. If you like Sonic and/or pinball, I'd recommend giving this version of Sonic Spinball a shot.