App Review: Pinball Yeah!

The silver ball is not like it was when I was a young boy.

Reports of the death of both Pinball and Interplay have been greatly exaggerated it seems as the Android port of last years Pinball Yeah! arrived in the Marketplace a couple of weeks ago. The game features four tables, unlike the highly popular Pinball Ride that features only a single one, but has at least four times the content as any of the tables in Pinball Yeah! The tables here vary a lot, there’s the Pirate table, Irish pub table, A.I. table (Tron) and a classic style table; each of these has a handful of ramps and things to do, but some are much more lacking than others.

The Irish Pub table has some drunken visual effects and multiball, but beyond that it it has very little else going on, with its single ramp and bullseye targets. The A.I. table has a great visual style and rails that lead you to sub-tables, however each of these sub tables is very small and only contains a couple of targets and bumpers. The classic style Coderunners table is also kept relatively simple but it intentionally feels a lot like a real pinball table than the others here and has all the classic sounds, making it one of the better tables in the collection. With electronic pinball there’s generally two methods that work, either emulate a traditional table very well or take it so far in the other direction and do something crazy and that’s where the Pirate cove table stands out. Pirate cove has several rails that’ll take you to a pair of sub tables to earn treasure that can be collected later and it also has a Kraken that can be summoned, it also has some over the top speech from the pirates “Go fer the treasure you scurvy dog!”.

Those who don’t have a habit of nudging pinball tables might find Pinball Yeah! rather tricky as the deadzone between the flippers can seem rather large on some of the tables and even the launch ramps on the classic table can often drop the ball between the two flippers if you’re not ready to nudge. Something else to be aware of is that if you’re on a lower end 1GHz device such as an EVO then you’ll need to reduce the visual quality of the game or else you’ll suffer some pretty bad control lag that you won’t find on higher end devices with a Tigra 2. Visually the game looks mostly very clean, however there is a point or two on some tables that aren’t very clear it’s generally easy to keep track of what’s going on. The game can also be rotated for both portrait and landscape and the view adjusted between a close up, full table view or another view that moves around with the ball so closely that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on.

It’s hard to accurately judge physics in a pinball game, as so much relies on the angle of the table, but the physics here don’t seem quite right. The ball seems little too light and floaty and there’s no sound of the ball rolling over the back of the table and connecting with flippers, making the ‘feel’ of the ball somewhat absent.

For the price Pinball Yeah! is a good deal at just over 30 cents a table, even if they might be far from winners with their lack of content, they do have variety.

When you’re ready, head over to the Android Market and download this game by clicking or scanning the QR Code below.