High Speed (NES)

I almost want to do a review of this YouTube review of 'High Speed' for the NES... Narrated by a young Ben Stein.



Ok, so anyway... I just received a copy of 'High Speed' for the NES via Goozex. I dug out my RetroStation and stuck it in.

I was first struck by the awesome soundtrack, and then derailed by the terrible graphics. I was wondering if maybe the cart was not pushed down all the way, but it turns out the graphics just suck.

ANYWAY...

So, I have never actually played a real life 'High Speed' pinball machine (HS being one of the best selling pins of all time, with something like 17,000+ cabinets in existence.), though I have played the sequel, The Getaway, many times. Either way, I was expecting a straight virtual representation of the actual pin a la the other Rare pinball NES game, Pin*Bot.

No dice. Mere seconds into my first game, I collected a helicopter. WHAT? Yeah, a flashing helicopter showed up on the screen, and when I hit it, it flew down to rest on the apron. Ok... then I noticed some water bubbling up on the left of the playfield... then a tumbleweed passing by. THEN, a freaking BOMB blew up one of my flippers! ie. shattered it to pieces. A new flipper was airlifted in and installed during gameplay. So, it's a mix of the actual High Speed game, with some videogame flair. Then it turns out that collecting items leads to minigames (as seen in the YouTube review I posted above).

Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal, but I was weirded out enough to run over to the computer to type up this mini review. It's like a mix of a 'real' pin and 'Pinball Quest', the NES pinball RPG. Yes, I just wrote 'pinball RPG'... but that's a game for another entry...

So, I'm intrigued, and will play more. My only real knock on the game (the bad graphics are a slight ding) is that the ball stops during some text, thus throwing off your rhythm. Kinda like the spiral magnets on Twilight Zone. You think the ball is coming and you flip, only to have the ball come a split-second later and pass by your flipper.

Overall: A for effort, C+ for execution.