DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Thunderball! (Magnavox)

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Remember the old saying “anything you can do I can do better”? Well when Atari is riding on the top of the world, there were a bunch of console manufacturers and game programmers saying that exact same thing, usually followed by failure. The Odyssey 2, we all know about the Odyssey 2, I’ve talked about it before, and how it was rather disappointing, never quite living up to the slogan ‘The excitement of a game, the mind of a computer’. It seems that Magnavox/Philips saw what Atari was doing with Video Pinball in the arcade and decided to make their own version. In 1979 Thunderball! was programmed, a year or so before Video Pinball was released on the 2600, actually hold up a second. Thunderball was programmed, in 1979, I can see that on the box,” ©1979 E. Averett”, but Video Pinball on the 2600 was programmed in 1980,” Package, Program & Audiovisuals ©1980 ATARI. INC”, so who was copying who when it came to the home console release. Just to confuse things even further the inside of the Video Pinball manual says “©1981 Atari, INC.” WHAT YEAR IS IT!?! I’M SO CONFUSED!!

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Thunderball! looks even more primitive than Video Pinball, and that bar was set very low. Thunderball! is more colorful but that doesn’t amount to much when the entire game is basically squares and very chunky circles. Unlike Video Pinball that had comically large bumpers, and a tiny ball and spinners, Thunderball! has the reverse, tiny bumpers and drop targets, whilst having an almost comically large ball and spinner (Bonus Box). The ball is twice as big as the bumpers, but thankfully it moves very smoothly, there is nothing worse than a choppily moving pinball game. Just like Video Pinball the playfield is square, actually Thunderball! is MORE square than Video Pinball because it lacks the angled side bumpers, also those flippers look rather awful, simply being a line of seven pixels.

There are no standout sounds whatsoever; in fact there are so few sounds I was actually considering just skipping the paragraph altogether just to cut down on filler. All you get are several beeps and boops of varying pitch, and a few farts from the noise generator and that’s it, I can’t be very hard on the Odyssey 2 though, since I finally managed to get an O2 emulator somewhat working, and I played Frogger, and the music from that is absolutely dreadful, so when compared to that this game seems like Mozart.

Thunderball! is your standard game of pinball with a little twist, since this game lacks the tilt mechanic, another less useful one was implemented instead. You have the ability to shift the flippers from left to right , I’m sure it was to stop the ball from doing that annoying ‘perfect drain’ where the ball falls down the dead zone between the flippers. I’m sure that the flipper shifting is useful for experienced players, but I simply cannot predict where the ball is going to go. The ball physics aren’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but the ball has a proclivity to move along the same few paths over and over again, and much like with Video Pinball you rarely need to use the flippers since the large amount of bumpers will keep the ball moving forever, and the flippers will still be useless since, as stated before the amount of perfect drains are stupendous.

The box art is the best part of this game, but despite all the criticism it’s still not too bad of a game, I’ve certainly played worse pinball games, on more powerful systems. Thankfully this is one of those O2 games that are very cheap to acquire complete in box, I’m seeing a bunch on Ebay for less than ten dollars. Thunderball! is spared of the Collector’s Zone, mainly because it’s so cheap it doesn’t really matter, and what you end up getting is about worth what you paid for it. Also when I received my copy of Thunderball! I found a little slip of paper from the previous owner with their high score of 220150 in it, the got very good since I can only muster around 7000 on a good attempt.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/729/entry-15072-thunderball-magnavox/