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This colorful bouncy game might get on your nerves before you leave the table

Remember Pinball on the NES? Not a very exciting game, but a classic nonetheless. Perhaps you thought, "This game would be a lot more fun with Mario characters." Well, that's what we got with Mario Pinball Land, a Game Boy Advance game released in 2004. Developed by Fuse Games and published by Nintendo, MPL takes the Mario characters and throws them into several pinball tables. It sounds stange, but it works for the most part. 

The story is typical. Peach gets captured by Bowser....except this time she was squished into a ball and shot right into his castle! So Mario, of course, gets squished into a ball in order to get hit around by violent flippers and rescue her. I know, it's weird. How does a full-grown man get squished into a tiny ball? Anyways, the goal of the game is to collect stars, which will open new areas. There are five different worlds in the game: The Fun Fair (starting area), Grassy Greens, Shifting Sands, Frosty Frontier, and Bowser's Castle. 

As the player, you can use the flippers with the shoulder buttons and also use items. If you see a toad on the table, bumping into him will let you visit his shop, where you can buy items with coins you've collected. The items include the blue pipe, yoshi egg, star, and lightning. As you play, you'll notice a blue pipe nestled between the two flippers. This will usually keep you from falling through, unless the flippers move up just in time for Mario to squeeze through. After a short time, the blue pipe will disappear and you can fall through, so be careful. 

Each world has several rooms. If you defeat all the enemies in a room, the star will appear in the middle. The tricky part is, you have to run into the star to get it. Some doors require a certain number of stars in order to enter. Each world has a boss. Defeating a boss will allow you to go to the next world. You must defeat all the bosses and get their keys in order to unlock the path to Bowser's castle. And there are also some hidden areas, which is neat. The graphics are very colorful, and there are plenty of Mario characters throughout the game (including goombas, shy guys, koopas, and penguins). 

Now for the negatives. MPL can get pretty frustrating. Some rooms will require you to hit a certain object, which can be tricky. Going back and forth between the same rooms gets irritating fast. For me, the most frustrating part is in Shifting Sands. Inside the pyramid, there are three floor panels. Hitting the right one will open a hole to the next room; hitting the wrong one will cause snakes to come out. If you hit the wrong one, the hole closes. In the next room, there are two more floor panels; the right one leads to the boss, but the wrong one makes shy guys come out and closes the hole to the boss. Do you see the problem? If you actually make it to the boss, if you fall out of the room, you'll have to do it all over again. Suffice to say, you'll need some patience. 

Another problem that bugged me was the stars. If the star appears and you happen to fall into the previous room, you'll have to do whatever it is to get that star again. Apparently, they didn't want to keep the star sitting there in that room for you to pick up later. These problems make the game tedious, which is far from what you would expect from a Mario game. You don't have much control over Mario, and sometimes he'll get going so fast that he can easily slip beneath the flippers, even with the blue pipe in place. 

Final Verdict--3 Stars: It's Okay

Overall, MPL is not a bad game, simply one that can easily become frustrating. If you really love pinball games, you'll probably enjoy this one too. The enviornments and characters are colorful and charming, but the gameplay itself can be frustrating and tedious. Retreading the same rooms over and over is no fun, and perhaps this is why MPL is the first and only Mario pinball game. 

Join me for Retro Review every other Saturday as we examine games of yore.