Worst Pinball Game Ever?

I like Pinball Arcade for sampling a game, but I get bored of even the best games on that format.

Champion’s Pub

Scuba

Striker Xtreme (Stern, 2000)

I understand that this game was built at the worst time for pinball scene but releasing this atrocity was like pouring gasoline on burning pinball industry.

At the factory tour for Expo 2002, they were giving away Striker Xtreme translights as we exited.

South Park is that walk away, during a game, to get a bat out the trunk to come back an beat the Mr. Hanky out of it.

I have seen quite a few bad games, and I know many good candidates.

Many Sega games can be pretty awful (especially Starship Troopers). I have also seen some other games in the list and I have to say I don’t really like them either, but I hate the crud-burger of a game that is Monopoly. Broken gameplay, annoying, tinny sounds, and a very out-of place theme make this one of the worst games I’ve played. Elvis isn’t much fun either.

Yet one game I hate seems to be quite popular. As of writing, it occupies the 16th position on the Top 100. This game... I am surprised to see a prolific company output such failure and inferiority. It is the worst game of all.
This game is TOTAN. Blood of Jesus, I hate TOTAN. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but this game is THE definition of good companies making corporate F-ups. Why did they throw away the perfectly good team of past games? Why? WHY?!?! The only man who isn’t a glorified monkey in the design team is Pat McMahon. I’m sorry if I angered fellow fans of the game, but I want to set fire to this garbage. I just don’t get what this game is doing on the Top 100 and why people are selling it for 8 grand. Thankfully the rest of Williams’ games are pretty fun, but Tales of the Arabian Nights is a f*cking nightmare.

Starship Troopers does rank up there with the worst of them.

It seems not many of you have played Thunderbirds.

Yes, I was lucky enough to play Thunderbirds. It was not great. The only good thing was I did not need to pay to play that game. Thunderbird was one of the worst games I ever played.

There needs to be a touring pinball show "whipping horse" version so more people can get hands on with the now-legendary awfulness.

Keep in mind gameplay itself became a secondary objective when the Aussie preorders foundered back in 2015.

The main goal on pinside from that point onwards from the Homepin loyalists down here was to shill TBAG so much that Northern Hemisphere pinball distributors would be convinced into placing orders so that Homepin could become solvent to actually get the initial down under preorder machines built from 3 years overdue.

For perspective there were 17 preorders for TBAG in Australia. The other 99% of pinball collectors down here knew from the beginning what a shit show it would inevitably become and kept our wallets closed.

Twister

Hi, my name's grandnational, and I've played Thunderbirds...

It's really bad. The non-scoring ramp to nowhere is possibly the best feature. The DMD animations rival the likes of unfinished Alvin G games, but substantially worse. The "rules" are archaic at best. Basically hit stuff for points. Thunderbirds makes Sega/Stern Harley Davidson feel like Medieval Madness in comparison. Suffice to say, I'd argue there's more entertainment value in one of those flipperless plastic injection molded pinball-like games with a plunger from the 70's.

Twister? Yeah, it does have only the one spinner.
But the mat has red, yellow, blue and green dots on it.

But is it a matter of unsalvagable design, or would an overhaul of the software by a competent coder take it from worst to merely mediocre?

Well, it was late night at a show, and there had been some beers involved, but as I recall, it was an abomination.

Think zizzle style game play/layout, but with commercial grade components. Imagine Vacation America, but worse. Like a lot worse.

I recall it being extremely "easy", with little thought placed into the geometry of the playfield or shot layout.

I literally walked away in the middle of ball two.

I doubt anyone could "save" it...

I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for those that paid $7,000 for Primus. I was able to to play it on free play and I had to force myself to finish ball 3.

Mafia was pretty bad,
I started a game and walked away before the first ball finished.

Also on my list of couldn't finish a game
Full Throttle
Whoa Nellie

Yes.

Bally El Toro, or as many know it as El-boro. Just a turrible game.

My favorite memory of Pinburgh was playing with Lyman in the final round of qualifying two years ago I think. A group in a different division was finishing up on "El Toro". A player finished his game with what was apparently a score he wasn't pleased with as he had some choice words for the game. Lyman deadpans and goes, "Another satisfied El Turdo customer" I laughed and laughed.

Aussie MightyMast - Star Galaxy. Same size and layout as a Zizzle but looks like they merged it with a $10 toy pin that used a metal silkscreened playfield. Same ramps and triple bumper group using one solenoid like Zizzle. However everything is tripped by the ball rolling over a bare metal strip and contacting springs on the bumpers and one stretched in front of the slingshots. Also has the spinning bumper and extremely simple rule set, just one notch above a $10 pin.

SG (resized).jpg

If I still had Thunderbirds, I would definitely entertain a trade for that.

Super Mario, it’s an insult to pinball and an insult to Mario

The backglass makes me want to punch myself in the dong repeatedly. That must be one of those old sears catalog pins

Rob Zombie worst game ever.

Unpopular opinion. I got about an hour on one in Boston last year. I actually had alot of fun playing it. I don't know that I'd want one in my basement but to an amature who just likes fun games, it scratched the nostalgia and fun itch.

There could be hope to see a new Mario Pinball. In the 90s Nintendo went all out with licensing Mario, the pinball, the movie, some third party games, it all failed so they stopped for 30 years
They started licensing again recently, the Lego kits, 2 movies so there might be a good trend here for a new pin.

That’s ok, I’m a big fan of the Sf2 pinball so I totally get where you come from !

No votes for Goin’ Nuts? Even the designer (Adolph Seitz Jr.) admitted it had no point, other than to suck in a quarter every two minutes.

"Worst pin" lists are a lot like "worst music" or "worst book" lists -- the worst pin I've played is probably so forgettable that I've, well, forgotten it. Something has to have a certain level of quality to even register in long-term memory as "oh, geez, that was bad."

That said, there are four games that would tie on my list of "worst pins I remember playing", for different reasons:
* BBBB, because I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do.
* SF2, because I understood what I was supposed to do and I didn't like it.
* Police Force, for its "take high score" feature that utterly destroys the rest of the game. (Bride of Pinbot gets a solid honorable mention -- not for the billion shot, which bumps you to a different high score board, but for the 50M Big Wheel award.)
* Super Mario Bros, for the combination of "not at all fun to play" and "not at all fun to stand within earshot of someone else playing".