Indiana Jones Pinball Review @ The Game Grid Arcade, Utah
7http://gamegridarcade.com
Here's a look at the new Indiana Jones pinball by Stern. It is one of the most popular games in my arcade right now now and for good reason - it's a lot of fun and very addicting. If you're a video game player who has never given pinball a chance then Indiana Jones is a good way to start out. I never was a pinball player until a few months ago but now I'm hooked as it's a uniquely fun experience you can't get at home without paying several thousand dollars and recreated pinball tables on a game console are not even close to the real thing, no matter how good the graphics or physics are. After the video I went on to have a good game, finishing at about 54 million points - not crazy good but I'm still learning the finer points of pinball.
Indiana Jones pinball features elements from each film, including The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The goal of the game is to unlock 4 scenes from each movie so you can see the Final Adventure, which is quite a challenge. They picked some memorable scenes and quotes from the movies but when it comes to The Crystal Skull, unfortunately they didn't work anything out with Lucasarts or Spielberg to get some actual scenes from the movie put into the game - instead there are about three very brief snippets from the trailer and no quotes. Granted the game was developed before the movie came out and they were locking down any information on the film but I would think that for a game set to show scenes from the movie they could have worked it out. At least the machine can be updated via USB so hopefully they'll have an update for it soon but it's still disappointing considering how challenging it is to get the ball up the Crystal Skull ramp.
But despite this it's still a lot of fun and you'll spend most of the time hitting targets related to the other movies. As you see in the video, the toys they put into this one are the different treasures Indy goes after in the movies, The Ark of the Covenant (watch the video to see what happens when it opens), the Sankara stones, the Holy Grail and the Crystal Skull.
If you live in the Salt Lake area, drop by and check it out, we're at the Valley Fair Mall next to the Red Robin restaurant. You get 6 tokens per dollar (with bonus tokens for spending more), Indy is set to 4. We also have the rare Shrek pinball, which I'll be reviewing soon.