I rented Sonic Spinball a lot as a kid, and even back then I recognized it as being kinda awful. It was sheer stubbornness that kept me playing, attempting weekend after weekend to make it past the third level... Suddenly I'm going from collecting three chaos emeralds to five!? Fuck off!

I've been able to beat Spinball in the years since via emulation, but I've still had this nagging feeling that somehow this game - which is neither a good Sonic game nor a good pinball game - had beaten me. I decided to fix this recently and slapped down 20 bucks on a remarkably well kept CIB copy for the Genesis. It's almost like someone played this once, said "nope!" and then kept it in storage for the following 29 years. Weird. But at least now I can finally say I've beaten Sonic Spinball on actual hardware.

The 2.5 stars is almost entirely because I harbor some sick fondness for this game, like the victim of a crime who keeps visiting their assailant in jail. Sonic's weight and momentum feel like a betrayal of who he is as a character, heavy and clumsy - it's not even a good approximation of pinball physics. I've never played a virtual pinball game where it was harder to line up my shots. I'm sure they exist, but I put quite a bit of time into other pinball games of this era and Sonic Spinball remains one of the worst.

I do really like how the minigames feature characters from both the Saturday morning cartoon and The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, though. There's one where you knock Dr.Robotnik's god damn teeth out one by one, and that always stuck with me. These minigames are also dreadful to play, the ball is so squirrely that it'll likely hit a bumper immediately after being launched and go careening past your flippers and into the mile long gutter between them. It is nevertheless novel to see the 90s cartoon characters actually show up in a game.

There's also the soudntrack, which is... interesting. It's very grungy, even abrasive, yet it has its own unique charm. I bought the vinyl of it recently, so add that in with the 20 dollars I spent on the game itself and I'm out about 50 on Spinball related paraphernalia. Disgusting.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder how differently I might've turned out if I got really obsessed with Mario in the 90s instead of Sonic. Probably have a wife and kids and a good job. My life is a mess.