4. Crue Ball: Heavy Metal Pinball
1992 - Sega Genesis
We shouldn't be too shocked about this one, actually. Anyone who's seen drummer Tommy Lee's sex tape with Pam Anderson or singer Vince Neil's escapades with porn star Janine and some other chick should realize that any Motley Crue video game was bound to have balls flying everywhere. But just the same, this clumsy integration of the Crue license into a substandard pinball title just begs to be ridiculed. So here we are.
The game launches into a beeping, booping butchering of the Crue's song "Dr Feelgood" right there on the title screen, like a kid in pee-wee league football slapping on a grown-up-sized uniform and jumping into an NFL game despite the fact that the shoulder pads reach to his waist and he's looking out the helmet's ear-hole. It's the designers' way of shouting, "Get it? This game must rock because it's jamming a Crue song!" Well, sort of. A 16-bit game console actually isn't the best device to use to recreate hair metal.
Unfortunately, neither is a pinball game. Forget the ball physics - this game can't even get the table right. This is a band that wrote an entire song about their favorite strip joints. They're all married to sizzling hot blondes. They drive fast cars and hot motorcycles, play cool guitars, put on concerts full of leather pants and spandex and boob-flashes and explosions, but the pinball game's playfield is mostly empty and boring, with dull gray hardware. Seriously, gray? Have you ever seen gray on a real-world pinball table? No, you haven't.
But that might better than the alternative. The drop targets clumsily spell out such creative encouragement as "rock", "roll", and "head banger" - oh, we see. Because it's a Motley Crue game. Actually, thanks for the reassurance, because we were just wondering: in what universe do enemies including a green worm; a red, fuzzy thing with one eyeball; and green-haired skulls that walk on little sandaled feet symbolize rock-and-roll? The only way this makes any sense is to consider them heavily stylized representations of the band's collective STD germs. Hell, Journey Escape was easier to decipher than this, and that had sappy musicians traveling through space.
The little spectrum analyzers (the bumpy light shows on equalizers) sprinkled around are officially the only legitimately cool thing here. Hopefully, adding them in was some kind of technical achievement, because there's no artistic achievement anywhere.
