Submission #7582: ShesChardcore's SNES Battle Pinball in 03:57.63

This submission is for the Super Famicom game Battle Pinball. It features 5 stages based on various compati-hero characters like Ultra Man and Kamen Rider. While most pinball games are score chases, this one actually includes completable goals with boss fights after each stage.

Battle Pinball stages have a decent amount of complexity and things to do, assuming you're not just blazing through it all. The stages have multi-layered screens with various ways to score points or affect the other playing fields, etc. In general the bottom screens don't really help us at all so we avoid them after the plunge.

Beyond that, it's a standard pinball experience with 2 flippers and nudging. You can nudge infinitely without fear of tilting, and nudges seem to be more effective when the ball is physically touching something as opposed to flying through the air.

We plunge our way up to the second screen where there's a soccer field for some reason. The goal here is to get the ball into the top left blue "house" for fast transport up to the top screen. The plunge and hitting the enemy give us a good angle to do that. Up top we go.

To open the boss room, we need to do two things. The top right of the screen has an arrow that we need to be pointing upwards. The green kickers on either side change the arrow, and we hit a kicker on the way in to make that happen.

Second requirement is to kill the 3 little enemies sitting under the brown hole. Shooting the hole drops us into all 3 enemies, which kills them and opens the boss room. A shot to the upper right loop gets us in.

Here we fight Lavos Core for some reason. This boss has a quick kill. If our ball spawns on the right, a series of shots will trap the ball in the upper body portion and drop him fast. The same kill doesn't exist if the ball spawns to the left.

I know nothing about Gundam. It might not even be a Gundam character for all I know.

Anyway, space. On the middle screen there's two ways to get to the top. You can summon and kill a ship to open up the middle "hole" to get up. However, you can also open a path to the top left which puts you in better position for the miniboss fight, so that's what we do.

There are a few little gundam dudes that respawn on the upper left. Kill enough of them and the loop opens up.

For the miniboss, you have to hit all 9 yellow drop targets and kill the ship that comes in, which takes 8 hits but doesn't reflect your ball. From my experience the left side targets are the bigger pain so we drop them all first and go from there. Once you destroy everything you need to, the middle hole opens up and we shoot right in.

The boss is a Ninja Gundam throwing stars, but he has a similar quick kill as the first one. We park a ball on his head and down he goes.

This stage takes place underwater. We shoot the middle option on the plunge to get our angle set up to get into the top left pufferfish which is a similar goal as the first table.

On the top screen we have to spin one of the fish spinners, then shoot and open the boss door. Luckily the enemy on the right helps us by bouncing us right back in to the middle door that we just opened.

Unfortunately, this boss is awful. It's underwater, laggy, slow as hell, and we have to hit his lamp 8 times. I couldn't find a quick kill (which wouldn't even be "quick" anyway... stupid water) so if there's one meaningful improvement in the run, this would be it.

The final normal stage is in a desert-ish place with a restaurant and mine shaft. Normally getting to the top from the middle screen is a chore, but I managed to find a bounce up there that's totally free off the plunge.

Once at the top, we have to hit the top right thingy twice to unleash Ultraman to open up the mine cart, then we have to get ourselves into the mine cart from the top of it. We do this by bouncing a shot off Magneto and plopping ourselves in.

The boss takes a while but that's mostly due to not being able to hit him right after you've already hit him. He has weak spots in his "shoulder" area for lack of a better term. When you hit one, you destroy it and he spins. When he stops spinning, his hitboxes open back up so the goal is to be hitting that spot right as it appears, or at least being reasonably close to only lose a couple frames. After destorying the spots, we have to shoot him in the back (basically hit him from the top) and he's done.

This is the true "battle" pinball section of the game. You need to score 4 points on him.

And we quick kill him with 4 perfect shots not giving him a chance at all. GG. Pin Bo gets Pin Boned.

Third boss fight could be improved by finding better bounces. I don't think there's a way to get the ball stuck in him. Fourth boss fight has a few frames left on the table. I didn't find a "route" that put the ball there on the right frame every time, but I'm happy with what I got overall.

Memory: Claiming for judging.