Player Comments on The Life and Death of the Pinball Wizard

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional writer and only somewhat of a seasoned reviewer. To those of you who haven’t read the story, spoilers abound in this review.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Pinballing for my life, that’s an interesting concept. The story starts with a gripping first sentence. I like the imagery of staring at one’s own lifeless body, with the vanishing calluses and aches, and seeing through your own body. And the description of the arcade is done well, using lots of specific details to create a consistent atmosphere.

The conversation between Death and the protagonist was fun. It’s comedic and lighthearted, but you can also see the protagonist’s desperation to live, even if it’s just to beat his high score. The only minor critique I have is that the ‘You stick to it a bit’ sentence appears to be missing a full stop. And a subtle detail I noticed is how the protagonist’s personality interweaves with the narrative voice, like how a lot of descriptions and analogies refer to video games. Even the health bar and gamey element are a nice nod to arcade games.

GAMEPLAY

I have no idea how you managed to put a whole pinball game into the site’s editor, but I am definitely impressed. Even more so that I can control the flippers using my keyboard instead of clicking the buttons. I’m still impressed now that I’m replaying this storygame. The different levels and having to reach higher scores ramped the difficulty up as the story proceeded.

The flippers kind of slant downwards after they’re used, taking up ever so slightly less space, so I realized I could get a higher score by just letting the ball ricochet around the box on its own. Based on a very small sample size of three games (one where I actually played and two where I didn’t), the ‘let the ball do its own thing’ method won over playing most times. But who knows, maybe I’m just that bad at pinballing.

Something I only realised later: the ranges don’t capture every possible score. For instance, in round three, I scored exactly 7400, but the only options were ‘less than 7400’ and ‘between 7500 and 9900’. This gets more noticeable in round two, where the options are ‘Less than 4900’, ‘between 5000 and 6900’ and ‘more than 7500’. Unless something has been coded to avoid a score between 6900 and 7500, that’s a pretty large gap.

PLOT & WRITING

The small scope—a high stakes game of pinball—is a great way to make the most out of a 3k word count. I found the observations about death and the conversation between the two main characters to be amusing throughout. The short paragraphs of description effectively remind the reader of the stakes by illustrating the protagonist’s reactions while continuing to maintain a strong sense of setting and atmosphere.

I noticed a few comma splices, particularly on the Round 3 page, but they could be used as a stylistic choice to convey the fragmented nature of the protagonist’s thoughts as his sense of dread and urgency grew. Each little detail—from the way the machine tilts, to the row of quarters—makes the world so concrete and real. I love the analogy of life and death being like the ball in the pinball game. It’s very fitting considering the motifs in this story.

ENDINGS

Now, onto the endings. First off, the classic winning ending, where somehow I managed to win by the skin of my teeth, as the last round depleted my health down to zero. Seems that getting the highest score on round one is a surefire route to success, no matter how badly I do in the later rounds.

I like this ending. The only proofreading error I noticed is ‘in tact’ being two words. Death is certainly intrigued by pinball, likely due to the protagonist’s enthusiasm for the game, and despite his initial reluctance, decides to play too. I like how depth and character development can be conveyed through lines of dialogue without any surrounding description of action and facial expressions, it’s a real skill the author has.

I tried another route where the protagonist did badly in the first game and his use of words like ‘wack’ and ‘buggin’ does give a retro vibe to the story. There’s a good amount of replayability: getting the lowest score boundary on the second game leads to a different page depending on what you scored previously. This ending makes sense too: Death gets bored and wins a gift for Vida. The image of him holding bouncy balls (extending the metaphor for the souls he’s collected?) and a stuffed rabbit is amusing and fits the consistent trope subversion of his character. It also is a great reference to one of MHD's other stories that features these characters.

TL;DR

Overall, this is a really fun game and does amazing things with the site’s editor. I enjoyed playing pinball—it’s certainly quite addictive!

Best pinball game on the site, 10/10 would pinball for my life again.

I LOVE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE PINBALL WIZARD!

Damn this is cool! An actual functioning game inside the story game! Will play again to see how high I can get my scores each round.

That was fun :) The storyline behind this was fine (hanging out with death reminded me of The Book Thief) but people come for the the pinball game, which was intimidatingly cleverly made and worth 8/8 for what it is :D

I don't really know what black magic the author used to stuff an entire pinball machine into their storygame, but it's quite amazing to see just how much potential the editor really has. The pinball game works fine, but I also wanted to point out that the minimal plot offered helps so much with bringing back the nostalgic setting of when pinball was a popular game. It really feels like a slice of the past. Incredible work!

Very fun game that does a fantastic job with the editor!

Also, this is a really cool game for new people to play, simply to show new users that there's so much you can do with the editor.

I mean, who would have thought we could play pinball on CYS!

Great work, MHD!

Death and I should pinball more often.