Flipnic!~ Flipnic!~
Won't you answer me?~
Will I have luck today?~
Will I have a wonderfull day?~
— The first half of the opening tune heard on boot-up.
Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball is a Digital Pinball Table video game developed exclusively for the Playstation 2 and published by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan, with the game also being published overseas by Capcom in North America and Ubisoft in Europe. It initially released in Japan on August 7, 2003, with Europe seeing a release about 5 months later on January 23, 2004. North America, meanwhile, didn't get it until July 12, 2005, nearly two years after its initial release.
As with most pinball video games, the goal is to keep a ball in play with flippers and bumpers to rack up a high score. As the tagline in the photo states, however, it goes way beyond that in this game.
To put it simply: Flipnic is not your average pinball game. Heck, it might not even be considered average for the standards of most virtual pinball games. The tables in this game (except for the last one) are less like simulated pinball tables and more like unique, colorful 3D environments to explore, with your ball often defying physics and gravity to navigate them. Each table has a variety of "missions" to complete which lets you unlock more tables to play on. Said missions can involve having the ball shoot lasers at UFOs, or freezing over a waterfall and then shattering it to reveal a secret mini-table, or even playing a minigame that undergoes a brief Genre Shift. There's even boss fights sprinkled in-between tables. Very, very strange boss fights.
The game was met with average reviews upon release and didn't do too well saleswise, making a re-release unlikely. Regardless, with a vibrant presentation and catchy soundtrack, Flipnic is fondly remembered by those who've played it in their youth and has garnered a bit of a cult following. It's worth giving a try if you can find a copy.
Tropes of silver approaches the page:
- Announcer Chatter: Almost constant; The game has a very talkative announcer that helpfully explains the criteria to start any nearby missions in an area on every main table. He also narrates the in-game guide videos. About 70% of what you hear in Flipnic will most likely be the announcer's voice.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Since the nature of the tables means that they lack a plunger to shoot with, launching a new ball means having it spawn in a starting location where you can launch it in the direction of a spinning dot with the press of a flipper button. This makes it easier to start or accumulate towards missions by aiming for certain spots on a table with a well-timed button press.
- Each table has a handy list of all of its unique missions accesible in the pause screen. It even keeps track of exactly what missions you've completed, what ones you've started but have not finished, and what ones you haven't discovered yet.
- Speaking of the mission lists, each list is divided between major red missions required to unlock the next table and minor yellow missions that can be cleared to score bonuses. Some missions are unique to each table, while others are shared across them. The red missions are the only ones you have to clear to unlock the next table, and your progress is saved with each cleared mission, so you don't have to do them all in one go.
- Blue Means Cold: The butterflies that freeze Biology over are colored blue.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The game divides missions into red and yellow. Red missions must all be cleared in order to complete a stage, while yellow missions are optional.
- Couch Gag: Everytime the game is booted up, the first thing seen before the intro is an Atari-esque FMV of a monkey going fishing, with a little ditty electronically sung to the tune of Nat King Cole's "Bicycle Built for Two". The whole thing is played out like a fortune teller; there's five different versions of this intro, one chosen at random, that rate how lucky you'll be while playing Flipnic, and what the monkey catches determines your luck. The last line of the ditty changes with each version, too:
- Bad Luck: The monkey gets scared off after catching a crocodile. Poor monkey.
"—You should not play Flipnic today..."~- Small Luck: The monkey catches...a boot. Which it then wears on one of its feet as it walks away. It's better than nothing, apparently.
"—Your luck is getting better today."~- Good Luck: The monkey catches a small fish and does a handstand. Dinner is served!
"—You will be all successfull today."~- Great Luck: The monkey catches a large fish. Plenty of leftovers for our simian friend.
"—You are incredibly lucky today!"~- Miraculous: The monkey catches a small, medium, and large fish all at once on the same line. It's so unbelievable that the voice singing the latter half of the tune cuts itself off a bit to comment in amazement:
"I hope the best, and here—""Oh my God! It's a miracle!!!"~ - Early-Bird Cameo: There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo of Ape Escape's Specter and the Pipotrons during the abduction cutscene in Biology
. The latter were introduced in Ape Escape: Pumped & Primed, which wouldn't be released until nearly a year after Flipnic. - Flying Saucer: Several of them appear throughout the game, as either smaller ones that act as targets or larger ones that attempt to abduct the ball. There's also a chance of either a blue or yellow saucer spawning, which when hit rewards a 1-Up and a continue respectively.
- Gravity Screw: Within the first few seconds of Biology, your ball flips upside down onto the main playfield.
- This is taken even further with the aptly-named Zero Gravity missions, which completely disable gravity and instead require the ball to hit constantly-rotating bumpers to move vertically.
- Level in Reverse: Biology, Metallurgy, and Optics have B variants that are this, in addition to some lighting changes.
- Luck-Based Mission: Well, this is a pinball game, after all. Some of the missions in general can come down to luck:
- The prime example is the slot machine present in the first table, Biology. Making matches on it is the main gateway to the table's unique yellow missions, and there's 5-6 of them tied to it. You stop each reel by hitting bumpers above them. Having to navigate the ball there and time your bumper shots can be a real pain in the neck and you have to make a match within a time limit to even start a mission. There are a few wild cards on the reels to help fill in matches, though.
- The boss fight against the giant robot crab in Metallurgy can take either a minute or a hour depending on if you can get the ball between it and a drone that revolves around. Unless you've weakened its power by clearing a prior mission first, you'll need to do so to rack up quick damage and kill it in one go, as every time it leaves to summon mooks, it'll come back with full health.
- Mini-Game: Biology has quite a few of them, activated by matching their respective symbols on the slot machine.
- One-Word Title: In Japan and Europe, the game is just called Flipnic.
- Pressure-Sensitive Interface: Flipnic uses the DualShock 2's pressure sensitive buttons to control the strength of the flippers.
- Retraux: The Geometry stage is meant to emulate the look and feel of the earliest days of video games, particularly Breakout and vector games such as Space War.
- This also applies to Metallurgy's Multiball cutscene, which is meant to look like something out of the 1970s with warm colors, exaggerated letter widths, and small lights lining the text.
- Slow Laser: You can fire these in Metallurgy during the Show Time missions.
- Tagline: In North America, "It's not just about bumpers and flippers anymore!". In Japan, "FLIPNIC is an enjoyable simple-action amazing pinball game for you".
- Timed Mission: Quite a few missions in the game are these, most notably the Zero Gravity missions and some of the mini-games in Biology.
- The Foreign Subtitle: The Ultimate Pinball suffix was added for the North American version of the game.
- Theme Naming: Every table is named after specific branches of scientific study that relate to the structure of the tables themselves:
- Biology is named after the study of natural life and living things, and takes place in a bustling jungle rich with plants and wildlife.
- Metallurgy is named after the study of metals, specifically their propeties and methods of refinement. The table takes place on a metallic space station crawling with UFOs and giant robots, and is very futuristic and technological in design.
- Optics is named after the study of sight and the behavior of light, as well as how light and other forms of radiation are transmitted and reflected off of surfaces. This table is what you would get if you played pinball on a neon sign, being a black light, colorful landscape with the most important details emphazised by bright colors.
- Every "boss" table that unlocks in-between the standard tables is named after Evolutionnote , a biological theory that explains how species change over time with adaptations to their environment. Each Evolution board involves you sending your ball at a constantly evolving creature that changes its attacks with each form.
- Geometry is the Odd Name Out, as it is named after a mathematical study instead of a scientific one, that being of course the study of shapes. Fittingly enough, this table has a 2D, 8-bit design with loads of geometrical shapes, and it controls radically different that the others, playing more like Breakout than pinball, complete with moving paddles in place of flippers.
- Video Mode: Many of them.
- Biology in particular has no less than five, all of which are activated by a slot machine in the main area. These include UFO Quiz Show (count the UFOs that fly by the screen), Color Puzzle (hit a 3x3 grid of bumpers to make them all the same color), Hungry Monkey (hit bumpers with the ball to spawn bananas, and simultaneously control a monkey to collect said bananas), and Lucky Flamingos (collect all the stars and hit every flamingo using Baffle Ball-like controls).
- Geometry has Galaxy Tennis, a wire-frame tennis game that looks similar to Battlezone.
- White Void Room: The Zero Gravity missions take place in one of these.
- Zeerust: Some of the game's artwork and cutscene videos evoke this sort of look, particularly the title graphics in the multiplayer modes.
- Yes yes, I will answer for you!~If you would like to know.~I hope the best, and here it is:
