Sonic Spinball

Sonic Spinball is a pinball game developed by Polygames and published by Sega in 1993. It features Sonic the Hedgehog traveling through the Veg-o-base. This game is a Sonic pinball game.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The graphics in this game look really nice and very colorful. Some of Sonic's sprites and Robotnik are some of the best looking for the time.
 * 2) * Speaking of Robotnik, despite this being a spin-off, he has a surprisingly faithful design that perfectly ties into his design in the Sonic 2 cover (especially compared to both Sonic cartoons having different designs altogether), where he actually looks like Robotnik with black menacing eyes (not only in the game's box art, but also in-game as well! Which is a remarkable design choice for Robotnik that matches his goofy but villainous personality).
 * 3) The soundtrack is very catchy and upbeat. Much to the point that the iconic Toxic Caves theme is so kicky and uniquely catchy, to the point where it's one of the most timeless soundtracks in all of Sonic games. This was carried to the point that this soundtrack was brought back with a remixed version of it in Sonic Generations.
 * 4) The concept of having an adventure-like pinball game where the plot of the story revolves around Robotnik conquering a volcano in Mobius after shooting Tails' plane in order for Sonic to fall to his doom and has to fight his way through pinball mazes, sounds like an interesting and creative premise.
 * 5) You can control Sonic in the air, which feels fun to do most of the time.
 * 6) Good mini-games in between the stages that give you a break from the pinball mazes.
 * 7) The bosses are pretty cool looking, with them including Scorpio, Roboiler, Veg-o-Machine, and Robotnik himself.
 * 8) There is lots of variety in pretty much every stage, Like Lava Powerhouse having a steam arena, and the barrel boating in Toxic Caves.
 * 9) Characters like Sally, Bunnie, Antonie, and Rotto from Sonic Satam make a cameo appearance. Also, Tails and Adventure of Sonic the Hedgehog’s Scratch appears in the game.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The options menu/results theme. Even though it's nowhere as bad as mh:crappygames:CrazyBus’s title screen music, it is still pretty ear bleeding and terrible to listen to.
 * 2) * The sound when you hit a boss in all of the boss battles, while decently designed well, it sounds creepy and a tad bit irritating.
 * 3) The control scheme isn't always the best, much to the point that it's no surprise that it has garnered a lot of criticism for how slow and sluggish the normal speed in the game is. Thankfully, if you surpass the options menu and turn up the game's speed, it's much more fun to play.
 * 4) * Especially when Sonic floaty controls can be unreliable and problematic sometimes. A prime example of this is if Sonic hits a boss (i.e Robotnik) and then he can fly out of the boss level by mistake, and you'd have to manually go all the way back up there, which puts way too much difficulty for a Sonic game.
 * 5) The game may have only four levels that are challenging, but they are all pretty hard to complete levels.
 * 6) Puzzles can be a bit difficult to solve at times.
 * 7) The Game Gear port is pretty bad.
 * 8) The game itself was rushed out in an attempt to add more development time for Sonic 3 & Knuckles (ironically a game that was also rushed since Sonic 3 was near to completion). This resulted in the game being somewhat unpolished.

Videos
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Reception
The reception was widely mixed. Well received were the novelty and visuals, while most criticisms was directed at the controls (a GamePro reviewer noted that the controls were so mediocre the game would be considered mediocre as well)

Jeuxvideo awarded this game a 15/20 which is one of the highest ratings for this game by a critic, while one of the lowest ratings was a 4/10 from Eurogamer.

Trivia

 * In the CD album Sonic the Hedgehog Boom and in the Sega Tunes's Virtual Sonic, it had 4 arranged songs from this game that was all composed by Howard Drossin himself.
 * Both this game and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine are spin-offs that were made in the exact same year of 1993 to give a proper delay for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles while it was having a slight hiatus before it was released in 1994. Especially since Sonic CD was also released in the same year as the aforementioned spin-offs were.