Sasha the Kid has worked hard for months on these and provided extensive notes to be turned into reviews. The other three of us just didn’t get around to playing these until this week. The original plan had been to do these first, then Natural History. “Trust me, you’ll want to do Natural History first. Dr. Seuss is……. not good” Sasha told us. She was right, too. Thankfully, up next we’ll be posting the Zaccaria Deluxe line, which will do a LOT better. We’re all very proud of Sasha for the effort she’s put into working on reviews for every AtGames table, including Zaccaria ones. Because of her hard work, we’ll be making regular updates to The Pinball Chick in the form of smaller, individual reviews. Today, we’re finishing up Dr. Seuss Pinball Pack 1 and 2, available for AtGames Legends Pinball HD, Micro, and 4K. And hey, this is now officially the first AtGames exclusive pinball franchise to start earning MASTERPIECE ratings from the group! But, it’s also one of the worst franchises in digital pinball, with three Certified Turds. Dr. Seuss badly needs patches for both sets.

Scoring System

MASTERPIECE: 5 out of 5, the cream of the crop.
GREAT: 4 out of 5, an elite pin.
GOOD: 3 out of 5. A decent but flawed pin. To be clear, GOOD means “good” at The Pinball Chick.
BAD: 2 out of 5, a poorly designed pin or a competent pin that’s just not fun.
THE PITS: 1 out of 5, an actively abysmal pin with a multitude of problematic elements.

Award System

CERTIFIED EXCELLENT: A scoring average of 3.6 or higher awards a Certificate of Excellence. We generally consider a table that’s awarded this certificate to have a value of $15 by itself.
PANTHEON INDUCTEE: A scoring average of 4.6 or higher earns the table a space in our Pantheon of Digital Pinball. We generally consider a table that enters the Pantheon to be a must-own table.
CLEAN SCORECARD: An otherwise decent table that, while not amazing, earned no ratings of BAD or THE PITS. We don’t place a set value on this award and suggest our readers decide what a table we ultimately all approve of is worth to you.
CERTIFIED TURD: A scoring average of 1.4 or lower earns the table a place in the Sewer of Digital Pinball. While we don’t penalize a set for having a Certified Turd, it certainly isn’t a positive thing.

DR. SEUSS PINBALL GENERAL REVIEW

• Once again, every table is done in the style of Magic Pixel’s popular Zaccaria Deluxe model series.
• Despite the license, Dr. Seuss Pinball doesn’t feel like it’s designed for toddlers or young children. We don’t feel most of these would make proper trainer tables for newcomers to pinball, and the high difficulty of a few might actually have the opposite effect and turn young children off of the sport. These are some of the most complex designs to come out of Magic Pixel, for better and (mostly) for worse. In theory, Dr. Seuss can appeal to “the kid in all of us” but that’s a cop-out. This feels like a massive misfire of the IP on the basis of complexity and difficulty alone. Dr. Seuss is ultimately about simplicity turned wacky, and these don’t feel true to that.
• Although he’s unable to play these as of yet (he’s in the UK, so we’re having trouble getting him an AtGames Legends), pinball designer Dave Sanders, our resident expert at The Pinball Chick (who AtGames & Magic Pixel should really poach from us and put to work making tables and helping them with their score sheets), was befuddled by the look of the tables. “The art looks like it’s lifted straight from the source material which, naturally, it would be. But this creates a problem, since Seuss’ designs and architecture style (which turns up in everything) doesn’t obey, and in fact openly defies, rules of geometry. Like Picasso, Seuss mastered the rules first to know how to break them. But it’s not remotely suited to anything like pinball, where your eyes are meant to be drawn to particular directions. When they fill the remaining playfield space with Seussian squiggles and wiggly lines, what you end up with is an unreadable and incomprehensible mess. There’s no way in the world any of the Seuss tables, let alone the more obscure ones, look intuitive to play in a hurry.”

• 

  While they might have air-balled the theme integration, we think that Dr. Seuss’s ABC from Pack #2 is one of the best Magic Pixel tables ever. We wanted to get that out of the way before we get to all the negativity to show we’re not total haters.
• We’re not sure if Dr. Seuss Pinball Pack 1 is glitched or not, but all three tables have their slingshots and bumpers get progressively more powerful, apparently as a result of building up kinetic energy from the bumpers and slingshots like the ball is made of  Vibranium. Hits so powerful that a single bounce on the slingshot can send the ball at such a high speed that it becomes a blur capable of quickly traveling the full circumference of the table. It’s ruinous, and deliberate or not, we’re comfortable declaring Dr. Seuss Pinball Pack 1 the worst collection of digital pinball tables ever made. Even the legendarily putrid Zaccaria Pinball Retro Pack had one Certified Excellent table. The highest scoring Dr. Seuss Pack #1 pin has a rating of 2.0 – BAD.
• We don’t recommend buying either Dr. Seuss pack at their full retail price, but if Dr. Seuss’s ABC is ever sold separately (or you can get Pack 2 for $15 or less), get it!
• The sales page at AtGames doesn’t even show you half the tables of Pack #2. Oh, The Places You’ll Go and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish don’t have any pictures. Neither table is particularly well made (well, Fish would have been if not for a really bad idea they couldn’t resist including), but with patchwork, they could be. If these are patched, we’ll redo this review, and trust us, they really need to patch these.
• Again, not haters. We’re BIG Magic Pixel fans and big Zaccaria fans. We unanimously prefer their physics engine to Zen’s. But real fans don’t blindly cheer everything a studio churns out. Six of the seven of these Dr. Seuss pins are, simply put, not good as pinball tables, and cheering mediocrity isn’t fandom. That’s infatuation. It’s not healthy, especially when a studio is capable of better. Their Natural History pins, 9 of the 12 of which we rated GOOD or better, prove that. In the coming days, we’ll be posting individual reviews of the Zaccaria Deluxe model pins, some of which are serious contenders for the Pinball Chick Pantheon. But for now, buckle up, because this is going to get ugly.

THE CAT IN
THE HAT

The Cat in the Hat is so badly made that it should be delisted. The absolute worst Deluxe model table from Magic Pixel, bar none. There’s too much packed into the playfield, leaving no room for creativity on the player’s part. Every shot is “railed” to some degree, but there’s not a single good shot on the entire table. The targets are really poorly placed. For example, even after several hours, none of us could consistently hit the “F” target in F-I-S-H. That’s a little crazy, since we’re not bad at pinball in our home. That “F” target is a “beyond the toe” toe shot that Cathy alone hit one time directly off the flipper. We’re not even sure how, since the same angle didn’t work for anyone else. Usually it requires a bump off the slingshot to get it, but with these slingshots? Good luck. For whatever reason, Cat in the Hat and the rest of the Seuss Pack 1 pins have that problem with the slingshots storing punching-power. By the end of the first ball, the slingshots are capable of shooting the ball the full circumference of the table. When this doesn’t hit an orbit, it creates a chaotic “rubber ball” effect. It gets even worse, because like so many Magic Pixel Deluxe tables, the bumpers themselves are too packed together and the ball gets stuck in them quite a lot. But, combine the bumpers with the overpowered slingshots and you could in theory get caught in a cycle where the slingshots send the ball flying up the full orbits of the sides and into the bumpers, which then knocks the ball around before dropping it onto the left slingshot, which could reset the cycle. “The evil cycle” as we came to call it burns away most ball saves, and it’s not that rare to go over a minute between playable shots. At one point, the evil cycle lasted around three minutes before the ball was able to touch a flipper again. If this was a “mode always active” table like ABC, that’d be one thing, but Crap in the Hat uses the “stoplight mode” format, so you can’t do anything else while a mode is going. The penalty for missing a shot shouldn’t be the risk of becoming bored while waiting to get another shot. We didn’t think it was possible to make a worse table than some of the Zaccaria Retro pins, but they proved us wrong. Someone put this cat to sleep.
Pack: Dr. Seuss Pinball Pack 1
Vice Family High: Cathy “IGC” 238,707,850
Cathy: THE PITS
Sasha the Kid: THE PITS
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: THE PITS
Scoring Average: 1.0 – CERTIFIED A TURD

DR. SEUSS’S ABC

Behold: the one truly fantastic Dr. Seuss pin and, perhaps, Magic Pixel’s finest hour. Well, unless you’re Oscar, who we advise not to read this part unless he remembers to take his blood pressure medication. ABC’s novel concept is that a mode is always going, from the first plunge until the game ends, as you run through various alphabet-based targets that are SO SATISFYING to shoot. But, unlike most Zaccaria Remake/Deluxe pins, you can still shoot other targets. The result is one of the greatest pins to come from Magic Pixel. It also led to an epic screaming match in the Vice Household. Oscar had a tantrum over the fact that everyone else overlooked the horrendous scoresheet. Admittedly, it’s kind of breathtaking in how careless the scoring system for ABC is. Among the highlights: multiball does NOTHING but add a second live ball to the playfield. But who needs multiball when the H-I-J-K orbit feeds a spot target that’s supposed to only light randomly but is basically always lit and scores tons of points. It can be shot from either primary flipper, as well. But, despite what Oscar says, nobody was really chopping wood with it. Everyone was trying to clear the modes, which pay-off well and offer a genuine tour of the table. While his gripe is legitimate, his case for not awarding at least a rating of GREAT would have carried more weight if he pointed out that zone-style layouts, by their very nature, feature plenty of low-risk shots and it’s absolutely valid that some of the modes in ABC lack excitement because there’s little to no drain risk from them. If you hate zone-style design, you’ll really hate this one. Oscar isn’t a fan of the style, but other than him, we like them in our house. ABC could use some re-balancing, but we loved this pin. And now cue Oscar for an extended whining session related to one lousy shot.

KICKBACK – Oscar: I cannot believe the two youngest kids voted MASTERPIECE. I’m not mad at you girls. I’m just disappointed in you. ABC’s scoring is not something I can look the other way on. Specifically, the Spot Reward shot is too easy to chop wood on. I’m fine with tables that have one overpowered shot if it has proper risk/reward. For example, the Thing Flips shot from Addams Family. I can get behind that, because it requires different shots to build-up the value, and because it is exciting to watch someone drain one Swamp Shot after another. It’s a difficult shot to master, and that’s what makes it impressive to start sinking with consistency. But, this shot isn’t like that. It’s a very easy shot fed by a primary target that takes no time at all to build the max value of. Value that carries over between balls, even though it has almost no risk factors involved. Once it reaches the magic five million value, it’s that for the rest of the game. I want to believe Magic Pixel made some kind of coding mistake and a patch will fix it.

Whether this was intentional or not, it’s the worst kind of rarity in pinball: a high yield shot that’s not thrilling at all. According to the rule sheet, this target “flashes randomly.” But it’s actually lit more than it’s not, and since even the auto-plunger hits the target, you can deliberately drain a ball save for an easy five-million points that has next to no potential to sink on the return. In fact, it’s a viable strategy to use this shot as a means to take control of the ball, and any shot that’s true of should never pay off so much. No matter how fun the whole layout is, I can’t get behind a table that so poorly weighs the risk/reward. This might be the first original digital table I’ve played that’s a MASTERPIECE in layout and THE PITS for its rule sheet. I’m splitting the difference by plugging my nose and voting GOOD. I’m basing that rating entirely on the way the modes are done and a stellar playfield. Maybe my favorite zone-style playfield since Bally’s Doctor Who table. But, the scoring really puts a damper on the whole thing.
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 2
Vice Family High: Angela “ADV” 388,660,420 (Top 40)
Cathy: GREAT
Sasha the Kid: MASTERPIECE
Angela: MASTERPIECE
Oscar: GOOD
Scoring Average: 4.25 – Awarded a CERTIFICATE OF EXCELLENCE

FOX IN SOCKS

Fox in Socks could have been the best Seuss Pack 1 table, which is like saying you prefer a paper cut to having your finger chopped off. If not for the same problems all Seuss 1 pins have where the slingshots become overclocked, Fox in Socks would score at least ratings of at least GREAT from everyone. The stand-up targets are all really placed and make for fun traditional pinball sharpshooting, and the overvalued but energetic mini-field, which scores one million points per target, did manage to feel exciting and was easily the best of its breed in the Dr. Seuss series. But, by its nature, sharpshooting requires predictable rebounding and defense, which becomes impossible when a slingshot is capable of knocking the ball the full length of the table. The violence of the slingshots makes rebounding more luck-based than anything, and the worst part is, we don’t even know if this was done deliberately or not. “Maybe they wanted the slings to feel as hyperactive and ‘wacky’ as Dr. Seuss books are?” Maybe. We don’t know, but the result is two tables that are unplayable. Grinch does it too, but that table’s layout doesn’t lend itself to rebounding issues and instead just becomes boring. Fox in Socks feels like it’s cheating players. They really need to patch this “kinetic build-up” out. Fox would benefit, as there’s a genuinely fun table buried underneath the problematic coding.
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 1
Vice Family High: Cathy “IGC” 360,580,390 (Top 30)
Cathy: BAD
Sasha the Kid: GOOD
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: BAD
Scoring Average: 2.0 – BAD

GREEN EGGS and HAM!

A single element ruins Green Eggs & Ham, utterly and completely. The trollish mode start saucer spits the ball as hard as it can at a shallow angle to the left of the board. It almost always hits the top corner of the left slingshot. While it doesn’t activate the sling, it doesn’t matter, since it already has enough force that it’ll ricochet hard off the corner and probably end up skipping along the right rails, where you have to risk a TILT to defend against it. A shot you have to make, and can’t really avoid making, randomly kills you. Wow. We really hope it’s worth it for whatever glee the design got out of creating a ball return that gives an unplayable ball. Sometimes (especially during multiball), the ball even bounces off the left sling and goes right back into the very saucer it was just spit out of. Why would anyone do this? Did the designer get turned down for the junior prom and this is their revenge on the world?

Also, the perils of having a digital character pick up the ball and drop it in a box for a multiball lock is that it opens the possibility for a glitch by several magnitudes. Sometimes Sam-I-Am has butterfingers and the ball just doesn’t get picked up and continues along the ball path. This happened to Cathy in her game, and once Sam-I-Am broke, it continued to fail to pick up the ball when the lock was lit for the next cycle of players, who were left unable to get a multiball at all. Then again, the mode start seems to glitch out too. We had a game where something happened during the first player’s first ball, and after that, it never again lit the mode start for any player for the rest of the entire match. Whatever. Instead of rating Green Eggs and Ham BROKEN, the crappy way the mode start saucer is done was enough for us to all agree that this is second to Cat in the Hat as the most unplayable Magic Pixel Deluxe table ever made. There’s no point in talking about all the other targets, since we’d never recommend anyone play any pinball game that wants to play Keep-Away with the ball like that mode start saucer does. We’ll chalk up all the glitches to bad karma brought on by bad design. You’re better than this garbage, Magic Pixel.
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 2
Vice Family High: Cathy “IGC” 303,310,070 (Top 25)
Cathy: THE PITS
Sasha the Kid: THE PITS
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: THE PITS
Scoring Average: 1.0 – CERTIFIED A TURD

GRINCH

Grinch was clearly made with the best of intentions, and it pains us that we were so bored by it. It’s just not a fun table. It’s like the evil twin of Dr. Seuss’s ABC, because a mode is always going, and we really don’t want to discourage Magic Pixel from exploring that further. It’s a great idea, and it just doesn’t work with Grinch because of a boring playfield. Weirdly, this is the only AtGames table where all four Vices have reached the wizard and actually gotten, GASP, an extra ball!! We have no clue why Magic Pixel is so stingy with EBs since they’re typically exciting, but in the case of Grinch, it’s hard not to reach the wizard. If not for the Vibranium ball effect that’s there for every Seuss 1 pin, we’d probably still be playing, since when we finally did drain, it was usually a result of an impossible to defend warp-speed launch off the slings. The Grinch is a lump of coal because of the ludicrous decision to have a barrier of targets crowd the primary flippers. What this does is separate the middle of the playfield from the drain and create what is essentially a faux split-level layout. That’s a BIG problem because everything above that row of targets isn’t merely low risk, but NO risk. The result is Grinch is a table without any stakes at all, where games take forever and consist entirely of mindless picking ‘n flicking. Our first game as a family took so long that, half way through the first ball, we put on a 95 minute movie. By the time the movie ended, Oscar had just started the final ball of the session. Normally a player having a long ball would ice the other three players, but Grinch incentivizes wood chopping like no other table we’ve seen, and that barrier of targets acts as a drain pin that keeps the ball well away from the actual drain. We like some of the ideas, like the choo-choo train in the center of the playfield that you have to shoot around. But, like so much else with Grinch, the train does nothing but slow down the gameplay. Or, to put it another way, this is the table we played the fewest games of for this review, but it was also the table we put the most actual time into. Don’t touch this one with a 39-and-a-half foot pole.
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 1
Vice Family High: Cathy “IGC” 818,743,460
Cathy: THE PITS
Sasha the Kid: THE PITS
Angela: BAD
Oscar: THE PITS
Scoring Average: 1.25 –CERTIFIED A TURD

OH! THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!
(We assume the name is meant to be ironic)

“The scores on Places’ leaderboard are pretty low compared to other Dr. Seuss tables! Ooh, that’s ominous!” we all thought. We soon figured out why. Oscar reached the third mode, called “The Way Up” where the object was to spin the spinners. Something went wrong and the table just plain didn’t count any spins, or any other points, even though the targets were still lit. After five minutes of shooting the table’s lit spinners over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over he finally drained, having scored no substantive points that entire time making the shots that the table told him to. We were convinced it was broken, but then Angela actually won this mindless grind of a mode by doing the “and over” part apparently one more time than Oscar did. That’s the Dr. Seuss Pinball experience in a nutshell: a mindless, demoralizing grind that makes you question whether they even wanted to develop this property at all. Why are these Dr. Seuss tables so brutally hard? Imagine if they were developing Sesame Street pins, next. Places has some of the worst target placement from Magic Pixel (including targets you can’t even see because the mini-field is laid on top of them), two inelegant mini-tables, and slingshots so lethal that this feels like a parody of Dr. Seuss and Friday the 13th. Really awful multiball table, too. I’ve never seen so many “everyone out of the pool!” multiball endings on any previous Magic Pixel pin. Oh! The pins you wish you played instead!
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 2
Vice Family High: Angela “ADV” 138,467,360 (Top 20)
Cathy: BAD
Sasha the Kid: THE PITS
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: BAD
Scoring Average: 1.5 – VERY BAD

ONE FISH – TWO FISH
RED FISH – BLUE FISH

After a certain point, decisions made for the Dr. Seuss tables feel almost like self-sabotage on Magic Pixel’s part. Fish is another that would contend for the title of “best table of the Dr. Seuss packs” if not for one unfathomable decision involving a digital character that completely, utterly ruins the table. Besides yet another terrible mini-playfield that’s too tightly packed and has a wall that catches the ball and distributes it right between the flippers, the overall layout is really good. A tour-the-table, combo-slapping thing of beauty. So, what’s the problem? The Gack, which is a moose-like creature, randomly bends over like it has no attention span. When it does this, its humongous antlers block the lanes. It’s like the anti-shooting rhythm trap, and because it happens randomly, you can’t really plan for it. Like we said, self-sabotage.

The antlers don’t even function like a wall. Instead they’re like a net and eat-up most of the momentum of the ball, causing it to fall limply near the drain or onto the slings. We said “why would anyone do this?” a lot playing these Seuss pins, but this one hurts, because otherwise this is a table that feels like anyone could enjoy it. Did you even want to develop for this license at all, Magic Pixel? It doesn’t feel like it. What’s a real shame is Fish is probably the most balanced scoring table they’ve done in many ways, but we never once were able to get the bonus points out of the mini-table or even consistently find an angle to shoot the loop. In other ways, it’s not so balanced, as Sasha won the family duel in a clean sweep by chopping wood using the bumpers. While there are some risk factors involved (if the bumpers knock the ball to the left orbit, the ball will certainly drain if you don’t nudge at the right moment), it’s too easy a shot, and you’re awarded huge points for a lousy ten hits of the bumpers. Delete the Gack and we’d certainly give this, at minimum, a Clean Scorecard. Re-balance the bumper points on top of that and Fish might enter the Pantheon! Unfortunately, for now, this awesome layout goes to complete waste.
Pack: Dr. Seuss’s Pinball Pack 2
Vice Family High: Sasha the Kid “KID” 245,227,210 (Top 25)
Cathy: BAD
Sasha the Kid: BAD
Angela: BAD
Oscar: BAD
Scoring Average: 2.0 – BAD

Run for the hills, Horton, before they screw you up too!