Tag: Star Wars: Classic Collectables Review

Star Wars: Classic Collectables (Pinball FX Table Review)

Classic Collectables BackglassClassic Collectables
Pinball FX non-VR Debut
aka Star Wars: Classic Collectables
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by Zoltan Vari
Set: Star Wars Pinball: Thrill of the Hunt ($9.99)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki
Classic Collectables is the +1 of a two-pack with the solid and fun SuperPin tribute Mandalorian. Mando is pretty dang good. Classic Collectables is pretty dang bad. Maybe Anakin didn’t balance the Force, but by golly, Zen Studios did! I never understood that whole “balance the Force” thing anyway. When those prequels started, there were like five thousand Jedi and two Sith. By the end, there were two Jedi and two Sith. Mission Accomplished. When Obi-Wan screamed “YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!” Anakin should have yelled back “DUH, and I did exactly what the prophecy said! The Jedi outnumbered the Sith 2,500 to 1! What did you think would happen if I balanced the Force, dummy?”

Classic Collectables, aka Loopity-Loop Mania, is as boring, as repetitive, and as downright nonsensical as pinball gets. Shoot the Death Star loop, then hurry-up and shoot it again, and shoot a toe shot to the left corner while you’re at it. Those are the only shots of any significant consequence on the table. Death Star Loop, toe shot, toe shot. The center loop is the most important one and the key to the whole table. There’s a scoop above the Death Star, and making a shot on it flings three of the old timey Kenner Star Wars action figures onto the table and begins a hurry-up to collect them. You collect them by shooting the same Death Star scoop that activated the mode, then two shots off the corner flipper that you get by activating a manual bridge. When the mode ends, the figures are refreshed. If you have collected opposing toys like, say, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, you can duel them against each other in a two ball multiball where the only shots are the toe shots.

Signature Shot – The Death Star Loop: If this worked every time, I probably wouldn’t hate CC as much as I do. But with a physics engine as inconsistent as Pinball FX’s is, sometimes the ball just loses all its momentum before it circles around and completes the shot. For no reason, and it’s sort of out of the player’s hands when it happens. There’s just too much wiggle room for the ball to wobble and miss. Since this shot is how you get the toys, it’s pretty important it work predictably, and it doesn’t.

The idea of collecting action figures would be fun if there were other ways to do it besides this one sequence of shooting this one, frustrating loop, then repeating the shot once along with the two toe shots, but that’s really it. Anything else you can do is a waste of time and energy when the toys yield the most points for the least work, and that’s not even factoring-in risk. The three shots that grab the toys are fairly safe compared to everything else. Even worse: the hurry-up value you score when you collect a figure is imprinted on it, and factors in for the multiball modes that require the figures. Logically, if you miss your shot, it doesn’t make sense to keep shooting it. Just let the timer run out and start again. I mean, why not? Assigning values to the toys would have made so much sense, and not doing so feels like something done to not trigger a screaming match between Star Wars fanatics and the designer. “WHY DID YOU ONLY MAKE DARTH VADER FIVE MILLION POINTS WHEN BOBA FETT SCORES TWELVE MILLION?”

Signature Element – Action Figures: The collecting aspect of CC is the best idea in the worst possible table. There’s even Mortal Kombat 3-like codes you can do with the toys that gives you more time (and thus more possible points) when you shoot the Death Star to actually start collecting them. For example: if you can prevent yourself from collecting the Luke toy AND the Darth Vader toy until you’ve cycled through all the other New Hope and Empire toys so that the Palpatine toy appears, then you get a three-person roster of Luke, Palpy, and Vader, the hurry-up countdown starts at twenty million instead of five million. It’s a neat idea. It’s just too bad the collecting is so repetitive. We’d love to see Zen do another action figure collecting pin, only with increased ways of getting figures. If they get the G.I. Joe license, they should remake this pin with more shots.

Outside of those three shots, there’s really nothing Classic Collectables offers that makes me want to play it. Any other shot is a massive waste of time. And the table offers all kinds of mechanical hang-ups and rejections that don’t feel tied to how you actually shot the ball. Like how depending on the camera you’re using (say, standard view camera #2) the random award cellar might throw the ball right between the flippers. The table is REALLY clunky with how it shoots. We use the term “bricklayer” a lot, perhaps sometimes inaccurately. Classic Collectables is a no-doubt-about-it bricklayer. The shots are so inelegant and so frustrating that, despite one of the most fantastic themes in Pinball FX, there’s nothing likable about actually playing it. The skillshot is needlessly tight and not worth the effort of hitting it. The bat flipper in the corner that’s tied to the two toy shots isn’t precise enough for what it asks of players. The multiball loses its excitement when it’s super easy to just do the high-yielding two-ball duel where the jackpot is the same toe shots you’ve been doing the entire time. In the dueling two-ball multiball, you can fight the same two figures an unlimited amount of times. They should have limited how many times you could duel the same two figures, which would have completely prevented using a multiball to chop wood. But mostly, they needed more methods of collecting figures. It’s not the worst Star Wars pin because Han Solo exists, but the only thing Classic Collectables will collect is dust.
Classic Collectables SmallCathy: THE PITS (1 out of 5)
Angela: THE PITS
Oscar: THE PITS
Jordi: THE PITS
Sasha: THE PITS
Dave: THE PITS (Nintendo Switch)
Elias: THE PITS (Nintendo Switch)
Overall Scoring Average: 1.0 💩CERTIFIED TURD💩
Some review copies were provided in this review, others were paid for.