One of the more fascinating things to see in this last generation have been all sorts of ports of titles from other systems or regions that I never saw when they were originally released. In that vein, when I saw some shots from Dino Land I was actually a bit excited. Given that I’m a huge fan of pinball machines from the arcades, and have played all sorts of video pinball titles over the years, enjoying many of them for their unique quirks, I was hoping to have uncovered another lost gem. That unfortunately isn’t the case, and on top of the original game not being terribly good, it seems like insufficient care was put into making the most of it on the Switch as well.

Originally released way back on the Sega Genesis, I’ll admit that I don’t recall too many video pinball games in that era. It wouldn’t be until a number of years later that the excellent Pokemon Pinball would be released on the Gameboy Color, and while there were very early titles like Pinball on the NES, they were far more primitive. So I’d agree that the people behind this were at least somewhat ambitious, with the game featuring a scrolling playfield and a fair number of themed elements, both static and with some moving around. In that way you can at least appreciate that the elements of a video pinball game are present.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the movement and physics of the ball, everything sort of runs off the rails. The performance in this area would, at best, be called erratic, with the ball coming off of the flippers at odd angles, a moment where my ball simply stopped on a flat surface at one point, and a pretty regular feeling of lag as the ball would scoot around. It doesn’t help that the layout of the table itself is a bit strange, with bumpers sometimes changing position, underlining that this is its own odd outlier of a creation. Throw in that even on the conversion they didn’t bother to map the flippers to the shoulder buttons, perhaps honoring the original buttons but being authentic to a fault, and this simply wasn’t much fun and burned out my interest pretty quickly. There are absolutely some video pinball games of interest from over the years out there, but this isn’t one of them.