High Speed (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Tradewest's 1991 pinball game for the NES, High Speed.

There is no ending, but in this video I show both congratulations scenes.

The NES didn't have many pinball games - there were only six officially released in North America - and it's not too difficult to intuit why that might have been. The hardware simply lacked the power to faithfully reproduce the beautiful table and backsplash art, the constant blare of sirens and voice samples over the clangor of mechanical parts, and the physics-driven gameplay that were integral to the pinball experience.

That's not to say that there weren't some noble efforts on the NES, though. Nintendo's Pinball was a reductive but fun early attempt,and Jaleco's Pinball Quest stood out for its ambition, but Rare's adaptations of Pinbot and High Speed, two popular Midway tables from 1986, are real class acts.

High Speed was originally billed as "Williams' 1st driving pinball featuring an action-packed police chase," and it was inspired by the designer Steve Ritchie's own real-life experience. The game's focus is on running red lights and evading the police while boosting score multipliers and collecting loot. Pretty cool concept.

The NES game aims to recreate the original table, but it adds a few unique flourishes that would've only been possible in a video game. There are roaming enemies that can break the flippers, interfere with your ball's trajectory, or outright destroy the ball, and there are screen-clearing lightning bombs that you can earn to wipe out these hazards. There are also a few minigames - a cool R.C. Pro-Am-inspired race and pachinko - to pep things up a bit.

I love the game, but I imagine it could be pretty polarizing. On the one hand, the game is loaded with digitized speech samples, all of table's features have been faithfully reproduced with an amazing amount of detail, and the new additions do a great job at fleshing out the experience for a home console. I also really like how the screen splits to keep the flippers visible the entire time.

On the other hand, as impressive as the presentation is for the NES, there's no denying that the ever-present morass of dithering is rough on the eyes, the nonstop wall of white noise sound effects will fray your nerves before long, and though the ball physics are reliably consistent, they're not particularly realistic.

If you're looking for the "real" High Speed experience, Pinball Arcade features a much closer depiction and is playable on pretty much any console from the past decade. Taken on its own merits, though, the NES recreation is still a fun way to spend a few hours.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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