You Got Your Pinball in My Feudal Warfare!

Frankly, I just don't get the biathlon winter sporting event.

You've got your cross-country ski racing. Nothing wrong with pitting athletes against each other in that way. And you've got your shooting at targets with rifles. Perfectly respectable way for two competitors to measure themselves up against one another. I just can't see how to make the two halves of the event mesh together with one another. There's no way to qualitatively measure one event in a way that makes any sense. We might as well add a bake-off as part of the Indy 500, a bare-knuckle boxing round as part of the Miss America pageant, or a weight-loss challenge to help determine the winner of the Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

But all of those ideas make more sense on paper than the concepts behind Odama for the Nintendo Game Cube.

On the one hand, Odama is a feudal Japanese war game, where players lead their army of loyal soldiers against hordes of enemy combatants, pushing through level after level of dangerous terrain on their way to capital city with the aim of reclaiming the lost throne. Hundreds of little video soldiers fill the screen at any given time, clashing against one another and working as teams to achieve victory goals on the battlefield. There's even an innovative voice command system with a special microphone allowing players to issue direct commands like "charge," "fall back," or "open the floodgates" to their troops.

But on the other hand, Odama is also a pinball game, complete with two flippers and a large steel ball that ricochets around the playing field. Obstacles that lie in front of your targets, rugged, sloping play fields, and the ability to tilt the table all balance out absolute control over the game with an element of random chaos.

Each concept is a staple in gaming, but no one sensible would ever think to shoehorn the two of them together at the same time. I'll admit that I was awfully skeptical about Odama when I first heard about the game, but I've seen enough games on the Nintendo platform that pushed at the game mechanics envelope and created something that, while not always a complete success, certainly turned out to be memorable.

Odama certainly lives up to that benchmark of flawed memorability.

The overall premise is simple enough. Each level is a more or less open field with hills, trees, rivers and buildings spread around. At the bottom of the playing field are your two pinball flippers, and at the top is a tall gateway that stands as your ultimate destination for the level. Down near your flippers is a crew of troops who carry a large iron bell up towards that gate, and once they pass through, it's time to move on to the next level. In your way, though, is an ever-replenishing supply of enemy soldiers dressed in black ready to push your bell back down to the bottom of the screen. Fortunately, players have their own red-suited soldiers ready to push back against those black soldiers. There's no way to control them directly, but it is possible to move them around en masse with commands through the microphone device that comes bundled with the game. Make them charge, make them fall back, make them knock down enemy fortifications, make them flank the enemy for a quick kill. When the numbers are in your favor, that microphone is an awfully powerful weapon to help players accomplish their goals.

But the red soldiers are limited in number, unlike the black forces, so the player needs something to even out the balance of power, and that where your giant pinball, the titular "Odama" comes into play. Use it to knock down obstacles or to crush enemy soldiers. Hit certain targets to collect bonus power-ups like extra time or food that can be used to distract the enemies or to bolster your own troops' morale. There are even special moments when the Odama can convert any enemy soldiers that it touches to your side. But the Odama is as dangerous as it is powerful. Players who knock the giant ball around haphazardly will likely crush as many of their own soldiers as they do the enemy, dashing any chances of victory on that level to pieces. It takes a very delicate balance between strategic finesse and brute force to get that bell all the way up the battle field and through the gate.

The games creators have done an admiral job of creating an authentic feel for the physics of pinball. The flippers, activated with the game controller's shoulder buttons, are quick, responsive, and strong. Landscape features act as ramps and ricochet points, just like on a real pinball table. And the analogue stick on the control pad controls the tilt of the battlefield, giving players a finer control over the ball's trajectory that using the flippers alone.

As anyone who's wildly obsessed with pinball can tell you, there's no luck involved with the game. It's pure skill. Every target on a pinball table is clearly marked, and once you know what a target is for, you'll know exactly how to use it to your advantage. The producers of Odama, though, have opted for a much more random, arbitrary approach to the game. Each level comes with a time limit, and success or failure is almost always determined by the player's ability to collect bonus-time power-ups. The locations for those power-ups are easy enough to find, but you never know which one you're going to find, forcing players to waste their time on what often turns out to be useless for them. In a great game, success shouldn't be determined by such random factors.

Other gripes? There's a total of eleven levels in the game, several of which are simple enough to beat on the first attempt. All together, the game can be beaten in a single day (two at most) by a dedicated players. It's simply too short. And the bonus you get for finishing that final level? You get to go back and play any of the eleven levels you want in any order you like, rather than having to play them through in order as you did the first time. Since each level has one and only one basic strategy for success, the appeal of going back and playing through them once again right away is severely limited.

Level design is also hit or miss. The initial playing fields are rather complex, busy with lots of targets and tasks for your soldiers to accomplish - gates to unlock, rivers to flood or block as needed, catapults to commandeer, and so on. After the first five or six levels, though, there's nothing to do for each level than push against the enemy soldiers. Maybe the game's release date came up on the designers a little too quickly, but that's no excuse for running out of innovative ideas halfway through the game.

All that being said, though, Odama still proves itself to be one of the most unusual, inventive games to come along in several years. For anyone out there who wants to play something that feels unlike anything else they've ever played before, this is the game to get. No one would argue that this is one of the best games of the year, but it is indisputably one of the most creative and original. It doesn't seek to copy all of the latest video game crazes, but blazes off into entirely new territory. (And as an extra added bonus, Odama has the greatest closing credit theme music of any game I've ever played. It sound like a James Bond theme - one of the cool Shirley Bassey ones from the late sixties rather than the tepid pop rock numbers from the eighties and nineties.)

Odama hasn't exactly been a commercial success, but that works in favor of anyone who's a little intrigued by the game. It's been showing up in discount bins lately for less than half of the original price, so there's little argument against giving it a quick look and a play through.