By now anyone with a Gamecube and a right mind has experienced the first-person adventure bliss that is Metroid Prime, and in customary Nintendo fashion when a mascot character and game franchise strike gold, the spin-offs begin. We've seen Mario branch off into a plethora of different genres with high frequency, but now it's Samus Aran's turn. Successfully melding the Metroid Prime universe with the blistering arcade experience of pinball, Metroid Prime Pinball for the DS is one of those games that sounds somewhat iffy on paper, but come game time pulls everything together so flawlessly that it leaves you wondering why the developers hadn't arrived at this premise sooner!

When it comes down to it, Metroid Prime Pinball is just as it's described: Metroid Prime interlaced with pinball. Built for the DS, you take your pinball skills to six different double-screen tables themed after environments in the Metroid Prime universe - the Pirate Frigate, Phendrana Drifts, Artifact Temple, Impact Crater, Phazon Mines and Tallon Overworld. With Samus in Morph Ball form acting as the pinball, you flip and bump her around these tables using the left and right shoulder buttons (or the respective D-pad arrows if you so wish) to activate the corresponding flippers and send her flying up ramps and into score bumpers. In terms of being a pinball game, Metroid Prime Pinball seriously is as good as videogame pinball can get, with fantastic ball physics, fast-paced action, challenging-yet-accessible gameplay that anyone can pick up and enjoy, plus that perfect oh-so-addictive pinball draw.

There are three modes of play at hand: Multi Mission, Single Mission and Wireless Mission. Multi Mission is the overriding mode of play for solo players, and in this mode you bump Samus through the game's six table regions collecting artifacts and battling familiar boss villains in order to progress to the final stage and boss. As you discover artifacts and advance through the various tables, they then become unlocked for playing in the Single Mission mode, which, simply put, is a quick play mode for single players to hunt down and best their previous high scores. Finally we come to the Wireless Mission, a mode that allows for 1-8 players to simultaneously duke it out against one another to reach the specified score first. Better yet, single-cartridge download play is supported here, so if you don't have any friends with the game there's no need to fret. On the downside, there's only one multiplayer table available, which is a bit disappointing.

Utilizing the Metroid Prime universe as a canvas for its pinball action, Metroid Prime Pinball truly taps into its source of inspiration to generate a unique pinball experience with various mini-games, power-ups and enemies that Metroid fans will instantly recognize. While smacking Samus around in ball form you steadily unlock and enter into various mini-game bonus modes that have you doing more than what a traditional pinball game has to offer. In challenges such as Shriekbat Shootout and Beetle Blast, Samus actually leaves her Morph Ball form for a brief spell and enters into a stationary third-person combat mode that has you blasting away at incoming swarms of Shriekbats or Beetles where you can't take more than four hits. You also deal with other familiar baddies such as Space Pirates, Triclopses, War Wasps and, of course, Metroids, with Samus's Power Bomb and Missile weapon upgrades coming in extremely handy. Other mini-games include Wall-Jump Challenges that have you alternately timing left and right shoulder button presses to wall-jump up to reach an airborne artifact, and various Multi-Ball Challenges that launch additional balls into the mix for an added boost of hectic, reflex-intensive pinball action. Many of these challenges also come in three advancing levels of difficulty to complete, for the highest possible scores.

Metroid Prime Pinball also captures the spirit of the recent Gamecube classics through its graphics and audio. For one thing, the table environmental regions look as if they were directly transplanted into the game from Metroid Prime, and by no coincidence they're visually breathtaking. From what I've seen, I have no problem anointing Metroid Prime Pinball as the best-looking DS game to date; even the overlay effects and presentation elements are top of the line. The eyes don't lie: this is one gorgeous game. As it turns out, the ears don't lie either, and that's good news because the audio, including the on-table announcer, pinball sound effects and Metroid Prime-replicating soundtrack, is impressive stuff.

To deliver an authentic pinball feel to the handheld platform, Nintendo has launched (and included with the game) the DS Rumble Pak. By popping the Rumble Pak into the DS's GBA game slot (the Rumble Pak itself looks identical to a GBA game), players can experience the rumble and vibration of real pinball right in the palm of their hands. This new peripheral is a wonderful addition to the DS's innovative hardware lineup and goes a long way towards enhancing the game with its subtle force feedback. Can you play without it? Sure you can, but it's included free with the game so there's no reason not to use it.

So, what exactly does Metroid Prime Pinball do wrong, if anything? As is, I can honestly say there isn't much that the game doesn't do very well. However, there are a few missing ingredients that were needed in order to bump the game up to its fullest potential; the provided tables are great and aesthetically gorgeous, but while playing I couldn't keep from feeling like there could've been an even greater amount of interactive pinball elements to further ratchet up the sense of constant activity that a classic pinball game brings to the table (no pun intended). More tables themselves would've gone a long way as well, especially in the wireless multiplayer mode that only offers one. Six is a solid amount and is definitely enough to satisfy, however only two of them are full-on pinball tables with all the works; the rest are basically dedicated to hosting boss fights. Finally, more should've been done to make use of the DS hardware; sure, the game looks spectacular and the two-screened layout is nice to have for an enlarged pinball area to work with, however the touch screen isn't really used. You can tap and drag on the screen to nudge the table and help keep your ball alive in dire situations, but this control feature is both difficult to pull off at a split-second's notice and not entirely useful whenever you finally do master it.

I said it earlier and I'll say it once again, video game pinball doesn't get any better than what Nintendo and Fuse Games have put together in Metroid Prime Pinball. After taking the game through its paces through days and nights of compulsive play, I ultimately feel like there are only a couple of subtle touches missing that could have pushed the game over the hump and into the rapidly-growing DS library of elite titles, but in the end what's here is a marvelous showing nonetheless and yet another hit that DS owners need to strongly consider adding to their collections.

Reviewed by Matt Litten for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).