New pinball: Pokémon (Premium)

My latest acquisition is Pokémon Premium. I have always loved Pokémon, even if I am badly out of date on the newer generations. I basically played Red, Blue, and Yellow on the Game Boy a long, long time ago, and only a handful since: Let’s Go Eevee and Let’s Go Pikachu, a little Pokémon Go, and the FireRed and LeafGreen remakes of the games I already loved. So I am not a hardcore fan, but I have a real soft spot for those original red and blue days. What can I say, I am a creature of habit. When Stern announced this one, I knew I wanted it.

It also created a bit of a dilemma. When I first started down this pinball road, I kept telling one of my best friends, “I promise, I only need five machines. Okay, six.” I was honestly leaning on that friend to keep me in check so I would not go overboard. Pokémon brought me up to ten machines in the basement. (I am pretty sure it is ten. I genuinely lose track.)

You can see in that second, slightly haphazard photo that I have, for the first time and a little reluctantly, put two machines, Funhouse and Pokémon, on the other side of the room. That side has a story of its own. When I bought this house, it came with an old wooden piano from around 1918. I used to play, and I even took lessons to get better at it. (I will write up my whole history with piano someday and come back to link it here.) I finally moved the piano into the storage room, blankets and all, to keep it in good shape, and there used to be a TV where those two machines now stand. The upside is that this opens me up to maybe two or three more machines down the line. In an ideal world, I will let myself get just one more.

But back to Pokémon. It is a really fun shooting game. The catch, as of writing this, is that the software is genuinely rough. Even though I love the game, it might be one I trade away someday, simply because it is so repetitive: the same loop over and over. That probably plays fine on location, where people drop a few credits and move on, but it is not ideal for a home-use-only collection.

Lately I have been playing in a pinball league, and I made a friend there named Eric. He has a King Kong machine, and going over to play it is a reminder of what I am missing: it is so unique, with so much to do and so many modes. The league location also has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and even though I am not a big Turtles fan, that game is an absolute blast, loaded with shots and features and modes. That is really what I am after for my next machine, whether that means trading Pokémon for something deeper or just adding one and seeing what happens.

If there is one lesson Pokémon taught me, it is this: I am probably never buying a brand-new Stern again. They are just too slow and too inconsistent about shipping the software updates that actually make their games better over time. Maybe I will come back someday and update this post to say things turned around and it is a blast now. Or maybe I will come back to say I finally traded it. We will see.

Update, June 2026: things turned around. The 0.83.0 software made a real difference, and I’m keeping it. I wrote up the new high score and what changed.