YOU GIVE TO ME RIDE

[prog]

I now officially agree wth mmcirvin and rserocki that Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection is a hot little number and totally worth $20, especially if you spent a lot of time around pinball machines during the 1980s and 1990s. The level of simulation is truly amazing, and evident that true pinball otaku had a hand in creating this disc. The tables look, sound and act exactly as their real-world counterparts, as far as I can tell.

Get the Wii version, if you can; the controls are simple and clever, essentially letting you play "air pinball". My only complaint is that the motions necessary to play pinball well emphasize the Wii controllers' assumption that I have smaller hands than I do. My right trigger finger quickly starts to ache from pulling on the too-small B button repeatedly, and my right palm continually presses the 1 and 2 buttons by accident, which in this game changes the camera angle.

Despite this, I have just played Taxi like 10 times in a row. Still haven't managed to pick up Santa. One day.

Comments

[leahleaf.livejournal.com]

GORRRRRGARRRRRR

[prog.livejournal.com]

ME, GOT, YOU

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I wish that the simulation would not always say GORGAR BEAT YE at the very very end, regardless of whether you won a game or not. You can get it to say YE BEAT GORGAR, but the other line always seems to be said at the last, to my recollection. Or maybe it is simply Gorgar's wishful thinking.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ha, I thought it was saying "GORGAR! FEED ME!" As in, "gimme another delicious quarter".

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I used to think it was saying GORGAR FEED YE / YE FEED GORGAR, when I heard it in an arcade. I never really understood for sure what was supposed to be going on, but never questioned it.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Whoa! And Black Knight? Firepower? FUNHOUSE?? Should be fun to see how they do that one. This is awesome!

[prog.livejournal.com]

The lack of HD graphics on the Wii makes the busier tables, like Funhouse and Whirlwind, look a bit muddy when the camera is pulled back to show the whole playfield. But I don't notice it much when I'm concentrating on the ball.

I found myself missing the Whirlwind backglass fan, too!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it's not Black Knight 2000.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Huh, Black Knight is actually rated higher than BK2K on IPDB (8.3 vs. 8.2). I never really played either one much, but I always thought BK2K was the one everyone loved.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Black Knight has the property that it's really, really easy to get multiball. Whether that is a bug or a feature is a matter of taste.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I think Firepower is actually one of my favorite games of the lot. By later standards it's extremely simple, but I think that's part of the charm. (Fans of early personal-computer pinball sims will remember Raster Blaster, whose table design was a knockoff of Firepower. David's Midnight Magic was a knockoff of Black Knight.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

It's dangerously close to making me actually want a Wii. Cheaper than buying a real Funhouse machine, and doesn't require maintenance! But, no attract mode, which is a serious oversight. "Hey Spunky, play again!"

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Oh, and, no fan in Whirlwind. That was so great on hot summer days. They should sell a Wii-controlled fan as an acessory!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Oops, you already said that. AGREE

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

If you have a PS2, you could get the PS2 version. Or if you have a PSP, you could get that version. Although I don't think those versions have two pinball machines the Wii does have, Sorceror and Jive Time. At least, the PS2 version does not.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

For the record, I don't have any videogame machines, just a Linux desktop and an older Windows laptop. I generally don't feel like I have time for videogames, but Funhouse is seriously tempting.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Ah, I understand. Indeed, I find it much easier to pick up this over something like a console role-playing game and play it for a few minutes at a time.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There also seems to be a thriving scene in free Windows pinball simulators, like Virtual Pinball and Future Pinball. I suspect that's what has killed a lot of commercial pinball sims (well, along with the fact that only old dudes like pinball any more).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, isn't he saying "you give Gorbie ride"?

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

My fiancee thought it was you give Gorbie ride. I thought it was You give to me ride.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...The seams in the simulation do sometimes show. Pinbot seems to push the Wii's puny CPU pretty hard. The ball tends to "fall off the table" a lot in that one, which I think is just the ball going so fast that it overwhelms the physics engine's internal frame rate and shoots right through a wall into the void beyond the Matrix. People who played Pinbot a lot in real life also tell me that the "advance planet" target is much harder to hit in the simulation (it's wicked hard), which may be some inherent discreteness in the flippers causing trouble.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

Is there any good Adams Family simulators? That is my favorite pinball machine. Seriously considered buying one once, for about $3000, for the office. Should have.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The free/bootleg scene might have something, but rights issues might be a problem for anyone trying to do a commercial Addams Family sim. You'll notice that the games in the Williams Collection are all machines that weren't licensed tie-ins. (In most of the era covered by this collection, Bally and Williams were the same company; the non-licensed machines tended to be produced under the Williams name, and licensed ones as Bally).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Two of the machines in the collection, though, are the work of the same designer who did Addams Family (Whirlwind and Funhouse).

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this is a good simulation or a bad simulation.

http://www.pajb.com/pinball/visualpinball.html

http://pinmame.retrogames.com/ says as of February this year,
"Added support for Addams Family Values and Rock Encore"