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

[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.)