Pinball Hall of Fame

Written by Adam Woolcott  on September 19, 2005

Review: Further proof it's nigh-impossible to translate pinball to a video game.

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Unlike classic arcade games, pinball games really never go out of style simply because they're the same basic premise time after time, just designed to be as challenging as possible Ц and there's no 'graphics' to worry about, which is almost always the culprit when trying to play nostalgic classics. You can find a table and play it for hours no matter how old it is, and have tons of fun Ц a genius of game design. Unfortunately, pinball has pretty much died off thanks to the demise of game arcades; with game consoles so powerful and successful there's really no market anymore for your traditional arcade cabinet, and without those, pinball really has no place to thrive in comparison. Thankfully, a few people remember the enormous popularity of pinball, and are trying their best to remind younger gamers of the genre of gaming that made way for the gaming business as we know it in 2005. The first of likely many collections, Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection takes you back nearly 50 years, all the way up to the early 1990's when the genre began its irreversible slide into obscurity. At an affordable price point of $15, old-school gamers who think of Nintendo as 'new school' can find a lot of value in these classics Ц even though the games themselves are not as good as the originals...unless the originals had floaty physics and dead flippers. In this case, while the game is a great history lesson, it's also a lesson in how difficult it is to shrink a table down into this format.

As you'd expect by the title of the game, Pinball Hall of Fame chronicles some of the most famous pinball tables from D. Gottlieb & Co. spanning the mid 1950's all the way to the 1990's when the genre was dying out. There's 7 tables in all Ц Ace High from 1957, Central Park from 1966, Big Shot from 1974, Genie from 1979, Black Hole from 1981, Victory from 1987, and Tee Off from 1993. Each one contains little blurb about the historical aspects of the game (such as Black Hole having a 'reverse gravity' portion underneath the main table, and how the game was the first pinball game to charge 50 cents a play, thus the most profitable pinball game in history at the time), and a huge flyer that was used to convince arcades and other businesses to invest in the game. Though there's nothing really mind-boggling or in-depth, each game has a decent amount of info to explain why each of the tables included could be considered hall-of-fame worthy. In addition there's a couple bonus games to unlock that aren't pinball-based, but instead just a little diversion for those who end up mastering these difficult games...or if you're sneaky and find the necessary codes on some cheats website and unlock the bonus stuff instead.

Up to 4 players can participate in a 'pass the controller' style of multiplayer, competing for the highest score (shame only the Xbox version lets you upload top scores online), making for a decent diversion if you have any older gamers around or perhaps something to play with a non-gamer. Unlike the last pinball game we reviewed, Flipnic, Pinball HOF doesn't have awkward default controls; instead the game uses a very basic and useful control scheme. The right analog stick serves as the ball launcher, and the L1 and R1 buttons function as their respective flippers, while the left analog stick lets you tilt the machine, though it's practically worthless since you'll get caught doing it almost every single time Ц obviously they don't want any cheaters, though a cheat code lets you freely tilt the machine without penalty. Each of the games are unique enough in concept and as the years go up, they get more and more advanced, showing how the genre evolved over a 40 year period of time, presenting a great history lesson as you'd hope from a game titled Hall of Fame. Thus from a purely technical standpoint, you're looking at a top-notch collection with smartly chosen tables.

One of the most difficult tasks with reviewing these older games is the inability to compare them to the originals, compared to many other compilation discs that have come out in recent years that typically contain arcade games that most gamers over the age of 25 played when they were fresh off the production line, or still around in some of the remaining game arcades. In this case, where exactly am I to find a real version of Central Park, which came out 13 years before I was born? Central Park is singled out because it's one of the worst games on the collection; obviously the game was designed to steal your money hard and fast, due to the bizarre flipper placement and the three narrow walls between them which cause the ball to be lost way too easily compared to the 6 other games Ц even Ace High was more fair and it was manufactured 10 years prior. The game also exposes the biggest issue with video game conversions of pinball Ц when you're playing a real table you can see the entire thing at once standing in front of it, while here you only see a little part of the table at a time, hampering your reflexes when the time comes. They likely could have shrunk the table down to fit on a TV screen, but it would make things even worse with everything all scrunched up.

This is just scratching the surface of many of Pinball Hall of Fame's problems. The ball physics aren't too bad, but it tends to be too fast for the screen to handle thus you end up unprepared to handle putting it back in play. Some games have a floating ball issue, but not all of them do. On the other hand, a few of the tables have dead flippers Ц as in they seem to not have enough power and don't send the ball flying far enough up the table no matter how hard you try. Genie would unquestionably be the best game in the whole collection had the flippers been a bit better emulated; instead it's deadsville far too frequently (compared to the real table, which I have played though it's been years). As such the best game of the whole set is Black Hole, with manages to have lively flippers and the least amount of troubles with the ball itself. Frankly, Pinball Hall of Fame is just another example of why pinball video games don't work most of the time Ц it's apparently far too difficult to simulate actual hardware and moving parts without screwing it up. Unless you're building a game directly to a console (something that almost never happens because nobody wants to play pinball games in this day and age), it seems impossible to get right. Die-hard pinball fans can probably adjust to this over time, but those lacking patience will get frustrated in hurry.

One place Pinball Hall of Fame deserves credit is in visual originality. Instead of generically throwing the games onto the screen, developer Far Sight Studios instead crafted a virtual arcade that you can explore, so to speak. And when you select a game, you don't just get the game; instead they rendered the entire machine, and right down to the stickers showing how much it cost per play and on the older games, the warning about gambling on competitive play (due to the New York City ban on pinball for years due to accusations that it was nothing but gambling done in a different way, rather than a game based on skill). It's accurate right down to the reflective glass on top of the table; it's almost exactly like being at the table - playing a game within a game, so to speak. This direction does really kill the audio though Ц in order to emulate the sounds emanating from the speakers of the table itself, it's really tinny and drowned out most of the time Ц it sounds...distant, I suppose is the right word. Obviously in the real arcades you could really never hear anything either since there was usually music drowning it, but in this instance it's quite weird.