Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection

[mmcirvin]

OMG BLACK KNIGHT AND FUNHOUSE AND PINBOT OMG OMG

Strangely, this seems to have gone directly to bargain bins upon release, at least in Wii form.

Comments

[kodi]

I've never been a huge fan of pinball sims, but I'll definitely make an exception for Black Knight and Pinbot. Wow.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Did I mention Space Shuttle?

Also Taxi and Gorgar and Firepower, which I was not familiar with but are all pretty good. Taxi seems to be the only known appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev on a pinball machine.

[spatch]

Hey! You give Gorby ride!

The blonde passenger is Lola in this version, right? (Monroe's estate didn't exactly like Williams using the M-name.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

Take the express lane!
Quick! To the airport!

Fir! Epo! Wer!

[notr.livejournal.com]

"Pretty good"?? FIR! EPO! WER! defined multiball target-shooting games.

Of course, a Williams collection won't include the queen of talking pinball games. ENTER XENON.

Re: Fir! Epo! Wer!

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I wish the collection had Xenon. I renamed my computer to Xenon after a friend mocked me for my computer having some generic default name. I changed its hard drive icon to XENON in the pinball style of lettering and bought "Seven Waves" which is an electronica album by the musician behind the female voice and musical effects for the pinball.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

Oh. Man. Black Knight, you say? For the Wii, you say?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes.

It uses the nunchuk, with left- and right-hand triggers to control the flippers. You shove the machine by shoving. It's the most natural pinball sim control I've used.

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

Yes, but does it have The Machine: Bride Of Pinbot?

If I can't give a massive chrome fembot a knee-trembler by flicking a pinball into just the right places, I'm not interested.

NO STEP

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't think it does.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

Nope, and it doesn't have Time Machine either. But it does have Space Shuttle!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, the earlier title based on Gottlieb games stinks, from what I've played of it. It's really buggy and the games themselves are not nearly as good as these Williams classics.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and I should add that this is apparently out for the PS2 as well.

[ckd]

I want Whirlwind.

With a USB-controlled fan.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, it has Whirlwind too. You might have to keep dreaming about the fan.

If they came out with a sim of some of the 1990s games like Addams Family and Twilight Zone and Star Trek: TNG, I think it would damage my brain. There would probably be sticky licensing issues with those, unfortunately--it'd probably prevent a bargain-priced omnibus like this.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, I imagine Twilight Zone would be particularly hard to simulate, with those weird gadgets all over the board.

[jinni-x.livejournal.com]

It just made me want the real thing :(

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There is that problem. You can buy a lot of these but it's an expensive hobby!

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

OMG how did I not know that this existed? Also, did you see my Flickr set from our visit to the Pinball Hall of Fame last month?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerri9494/sets/72157603960412329/

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If I ever go back to Vegas, that is definitely the place I will most want to visit. I'm not even really a good pinball player, but I'm fascinated by these machines.

[pianodan.livejournal.com]

Good frickin' lord, not the Black Knight.

I spent hours and hours and HOURS and hours keeping that stupid machine mostly working in college.

It's hard to to anthropomorphise a goddamn machine that keeps saying "You cannot defeat the Black Knight!" and then immediately burns out a solenoid in the middle of finals week.

#*%(#( Black Knight.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A sim may not give you the real experience of whacking a metal ball around, but at least it won't break.

In the conventional manner, at least. I did manage to hang this sim really hard once by fumbling the controller (while my daughter was trying to grab it) so that the nunchuk came loose while stuff was happening. I guess I should have followed Nintendo's elaborate instructions about hooking its connector on the wrist strap.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I like this game a lot. Oddly, I really beat up on Black Knight the first time I played it on the PS2 whereas I found it so hard in the arcade. It seems Jive Time and Sorcerer are not in the PS2 version for whatever reason.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those two are Wii-only. Sorceror is another pretty good Eighties table.

Jive Time is of mostly historical and aesthetic interest--I think some of the old electromechanical games are good (I was addicted to the old freeware Royal Flush sim for the Mac), but this one relies too heavily on the chance element and drains really easily. But I like the pseudo-Peter Max/Heinz Edelmann graphics on the backglass and playfield.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Do you have any Littlewing pinballs (if you still use a mac)? I have their demos but never actually bought any
http://www.littlewingpinball.com/contents/en/index.html

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried them--with the exception of Royal Flush, the pinball sims I've tried until now tend to have been on other people's computers and consoles. I tend to like ones based on actual classic machines more than the ones invented from whole cloth, though some like the Pro Pinball series had designs that weren't far from what you'd actually find in a 1990s arcade.

(I'm still not sure why Crave's Gottlieb collection didn't include Royal Flush; that was a great game--I seem to like the ones that have a lot of target shooting. I get the general impression that Gottlieb made some of the best games back in the electromechanical era but fell behind Williams and Bally when solid state ruled. And then in the 1990s, Williams and Bally/Midway merged and basically ruled the universe until the market dried up.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm still not sure why Crave's Gottlieb collection didn't include Royal Flush

...Hmm, it could conceivably have been some sort of rights issue. The Royal Flush sim that I liked so much seems to have actually been commercially released for Windows in 1996; the Mac version was never released commercially and got distributed as freeware by the author, supposedly with permission. It's not playable on modern Macs at all, since it ran under the Classic OS.