BONG BONG BONG BONG Stop playing with the clock!!!

[mmcirvin]

I played "Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection" some more last night, way more than I should have.

A while back urbeatle mentioned grinding elements escaping the MMPORG genre. One thing that made me a little apprehensive at first was that this disc has an achievement system. You start out with a rather small number of credits, which you can earn by meeting various challenges for the different tables, and though some of the games (Funhouse, Pinbot, Gorgar and Taxi, at least) have free play, the others take credits to play. You can unlock free play for any of the other tables by paying 100 credits.

If this had been badly tuned it'd have introduced an unpleasant grind element into the game. (You're going to make me work to play the games I already paid for?) Fortunately, even the easy achievements give you big wads of credits, and it's pretty easy to get enough credits not to worry about running out, at least at first. Still, a complete pinball newbie might find this daunting.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...It's also interesting reading early reviews of this game, since it was previewing at shows for almost a year before it was released (I suspect development slipped a lot, maybe because they didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the Gottlieb volume, which seemed to be a premature release) and there was a PSP version that came out first, several months ago. The numbers of tables and the details of the unlocking/achievement scheme are all over the place; it's not hard to imagine that the achievements got tweaked repeatedly after play testing.

Now that it's been released, it can be hard to find in retail. Gamestop refuses to acknowledge that it exists. It's available through Amazon, but I actually bought it off a rack of miserable off-brand Wii dumpware at an FYE store at Burlington Mall.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The 100-credit buy-in isn't actually worth it, because once you get all of the first screenful of achievements for a given table, you're allowed to unlock free play on a locked table of your choice, which can, but does not have to, be the one you were just playing. You're likely to start doing that not long after you get to 100 credits, so you might as well just hoard the credits to play the remaining locked machines, just in case you dip below 100 (not that this is likely, since making achievements still gets you more).

So far I've gotten the first set of achievements on Black Knight and Pinbot, and I'm really close on Gorgar and Jive Time (which I've come around to liking a little more--even if much of the gameplay just consists of putting obstructions in the gigantic out lanes to make it less likely you'll lose the ball at random before you get something good on the spinner).

Making the harder achievements eventually gets you other options like the ability to change the color of your ball. Eventually credits become essentially meaningless, but you can keep hoarding them for bragging rights.

There are lots of camera options that are available from the beginning. It's annoying that the game doesn't save your camera preferences, but the default "Smart Cam 1" is actually not bad for most of the games--in some cases I prefer "Smart Cam 3" which has a higher vantage point.