Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection review

Thankfully, the game gives you a ton of instruction on how to play each table, from the deceptively simple Jive Time to the mind-bogglingly complex Taxi. Controls are simple: B and Z are the flippers, the analog stick is your plunger, and shaking the nunchuk or Wiimote will nudge the table from one side or the other. Sadly, there’s no support for the classic controller. Also, while the Wii version gets two more tables than the PS2 one, it costs substantially more too, which is a bummer.

But the big letdown is that this game, like its predecessor Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection, forces you to unlock several of the tables before you can play them. When you start, four of the machines are set to Free Play, but the rest require credits to play. You start with 20 credits (up from zero in the last game), and earn more by completing goals, such as getting a high score or activating a multi-ball bonus, on each table.

The problem is, it takes 100 credits to unlock Free Play on any of the remaining machines, so you’re sorely tempted not to spend any credits playing them until you have 100 and can unlock it permanently – and credits simply don’t come easily enough.

There aretwo additional ways to unlock Free Play on the remaining machines, but they're not ideal either. You can spend credits to play a table, and if you complete all its regular table goals while doing so, it'll unlock the table for Free Play. But you're spending the same credits it takes to juust buy the table, so you could find yourself stranded. Finally, there are super-tough "Wizard" goals for each table, unlocked when you achieve the normal goals. Complete those, and you can unlock a different table for Free play. But that's a mammoth undertaking.

We get that this is supposed to be a player incentive, but it’s too punitive. Give us more unlockables like the mirror mode and different ball graphics – those are bonus items we don’t mind working to get. But let everyone, regardless of skill level, have the tables you’ve written on the back of the box with no strings attached. They paid for them.

Mar 24, 2008