mrshl | blog

Playing Pinball on the Wii

Holy crap. Jordan and I spent much of last night playing Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. We picked up the Wii game for 19.99 at Target, and couldn’t pass it up since we had played the earlier Gottlieb Collection on Nintendo GameCube and loved it. The moment we put it in, Jordan freaked out because the first table you see is Taxi, which her mom and dad actually owned until recently. Jordan knows that table incredibly well from playing it thousands of times as a kid.

The game looked just the real thing, but as we played, she was more impressed that the physics had been carefully preserved. For example, She knew I was toast before I did when the ball went dead after hitting a certain spot and fell right between the flippers. She said it did the exact same thing on her old table. The Wii controls are perfect, too. The flippers are the triggers on the Nunchuck and Wiimote. The analog stick on the Nunchuck is a great substitute for the plunger, and you can nudge (or TILT) the machine if you shake the Nunchuck or Wiimote.

Here’s a video of the table in action.

There are nine other tables included in the Williams Collection, but we mostly played Taxi until I managed to get the high score and complete all the "Wizard goals." I got nearly 7 million. Jordan says her high score is 10 million, but I’ve got no way to verify that, do I? Anyway, for only 20 bucks, I recommend the hell out of this game. It’s received very favorable reviews on Metacritic, and the faux-Satriani soundtrack is so, so good.

Get it.