Pinball Hall of Fame Review

Our friends at Success HK have posted a review of the PSP game Pinball Hall of Fame:

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<blockquote>Take a trip through pinball's memory lane in the palm of your hand with this compilation of classic Gottlieb tables for the PSP.
If you want a dose of old-school pinball, there aren't a lot of places you can go. Most of the latest pinball games are buried under a Nintendo license. But for people who like their pinball with a touch of nostalgia, there's the new PSP port of Pinball Hall of Fame, which is a collection of Gottlieb pinball tables.

Pinball actually goes back a lot longer than you may know. In the beginning, there was pinball. And it was good. But then along came video games and, well, rolling a ball around wasn't quite so exciting for a lot of folks. In Pinball Hall of Fame, you'll get to visit a time before pinball had to compete with Pac Man.

Pinball Hall of Fame is a port from other console systems, but it adds three new tables to the already impressive collection for a total of 11 tables, all markedly different from each other. The oldest table in this collection is Play-Boy from 1932. They hadn't even invented flippers yet. It was about as interactive as a slot machine. You just pull the plunger and hope the ball gets stuck in one of the holes on its way down to the drain. And you only get one ball at a time, so Play-Boy has nothing on Pachinko.

Then in the 1957 table, Aces High, you get flippers. Eventually, the tables start folding in more goals, ramps to different levels, and gimmicks like the table-within-a-table on 1981's Black Hole. There's an inset area under glass beneath the main table, but it's tilted in the opposite direction so that the flippers are on top and the ball seems to roll backwards. Very freaky.

As the tables progress, you can see Gottlieb struggling for new ways to make pinball different. In 1983's Goin' Nuts, you use multiple balls at once to build up a timer, which starts ticking down once you've only got a single ball left. The table never actually entered production and there are only ten test models, virtually recreated here for your edification.

This isn't just a bunch of tables crammed onto a UMD. There's a lot of history in Pinball Hall of Fame, which gives it all a touch of class. It has the reverence of a museum, complete with old pictures of the pinball machine factory and scanned promotional materials for each table. The developers at Farsight Studios have created a sort of virtual arcade where you earn credits to play tables until you've unlocked them by beating goals on other tables. You can even spend the credits on arcade gimmicks like a Love Meter and a fortune teller, both of which might earn you additional credits. You can play a tournament mode that tracks your performance on each of the tables for a total score.
The tables look great, lovingly rendered in full 3D with your choice of camera angles. You can play holding your PSP sideways, which isn't nearly as cool as it sounds. For some reason, it's oriented with the analog nub at the top. But you need to use the analog nub to nudge the table, which involves taking your hand off a flipper button and reaching across the screen. Why didn't they just flip it over and use the right and left direction button for the flippers?

Fortunately, with so many options for camera view, the game displays just fine from the default horizontal view. The graphics are lovely and smooth, with the exception of some slowdown in multiball mode on some of the busier tables like Victory and Tee'd Off. The sound is affectionately captured, from the hearty clunk of a free game to the tinny digitized voices.

All told, this is a great package for the PSP that offers discrete slices of fun with every game. It's perfectly suited for five-minute playing sessions whether you're into old-school pinball or not. And it'll let you save your quarters for more important things like laundry and parking meters. </blockquote>