Theatre of Magic is one of the highest-scoring tables ever — you can crack a billion points!FarSight Studios brought Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection to Xbox 360 three years ago; in the interim, Zen Studios’ Pinball FX 2 has helped redefine the pinball genre on Live Arcade. Now FarSight returns with The Pinball Arcade, its own XBLA collection featuring licensed re-creations of four real-world tables from four different manufacturers. Silverball showdown!
One of the Williams Collection tables — Tales of the Arabian Nights — appears here as well, looking much better and playing dramatically faster. (Maybe too fast — all the Arcade tables here feature very slippery physics.) FarSight resurrected some of the most popular but complicated tables, filled with spiraling ramps, hidden magnets, reversed sub-playfields, and LED mini-games. Thankfully, each table comes with detailed on-screen instructions. Gottlieb’s Black Hole feels dated and easy; Arabian Nights and Bally’s Theatre of Magic prove repeatedly thrilling and challenging; but Stern’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is too noisy and complicated for its own good.
Black Hole's hidden reverse playfield was revolutionary in 1981.If you’ve been getting your fix from Pinball FX 2, you’ll miss its wealth of camera angles and animated characters, as well as the helpful ghost trail that highlights the ball in play. FX 2 tables are “post-pinball” pinball games, while Pinball Arcade’s tables are deadly accurate re-creations of the original mechanical objects. That doesn’t make Pinball Arcade bad, just traditional and unenhanced. (It doesn’t have online multiplayer, either.) What The Pinball Arcade set out to do — lovingly and accurately re-create true genre classics — it does very well, and pinball purists won’t be disappointed.
Ripley's Believe It or Not! offers two-ball multiball.PUBLISHER: Crave • DEVELOPER: FarSight Studios • ESRB: Everyone 10+ • MULTIPLAYER: 2–4 local only (hotseat play) • ACHIEVEMENTS: Standard • COST: 800 Microsoft Points ($10)
+ Great pinball, lovingly re-created.
– Few camera angles, no online multiplayer.
– We miss the console creature comforts that Pinball FX 2 offers.
? Has most of the current generation of gamers even played a real pinball machine?
