Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection

Play the 8 greatest Gottlieb pinball tables of all time.

NA release: 20th March 2005
JP release: N/A
EU release: N/A
Developer: FarSight Studios
Publisher: Crave Entertainment
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Pinball… something I never really enjoyed in real life. While I can get a bit of enjoyment out of some video game versions of pinball, they tend to be wild tables that would be impossible to do in a physical pinball table. So this collection being based on real pinball tables doesn’t fill me with excitement.

The game contains seven Gottlieb pinball machines from 1957 to 1993: Ace High, Big Shot, Central Park, Genie, Black Hole, Victory, Tee’d Off. The physics seem a bit off for me, with the ball dropping straight down at odd times, but I’m not super familiar with pinball tables, so they may just be me. A few tables, like Tee’d Off, felt like the ball went straight out from being launched to falling down a hole, with no chance of input.

The developers have attempted to make the tables feel “authentic”. There’s a lot of background noise of arcade machines and the like, and there’s graphical effects like glare and reflections. While this may be what some poorly cleaned pinball tables might look like, it just makes it extremely difficult to see what is going on.

There’s a few additional games. A blackjack themed gambling machine called Play-Boy, a Xolten fortune teller machine and a love tester, the last few you would just try out once. For people that are specifically fans of this small handful of tables, it’s a decent way of playing at home, it just seems like such a small amount.

Poor

The physics are fine but you’ll find that the ball behaves a bit goofier, and the table challenges are limited to one challenge, whereas Williams Collection has a whole stack of table challenges to shoot for. Even the visuals are a little rougher – it’s not a bad looking game for the most part, but the art assets for each of the machines can get a little low resolution.
Craig Harris, IGN (Wii Version)

Remake or remaster?

A modern collection for Gottlieb pinball tables would be good for fans. Visual Pinball seems to be the unofficial way to go.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to buy Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection, but you can play the tables themselves via Legends Pinball HD form AtGames, which is a physical pinball table with a digital screen.