Pinball Hall of Fame - The Williams Collection brings the retro-gameplay of specific pinball machines onto your Wii system in a very realistic feeling and enjoyable manner.

Visually, Pinball Hall of Fame duplicates the look of the ten machines portrayed in it. Everything from the clean looking Jive Time to the extremely crowded and packed Funhouse machine seems to have been realistically duplicated in this game. While graphics aren't the system's biggest draw, they definitely seem to get the job done with The Williams Collection.

Sound isn't left wanting either. All of the bumps, bings and buzzers come through loud and clear, not to mention the machines' own personal sound effects like Pinbot's robotic voice or Space Shuttle's launch command. While in the hub area (an arcade of course), the various boops and beeps coming from all around you really bring home the overall effect.

Pinball Hall of Fame - The Williams Collection features machines from as far back as 1970 all the way to 1990. You will get to relive the experiences of Gorgar, Firepower, Black Knight, Sorcerer (one that caused me many headaches), Taxi and Whirlwind (plus the machines mentioned in the previous section).

As far as I know, there have only been a couple of Pinball Hall of Fame games, the last one that I am aware of being The Gottlieb Collection, which, if memory serves, Psibabe didn't find all too enjoyable, or at least there were enough problems with the game to cringe at the thought of another one. Thankfully, it seems like most of the issues have been worked out for The Williams Collection because I never felt cheated while playing the games and seemed to be satisfied with the physics of each machine.

There are a few gameplay modes here. The most straightforward is Practice Mode, where you take your credits around the arcade and play the various machines. You earn Credits by playing in the other modes, but there are also a few ways to unlock a table's Free Play Mode. The main way to achieve this in Practice Mode is to play a table so well that you achieve all of the goals the game has set aside for it, or you can just save up enough credits to buy the table outright.

The Williams Challenge Mode takes you through a set series of tables allowing you to advance to the next one only when you have surpassed a goal amount. Once you have beaten a table, it becomes available to you for free in Practice Mode. The odd thing about this mode, which makes sense from a replay perspective, is that you can't just leave the challenge and go back to it where you left off. Just because you beat the Black Knight challenge, doesn't mean you can skip the entire table before it in order to advance.

The last mode is Tournament. Here, up to four players can complete (even on tables that didn't originally support multiplayer) and standard Pinball Tournament rules apply as far as point tallying and winner determination.

Pinball Hall of Fame - The Williams Collection has some tough tables in its ranks, and the Williams Challenge mode definitely seems to lay them out in just the right order. Also, this mode seems to have found just the right numbers to set the goal for each table. Since there are inherent differences in the possible scores of each table (some tables are simply easier to rack up points on), the ones with the extremely high goal score are still achievable since they are typically attached to these high-scoring machines.

That isn't to say that there weren't a few times when I got fairly frustrated at a particular table (Jive Time in particular), but it was never so bad that a few times practicing in a different mode didn't help me overcome the issues.

Pinball Hall of Fame - The Williams Collection uses both the Wii-mote and Nunchuck. Pulling back on the Wii-mote's stick pulls the plunger with a nice analog feel to let you give just the right amount of umph behind the ball, while the (Z) and (B) buttons act as the left and right flippers respectively. You can even nudge the machine left or right by shaking the controller in the appropriate hand, but, of course, if you are too aggressive, you can cause the machine to TILT. One of the nice little details was the inclusion of the flipper sounds coming from the Wii-mote's speaker. The solid clunk sound in your hands really helps to sell the overall feel of the game.

As far as replayability is concerned, I found that I was able to unlock tables at a pretty good clip, so I was worried about this game's ability to draw the player in once Free Play Mode was available for every table. But considering the target audience would be people who love these games and would love to have actual versions of them in home to be played whenever they want, I found this worry to be unfounded. If you are a pinball fan and loved playing the physical versions of any of the tables featured in this game, then The Williams Collection is probably worth the money, but if you aren't a fan of this style of gameplay, then the game simply wasn't designed for you.