I bought the Williams collection for Xbox about a month ago and loved it (rekindled my love affair with Taxi, and I've since bought the pin!)
In my view it's the best console based pinball game out there, better than Pinball FX2 which although also an excellent game, just doesn't nail the ball physics and hasn't got the nostalgia value of being based on real tables.
Farsight Studios, the developer of The Williams Collection, posted an interesting vid on YouTube that details how they go about putting their pinball games together. If nothing else you come away with the feeling that they're a group of pinheads that are incredibly meticulous about how they go about putting their video games together. Each digitised table has its playfield stripped down part by part for scanning before being recreated in software.
You can see the vid here:
Since The Williams Collection came out Farsight have also released Pinball Arcade for Xbox Live Arcade. The game was released with four tables (Tales of The Arabian Nights, Theatre of Magic, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and Blackhole), but what's really interesting is that the developers have apparently secured licensing to release "90% of the top 40 pinball machines of all time". This will come in the form of downloadable content.
I don't know which list they see as being the top 40, but even if it isn't the IPDB list I'm excited that they're planning to release so many tables. It's an excellent way to get a feel for a table's gameplay and I think will help people to narrow down their short lists of wanted machines. I'd never played No Good Gofers until I played it on Xbox, so playing it for real at Slam last weekend was special, and in fact I'd like to own the table now.
Virtual pinball has come of age. Now, if only they could add the option of online multiplayer games.
