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This is your captain speaking...

I was as much raised on video games as I was prayers, horror movies, and nursery rhymes. When I discovered GamePro magazine as a young lad, I soon realized the one thing I seemed to enjoy more than video games was reading about video games, even going so far as occasionally reading strategy guides for games I had never played. During the "Writer's Workshop" exercises in my second grade classroom, I found that the one thing I enjoyed more than reading about video games was writing about video games.

Ten years later, I discovered I liked computer programming more than all of those earlier things combined, thank God, but the fact remains: I still very much enjoy reading and writing about video games more than playing the games themselves, and I have no idea why. I still subscribe to Nintendo Power because it's like waking up on Christmas morning 13 times per year, but only if you count Christmas morning itself, and only if I find a subscription to Nintendo Power under the tree. Let's just write it off as one of many celebrated quirks and get on with business.

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection

I was raised by a bowling alley. It's a fact I live with every day. If Alaska were its own nation, as some Alaskans hope it will some day be, and if Alaska had a national sport, it would NOT be hockey. It would be bowling, the every man's sport, the sport that can and should be played year round through subzero temperatures, optionally in conjunction with Alaska's other would-be national sport: drinking, and with or without Alaska's would-be national anthem, "Everybody Knows" by Leonard Cohen, playing on Arctic Bowl's Internet Jukebox courtesy of Craig.

My family is a bowling one, going back at least three generations. As a small child, I was handed over to the bowling alley nursery during my parents' Sunday night bowling league, where frosted animal crackers and occasional interjections of Dr. Seuss, a doctor with the most dubious of credentials, averted my attention from the tobacco hotbox across the way. Once I was able to fend for myself, I graduated from the bowling alley nursery to the bowling alley arcade. This arcade was in a perpetual state of flux, with classics such as Super Off Road, Sunset Riders, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, NARC, Tetris, Samurai Shodown, U.N. Squadron, and Raiden materializing and then vanishing years later. My babysitter each Sunday night was $3 worth of quarters. How does one make $3 last three hours? I'm not sure, but on a good day, pinball might get you halfway there.

The Terminator 2 pinball machine once made a brief, wondrous appearance. If you were to visit the arcade now, you'd find an oft-broken WWF Royal Rumble pinball machine in its place. But the machine that had real staying power, or maybe nostalgia is just warping my sense of time again, was Pin*Bot. I used to watch a woman much taller than myself (at the time) show her mastery over Pin*Bot. Until I saw her, I thought it was merely a game of keeping the ball afloat for extended lengths of time. When she played, she played with purpose, holding the ball on the flippers, aiming for things in a strict order, nudging the machine once in a while, and keeping a watchful eye on her score. I spoke with her exactly once, when I dropped a quarter into the Pin*Bot machine during her ten-second "Continue?" countdown and somehow wiped out her high score because of it. A few intense moments of being on the receiving end of some very harsh words taught me that making it onto the Pin*Bot high score list was the be-all and end-all of existence.

Now, I can re-live those painful memories in my own living room with Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection! During the summer, I can re-live them twice as hard by playing a virtual likeness of Pin*Bot in a living-room-sized haze of forest fire smoke, sans the addictive qualities of Marlboros that haunted the bowling alley in the early '90s. It's all bad when trees burn. Believe the hype, Pinball Hall of Fame is the best pinball simulation to date. It hosts virtual replicas of ten pinball machines spanning several decades, up to and including the semi-modern FunHouse and Whirlwind machines. And Pin*Bot, of course.

Other reviewers will rave about the game's realistic ball physics. I ask, would you recognize good ball physics if you saw them? Yes. In most (all?) other pinball games before this, the ball always felt floaty, like it was in slow motion. In yet other games, like Sonic Spinball, the ball felt like a hedgehog. The pinball of past games always seemed a little too pure, as if the ball always knew better than to do the crazy tomfoolery that real pinballs always do, like flying up and hitting the glass, jumping over obstacles, getting flat-out stuck. These things actually happen in Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. The ball will sometimes pick up insane speed from the spinners on the Whirlwind table, which wobble around like they don't have a very good fit in their sockets, just like the real table over at Kaleidoscope Billiards. Balls can even "fall off the table." What?

Better yet, each of the tables comes with a tutorial of its objectives and scoring mechanisms. For once in your life, this game might actually teach you how to play pinball properly for massive scores. After mastering the ten tables in this game, head on over to the pinball guides at GameFAQs to study the 26 tables over at Ground Kontrol, and you'll have an ace in the hole come the Second Annual Pinbrawl Pinball Tournament. Just a little direction will go a long way, here, as my Whirlwind scores quickly ballooned up by a factor of eight after watching the game's 47-slide Whirlwind tutorial.

They may sound gimmicky at first, but the Wii controls are fantastic. One holds the Wii Remote and the Nunchuck in either hand. The Z button of the nunchuck controls the left flipper; the B button of the Wii Remote controls the right flipper. If you dare to nudge the table, just shake the controllers. This is not waggle, it's science! Thrust the controllers backward to send the ball forward. Quickly move the controllers to the right to send the ball to the left. It's the real deal, if only a pinball machine weighed no more than the combined weight of a Wii Remote and Nunchuck. (In reality, if pinball machines weighed only one pound, I wouldn't have contented myself with mere nudging; I would have stolen Pin*Bot from Arctic Bowl years ago.) Pinball video games have had the nudge feature for a long time, but it never felt as effortless, or reflexive, as it does here. You will end up using this feature whether you intend to or not. The game even lets you beat the shit out of a pinball machine long after you've registered a tilt, sending the now-defunct ball all over the place pointlessly and furiously. It's the little things, you know?

Excite Truck

If I recall correctly, the reason Excitebike for the NES became such a hit was due, in no small part, to its level editor. For many, it was our first chance to discover why level design was best left to the professionals. This lesson was further cemented by my experiences dabbling in Doom II level editors years later. A gymnasium full of six hundred Arch-Viles is not only unreasonable, it is approximately five hundred Arch-Viles in excess of what it requires to lock up a 486DX4 with 16 MB of RAM. Excite Truck, the "spiritual successor" of Excitebike, does not have anything remotely resembling a level editor. While it is generally regarded as a good game, and one of the best launch games for the Wii, I don't hear about it much. Why? Because it doesn't have a level editor, of course!

What it does have is a very strange control scheme built on top of gameplay that is also a bit strange, if not equally so. Vehicles are controlled by tilting the controller from side to side, but not like a steering wheel a la Mario Kart Wii. Holding the Wii Remote by each side, the airtime of a vehicle can be controlled by tilting the Remote forward or backward. After acclimating yourself to many shoddy Wii games with unresponsive controls, you could easily dismiss Excite Truck's controls as overly loose. My first experiences with the game had my truck routinely making 180 turns in midair before landing in vast expanses of trees over and over again. You should definitely take the time to play through the tutorials on this one. The controls are excellent. It's just takes two or three hours of play to realize it. Unfortunately, this means you will rarely find a person willing to invest the time needed for a competitive multiplayer experience, which is capped at two people and stripped of CPU opponents.

New vehicles are unlocked as progress is made playing across many of the same environments repeatedly on varying difficulties. Scores are based on stars, which are earned by winning races, smashing into opponents, driving safely through forests, doing 360s in midair, flying through rings, and drifting. There are lots of vehicles here, none of which are based on anything real, but most certainly have different strengths and weaknesses. Picking which vehicle to bring to a particular track is strategic, demanding plenty of rewarding experimentation in the later levels. If high scores are what you crave, there are many opportunities to prove your hours of dedication here, be it through how many stars you are able to obtain in a particular track, or the universal "most airtime," "longest tree run," "longest drift," etc. statistics. No online leaderboards, for shame.

The game feels deceptively simple, but there is a ridiculous amount of room to squeeze more stars out of each track. This brings to mind my biggest complaint by far, which might be a bit of a spoiler at the same time. Completing all of the tracks unlocks the Monster Truck, and then later, the Crazy Monster Truck. The latter truck is the Monster Truck with a persistent "POW" power-up. Basically, it is God Mode disguised as a legitimate vehicle. After hours of pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into picking the right vehicle for each job, memorizing terrain with Dragon's Lair like precision, and lucking out once or twice, all of your previous scores and all but one of the 30+ vehicles are made moot. The Crazy Monster Truck, and the regular Monster Truck to a lesser extent, spoil whatever replay value this game might have had. Sure, nobody forces you to play with these vehicles, but how else will you compete on the honor-based high score board that is Cyberscore? How could you do this to me, Nintendo? I went back to reading books in my leisure time because of Crazy Monster Truck.