Although the golden age of the arcade is long gone, if there is one in your area then there is a good chance it has a Pinball machine in it. These simple yet highly addictive games have wowed gamers from around the world, and they have been going strong now for over 100 years. The problem is that Pinball is not in high demand like it once was, and this game is a hard sell, especially on a next generation console like the Xbox. Fortunately, XS Games believes that these types of games still have a place, and that means that Pinball is finally coming to the Xbox. In Pure Pinball you can see if 4 tables, Xbox Live support, and low price are going to be enough make you want to play a Pinball video game.

For some of you younger gamers that never even played a pinball game before (I’m always surprised how many haven’t), the basic idea of these games is to keep a steel ball from falling down to the bottom of the table. You try to score points and stay alive by using your flippers in order to knock the ball away, but the beauty of a good Pinball game is that the games were designed to be difficult. Special bonus features like Multipliers (multiply the points per hits) and Kickbacks (extra protection) have to be earned first, and losing a ball just takes a few seconds. The thing that makes these games so addictive and so worthwhile is hitting that secret target will give you that big payday, and most importantly -- getting that high score.

You don’t have to play on just one table either. Pure Pinball has 4 different tables to try out:

Excessive Speed - The car racing table with lots of tunnels.
World War - This war based table has plenty of targets and cool sounds.
Runaway Train - This stage is based in the Wild West and it is one of the smallest tables in the game.
HyperSpace - This is one of the craziest boards in the game.

Although having four different tables sounds great, other then the themes and the placement of the higher level flippers, the games don’t really differ too much from one another. All these games play like traditional Pinball too, so there are no fancy bonus screens like the ones found in other Pinball based video games such as Pinball of the Dead (Gameboy Advance) and Devil’s Crush (Turbografx-16). It is also kind of annoying that there is this big scoreboard (a.k.a. Dot Matrix Display) blocking, but at least you can freely edit your view or the placement of the scoreboard anytime during the game play by using the extra buttons on the controller.

If there is one benefit to having a Pinball game on the Xbox, then it has to be that each table looks photo realistic. Some the targets can be hard to make out at times but once you learn the table well enough it really isn’t so bad. If it wasn’t for my TV, I would swear these tables look like the real thing! As for sounds, each stage has its own theme music and unique sound effects to do the job. The game even has a bit of crowd noise so it sounds like there are others watching you play.