The Pinball Arcade (PlayStation 3)

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Description

Pinball Arcade is based on the Pinball Hall of Fame series and includes accurate simulations of pinball tables from Gottlieb, Williams, Stern Pinball (which also includes its previous incarnations: Stern Electronics, Data East Pinball, and Sega Pinball) and Bally. The latter two companies were not previously featured. It includes four tables, one from each company, with support for additional tables through commercial downloadable content. The included tables are, in the order they appear on the game:

• Tales of the Arabian Nights (Williams, 1996) (previously included in Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection)
• Ripley's Believe it or Not! (Stern Pinball, 2004)
• Black Hole (Gottlieb, 1981) (previously included in Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection)
• Theatre of Magic (Bally, 1995)

The iOS/Android/OUYA/Windows versions come with Tales of the Arabian Nights for free, with the Windows version including the Pro upgrade for free, while the PS3/Vita/360 versions come with the aforementioned four tables.

The game also features a large amount of additional tables available for download, including tables that were already on previous Pinball Hall of Fame titles (such as Black Knight, Medieval Madness, Big Shot and Central Park) and other tables never seen on other games (such as Attack from Mars, Cirqus Voltaire and Bride of Pin-Bot), alongside some based on licensed properties (from tables like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Elvira and the Party Monsters to ones like Twilight Zone and Star Trek: The Next Generation), although they're not all available on every platform yet. There is support for achievements/trophies (Xbox 360/PS3/Vita versions) and online leaderboards, and the game includes a few extras, such as a little history on the games and the original sales flyers, plus in-depth instructions on every element of each table. It also has support for online play in the form of various online tournaments held by FarSight.

Screenshots

There are no PlayStation 3 screenshots for this game.

There are 5 other screenshots on file for other versions of this game.

Part of the Following Group

• Pinball Arcade series

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Forums

Topic	# Posts	Last Post
Table Packs	12	M4R14N0 (1284) Sep 10, 2013
TPA's Kickstarter: The Twilight Zone	1	M4R14N0 (1284) Jun 05, 2012

Trivia

Previously included tables

While most of the tables have had their first adaptation on Pinball Arcade others were previously adapted on different games. Besides those included on the Pinball Hall of Fame collections, there's these ones:

• Bally's Elvira and the Party Monsters was previously adapted for the 1992 Atari Lynx game Pinball Jam, alongside the Williams table Police Force
• Both Bally's Creature from the Black Lagoon and Williams' Tales of the Arabian Nights had versions on the 2001 PC game Williams Pinball Classics (not to be confused with the European name for the PHOF Williams collection, but coincidentally enough TotAN was included on the PS3/360 version of said game) alongside Bally's tables Black Rose and Lost World. This strangely enough makes TotAN the only Williams table on that collection.
• Before being included on this and PHOF Williams, Pin*Bot was adapted into an NES game by Rare in the late eighties, which took some liberties by adding hazards not present on the original table as that would've been impossible in real life. Rare later took the same formula with their NES adaptation of the Williams table High Speed, which also added a few mini-game tables alongside the hazards.
• Haunted House was most famously included in 1998's similarly titled Microsoft Pinball Arcade, and it was also the sole table on that game's demo version.

Pro Mode

Starting with the seventh table pack on iOS and Android, FarSight has added a Pro Mode upgrade for select tables, starting with Scared Stiff, although this was also added to the earlier Tales of the Arabian Nights and Medieval Madness tables. This allows you to enter in the Operator's Menu for the respective table, letting you change the settings (which disables leaderboard posting and table goals until it's reset to the default settings). Pro Mode also has a Table View mode, letting you view around the table; an option to "control" the ball, and tips from professional pinball players. The PlayStation Network versions didn't get it until early February 2013, with the release of both Table Pack 7 and the Twilight Zone table.

Xbox 360 version

The Xbox 360 version hasn't been updated since late August 2012 due to publisher issues: that version's publisher, Crave Entertainment, alongside parent company Fillpoint, had gone into bankruptcy sometime later that year. Microsoft policies for Xbox LIVE Arcade releases do not allow developers to self-publish unless they're a company that does retail releases for the system, which is why FarSight couldn't do anything, and they have been trying nearly a year to gain back the contract they had with Crave so that it could be transferred to another publisher. However, on June 27th, all of the DLC available for that version had been delisted from the Xbox Marketplace, with the core game itself getting deleted on July 18th. It was later mentioned by a FarSight rep that this was due to Crave getting their publishing contract for Xbox 360 revoked by Microsoft, which means they won't be able to publish anything else. It is not known what will happen with this version.