You can tell right off that Zen Pinball is serious pinball. Just press the shoulder buttons for the flippers. It feels like there's some intermediary step between pressing the button and the flippers popping up. As if you weren't actually flipping the flippers so much as telling some other mechanism to flip the flippers. It's not easy to explain, but it's there. And some would call it lag.

Do not trust such people. They are not pinball aficionados. They are poseurs. They should stick to stuff like Metroid Pinball on the Nintendo DS or those early Sierra collections where ghosts flew around and grabbed your balls. Because what developer Zen Studios is doing in this superb collection of four pinball tables for the Playstation 3 is modeling the inner workings of a pinball machine between the flipper button being pressed and the actual, I dunno, servos or circuits or electroids or flipper faeries or whatever sparking into motion the electronic goodness inside every realworld pinball machine. It's not lag. It's physics. And if you grew up with pinball machines, you will experience this as a pleasant and familiar sensation, not unlike the smell of redwood bark on the playground where you were in fourth grade or the melody of some song you once heard or remembering the name of someone you forgot a long time ago. It is slight, powerful, and true. Lag! Pshaw. It is part of the essence of pinball.

Read the review of Zen Pinball after the jump. Even if you're not into videogame pinball.

Zen Pinball isn't just named after your state of mind when you're playing pinball. It's named after Zen Studios, a bunch of folks in Hungary who cut their teeth making Pinball FX, a more generic videogamey set of pinball tables for Xbox Live. This is nothing like those. Zen Pinball is far better. In fact, I dare say it's consummate.

For starters, the graphics are markedly improved since Pinball FX (disclaimer: I've only seen the trail version, so I'm making assumptions about the later add-on tables released on Xbox Live Marketplace). Zen Pinball isn't as high-rez as the PS3 supports, but these tables look sharp and they're free of performance problems. Nothing kills a good pinball videogame like framerate hiccups when you've get a wild multiball session going. There are six different table views available, with a remarkable freelook option as well. Hold down the square button to pause the game, then tilt the controller to move the view around. It's not going to be terribly useful when you're actually playing, but it's a wonderful feature for getting to know the tables, and ever more wonderful for letting you admire the artwork.

The artwork is worth admiring. At first blush, all the tables but V12 -- a clean car-themed table -- might look cluttered. But it's part of the learning curve to see through the clutter and pick out the features. The Tesla table will look like a brown tangle when you first play it. But given a little time, you'll find a gorgeous piece of work with a rich retro 19th Century look, adorned with copper coils and a stately steam cannon looming to the side. Shaman, on the other hand, still looks to me like a godawfully gaudy stew of primary colors, but it's my least played table at this point. El Dorado isn't to be confused with the original table of that name by Gottlieb - sorry, I'm probably being too much of a pinball wonk - and it's got an announcer who I really want to punch in the face. But the treasure hunter theme is nearly as well done as the inventor theme for Tesla. The sound in V12 is tremendous. All of these tables have personality, style, and lots of features to explore, including some really nifty gimmicks like the magnetic tray in Tesla or the cylinder chamber in V12.

And all of the tables are extremely realistic. Ghosts will not grab your balls. Zombies will not walk around the table (ah, the indulgences of House of the Dead in so many different genres!). You do not jump to another screen or change levels or play Samus shooting aliens. Not that Zen Studios plays it 100% straight. There are videogame effects, such as scores floating up when you hit a target, steam blowing from the valves on Tesla, and bubbling cauldrons on El Dorado. But Zen Studios - bless their pinball wonk hearts - lets you switch this stuff off if you're an old pinball fuddy-duddy like me. Well, I thought I was an old pinball fuddy-duddy, but I ended up turning the frippery back on and leaving it on. You've warmed the cold steel ball of my pinball-loving heart, Zen Studios. However, if I want to get all authentic, I need look no farther than the operator's menu for each table. Ahh, those were the days, paging through the menus on a dot matrix display to give myself extra balls. Sorry, there's that pinball wonk talk again.

Okay, here's something you could never do with realworld pinball that's an integral part of Zen Pinball: the multiplayer games, carried over from Pinball FX, are a delight. I don't mean the hotseat, where you take turns passing the controller around and each of you playing a ball at a time. I'm talking about the online multiplayer. Zen Studios has an ingenious simultaneous multiplayer mode where you race to accumulate a certain score. You have unlimited balls, but every time you lose a ball, you lose a percentage of your score. A meter marks each player's progress with a colored caret, easy to read at a glance. No lag, no waiting, no running out of balls, but plenty of head-to-head competition as the score meters rise.

Sony's PSP was the platform of choice for pinball games, because of the excellent Gottlieb and Williams Pinball Hall of Fame collections. But here comes the first and only pinball game for the Playstation 3, lacking only the nostalgia value of those excellent PSP collections. If you're not looking for something outrageous and over-the-top, there's currently no better way to play videogame pinball that Zen Pinball. And although it helps if you're an old-school pinball wonk, it's by no means necessarily. There's enough style here to more than make up for the fact that you don't have zombies wandering around on the tables.