One of my favorites as far as merging of the form and the story is Black Knight (and Black Knight 2000). The machine itself is framed as your knightly opponent in this apparent duel (it even taunts you, LOL), and the table layout is such that you can be on offense—ball in the physically-elevated high part of the field, with scoring and mode-progress opportunities and basically no risk of losing the ball as long as you keep it up there—or defense, in the lower part of the field, where it's quite easy to lose a ball, and play's alarmingly fast & reactive, but there are also some good bonus chances or ways to set up your next play in the top field.
And that theme song on Black Knight 2000. Oh man. So good.
[EDIT] Oh and I forgot that the "knight" taunts you during that awesome song with "give me your money!" (among other taunts), which is another machine -> character connection. You are dueling the machine. It's basically a perfect fusion of story/motif and the form of the game.
One of my favorites as far as merging of the form and the story is Black Knight (and Black Knight 2000). The machine itself is framed as your knightly opponent in this apparent duel (it even taunts you, LOL), and the table layout is such that you can be on offense—ball in the physically-elevated high part of the field, with scoring and mode-progress opportunities and basically no risk of losing the ball as long as you keep it up there—or defense, in the lower part of the field, where it's quite easy to lose a ball, and play's alarmingly fast & reactive, but there are also some good bonus chances or ways to set up your next play in the top field.
And that theme song on Black Knight 2000. Oh man. So good.
[EDIT] Oh and I forgot that the "knight" taunts you during that awesome song with "give me your money!" (among other taunts), which is another machine -> character connection. You are dueling the machine. It's basically a perfect fusion of story/motif and the form of the game.