"He's dead jim." or I miss the arcades and pinball

[High Lord Tolkien]

I was at Fun Spot in NH this weekend with my son.
I was in need of some pinball and he loves the old games.

It's sad to see the arcade experience fade away.
No new games.
There was one Jurassic World shooter but it was lame.

Even the pinball machines, which can't be made into a console obviously were not being played.

I did find my favorite one though so I was pretty happy.
But Rudy's eyes didn't open...

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There is an annual pinball festival in Grapevine every year. Lots of enthusiasts and collectors bring out their machines from decades past for people to see and often play. I'll have to look it up to see when it is--we have may missed it this year.

On a tangentially-related topic, there is a bar in Ft. Worth called Barcadia which has a collection of old video games. Ms. Lebwohl and I keep saying we need to go so the next time we have an opportunity for the kids to be gone and/or have someone watch them we will go out for a drink there with a pocket full of quarters.

[sgt.null]

HLT - Julie and I miss Funspot. she was champion at Skeet Ball.

>sigh<

[High Lord Tolkien]

There is an annual pinball festival in Grapevine every year. Lots of enthusiasts and collectors bring out their machines from decades past for people to see and often play. I'll have to look it up to see when it is--we have may missed it this year.

On a tangentially-related topic, there is a bar in Ft. Worth called Barcadia which has a collection of old video games. Ms. Lebwohl and I keep saying we need to go so the next time we have an opportunity for the kids to be gone and/or have someone watch them we will go out for a drink there with a pocket full of quarters.

Yeah, I'm on a Facebook pinball group of collectors. It's interesting. Lots of get togethers, sales and helping each other finding repair parts. It's like a lot art. Williams is the best imo but it's gone.
There is one last company making machines but the ones I've played kinda suck.


Sorry Sarge.

[Avatar]

I've never been into pinball. I used to work for an arcade game company in London, and when you have to disassemble, clean, move and reassemble pin tables (as we called them), their charm fades quickly.

We used to live above the office in an apartment owned by the company, so the whole place was full of pin tables and arcade games, even those old flat-top ones you had sit at and look down at the monitor. (We used them as coffee tables that you could play.)

Or we used to get high (by which I mean coked up in those days) and go down to the office at 3am and play the stand-up arcades until dawn.

--A

[Cheval]

I loved going in arcades to play pinball.
Thought it was better than video games becase the action was always different.
No patterns to beat the game and had the excitement of winning free games instead of "extra lives".
Usually had 3 or 4 extra games won by the time I had to leave,
so I would give them up to any younger kid that would be around.
50 cents would give us an hour or two of fun.
Anybody remember when for a quarter you got 5 balls?
Then it went to 3 balls, then 50 cents for a game.
Now it's a dollar for 3 balls!
Ah... the old days!

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

I bet a nostalgia arcade would do OK in a lot of areas. I'd go every now and then. Kind of like a Dave and Buster's that didn't suck, combined with a playable museum.

[[Syl]]

I think the industry did it to itself. It used to be that you'd go to an arcade to play games that were better than what you had at home. You just can't do that anymore. With the increasing power and ubiquity of systems and decreasing cost, all you can do is bigger and louder. That only appeals to a small subset of people willing to shell out the arm and a leg games cost today.

Plus, it seems to me that they know that. They design games like quarter (dollar) mills. It used to be that after a short learning curve, you could go through a 45-minute game on only a few credits. If it's not 1 on 1, every game seems to have a running clock or guaranteed health/life attrition. Gone are the days of beating Double Dragon on one quarter or Area 51 on two (my all time streak was 967, btw).

I've always liked pinball, but it was mostly as a break from playing other games. And speaking of breaks, these days you're lucky if you can find a pinball game that has all the parts working. And when you do, there's like 4 side-outs, no kickback, and way too many hits designed to go right down the increasingly-large area between the flippers. Extra game? Forget about it. I've hit multiple jackpots without even hitting the halfway mark. Although why that extra game sound always had to be so god-awful I'll never know.

[Avatar]

Area 51

The heaviest, most awkward stand-up ever to move. I lost all the skin on my forearms once when my "assistant" dropped the trolley out from under one and it fell on me.

--A