There was also pinball at a barcade in Area 15, the very cool building where the Meow Wolf installation is located. Kat compares playing outside of North Carolina to taking off the training weights. But making up for it was the woman who talked with us a lot and showed me a photo of her cosplaying the girl from Total Nuclear Annihilation, which was amazing. Which is understandable if it's just me, I'm hard to talk to, but it takes serious effort to not talk to Kat. We generally met friendly people there who were excited to see new faces in their tournament, except the reigning champion did not say a single word to us the entire time. We played in a women's tournament at Good Timez Billiards, a venue that was at least trying hard, though they were down to 4 working machines by the end. We did end up at two other pinball venues in Las Vegas. The left photo shows my high score on Big Hit, which happens to be a transposition of the meme number. It's a baseball-themed game from the end of the EM era that's got everything you'd want from that era: a bunch of drop targets, rollovers, and vari-targets. And maybe the big hit for me, the game I played many times for a quarter each, was Big Hit (Gottlieb, 1977). I played Genie (Gottlieb, 1980) and NBA Fastbreak (Williams, 1997) several times because they were working well and they were fun. That's the right photo at the top of the post. I played a baffling flipperless game - I started my pinball series from the '30s, I get flipperless games, but the baffling part is that this one, Bally's "Fun Cruise", is somehow from 1966. I got to play Revenge from Mars (Bally, 1999) for the first time and it worked well enough: the sound was making uncomfortable glitch noises but the shots were fine. A venue of this size would need to charge an entry fee to hire enough people to make it work, but if the Pinball Hall of Fame charged an entry fee, everyone would demand a refund.Įven so: I'm excited to get to see a wide variety of pinball machines, so I searched hard for playable ones. The prices (25 cents to 75 cents per credit) are reasonable for what you get, but we already know that pinball can no longer be sustained by its coin intake alone. You'd think the newer machines would be working better, and that's how I ended up playing Elvira's House of Horrors without functioning ramp switches. Many machines had index cards on them describing when they were refurbished (usually in the '90s). I tried a lot of machines and I would describe about 6 of them as "actually working". We're told there is one person who maintains the machines - I saw him and he was hard at work - but it is absolutely not possible for one person to keep 300 or even 100 pinball machines running. The machines that are on and accepting quarters are mostly in states that a tournament would classify as "major malfunction". You will see it advertised on Pinball Map as having 300 different pinball machines (fewer than 100 of them were turned on), including the only copy of The Pinball Circus that you can play (no you can't). It's located in a big warehouse on the Las Vegas Strip that says "PINBALL" in giant letters. The Pinball Hall of Fame is a monument to disrepair and decay, to quantity over quality, except now they're failing at quantity also. And if you like obscure old pinball games, as I do, you will get to play a few of them. Spending even $20 there takes dedication beyond what I had. I'll start by saying something nice about the Pinball Hall of Fame: it is one of the cheaper places to spend time in Las Vegas.
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