My first stop was the village of Angoulême in the South of France, where one of the largest comics festivals in the world happens every year. On my first night in town, I asked my hosts to take me to the bar where there was a Medieval Madness last year. I was hoping to live out The Pinball Dream! They took us to Kennedy's which was an Irish pub sort of a place.
Sadly, the Medieval Madness had been swapped out for a Striker Xtreme. It was in the back room, in a corner, turned off. I was pretty bummed out, because usually when you spot a machine that's off, it means it's out of commission.
Max went to go talk to the barkeep to see what the deal was, while I checked out the machine. It looked to be in pretty good shape. It was kind of surreal to see the rule sheet entirely in French (which I do not read). You can click on this photo to make it bigger:
It turned out that the machine was off, but only because the town gets so crowded for the festival that there will be too many people in the bar and not enough room for people to play pool and pinball. We turned it on and plugged in some Euros (1 Euro = 1 credit / 2 Euros = 3 credits) and started to play!
The machine worked just fine and was actually pretty fun. We all played for a while and then suddenly I had an amazing ball that lasted forever (multiple multiballs, extra balls, replay, etc.) I feel like I had been talking up my skills, so I'm glad I was able to back up all my talk with some action! Sadly, my game was not good enough to make the high score board. Oh well, next time!
NEXT UP: Pinball TRAINing!
Was NES the grand champ? :)
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have been surprised! No, sadly, all the high scores were "robot" defaults (DAN 10,000,000,000). I wish I could have gotten on there - my guess is I had to stack some stuff before getting into multiball to really get up into the stratosphere. Oh well, maybe next time!
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