Medieval Madness Sound Problems!

Last week, while playing a game of Medieval Madness, the sound suddenly shut off while gameplay continued.  Then the initial "BONG!" sound effect from when you turn on the machine went off and then the sound and music came back on VERY LOUD (the default setting of 4 or 5? I have it set to 1 since it's in my kitchen).

The loud sound continued through the rest of the ball, but after tho bonus was tallied and ball two was placed into the shooter lane, the sound reset to its normal levels (??!).  On ball two the same thing happened, only this time there was no music when it was really loud, only sound effects.

I've done a few more tests and it seems like this happens when I start a part of the game with new music (Royal Madness, Castle Multiball, etc.)  On my latest test, I pushed through to ball 3 and the whole machine reset itself (GULP!)

I opened up the backbox and checked out the A/V board (if you can't tell - I don't know anything about this stuff) nothing looked visibly burned, all the fuses were OK, the LED was blinking the way its supposed to (according to the manual) so I'm not sure what's going on.

If anyone has any suggestions on what to check or anything to try, I would greatly appreciate it, thanks!

Updated Medieval Madness Ball Trough

For my birthday, my parents bought me an upgraded Williams/Bally Ball Trough Assembly.  It was a great present, because at $125 it was hard for me to justify buying it for myself.  Thanks Mom and Dad!  Here I am holding the new trough up in front of the old one which will be replaced.

The problem with the old assembly is that the track where the balls sit develops little divots over time (like, say... 18 years!).  This has happened on mine to the point where the balls will get locked into the divots and won't slide down to be ejected up into the shooter lane.  You'll start a multiball and... no balls!  To fix this you have to uninstall the entire assembly and then take a metal file and grind down the divots.  I have had to do this twice now.  It's not the end of the world, but it's a pretty involved project.

The upgraded assembly uses removable rails as the track for the balls.  These can be unscrewed, rotated, flipped and replaced, ensuring that this part will last for the lifetime of the machine!  You can access the rails with the playfield up, so I shouldn't ever have to take this thing off the machine ever again.  It's also got a latch built into it that prevents the balls from entering the shooter lane, so that you can raise the playfield without having to run the "eject balls" test.  I was very excited about this time-saving feature!

First I took out the old assembly, which you can see here on the left, with its optical boards and solenoid still in place.  All I gotta do is transfer those components onto the "blank" new assembly.  Should be easy, right?

Click to enlarge

As it turns out, no... it's was not very easy.  The first obstacle I hit was that the mounting holes for the circuit board did not line up with the holes on the assembly.  I figured this was because this one part is supposed to work for about 20 different machines.  I moved the rubber washer and metal sleeve on the circuit board to another hole that was below the original one and that lined up better.  However, there is a little double-sided nut that moves to one of two pegs to accept the bolt from the circuit board, but because of the peg, the bolt only goes in about half way.  I dug through my toolbox for a shorter bolt with the same thread coun, but no luck.  I ended up using two nuts as giant washers to get a good grip with the original bolt.  If you look carefully below you can see it sticking up in the middle of the board:

Click to enlarge

Next I brought this assembly back over to the machine to install it, only to find that the holes in the playfield did not line up with the holes in the top of the assembly!  I could only get 4 of the 6 bolts in.  I'm sure it's still enough to keep it on there - but come on!  It was off by about 1/8" on the last two holes - not even close.  I would think this would be the first thing the designers would make sure is consistent on this redesigned part.

Next I thought I'd try out the latch function for the first time.  I slid it up and let go.  It instantly fell back down.  It is very loose (maybe because I had to torque the assembly to try and get 4 of the 6 bolts to fit in the misaligned holes?)  Anyway, this was a real disappointment.  If I keep my hand on it while the playfield is going up, eventually it crosses a point where it will stay down on the other side.  I guess I could also tape it before I flip it up?  Ugh.

I'd give this part a B-  It works fine now that it's in place (except for the latch) and I look forward to not having to uninstall it if/when the trough develops more divots (assuming those four bolts hold!) but it was disappointing that it didn't fit the machine better.  All my other experiences with redesigned parts have been much more positive - where they pop right into place.  Anyway, it's in there!  So we'll see how it performs...

Pinball in the West Wing

I mean in the show...not the actual West Wing.  If I could get confirmation that in the very deepest inner sanctum of government, there was a pinball machine, I would be ecstatic.  No, however, I am talking about the Martin Sheen classic, West Wing,  The show ran seven seasons from 1999-2007.  I'm on season 3, presently, and earlier in the season, the cast of main characters is in a bar somewhere, presumably in New Hampshire.  The camera pans across the bar and there is a man playing a pinball machine.  Or... I should say that the man appears to be playing the machine.  I've gone over this clip again and again, and I don't think he is actually playing.  Can anyone out there in internet tell me what is going on on the DMD?  Is this actual gameplay?  The game in question appears to be Junkyard.  I would not be surprised if this poor extra was just asked to pretend that he's playing pinball, but there's a part of me that also wants Aaron Sorkin to be, like, "keep playing!  I want you to be getting jackpots when the camera's on ya!"

What have I played?

As this is posting, I should be in Pittsburgh, PA for PAPA 18, and then visiting in the days following with some of my favorite people in the world (Sophie, Carl, Josh, and Joyana!!!).  I queued this up so that we can have uninterrupted service here at Drop Target HQ.  I was in the car with my girlfriend the other day when she asked me, "have you played every pinball machine?"  Of course the answer is a resounding NO, but then she asked, "how many of the, like, top 100 games have you played?"  Hmmm, a more reasonable request. 

I went onto IPDB and pulled up the list of top 300 SS machines and started from the top, checking which ones I had played, and which ones I hadn't.  Here's the machines I haven't gotten a chance to play YET!

23) 1994 The Shadow by Bally
31) 1991 The Machine: Bride of Pin-bot by Williams
37) 1995 Pinball Magic by Capcom
53) 1996 Safe Cracker by Bally
58) 1993 Last Action Hero by Data East
68) 1994 Corvette by Bally
82) 1994 WWF Royal Rumble by Data East
85) 1994 Demolition Man by Williams
88) 1990 Back to the Future by Data East
97) 1990 Dr. Dude and his Excellent Ray by Bally
99) 1997 Starship Troopers by Sega

Now, I want to STRESS that this does not mean that I am a knowledgeable expert, or even competent player at the games that are NOT on this list.  I'm still at the point in my pinball journey that I am discovering what is out there.  That being said, the past couple of times I've gone to Pinball Wizard Arcade in NH, I've spent more time on one or two machines, instead of trying out every machine separately. 

(I kept looking past #100 to see if it would be worth going on, but the list of games I had played diminished almost immediately, and we entered unfamiliar territory.  So many games to play!!)

Pinball in Montreal. Amusement 2000 Plus

My girlfriend and I recently celebrated our 2 year anniversary by spending some of her winter break in Montreal.  Because we knew that the weather was atrociously cold, we imagined that we would be spending a lot of time indoors.  Reading, going to museums, you know, vacation stuff.  Never one to step foot in a new city without doing my homework, though, I did a cursory look at what pinball might be around, and I found two machines at Amusement 2000 Plus in downtown Montreal, right on St Catherine!!  I have gone up and down that street so many times, but I could not remember AT ALL ever seeing an arcade. 

I called 2000+ and they said that they had Metallica and ACDC, both LEs.  I have not gotten a lot of play time on either machine, so I was pretty pumped.

The best part of 2000+ was how it looked!  I used to go to Aladdin's Castle when I was a kid and 2000+ reminded me SO MUCH of it!  The colors were bright, the lights were blazing, and the architecture was bonkers.

Sadly, the Metallica was out of order, so all I got was a couple of games on the ACDC.  My first game didn't go well, and I just flailed about.  The second game was amazing, and I really lit up the board, getting a replay on my first ball.  When everything was done, I had gotten around 65 million, which is maybe the highest I've ever gotten on a Stern game. 

The highlight was during a multiball where I (on purpose!!) managed to get all four balls on the right flipper.  "Tess!!!  Tess!!  Get your camera!  Get a photo of this!  I'm doing it!!"

Pinball dynamo Bowen Kerins had the high score on the machine, and it felt cool to be playing a machine that had felt his metered and masterful touch!  Overall, the ACDC was in great repair, and 2000+ was clean, maintained a moderate noise level, and was a total joy to play in.  Next time I'm in Montreal, I'll make sure to stop in again.

PAPA Visit Part 4

OMG!  I realized that I drafted this up, but then never posted it!  What a fool I am!  Well, last time I talked about games made by the Italian manufacturer Zaccaria, and how I think that they bring a certain freshness to pinball that I haven't seen in a while.  Today I want to talk about the last machine, the VERY LAST MACHINE that Josh, Joyana, and I played as we left PAPA headquarters. Sitting there, in the midst of the standup arcade cabinets by the door out was the greatest foe of all.

 VARKON
Now, let's back up for a second and take in the full majesty of what we're looking at here.  What appears to be a standup arcade cabinet is actually a pinball machine.  The field is very short (about the size of Granny and the Gators, or the Super Mario pin), and is displayed vertically.  HOWEVER, this is not actually how the playfield is oriented inside of the cabinet.

Whoa, how's this possible?  Anyone who is familiar with how Pinball 2000 works can skip this section.  Basically, the playfield in Varkon is placed in the middle of the machine at the regular 7 degree angle that pinball has traditionally been set at.  What you are looking at when you play Varkon is a 45 degree mirror looking down at the playfield.  Even though the angle seems to be so steep as to mess with the ball's physics, the ball actually moves at a regular pace.

This simple trick is my first favorite thing about Varkon, the illusion of weaker gravity.  If the art is to be believed on Varkon, the player takes the role of some sort of space explorer/warrior poised on the outside of Varkon's lair.  The game is working towards entering that cave and facing off with Varkon himself.  Since the ball seems to fall slower than the angle would allow, it really feels like the player is on another planet.

Instead of having two buttons on the side of the cabinet to control the flippers, the buttons are on the usual spot on an arcade cabinet.  This takes some getting used to.  

The game is pretty straight-forward.  There are six letters that spell out "Varkon".  Two on the upper lanes, one by the right flipper, and three standups to the left of the left flipper.  Hitting all these shots enables the player to shoot a scoop in the upper left portion of the playfield and move to the lower playfield to show off against Zarkon.

The best part of the game, no questions, hands down, is getting to the that lower playfield.  All the lights on the machine go dim and the lower playfield lights up, showing Zarkon's hideous true form!  He's just a face!  A space face!  It's bad ass!  As we were leaving PAPA, Josh and I couldn't shut up about Varkon.  

This game perfectly encapsulates what I loved about the PAPA HQ; the span of games represented there range from beloved classic to obscure experiment.  Each has something to teach about what works, what doesn't, and what's possible with pinball.  It's a shame that there's only one game built like this one.  I could see this being a really fun format to play around with.

This concludes my retrospective of my PAPA HQ trip.  Again, thanks to Elizabeth Cromwell for kindly extending her time to show me around and let me take a stab at some of the machines.  It's a trip that I won't soon forget!  Next week I want to talk about some surprising pinball reading I did yesterday!

DTZ6 Interview!!

Quick update this week!  Alec and I are starting to kick the production of DTZ6 up!  Both of us are really committed to getting this out by the end of the summer!  One of the more daunting tasks on my list of DTZ6 to-dos is the transcribing of an interview that I did at Stern HQ.  There, I got to talk to Jody Dankberg, Steve Ritchie, Mark Galvez, George Gomez, and Gary Stern.  Phew!  Not everything will make it into the issue, but I'm going to be transcribing it for posterity.

Ha ha, that's right, I'm old school!  I got this audio recorder in college, and it has served me well ever since!  If I can digress for a second, I just want to stress that this recorder is the Roles Royce of audio cassette recorders: the Sony TCM-210DV Voice Recorder!  JUST LOOK AT THIS THING!  You can change the speed that you record and play back content!  You can change the recording setting to double so that you get double the millage out of your audio cassettes!  There is a pause switch that allows you to pause either your recording or your playback.

In summary, the recorder is cool, and transcribing the interview has been a lengthy process.  The highlight was easily when I realized that the meeting between me and George Gomez was captured here ON TAPE.  NERD.  OUT.

Reading from Yesteryear

A couple weeks ago, my fellow Center for Cartoon Studies faculty member and all-around great guy Stephen Bissette handed me an article that he had cut out from Wired magazine.  It had been delicately cut out of the magazine, and all 3 pages had been placed in its own manilla envelope with "FOR JON CHAD!  ABOUT PINBALL!" scrawled across it.  He gave it to me, knowing of my love of pinball.  I just got around to reading it last week, and it was a very surreal experience.

As I opened the article to its first page, I was shocked by the headline.  As I tore into it, I realized that this was the grimmest look at pinball that I had ever encountered.  Here's some passages that really put a stake in my heart:

"Toll the bell, Pinball...is dead"
"Pinball machines were too heavy, bulky, and delicate...the arcade dinosaur had met its mammal"
"In retrospect, pinball was only a bridge between the machine age and the digital age.  Like it or not, we have reached the farther shore."

What is all this about?  I thought that we were living in an age where you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting an article from a local paper writing, "remember pinball?!" in reference to some new barcade-type outfit opening up.  This is supposed to be the fat years for pinball, right?  What's going on!?

In full disclosure, I only got one page into the article before I stopped, and it finally dawned on me, "wait, when was this written?"  I know that that must seem like the dumbest thing in the world, but I really hadn't thought of it.  So, low and behold, this was written in February 2000.  Doing some quick math, that's, like, 4 months after Williams closed the doors of their pinball division.  FOUR MONTHS!

Suddenly, the article took a new light.  It wasn't infuriating like the first page had been, where I was thinking that Wired just had their facts grievously wrong about what I saw as a thriving pinball scene.  Instead, it was sad, and frightening.  THIS was the length that people were convinced that pinball was dead.  WIRED MAGAZINE was willing to put it in print and run it.  I feel so lucky that Alec and I got into pinball when we did, but this makes me admire those who went through the pinball dark ages!  It's a testament to the strength of the community, and the enduring enthusiasm that pinball fans, operators, and designers have for the craft.

Again,  going through the early 2000's wasn't part of my pinball narrative, so reading this article and seeing the articulation of the sentiments at the time was really fascinating.  If you are interested in checking it out, I found it archived HERE.

May Pinball Recap

In May I traveled to Toronto, Ontario in Canada for the Toronto Comics Arts Festival.  I was stoked to find that Toronto came up on the Pinball Map app, but sadly, the neighborhood where the festival was taking place was pretty far from any of the machines on the map.

The only machine I saw while I was in Canada was this Buccaneer in a shop in the Kensington Market area.  Tragically, it was out of service.  I still don't think I've ever played pinball in Canada.  One of these days!!!

A few weeks later, back in the states my wife Claire and I were up in Oakland seeing a movie, so we swung by the Legionnaire Saloon to play a few games of Monster Bash.  The machine had a full-color LED dot matrix display, which I have been seeing more and more of lately.  They are super cool looking!  I kind of want to get one for my Medieval Madness machine, but they are still pretty expensive...  I know a lot of work went into graphics, hand painting every pixel, so they are worth every penny.  I guess I just gotta save up for it!

Then, at the end of the month, I was in Chicago for the CAKE festival.  After day one of the show a big posse of friends once again headed down to Headquarters Beercade for some free pinball.  Yes, I repeat, FREE PINBALL.  It was a good way to wrap up the month of May!

There's a new SW:E1 pinball machine in the Bay Area!

It used to be that the only Star Wars: Episode One pinball machine in the San Francisco Bay Area was at Playland Not-At-The-Beach.  Don't get me wrong, PNATB is great, but it's only open on the weekends, and it's a bit of a hike to get up to El Cerrito.

Back in May, my buddy Gene X Hwang sent me a tweet asking, "Guess what machine they just got at Free Gold Watch?"  Gene knows that SW:E1 is my favorite machine, and we have been trying to find some time to make it up to PNATB so that I could show him what I know about the game.  I replied, "No way!" and we set a time to meet at Free Gold Watch to play the machine... on May the 4th (be with you!)  Appropriate, right?

The SW:E1 machine was in okay condition.  The pop bumpers were blasted out (a common problem with this machine) and the center gate was having a few issues, but other than that it was working great.  Two things made this particular machine different than any other SW:E1 machine I had played thus far:  1) It had a Revenge From Mars cabinet!  Originally, the Pinball 2000 machines were going to have a generic cabinet and you would just insert whatever playfield you wanted, and then swap out the backglass.  This is still possible, though I had never seen it done, until now.  2) It had a LED screen instead of a CRT monitor.  The back was off the machine, so I was able to snap this photo of its insides:

This was cool because it made the picture much more crisp and bright, but also because it meant that the cabinet wasn't quite as heavy.  Usually it's pretty much impossible to move this machine around, but it was slightly more possible with this lighter monitor (though the tilt was so tight, we were both tilting).  If memory serves, Gene got a high score and I couldn't put a good game together.

Anyway, I'm stoked there's another SW:E1 machine in the Bay Area and I will definitely be playing this more, in my attempt to beat the machine.

PAPA Visit Part 3

Last week, I showed off some oddball points from the PAPA collection, as well as some glamour shots of the games Josh, Joyana, and I played.  This week, I want to focus on the Zaccaria games that we played.  As I said last week, I made a special effort to play a bunch of these games because I have never seen them anywhere else before, and I don't know where else I'd see them.  

Huh, you've never heard of Zaccaria?  "Maybe they were just a flash in the pan.  A company that made a machine or two, but dissolved because they couldn't compete with the Chicago-based pinball giants?"  I hear you muse.  Guess again!  Zaccaria made thirty games between 1978 and 1987.  30!  You can click on the link above and read the wikipedia article about Zaccaria, so I'll sum up and say that they're an Italian gaming company that produced some really interesting titles before closing shop in 1988.  Here we go:

<- Oh man, you guys, ROBOT.  As a quick aside, I LOVE robots.  I've been obsessed with Tokusatsu (the genre of Japanese television that encompasses Power Rangers, Ultraman, Godzilla, and the like) since forever, and robots are a big part of that genre.  The art on this game was amazing.  My photo doesn't do it justice, so PLEASE check out the IPDB link above and get a better look.  The purple/red color scheme is unexpected, but really intoxicating.  It helps with the setting of the game.  This really distinguishes itself from Terminator in that way, where I don't feel like I'm on Earth beating back robots.  I feel like I've actually transported myself to the robot homeworld, taking the fight to them!!

Theme and aesthetics aside, this was a very fun game to play.  There are some slingshots and some bumpers at the top, which make for a very lively upper playfield.  The lower playfield SEEMS to be empty, until you hit the ramp in the center.

A quick note about the ramp: when you hit it, it immediately u-turns you up and heading back towards the player.  I can't actually think of another example right now. Needless to say it feels very unique.

As the ball is heading down the ramp, five pop-up targets appear on the playfield (just like the trolls in Medieval Madness).  You then have to hit them down.  Definitely the highlight of the game.  Great lighting, great sound effects.  I didn't get too far into the rules, but I loved it.  I could have stayed here all day!  Check out a video of it in action HERE

<- Time Machine.  This was a really bonkers game.  The basics are that there are two time periods, the past and the future.  You hit targets to prep your time machine to travel in-between the two periods.  Once you get your ball in the Time Machine scoop, the playfield changes DRASTICALLY.  A good square foot raises and lowers in the center to showcase either a bank of standup targets or pop bumpers.

You know, I REFUSE to go on until you see this beauty in action.  HERE.  It's okay, I'll wait here.

...

Cool, huh!?  The concept of changing the field so drastically REALLY reinforces this idea that the player is literally traveling between different planes of existance.  It's an idea I've never seen before.

The normal beeps and boops of gameplay sound is nothing to call home about, but oh man, the SPEECH!  The game is practically narrated by a character who I assume is some sort of super time wizard.  He tells you when you are going into the past and the future, and also helps you out.  In the past, you have to hit 10 (?) standup targets in the back.  As you hit a target, the light in front of it turns off.  If you then hit a target you've hit before, the wizard gives you a tip to hitting one that's still lit.  "More to the right." "More to the left."  It's just a little programming trick, but it's very cool to hear while you're playing.  Also, everything is in English, but there are a couple of lines that didn't sound quite right?  My favorite was "You're going well."

We also played some games on Magic Castle and Fire Mountain, and we had an equally fun time on each.  This brings me to my overall observation after playing the Zacarria games.  I felt like I was experiencing something wholly new and unique, yet familiar.  There were trappings of American pinball from the late 70's, early 80's that I recognized, for sure, but each game, without fail, was bringing something new to the table.

One of the things that I worry about with pinball is that we're going to get into too much of a feedback loop.  I love that pinball, although it has roots in France, is a very American art form, but I see a little Italian publisher like Zaccaria come around and blow the lid off my expectations with every game, and I wish that there was more international pinball.  Video games have flourished in the last two decades by having companies in North America, Asia, and Europe all competing against each other.  This is obviously a larger issue, but it's something that I thought about while hitting down those five robot pop up targets.

I would love to see the Japanese gaming aesthetic back in pinball.  Data East closed up shop in 2003, and have we had a non US pinball manufacturer since them?  I honestly don't know!  Please send them my way!

I have no other way to describe my experience playing Zaccaria games than to say that it just felt FRESH.  It was undoubtedly my highlight of the trip.  Phew!  Well, I thought I was going to get through everything this week, but I have ONE MORE machine that I want to talk about.  It was the last one we played before we left, and man oh man, it was strange!  Get ready!

Quarters!

Back when I first got my Medieval Madness pinball machine, I put it in the student lounge area in the Center for Cartoon Studies Senior Studio building.  Students dumped their quarters in the machine and we split the proceeds 50/50 with CCS. Their half of the quarters took the form of the April Fog Memorial Pinball Scholarship.  But what did I do with my quarters?

Well, a lot of laundry... but that's not all!  I decided early on that it would be a lot of fun to collect all 50 of the State Quarters that the U.S. Mint has been releasing in recent years.  I sent away for a Whitman Coin Collecting Folder, figuring that I should keep them organized.

What I didn't realize was that this folder required both versions of each coin - one from the Denver mint (D) and one from the Philadelphia mint (P).  Needless to say, it was relatively easy to find (P) coins in Vermont, but a bit harder to find (D) coins that had worked their way across the country from Denver.  

I was not above filling in gaps with coins I found while traveling out West, and I would say that by the time I left Vermont in 2012 I had about 90% of this folder filled up.  Of course, the last 10% was extremely difficult to find!  Any time I ever came across any quarters I would double check them - at the arcade, in a shop, doing laundry - anywhere.  

I made a Google Doc spreadsheet listing the remaining quarters I needed, and I set up "coin agents" around the country to help me find the missing coins.  The last one I needed was an elusive 2009 (D) Guam quarter.  I finally found it this April in Greg Means's coin jar in his apartment, in Portland Oregon.  My collection is now complete! 

Ain't that beautiful???  Here are some close-ups of the individual pages (click to enlarge):

My wife Claire and I filled in the empty slots at end with bicentennial "drummer boy" quarters and one quarter each from our birth years.  Ironically, my pinball machine no longer accepts quarters, because it's set to Free Play (it's in our living room).  But now my wife and I have coin collecting fever!  We bought a National Park coin folder, and are dutifully filling it up by obsessively checking every quarter that crosses our path.  This one goes all the way through 2021, so I guess we'll be at it for a while!

PAPA Visit Part 2

When I left off last week, Elizabeth had taken me around the facility, and showed off the layout, the competition banks, and some of the equipment that the PAPA wizards use to arrange the machines in around.  After our initial lap, we went back to the front desk and Elizabeth gave us a cup of tokens to play games with at our own leisure.  It was an amazing opportunity.  Much to my pleasure, and surprise, I found that the cups were FILLED with tokens that I had designed!?!  

They were already set up for Pinburgh the next weekend.  This was a very surreal moment for me.  I was with Josh and Joyana at PAPA HQ, and we decided that the best thing to do was to go around and play 3-player games on each machine that struck our fancy, rotating who gets to decide which machine we try.  Here are some of the gems we found while circulating around.

 

 The art on these machines was really inspiring.  Even though the art on a playfield is still screen-printed today, you can really see that on these older machines.  I can see some of the color combinations and tricks that we use on paper printing.  These machines have bolder areas of color with broad areas of overlap.  It's smart printing with great impact.  It reminds me of the feelings that I had when Alec and I were first getting into pinball.  The art on the pinball playfield and cabinet was a big deal to me.

 <- Heh heh, what??  This goblin is the creepiest thing that I've ever seen!!!

 <- Tattoo Assassins is a Data East game that PAPA high wizard Kevin Martin worked on as an Engineer.  This game is a fighting game in the tradition of Street Fighter, or more appropriately, Mortal Combat, complete with 2,196 finishing moves.  The game was never released, and two of the five cabinets produced have a home at PAPA.

As an interesting aside, Bob Gale, the co-writer of Back to the Future, was the director of Tattoo Assassins (!?!!?)

 <- Motor Show, made by Mr. Game from Italy.  The game looked like nothing to call home about, but what really floored me was the bonkers shape of the cabinet.  The legs were made out of plastic, and the cabinet had a plethora of angles.  The cherry on the crazy sundae was that the front of the game had two gun-handle-type devices that the player used to control the flippers.  That's right, NO FLIPPER BUTTONS.

Please, take a look at this profile image HERE for a better look.

 <- A hold over from Pinburgh 2013.  A mini version of the poster I made.  Really dreamy to see it under the glass.

 <- Verily, I can't remember what machine this was, but it was a cops and robber themed machine.  The cover to the pop bumper must have broken, and this is what they found to cover it with :)  Too funny!

 <- So cool.

 <- I thought that Shaq Fu was the only way that I could enjoy Shaq in the gaming realm, but I was happily mistaken.  We only had so long in PAPA HQ, so we had to curate which games we played.  I love how he has to freakin' crouch down just to get onto the backbox!

 <- The PAPA Champion gets to wear this badass belt like a wrestler.  I barely had the nerve to touch it!  Forget about trying it on!  THIS IS ONE HONOR THAT ONE EARNS!  I wouldn't sully that magnificent belt with my novice waist!

 <- Another shot of the pinball banners.  These ones are from Haunted House, Addams Family, and Fireball.

The bulk of games that we played were on the Zaccaria machines.  Knowing that I wouldn't get a chance to play them any other place.  I'm going to hold off on my thoughts on those games until next week, but I will say that I was NOT disappointed.  Other than that, we played games on Black Hole, Haunted House, Roller Disco, Wizard of Oz, the old Spiderman Game, and a couple of others.  Josh and Joyana were great sports, and we really had a blast!  Needless to say, each of the machines we played worked impeccably, and every surface on every machine was spotless.

I feel very lucky that Elizabeth took the time out of her day to hang out with us and show us around.  She and the other staff members of PAPA work incredibly hard to keep things running smoothly, and bring pinball to players in new and exciting ways.  If you are even NEAR Pittsburgh anytime in April or August, see whether it is around when one of the PAPA tournaments is, and plan accordingly.

Thanks Elizabeth!!!!

One year later... still on top!

This April I was in Portland, Oregon for the inaugural Linework NW festival.  While I was in town, I of course, made time to swing by Ground Kontrol to play their Star Wars: Episode One machine.  

It is, hands down, the best SW:E1 machine I have ever played, and I felt pretty good with myself when I put up 130,752,210 points on my first game.  "I'll be on the high score board for sure!" I thought to myself.  So, imagine my surprise when the machine went straight to the match screen:

I quickly scrolled through to the high score board, only to find that my high scores from last year were still intact and untouched!

This felt pretty awesome.  Battling myself!  Sadly, I was not able to bump PAT off of the board, or get any new high scores on this trip.  Maybe next time!

Medieval Maintenance

Back in April, I was having a really good game of Medieval Madness.  I made it all the way to Battle for the Kingdom, when all of a sudden, my left flipper went up and stayed there.  Even though it meant losing my game, I quickly shut off the entire machine.

I keep a log of all my pinball repairs.  This way I can go back and see when I replaced a part, or leave little notes for myself about how to dismantle things, or fix them, etc. etc. etc.

Back in May of 2011 I replaced all of the nylon sleeves on every coil in the machine.  This was a great repair for a few reasons: 1) I really got to know the underside of my machine, because I had to remove every single coil  2) it was fairly cheap to get all of the sleeves, but it really made the whole game run a lot more smoothly - I highly recommend this repair if you own a machine! 3) it also helped me catch a few coils that were starting to swell.  When a solenoid swells, that means it's getting close to dying, which can lock up the shaft, which can then fry circuits in the backbox.  It's bad news!

The two coils I found that were in bad shape were the tower diverter and the left flipper.  The tower coil had already burned through its paper covering so I replaced it right away.  The left flipper seemed okay, so I left it alone and made a note to myself in my repair log to keep an eye on it.

So three years later, the coil finally seized up.  Luckily I remembered that it was in bad shape and was able to shut the machine off before it fried anything upstairs.  I decided to just go whole hog and rebuild both flippers, since I had never done that with this machine.  I also ordered some other parts from Marcos to check off some "to-do" items from my repair log.

On a day when I was burnt out from traveling, I decided to do all my repairs.  It had been a while since I had gone "under the hood."  I remember thinking, "Here goes nothing!"

The first thing I did was replace the left troll housing.  I had to take this off once to fix the switch behind the left troll and it was almost impossible!  A previous owner had done some sort of spot weld on the bottom ridge of the bracket, which had messed up the threads in the bottom attachment.  It literally took a hammer to get this thing off the solenoid rod!  On the right, you can see the new, clean bracket with all the troll hardware moved over.  This may seem like a lot of work for something that doesn't get used very often, but I'd rather just have the right part in there, so that future repairs are easier to make.

Here you can see the old (dead) flipper coil.  This is only one of many pictures that I took, so that I would have some reference when putting the new coil back together.  I wanted to make sure all the parts were facing the right direction and that all the wires got soldered back on in the right place.

Here is a photo after I replaced the left flipper, but before I replaced the right one.  I guess I could have left the right one until it failed, but it seemed like a good idea to just replace them both.  It was really cool, I was able to go into the diagnostics and see how many flips each flipper had flipped.  The left flipper had 1,503,993 flips and the right flipper had 840,717.  I'm not sure if the flippers had ever been rebuilt.  You're supposed to do it every 500,000 flips or so.

I got the flippers back on and cleaned the playfield.  My machine has never played better!