You know, “Jews control the FGC” was not a take I was expecting to see today, but here we are.
Didn’t see that before but it’s possible. But we can’t draw enough conclusions from just this post alone. I am admittedly making a lot of assumptions just based on this guy’s use of the word “banker”.
Pinball kinda was a money laundering scheme for the mob when it started, though.
For one it was often gambling, pre-flipper (like pachinko!) tables were often formatted as bingo analogues (with more advanced ones changing victory conditions as play progressed), you won free games, tracked on its own reel, but the “house” would buy them back.
Even that aside though, pinball route operation relies on good relationships with local establishments you can put tables in and generates uncheckable cash inflows (Are you taking in $150 but only reporting $15? Okay! Are you only taking in $15 but putting $150 from another scheme on the books legitimately? Okay!) which played to mob strength.
The historical capital of pinball, Chicago, was the capital of American organized crime, and major manufacturers like Bally (like the casinos and weirdly, the gyms) and Williams (which abandoned pinball for the higher-margin work of making equipment for video poker) have readily crossed over into the legal “gaming” world.
Alright, so tomorrow we’re doing a gridiron, that’s a pinball tournament formatted after an NFL season, where everyone is matched to a team, plays their schedule, and then proceeds to playoffs by NFL rules. We used to do it yearly in the mid-2010s, but this is the first time in six years; it’s great cause at the end the playoffs eligibility gives you intense rooting interests in total strangers’ games.
I am the Tennessee Titans.
Going into a bye week, the Titans are 0-6 :(
The Titans finished the season with a 6-11 record.
dam man for how much you talk about pinball i thought you were good. sad!
A bunch of those were “I had a good game but they had a better one”, I’m 5-10 now, but yeah, I lost a bit of instinct in the personality change there, more critically the anxiety zeroing makes me worse at constant awareness of the table and snap-second reacting, even more critically I’m still getting used to even parsing 3D vision.
Alright, so tomorrow we’re doing a gridiron, that’s a pinball tournament formatted after an NFL season, where everyone is matched to a team, plays their schedule, and then proceeds to playoffs by NFL rules. We used to do it yearly in the mid-2010s, but this is the first time in six years; it’s great cause at the end the playoffs eligibility gives you intense rooting interests in total strangers’ games.
Alright, so tomorrow we’re doing a gridiron, that’s a pinball tournament formatted after an NFL season, where everyone is matched to a team, plays their schedule, and then proceeds to playoffs by NFL rules. We used to do it yearly in the mid-2010s, but this is the first time in six years; it’s great cause at the end the playoffs eligibility gives you intense rooting interests in total strangers’ games.
Alright, so tomorrow we’re doing a gridiron, that’s a pinball tournament formatted after an NFL season, where everyone is matched to a team, plays their schedule, and then proceeds to playoffs by NFL rules. We used to do it yearly in the mid-2010s, but this is the first time in six years; it’s great cause at the end the playoffs eligibility gives you intense rooting interests in total strangers’ games.
So Disney owns the MCU but Marvel can still license out the concept of the Avengers, soft butch!Captain Marvel, Black Panther and Dr. Strange fighting Thanos for the Infinity Gems.
Verdict: better than the movie-license Avengers table plus the Guardians of the Galaxy one
There’ve been a few efforts lately to graft modes and multiballs to vintage layouts; this is the best I’ve seen, with a mid-60s base with all the best features: rollover bumper lanes, a drop alley, a return to plunger, liteable spinners, A-B-C targets, 2 drop banks, a tight loop with a saucer lock, and a TOTAN-style spinner that magnetically captures balls to start (basic no-rules feature) modes. With an in-table instruction screen and old school backglass spinner-reel scores.
there’s been a lot of new entrants nosing their way into pinball lately; this from Pedretti is a new head for your existing Whirlpool cabinet that expands the mystery pool to 16 and adds some 1990 Steve Ritchie-ass modes to your 1990 Pat Lawlor table, plus a score display screen with good Flash-level animation.
Haven’t been respecting the midlife crisis mancave-bait Gen X retro band tables they’ve been making lately but Jersey Jack has topped the 1994 Data East here, even supplanted Viper GTS: Night Drivin’ as best pinball table featuring Slash.
Sweet Child O’ Mine is a multiball where they just feed you like six for the first half of the song, on the other hand no one wants to see a video of the band and audience from a fucking 2020 performance
I wonder if Bono ever envies how Axl got the music press to spend the early ‘90s constantly wondering out loud if and when Chinese Democracy was coming.
Playing pinball for the first time in a while, adopting the same familiar stance as always, suddenly realizing my center of gravity and sensory experience are completely different than they’ve been since I started playing pinball
Like, trying to muscle the table around, our relative masses had changed by enough it mattered.
the Elvira’s House of Horrors pinball machine features Teenagers From Outer Space, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE
meaning that it doubles as the mst3k pinball machine
the premise is Elvira’s trying to sell her house so you gotta kick all the b-movie monsters out
this is actually the third Elvira-themed pinball machine (1, 2)
The second one, Scared Stiff, is a 1996 DMD (“Dot Matrix Display”) horror-double-entendre classic, the first one, Elvira and the Party Monsters, is a 1989 I-bet-you-didn’t-even-know-pinball-design-had-a-cocaine-era
Playing pinball for the first time in a while, adopting the same familiar stance as always, suddenly realizing my center of gravity and sensory experience are completely different than they’ve been since I started playing pinball
the Elvira’s House of Horrors pinball machine features Teenagers From Outer Space, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE
meaning that it doubles as the mst3k pinball machine
the premise is Elvira’s trying to sell her house so you gotta kick all the b-movie monsters out
this is actually the third Elvira-themed pinball machine (1, 2)
You might not be all that surprised that I like pinball. It’s a pointless, fruitless contraption of annoying sounds and bright lights, with a bunch of half-broken metal inside. That’s more or less the crown prosecutor’s description of me from last spring. I heard they spent like a day in a whole-office brainstorming session just to come up with that one, but I digress.
The point of pinball is, like all great human endeavours, to rack up an arbitrary score by playing the game. To this extent, you pay money for a limited number of chances. A better writer than me could make this some sort of metaphor on life itself, but I’m not going to resort to that kind of trickery. No, I want to talk about actual pinball.
Here’s the thing about a game that mostly consists of bouncing a steel ball into stationary objects, which trigger sensors and relays. That stuff breaks down, and it breaks down all the time. Although you may imagine all mechanical objects as existing in a perfect state of repair and a zero-percent-humidity vacuum, the real world is completely filthy. Dirt and hair get into things. Grease reacts with the plastics and becomes some kind of nightmare tar that has to be removed with industrial paint-stripping equipment. Screws pop out. The playfield flakes off and warps. Complex electronics seize up somewhere deep inside and begin to act, in the words of Alan Turing, “fucking haunted.”
So that means that the operator of a pinball machine has to be constantly maintaining it. Keeping an eye on all the bumpers. Being good enough to play it and hit all the features, check to make sure the multi-ball bonus works. This is the kind of thing that I like to do, but unfortunately I was born a couple years too late to become full-time employed maintaining pinball machines across America, driving a $500 Plymouth Barracuda, seeding secret second and third families whenever I find a small town that I particularly liked. Instead, I get to look at my friends’ pinball machines and go: that looks bad. You should replace that part. And then they say: I can’t, because nobody makes that part anymore. And then I spend a year meticulously constructing an exact replica of that part, only for the next thing in line to break.
All this is to say that pinball is keeping me from doing even basic maintenance on my fleet of terrible cars, which I’m sure is appreciated by the citizenry at large. Stick that in your ass and smoke it, Your Worship.
I’m on a Facebook group for pictures of cats on pinball machines.
And though I knew intellectually how key the “home use” market is to the industry, and even joshed about how a lot of recent classic rock-themed tables were a hilariously on-the-nose play to this “midlife crisis” market, being directly confronted with evidence of how big a share of the operating tables in circulation are being hosted in mancave 4-table banks exhibiting no aesthetic or gameplay sensibility, just Funko-ass hoarding, is a revelation
I knew guys with basement machines, but like because they were pinball guys who would have tournaments on this collection of stuff they had assembled over at least a decade by being presented with occasional opportunities through iffy merchants and in response developing moderately deep curatorial knowledge
And like, my uncle had a pinball machine in his basement yeah, that was where our “barn finds” came from
