I am in rare pinball heaven
This weekend I've been at Past Times Arcade, in Girard, OH. We're here for their major IFPA pinball tournament, the Past Times Mega Matchplay.
In qualifying rounds yesterday, I won a few games but mostly I did terribly. Kat, however, is kicking ass. She qualified 9th out of 100 and she will be in the final playoffs today (broadcast on https://twitch.tv/neopinball).
Past Times is an absolutely incredible place, said to have 600 distinct pinball machines. I'd estimate about half of them are working at any given moment, but that is still three hundred working pinball machines. And I have seen them fix machines while I was there. I am in heaven.
Kat mentioned that the flow of the tournament has been great for her: "If I do badly in a game, I can just go out to the public area, play another game, and remind myself I'm good at pinball". This has not quite been my own strategy, because mostly I'm going and playing the rarest, most unhinged pinball games I can find, including lots of '80s imports. The gameplay experience often leaves me unsure of if I'm good at pinball or what pinball even is.
From virtual pinball I have seen a lot of tables by Zaccaria, the largest Italian pinball manufacturer in the '70s and '80s. They've got their own dedicated application that recreates them well. This left me unfamiliar with the reality of Zaccaria tables: they are constantly broken. More broken than other machines of the era.
In contrast, the machines by Inder, the largest Spanish manufacturer, have held up spectacularly well.
Pictured here are:
- Orbitor 1 (Stern, 1982), the last machine made by Stern Electronics, which is different from the current Stern. Its uneven playfield makes the ball orbit the pop bumpers. You can flip the ball back into play with the underside of the flippers. It is ilke 25% more playable than it seems but it is still not playable.
- Papillon (Jeutel, 1986). This French machine is clearly a knockoff of Farfalla (Zaccaria, 1983), but now its theme includes lesbian butterfly TF. Many of the shots are pointless. It's beautiful. CHANGE LOVE!
- Terrific Lake (Sport Matic, 1987), a pinball kusoge I already adore from having played it virtually.
- Kat in the tournament area, playing Corvette (Williams, 1994), winning