Episode 140 – Electric Bat Arcade

Apparently today is hashtag International Podcast Day or something. Well, we’re here to celebrate by dropping another episode. In episode 140, Jessica talks with Rachel from the Electric Bat Arcade. Electric Bat is located in Tempe, Arizona and it’s truly one of the best places to play in the Western United States. Take a listen to Jess and Rachel talk pinball and see if we finally find an answer to how many pinballs fit inside that bumper car (spoiler: we won’t).

Episode 138 – Ugly Gold Couch

We roll out another one of our location interviews this week as Jessica talks to Debbie from Ugly Gold Couch. This location is housed in a private location that is open for special events, corporate events, and quite often to the local pinball community. The game lineup is amazing, and it’s a must-see for anybody passing through the Boise, Idaho area. You can find them online here: https://idahopinballmuseum.com/

We have a new “regular” episode coming up real soon, so we apologize in advance for Jeff’s eventual bringdown of the vibe.

Episode 137 – The Pinball Lounge

This week we have Ed Klamp on the show to talk about his location, The Pinball Lounge, out of Oviedo, Florida.

We’re hoping that you’re enjoying getting to know all the people out there who work so hard to make location pinball so enjoyable and accessible to us all, especially during this Covid-19 pandemic. If you’re ever passing through Florida, drop by and say hi to Ed and drop some coins!

Episode 136 – Wedgehead

Jessica sits down to talk with Alan of Wedgehead out of Portland, Oregon. Wedgehead is a well-known location in the pinball world, especially if you’re out in the Pacific Northwest area. And perhaps as famous as their well cared for pins, Wedgehead offers killer merch that you’re see to see at any pinball show across the country.

After listening to Alan and Jess talk pinball, look Wedgehead up online, here: https://wedgeheadpdx.com/

Episode 135 – The Richmond Pinball Collective

Ok, so episode 135 is actually episode 1…and really, with the B/C episodes and bonuses, that 135 is even more wrong. Whatever. But this exciting! We’re launching a new ongoing series within the podcast feed where we’re going to interview location owners, operators, and technicians! For our first episode, we feature The Richmond Pinball Collective.

Let us know what you think about his new series and if you have suggestions for a location or want to be on, reach out to us! We would love to talk.

Please to enjoy.

Houston Arcade Expo Review by Lee Bellehumeur

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I traveled to the 2016 Houston Arcade and Pinball Expo Nov. 11th & 12th.  This is one of the smaller shows, but definitely has a lot going on. A multi-day tournament, seminars, vendors and even some Stormtroopers walking around.   There were over 200 games there that were split about evenly between pins, vids and consoles.  They had all the latest Sterns, a MMR, and a hot, fresh, Dominoes from Spooky Pinball.  The arcades were all in very nice shape with multiples of popular titles like Robotron.  The setup was nice and never got too crowded and the tournament had its own room.  Overall, the hotel was nice, less expensive than most and had a pretty good bar/restaurant so you didn’t need to leave the premises if you didn’t want to.

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Dominoes was the “WOZ” of the show and is a great looking game with the overall blue/red color scheme.  Although simple looking compared to say Ghostbusters, it’s a pretty fun family friendly game with “some” leftover toys from AMH and some new shots, so it isn’t just a re-theme.  I have no idea where the code is at overall, but it was fun to play and has some brutal outlanes.   Listed at $5299 retail it could be a solid seller for Spooky Pinball given the current market shenanigans.  The Spooky seminar was well attended.

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I sat in on a couple of other seminars, Jim Schellberg had a nice presentation of pinball in the media and Gerry from Multimorphic ran down the history of the P3.  Multimorphic had 2 games at the show, Cannon Lagoon and Lexi Lightspeed neither of which I had played before.  I usually would pass them up at shows chalking it up to “virtual pinball”, but stepped up and I have to say they both were A LOT more fun than I expected.  Cannon Lagoon is a simple game, but very addictive and Lexi has as much going on as any standard pinball machine.  I apologized to Gerry for passing up his games so many times and we had a nice conversation.  I hope they do well in the future.

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The CONS (or why I probably won’t be back):  As stated over and over in the Houston Pinside thread by a lot of people, the music HAS to go.  Holy hell, nothing like trying to play pinball and have basically concert level sound blasting at you from all 4 corners of the room ALL THE TIME.  I just don’t get it; to most of us the pinballs and the arcades ARE the music.  To make it even worse a lot of the pins were cranked to max volume, SO YOU COULD HEAR THEM.  Didn’t make it better.  It was all very fatiguing.  I realize sound management can be an issue with show, but it CAN be managed.  Nobody seems to care at the Houston show.  Reminded me of a saying, a good DJ plays what the crowd wants, not what they want.  In this case, it’s the organizers personal party and that’s what he wants.

Power issues.  A lot of shows have them, and it takes a lot of money and a serious commitment to upgrade a venue to handle a pinball show.  Breakers were tripping all weekend and I just couldn’t help but think that if there wasn’t a 5000 watt sound system sucking up half the juice this might not have been as much of a problem.  I feel like this just points back to the selfishness of the organizer and what he wants instead of what would make the show better.  When you’ve got 800 million on ball 1 and the game/row just shuts off, well, it sucks.

Other things that were generally overlooked were things like leveling games.  I don’t care if you have a Kingpin, next to a Big Bang Bar, next to a Batman Super LE.  If the games aren’t somewhat leveled, the play is ruined.  A lot of games had major league curve balls going straight over to the outlanes from the middle of the PF and it’s frustrating.  A couple of awesome Pinsiders brought several games each and I sent them PM’s a couple of time during the show about issues.  I was given the go ahead to mess with the leveling myself but is that really the answer?  Volunteers make the show happen, but the organizer should have designated somebody to take care of things like this.

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There was a great team of Pinmedics around that did their best to fix games ASAP when they went down.

All in all, it was a decent show, but mostly a locals party.  It’s a casual show, but maybe just a little bit too casual.  I understand the venue might change next year, hopefully for the better.  I met some cool Pinsiders in person like Nicovolta and I did manage to play a lot of great games, spend some money on crap and get Zombie Yeti’s signature on a nice piece of his artwork.  Sadly, there was no Maverick there.

Counting down the day until TPF!

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Ghostbusters Launch Party Road Trip

On Sunday, May 1st, Pinball Jones in Fort Collins, Colorado hosted an official Stern launch party for Ghostbusters. I (Jeff) decided to drive out to Colorado that same morning, compete in the tournament, and then drive back through the night. As I went out and traveled back, I recorded a solo podcast of sorts, catching up on some listener questions, giving my thoughts on Ghostbusters, and going over some recent issues in the hobby.

I hope you like this special episode. If you do, let us know and we can try doing more road trip episodes. Sorry for the audio quality, a car traveling 80mph (that’s the speed limit, don’t yell at me for going that fast) on the freeway isn’t an ideal recording space.

For those that just want to know how I did at the tournament, I took second. Yes, second place…again. It’s always second with me.

Pin-Up or Shut-Up at Flipperspiel Wunderland

Over the weekend I made the 6 hour drive down to Las Vegas to make a visit to Flipperspiel Wunderland to play in the Pin-Up or Shut-Up Tournament that took place on Saturday, August 17th. Flipperspiel Wunderland is located a few miles off of the main strip, putting it near a bunch of hotels, but not in a crowded area of town.

Upon entering, I found a row of EMs, some newer DMDs, a short row of classic SS games, and arcade games that peppered the spaces in between. The atmosphere was really laid back, and for the $10 entry fee, I got to play in the tournament and enjoy the rest of the games on the floor on free play as well as free pizza and drinks for the night. The tournament games included: Tron Pro, Striker Xtreme, Metallica Pro, Iron Man, and Genie. The turnout ended up being a bit smaller than expected, but it was still a good time and the tournament’s sponsor, Nifty LED brought their bulbs along and offered them at discount pricing.

If you’re passing through Vegas, you should definitely drop in on Flipperspiel Wunderland if they’re open. There’s a nice mix of modern and classic pinball machines in there, and everything is playing in good condition. I only had my cell phone to grab pics of the place, and I only captured about 1/2 of the machines here. Thanks to the Flipperspiel Wunderland and Nifty LED guys for putting on the event. I’ll be back again. IMAG0647 IMAG0646 IMAG0642 IMAG0641