DWJ
Member
For those who enjoy a little pinball (OK, a lot of pinball) along with their video games, the 2009 Pacific Pinball Expo is this weekend. October 2-4 (Friday-Sunday), at the Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, CA.
The Pacific Pinball Expo is to pinball, what CAX is to video games. The pinheads already know about it, but the video game folks might not have heard about it, as the event is relatively new; this is only the third year the show's been running.
The PPE features just about everything that ever had a silver ball in it. Very interesting feeling to play old woodrails from the pre-flipper days, where the game was almost entirely about "body english"... to say nothing of realizing that the loop-around-the-playfield intro 6shot to Stern's NASCAR pin actually dates back to the 20s and 30s. It's not very often (read: "ever") that you can play almost 80 years' worth of pinball in a single afternoon.
And after all that pinball, you're only a couple of miles from Marin's first arcade: Starbase Arcade, whose fans have now caught up with Arcade UFO (Austin, TX) in a month-long grind-to-the-finish contest to save their respective local arcades. (Details are on this thread; briefly, if you're in the SF Bay Area, and you're not playing pinball this weekend, you should be grinding points on Zap while watching the news, listening to the radio, reading this board on the second monitor of a dual-head setup, etc... The game's actually not that bad once it starts turning into bullet hell at around level 20ish. With 7 days to go and the contest effectively tied, a few new players putting in 15-20 minutes a day, or even one person crazy enough to grind for a few hours a day, can make a huge difference in the outcome.)
The Pacific Pinball Expo is to pinball, what CAX is to video games. The pinheads already know about it, but the video game folks might not have heard about it, as the event is relatively new; this is only the third year the show's been running.
The PPE features just about everything that ever had a silver ball in it. Very interesting feeling to play old woodrails from the pre-flipper days, where the game was almost entirely about "body english"... to say nothing of realizing that the loop-around-the-playfield intro 6shot to Stern's NASCAR pin actually dates back to the 20s and 30s. It's not very often (read: "ever") that you can play almost 80 years' worth of pinball in a single afternoon.
And after all that pinball, you're only a couple of miles from Marin's first arcade: Starbase Arcade, whose fans have now caught up with Arcade UFO (Austin, TX) in a month-long grind-to-the-finish contest to save their respective local arcades. (Details are on this thread; briefly, if you're in the SF Bay Area, and you're not playing pinball this weekend, you should be grinding points on Zap while watching the news, listening to the radio, reading this board on the second monitor of a dual-head setup, etc... The game's actually not that bad once it starts turning into bullet hell at around level 20ish. With 7 days to go and the contest effectively tied, a few new players putting in 15-20 minutes a day, or even one person crazy enough to grind for a few hours a day, can make a huge difference in the outcome.)
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