Dude, who even knows.
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Foo Fighters pinball
Mostly makes you angry it’s not a Nirvana table.
Verdict: Accurate
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A Pulp Fiction (1994) pinball machine. Interesting.
“Chicago Gaming Company”? I don’t know I’ve even heard of that one.
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Foo Fighters pinball accurately captures the “ugh, this should’ve been Nirvana” vibe
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 4 notes
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.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 20 notes
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
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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
Post reblogged from Ice Fairy Enthusiast with 20 notes
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)
Post reblogged from look, okay, these things happen sometimes with 225 notes
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.
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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
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