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Thread: Texas Pinball Festival This Weekend!

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    Pretzel (Level 4) 8bitgamer's Avatar
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    Default Texas Pinball Festival This Weekend!

    For those of you who can't make it to the Midwest Classic, the Texas Pinball Festival is also this weekend.

    Check it out here:

    http://texaspinball.com/tpf/

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    Peach (Level 3) dgdgagdae's Avatar
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    Interesting. I'm in Plano, and my Mom lives in Grapevine. I've never been to something like this, thanks for the info.

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    Great Puma (Level 12) Steve W's Avatar
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    I'm off that day, hopefully I'll be able to drop by.

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    Great Puma (Level 12) Steve W's Avatar
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    Man, the Texas Pinball Festival was crowded this year. Really, really crowded. But I got a chance to play some good pins, like the new Tron Legacy table. And I saw a lot of incredibly familiar faces there, although the only person I knew well enough to talk to was Brett, a.k.a. 8bitgamer. I managed to do better than I ever have on the Star Wars Arcade Game, getting to the fifth level before all the crazy barricades in the trench finally did me in. And I finally got to play Quantum! I've been wondering how that game played since the '80s, but never had the opportunity. Nobody seemed to want to play I, Robot so I put in a lot of time on that one, since it was my only chance to play it outside of emulation.

    There were a lot of standout machines there, like Hercules by Atari. It's a huge freakin' pinball table, so big that it uses an actual billiards cue ball rather than a standard pinball. I never had the chance to try it, the line was too big. At two ends of the room were Orbitor 1 pins, one of which would break down once my turn finally came up. I did get to try it, and it was a weird experience. Not much stuff on the table itself, most of the targets are around the edges of the field, but the table itself is warped in strange ways and has a three-dimensional moonscape design. You could never tell where your ball was going to go. And the best sound effects of any pinball game I've ever played. If I could have one machine, it'd be that one.

    As usual, a lot of the machines were having problems, like that Orbitor 1 pin acting up. Quite a few tables weren't functioning, along with arcade cabs like Hydro Thunder. The Star Wars Arcade's graphics were a little warped, Quantum had an odd twitching issue, I, Robot's controller was screwed up, that kind of thing. It saddened me to think that at some point in the future there's the chance that none of the original machines will be functional, everything will have to be through emulation.

    I got there around 2:30 and left around 7:15, with a splitting headache and a pain in my lower neck like a dagger had been embedded in my spine. Yet again, it was far too noisy. At least they didn't bother with the blaring '80s music, but the announcer's deafening volume probably had something to do with my headache along with the strange roaring noise in the room, like a waterfall, making everybody in the room have to speak louder and increasing the white noise in the room. I did see a few people with voice recorders or phones out recording ambient arcade and pinball sounds, which was interesting. It's rare to hear arcade sounds in a period with genuine arcades as scarce as they are now.

    Another thing I noticed on the older analog machines, some of the coin slots were for Francs or Deutchmarks. I found that pretty fascinating that these machines have traveled who knows where and have ended up in Texas, nicely restored.
    Last edited by Steve W; 03-25-2012 at 12:53 AM.

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