Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Soft plunging for quarters

CFF welcomed two new members Quarters and Soft Plunge
to the gang on Wednesday night, March 20, 2013.

Portland Pinbrawl 2012

Go here to register for it.

Showdown at Slabtown LIVES

UPDATE:

The Classics is over. Mike Mahaffey wins! Full standings will be posted later.

Check @portlandpinball on Twitter for some updates.

FINALS UPDATE: Bowen Kerins wins the Open tournament! Congrats, Bowen.

Final four: Bowen Kerins, Cayle George, Maka Honig, Keith Elwin.

Check back in the next couple of days for a more detailed recap.

That was a whole lot of pinball!

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So the tournament starts today! Today and tomorrow is the qualifying round.

Hours:
February 18 3:00-Midnight
February 19 12:00-Midnight

Location:
Slabtown
1033 NW 16th
Portland, OR

The scores and rankings during the qualifying round are updated live (about every 15 minutes), and can be found here.

Open Division Live Results

Classics Division Live Results

So you can keep track of the action from afar! (Note: Those are just the rankings for the qualifying round, not the final. See above for final results.)

Discuss stuff in the comments!

Anyway, don’t forget to try hard, every body! Good luck, and have fun.

Some notes:

-All the machines in the Classics bank are set to 5 ball.
-Some of the machines have very sensitive tilts and are set to “difficult” – so be careful.

Ricochet C-Bar Bounties + Cascadia Cup Registration Reminder

Two hot items for you to munch on, swallow, and then belch out.

First off: a reminder that the First Annual Cascadia Cup* is happening on November 7. Registration is now completely full. Thank you for those that have signed up. It’s gonna be fun!

If you didn’t know, Cascadia is the bio-region commonly known as the Pacific Northwest. It’s a lush enviro, all green-like and pretty, super casual and phased, and some people here want the United States to just get the hell out of it forever.

So this tournament is a celebration of the super rad Cascadia pinball scene. It’s an all day tournament, and you’re guaranteed to play 9 rounds! Basically, you get matched up with three others and play a game of pinball, then you get matched up with a different 3 others again and play a game of pinball and you get to do this 9 times. Then the top 12 advance to the final rounds. Dropshot’s testimony: “Those that attended last year’s event, the Slabtown Smackdown, will likely testify that this may be the most laid back tournament in the history of tournaments.”

You need to sign up ahead of time for this tournament. We are making t-shirts and stuff, and the prize packages will be SWEET. Pre-registration ends TOMORROW, Oct. 1. So sign the eff up. We currently have 29 registrants, and we’re gunning for 36 so that we have a nice clean bracket. AKA space is limited! More information can be found on the Cascadia Cup page.

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Item number dos: Casual flow knows no bounds! Much to everyone’s happiness, local operator Ricochet Pinball has taken over the C-Bar. They’ve added seven machines to the place. And in celebration, they set up an amazing bounty hunt on the machines there (well, on five of them).

The bounties are thus: Whomever holds the GC on a machine on the deadline of Oct. 15 wins $100! Uh yeah… that’s huge, people. That’s $500 in total prizes. There’s already some tight competition on them. But some of the machines are still just waiting to be slayed. So have at those machines!

The machines in the bounty hunt are:

Twilight Zone
Rollergames
Judge Dredd
Road Kings
Jack*Bot

Discuss the bounties here. Thanks, Ricochet!

*it’s sort of the 2nd annual… I dunno. whatever!

Quest for the Beta Test – Pre-Avatar Pinball Tourney

ROM from Casual Flow Headquarters here, bringing you news about an upcoming Slow-Flow tournament being run by local operator, Quarterworld.

Stern’s next machine, Avatar, is coming out soon. Avatar is already known among some circles (namely, the circle made up of me and my cat) as one of the most pixelated pinball games ever made. Take a look at this screenshot for an example:

It’s like freaking Monet met up with Buzz Aldrin and they had a baby together. And then they smashed the baby onto the playfield and then cranked up the pixels. Amirite?!

But wait, there’s more! Now’s your chance to finally see the pinball machine in person.

Quarterworld is being rad enough to let some top ballers get an early taste of the machine. To be granted access, all you have to do is hold a GC or #1 score on one of the two machine at the Langano Lounge by the tournament’s end.

Check out Qdub’s post about the tournament.

And here are some additional details:

Casual Span: Aug. 20 – Sept. 12.
Casual Loc: Langano Lounge. 1435 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard.
Casual Crush: The Simpsons Pinball Party, Indiana Jones (Stern)
Casual Flow Rating: 5/5 (due to length of the tournament)

There is the potential for four people to win this tournament. So don’t fret! You have a chance. And if you win, it would be cool if you could use the message board to give us fans and early review!

The City that Hates Pinball. Beacon, NY.

The City of Beacon, NY had the idea that they should enforce an old law banning pinball within the city limits, effectively shutting down the Retro Arcade Museum run by Fred Bobrow. The Retro Arcade features several old electro mechanical pinball machines as well many old rare and old arcade machines.

Apparently after being open for 18 months, the city decided to come along and enforce this crazy old law. Think about it, someone from the city came along and insisted upon enforcing this law on the arcade nearly two years after being open, what a douche of a person. In my opinion it is some crotchety old fart who has nothing better to do that to hate on stuff. I’m guessing this law is merely the vehicle for a much darker hate that is rooted in the City of Beacon.

Probably the best thing that we can do to get Fred back in business is to write or call Beacon city council and mayors office.
http://www.cityofbeacon.org/departments

There’s a facebook group that even has a nice form letter to send in.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=139564602749976

If the city does not allow the Retro Arcade to operate in the next few days. I think then we will have to up our efforts to this cause, and I do have some very creative and effective ideas in store for that. Let’s hope that some calls and letters will do the trick first.

Check out this video about the issue on CNN

Showdown at Slabtown II Finalcap

‘Tis over! After three days of tournamenting, and mini-gaming, and plain ol’ regular playing, it has come to an end. Let’s get to details!

58 people competed in the Open tournament, and 49 in the Classics tournament. Strong turn-out! And folks really put a lot of work into their qualifying entries. You had to put up some hot scores in order to make it into the final rounds.

And then once the final round started, oh man, things got shaken up fast. Some big names got eliminated in the first round of the finals.

And through it all Robert Gagno emerged victorious in – get this – not one, but BOTH tournaments! He swept it! No easy feat. He played great throughout the tournament. And when crunchtime came, in the final rounds, he pulled it off like a champ. He came down with this parents, Kathy and Maurizio, and they all basically operated as a team throughout the weekend. Team Gagno. (On a personal note: I got 2nd place in the Open, and while I felt like I played pretty well, I’m not sad! It was totally cool to watch Robert sweep the event. Major props.)

Nice showing by Portland players in the event. All our constant playing and competing must be paying off… with DIVIDENDS! Whatever that means. Nice showing by the core CFF contingent, too. But there were some notable absences (Replay!).

Here are photos taken by Robert’s dad of the winners line-ups. Check out their flickr page for a lot more great pictures.

Classics Division Winners. l-r: James Edes (4th), Cayle George (2nd), Robert Gagno (1st), Aaron “Dropshot” Nelson (3rd).

Open Division Winners. l-r: Fred “Fred” Franken (4th), Robert Gagno (1st), Steve Lampros (3rd), Ryan “ROM” Gratzer (2th).

Eden Stamm was top qualifier in the Open. Cayle George was the top qualifier in the Classics. Zoe “Legs” Vrabel was the top female qualifier, and she also won the PBR skateboard in a mini-tourney (thanks PBR!).

Big thanks to Aaron, Jake (Revtest), Fred, Eric, and Noah for organizing the event. And thanks to Slabtown for providing a rad venue. Mega thanks to Ricochet for their tight tournament machines, and for their really awesome mini-game machines. Here’s a video of Jeri from Ricochet showing off the NES Light Gun game.

Danny Backglass won the Time Machine reverse-flipper tourney, and Mike Smith won both the Tommy Bad Cats and the Star Trek NES Zapper tourneys. Way to go! Also, thanks to Quality Entertainment for their machine. Thanks to Chris Rhodes for bringing in Aztec, and for everyone who brought in their sweet machines. The line-ups were nice. Very well-rounded and interesting.

Check out this page on the message board for the full results.

Lastly, some pictures:

See you next year!

Showdown at Slabtown II – Casual Flowblock