YouTube Vids Part 2.
http://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainPinballI haven’t communicated with the man. But his collection of pinball promo videos is truly something to behold. I didn’t even know Bally/Williams/etc. had been sending out promo vids to arcade owners, but here they are. Totally fucking cheesy=totally fucking cool. We should get a reel of these together and show them all at the next CFF awards banquet.
Where you people at?
BBB
Table Setups and Youtube Videos
Pinball is fluourishing in Portland, which is a good thing. It seems like every time I go out, tables that were usually idle except at peak times are being played more and more often, by people of various skill levels– but most importantly, even the beginners and casual players seem to be taking their games more seriously. I often see people concentrating, checking out rule sheets, and playing multiple games trying to improve their scores.
That seems like good news for the pinball industry in general, the scene in PDX, and for competition levels. It’s good to be pushed by other local players, and to have scores up around town to gun for. Unfortunately it seems like there’s something of a glass ceiling for players that for whatever reason find themselves becoming serious enough to want to take their skills to the next level– namely, inconsistency of playing conditions that makes it much more difficult to practice particular skills and improve on particular games.
Some amount of inconsistency is the nature of the beast with pinball– there’s a huge number of moving parts in every game. There’s constant friction from a fairly heavy metal ball bearing flying at decent velocities along a sheet of waxed plywood. Many players probably notice the conditions of the same table change over the course of a single session, as heat from lights and coils builds up and changes the temperature and humidity inside the game, just slightly enough to make the game behave differently from ball to ball. Maybe that sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but I see it all the time on guitars– you can have it in tune backstage, and as soon as it’s under the heat of stage lights, see it go out of tune again– and that’s a much smaller chunk of wood and metal with a lot less going on than a pinball machine!
Most players just come to accept that the same table can be playing differently from day to day, that there’s going to be wear-and-tear, that even two identical games can feel radically differently on different sites, and etc; but is it too much to expect that the games we play seriously be kept tuned up at least as well as possible for what that particular game is capable of? I for one am a long way from being a competitive tournament player. But I still feel serious enough about my game that I would like to get there, sooner rather than later. It takes years of practice to become an A player– but if you’ve ever done anything seriously, from sports to music to cooking to art, you know that the tools you use and the environment you practice in makes all the difference in how and how quickly you develop. Read the rest of this entry »
Family Guy is Here!
Phill got 2 out of 3 Oregon Family guy machines…
1 at bog is up now.
the second will be at Shanghai.
