Pinball, like they made in the old country

As I said, PAPA was great. I made the B-division playoffs, and, while practicing, I totally rolled over Future Spa. No kidding.

The best part was seeing some rare Italian pinball games. A company called Zaccaria in Bologna, Italy, was responsible for these, and for the most part they were hard to find in the States. Most of their games were made in the late '70s and early '80s, a time when the American pinball designers were going with darker colors to go with themes of sword and sorcery and sci-fi and fantasy.

By contrast, Zaccaria games featured bright colors, and often had transparent upper playfields, so that the artwork wouldn't be obscured. And, since they're Italian, they tend to hang out in cafes all day and whistle at all the girls who walk by. Zing!

Standard time-travel wear is, of course, skin-tight purple spandex and thigh-high boots.

Pinball Champ '82 is, obviously, the most accurate representation of pinball competition ever conceived. There were ALLLLL kinds of bikini chicks hanging out at PAPA.

(OK, not really, but I think I did see at least a couple pairs of pants that were pretty similar to what the pinball champ is wearing here... if only because some of the players' wardrobes haven't been updated since '82.)

Ahh, poor Mr. Pinball Champ '82. I mean, sure he's got the pinball trophy, he's got the bikini babes, and he's, apparently, gotten a hold of some pretty good psychadelic drugs, judging from the rocketships filling the sky and attacking Saturn. It all looks good from the outside. But does he feel fulfilled? Does that pinball trophy fill the pit where there should be a soul?

What will happen when the fame has subsided, and the girls have all moved on to Tron Champ '83?

I think about these things.

The Italians are prescient in that they successfully foretold that robots would, in the year 2179, turn on their captors in an effort to get some poontang. Actually, this robot looks suspicously like Darth Vader, but with a red cape. Because if you're going to go capture some human females, you might as well do it with some robo-style.

That playfield is great, and the pink "robot bridge" ramp is one of my favorites. Sending the ball across the bridge causes a bunch of "robot" bumpers to pop up on the playfield, much like the trolls in Medieval Madness would a decade later.

Zaccaria was also adept at creating images of pure, unbridled terror:

YAAHHHH!!

I'm generally not afraid of clowns, but... this backglass might make me a believer. Yow. That's hella-creepy. Scary clown.

Finally, everyone's favorite. It's a pasta, it's a butterfly, it's... Farfalla.

This one's breasts got a certain... je ne sais quoi to it nipples. Actually, those breasts are eye-catching, come to think of it, and they might even make you miss their impossibly detailed surroundings. The texture and complexity of this backglass is astounding, and it's far and away the most colorful thing you ever would have seen in an arcade.

And, of course, breasts. This game is definitely Italian.

However, as you may know, we are a nation of prudes, which necessitated a slight change to the backglass for American distribution.

Thus, you have the hot Italian version:

and the Pax Network-ified American version, where Butterfly Girl decides to throw on a sweater.

As Mario might say: that's-a lame.

Either way, the playfield is beautiful and brightly colored:

Amazing, and I love those butterfly drop targets. This game's also memorable for the vertical white mini-flippers in the outlanes, where a propery-timed flip could save you from an outlane drain (when lit!).

So there's my annual pinball report. I leave you with one of those scary mermaid-seahorse girls from Fathom (by Bally, not Italian) designed to give you nightmares. Bye!

Andrew will appreciate this

When you're running a comic book company (say, DC), and you're doing a huge company-wide crossover featuring hundreds of characters ("Infinite Crisis"), AND it has the word "Crisis" in the title, who do you get to draw the cover to #1?

It better be George Freakin' Perez.

Pinball results

I did wind up making the B playoffs, but didn't make it past the first round.

Some Swedish girl named Helena won the B. Really.

Your new world champion, by the way is Bowen Kerins, who rebounded nicely from that one time I beat him.

I've got some great photos of classic games, including a bunch of Italian ones not commonly seen in the States... photo essay "TK". That means "to come" in newspaper-speak. (Reporters can't spell.)

Sunday, bloody pinball Sunday

After being knocked down by all the hundreds of plays yesterday, I had a good entry before dinner that boosted me a little bit. Currently I'm 12th, but lucky for me they expanded the qualifying field to 16, which gives me a decent shot at the quarterfinals.

There are three more hours of qualifying this morning from 9 a.m. to noon, so it's always a mad dash to see who can sneak in at the last minute. There are always a few surprises, but I'm hoping my best entry holds on to at least 16th place.

Moving up the pinball charts

I should play pinball at 9:30 a.m. more often. After showing up at PAPA seemingly before any other contestants had woken up, I put up my best B-division entry so far. I took the top score on Cue Ball Wizard, an obscure Gottleib game from 1992 with a giant cue ball on the playfield (really!). I had maybe never seen one before yesterday, and definitely never played one, so I fired up the laptop to go over the rules. That must have helped, because I put up 483M, tops out of the 50 plays on that machine so far.

With the high score there out of the way, I needed solid scores on the rest of my games in that entry, and I got them, for the most part. Right now I'm bouncing between tied-for-second and third place, so that entry might actually be good enough for top 12 on the weekend, to get me into the playoffs.

In other words, time for a dip in the pool. It's really freakin' hot here.

Pinball championships UPDATE!

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- I had a good entry yesterday here at the 8th Pro/Am Pinball Assoc. (PAPA) tournament.

Well, it could have been better. It started kind of poorly, with two not-very-good games, but I managed to score 8M+ on Funhouse, and then followed it up with an astounding 1B+ on Twilight Zone (my favorite game). I'm still not sure how I did that... after one day, that's by far the high score on that machine.

Right now that entry puts me in 5th place in the B division, but I'm highly skeptical that will hold up because of the two poor games in the entry. So I'm gonna keep trying to improve my standing! You can follow my progress here.

Note that there's a player in C Division going by the name "Neo Skywalker." It's just that kind of crowd.

The balcony is reserved

This link courtesy RM. For all you Statler and Waldorf fans: it's them at the movies.

What kind of world do we live in

Where Marc Cohn gets shot in the head, yet Michael Bolton and Bryan Adams are still allowed to wander around unharmed?