Recently in Video Games and Pinball Category

All right, so here's a bizarre coincidence. On Sunday, that is, three days ago, I watched the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", which was, by the way, the best Doctor Who episode I've seen so far. The episode prominently featured historical figure Madame de Pompadour, who I hadn't heard of, so I later looked her up on Wikipedia just to see what her bag was. That's how I roll.

Today while I was playing Ghostbusters: The Video Game -- also excellent -- the Ghostbusters encountered a portrait that they deemed significant, and they identified the subject as a relative of the game's villain. But wait a sec...

That's totally Madame de Pompadour! What are the odds?

Well, okay, given the amount of television I watch combined with the amount of video games I play and my average number of webpages surfed, this is probably more happenstance than coincidence. But still. Anyway after some minor Googling on my part I can't find anyone else who's made this connection, so, there you have it: I've accomplished something in life. Yayyyy.

This headline won't make any sense in a month and a half when I change my gamerpic back to Silver Centurion Iron Man.

Here's a fun article from ESPN.com about the latest PAPA. Kieran Darcy talks to Bowen Kerins, obviously a great player, and Kevin Martin, who must throw a ton of his own money into putting on the competition every year. The winner was Keith Elwin, who also won the Seattle tournament earlier this summer.

There's also a cool sidebar interview with Todd MacCulloch, the former Philadelphia 76er who now lives outside Seattle and has a big pinball collection of his own (45 games).

I had a big post ready to go about playing in the Northwest Pinball and Gameroom tournament last month, but then the Internet ate it. Damn you, Internet!

The quick summary:
- I didn't get to play Whirlwind again in the playoffs. That game is just going to have to continue being my white whale.
- We played in four-player groups, with half the players eliminated each round (16 qualified). In the first round, I had a great third ball on Creature From the Black Lagoon (thanks to the "Move Your Car!" mode) to take second place, and I pulled out a victory on the final game (and the only electro-mechanical game of the bunch), Royal Flush, to move on.
- In round 2 I was up against the #2 ranked pinball player in the world (and yes, they do rank these things), Keith Elwin. I did about as well as I could have expected in the first two games, finishing second to Keith in the first two games. I also took second on the final game (Royal Flush again) to move on to the finals!
- In the finals, I got my ass handed to me. But, by virtue of finishing 4th, I took home $300... a pretty good take! And, as I told Andrew in my best Rocky voice, "I just wanted to go the distance." It was nice having him and Julia there in the gallery to cheer me on.

For the full results, click here. To see how far I moved up in the world pinball rankings this month, click here.

I'll have a photo essay up, at some point, when I get some time to do some writing. (If ever.)

I've been having lots of fun this weekend participating in a tournament at the Northwest Pinball and Gameroom Show, a short bus ride away from my apartment. I think I've made the playoffs, although they were still tabulating the results tonight when they closed the exhibition hall. But in the midst of qualifying for the playoffs, I experienced the most frustrating game of pinball I've ever had.

And understand, I've had some bad ones. I've had games where the ball went down the outlane without me touching it three consecutive times, in playoffs... but I blame those more on me than the machine. In this case, I couldn't help but feel the machine was out to get me.

Check it out.

(Read this first)

Ahh, Future Spa. Why must you cause nothing but problems? Our primitive world is clearly not ready for your sexy futuristic ideals. You dared to dream of a world where women aren't afraid to show off their space nipples while jogging with some random sex clone. Now that's some women's lib anyone can get behind! (Yes, the world's a very different place, in 2008!)

Anyway, on to address Tanya's problem. If you were going to go the sign route, and are trying to promote what Planned Parenthood is about, I would be tempted to go with something like this:

PINBALL IS A CONTRACEPTIVE!

People who play pinball... don't have sex.

However, the sign may not be necessary; history teaches us that there's already a perfect solution to this problem. Furdell.com devotees will recall that during PAPA 2005, I came across several Italian pinball machines whose backglasses tended to be more racy (read: nipply). One game in particular, Farfalla, featured this ethereal babe:

And I discovered there was an Americanized version, in which the ethereal babe thought better of going the low-cut route and double-checked the back of her ethereal closet to find this tasteful red-and-green sweater:

So there you have it! The answer is: put a sweater on those puppies.

To make the transition easier, feel free to use this cutout.

Print it up, slap it on any of the offending lady parts, and poof... the objectification vanishes completely!

Hope that helps, Tanya. Pay it forward!

Elite Beat Agents is a great rhythm-based game for the Nintendo DS. It's got a great comic-book/manga style and some hilarious cut scenes.

And, according to the FAQ, it's OK... that... I cried during this stage.

Gotta go... (sniff)

Give me your money.

When Visual Pinball came out, I finally had a platform to build that pinball game I always wanted to create: Touchdown Fever! I spent way too much time developing and tweaking the table and rules... rules-wise, it's probably about as deep as a mid-1980s commercial game. I still have fun playing it, and it's been more than four years since I originally started working on it.

Download it here. (NOTE: VP requires Windows of some kind.)

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!

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I had to get shots of two of my most amazing accomplishments, which happened this week.

First, I beat Chris and Bowen on The Getaway: High Speed II.

That's big. That's like striking out Ty Cobb, and then striking out Babe Ruth. And, since I'm a complete ass, I had to get a picture of it.

Secondly, today I took first place in our fantasy baseball league.

Since this is not likely to last, I had to get a screenshot of that too.

GO ME!

I RAWK!

It's true; I did indeed win the local pinball league championship. You're looking at a two-time title holder. Or, you would be, if you could see me.

It was close, though; I nearly didn't make it out of the semifinals. I needed a big Red Line Mania comeback on The Getaway: High Speed 2, one of my favorite games, to make the finals. Then, two more great games of Getaway and one final big score on White Water put it away for me.

I definitely have to credit my Star Trek, which I improbably won in last year's league raffle, for helping me develop the advanced strategeries I needed to become more consistent. I'm getting better at flipper passes and drop catches, simply because I have a machine to practice on, and that helps a lot.

Um, it also does a good job at hiding the newspapers I need to take out to the recycling bin.

I've so far only seen the first season of The Sopranos, thanks to Netflix. It's a good show, with a dark, unsettling world view. The juxtaposition between Tony's worlds (regular family, mafia family, and psychotherapy) puts a postmodern spin on the traditional gangster epic. It's a complex and mature show, and thus, the perfect subject matter for a pinball game.

Wait, what's that? You think I'm kidding?

I'll show you who's kidding.

Yes, this is Stern's next game. Yes, those are pole dancing plastic dolls up in the corner. Yes, that's a talking fish head in the middle (apparently straight from Tony's hallucinations).

Some of the game's features:

Truck hijacks are achieved by shooting the loops three times to start a hijack hurry-up. Shoot the loop again to collect the award and increase you hijack total towards the number required.

The Bada Bing ramp needs to be shot repeatedly to light it again for an award. The ball is stopped next to the two pole dancers so you can admire the view while collecting your award.

Likewise, repeatedly shooting the right ramp will increase the number of buried bodies towards the target number needed to light your red insert.

Bizarre. This has to be the strangest idea for a game since Future Spa.

By the way, here's a Fun Furdell Fact: our ancestors apparently came to America because they were fleeing the mafia. Yep, that sounds like us all right.

This weekend, while laundering my laundry at the laundromat, I achieved a personal high score of 150,210 in Ms. Pac-Man. I usually consider it a good game if I get to see Act III ("Junior," in which a stork delivers a teensy Pac-Person to the Pacs), but over the course of this game I saw Act III three times.

Interesting Pac-fact that I did not know (and that cost me a life): when you get to a certain stage, which I think was level 19, power pellets have no effect. Eat one of the four giant dots on the screen, and the ghosts don't change even for an instant. Ouch. So look out for that, when you get to level 19 of Ms. Pac-Man.

The gods of pinball fortune, if there are such beings (and clearly there are), have smiled on me once again. Not only did I win a tournament and a league this year, but now I've won...

wait for it...

my very own pinball machine.

Ridiculous, but true. At the pinball league party last night, everybody who played during the past year got an entry into the raffle for a 1979 Bally Star Trek. Improbably my 2-in-82 shot came in... the game is now mine.

I still have to move it out of the Schobers' basement, and somehow figure out where to best squeeze it into my apartment. (Aside: Kimberly is the best wife in the world for allowing this. When I told her, she said, "I can't deny you a pinball machine," while laughing hysterically. Kimberly, I love you.)

And even after I do that, it needs a little bit of work... there are some lights that won't come on, and some... capacitors? that are blown? Or something? That's the other thing; I know a lot about software, but very little about electronics. So taking care of my own game is going to be a bit of an education. But, of course, I'm really looking forward to it.

MY OWN PINBALL!!! WOO-HOO!!!

Star Trek, by the way, is one of the earlier "solid state" games. That is, rather than being entirely electromechanical like older games with scoring reels (generally pre-1977), it's controlled electronically by chips and transistors and software, and the scoring displays are electronic (but numerical-only). So, there's a bit of boring history for you.

It's bad enough that, every time I pop in an action movie, and some pinball machines show up in the background, they inevitably get smashed. I'm all, "No, Jackie Chan, don't throw that guy into the pinballs!" but he does anyway.

It's bad enough that I have to watch David Letterman drop a vintage Spider-Man machine off a roof on the Late Show, to see what happens when it gets smashed.

But now, the final straw: I have to look at photos of a flood-ravaged PAPA headquarters.

Heartbreaking. Turns out those things don't float all that well. And they really, really don't respond well to water.

We're having the FSPA party today, so I'll definitely be pouring some malted beverage out on the curb for PAPA.

Some of the old games I saw at PAPA were truly hilarious. It's pretty clear which target demographic the designers are shooting for -- socially maladjusted adolescent boys -- once you see the overriding of theme of most of these games, which tends to be: hot women in bikinis show up in the strangest places.

Nope, couldn't quite crack the playoff barrier at PAPA.

Honestly, the tournament format doesn't favor the James style of play, which is to have a couple really great games and then three not-so-great ones. At PAPA, one bad game out of five will kill an individual entry, and with the level of competition present, I just don't have the consistency to score high enough.

The second-highest score on Addams out of 228 plays, however, is more than a moral victory. I'm definitely happy with that. And the one player who beat me, Brian Dominy, is a good friend of mine; we used to meet up every weekend in Atlanta back in the day for pinball. And he's a very good player.

Overall, I had a great time in Pittsburgh. I almost had more fun playing a lot of the games in the practice bank, many of which I hadn't seen in years, if at all. I've got some great pictures of old backglasses (women in bikinis pop up in the strangest of places), as well as from the great Steelers-Raiders game yesterday, which I did manage to score a ticket to.

Hopefully, later this week, once all the Yuengling is out of my system, I can post some of the better photos.

I just got a message from James in Pittsburgh. Sounds like he's having a good time, but apparently his pinball showing left something to be desired; at 23 out of 60, he will not be progressing to the finals, alas. This, even though he scored the second-highest score in The Addams Family!

Naturally, we demand a recount. However, in the meantime we hope that on James's return we will be regailed with accounts of what, exactly, goes on at a pinball tournament anyway. 'Cause I sure don't know. Probably just a bunch of dorks.

It's snap-decision travel time! This weekend, I'm making a quick getaway from Washington and heading for Pittsburgh, home of PAPA. PAPA, of course, being the Professional Amateur Pinball Association's World Pinball Championships.

Yes! This year, after a six-year absence, the annual Pinburgh contest has become PAPA 7, and hundreds (yes, hundreds) of people will flock to the Steel City to compete in three divisions, as well as in mini-tournaments such as One-Handed and Split-Flipper. Fun!

I, oddly enough, seem to be on a pinball roll lately. First I won the P3 Tournament in Earlington, Pa last July. Then, a couple weeks ago, I shocked the local pinball community (and myself) by taking home first place in the John's Place League of the Free State Pinball Association. (I don't think it made the papers.)

Improbably, I somehow managed to squeak out a victory against my good friend Sgt. Chris Newsom, who not only owns all the machines we played in the playoffs, but is a top A-division player in his own right. Previously, I had finished second or third to Chris in the playoffs four times. In fact, I think Chris had finished as the top champion in every season he's played in any league, until I pulled off the upset.

My victory does have a bit of an asterisk to it, because in our first game of Star Trek:TNG, Chris was well on his way to crushing me on the first ball when the machine power-cycled for no reason. That meant the game didn't count and we had to play again; I still played lousy, but Chris somehow managed to undercut me. I had taken first on the first two games I played, both on old favorite World Cup Soccer, and finished just well enough on the last game, Addams Family, to hold on for the victory.

So why all the en fuegoness? I have to attribute it to better catching, which I've been working on more lately. By trapping the ball, rather than just trying to hit it on-the-fly all the time, I've been able to more easily set up good shots and keep the ball under control. Plus, by playing in leagues, I've also gotten a lot better at adapting to the nuances of different machines. It's kind of like sight reading music; the more you work in unfamiliar territory, the quicker you become to adapt.

So anyway, the plan is to try to ride my recent wave of success into the B Division playoffs at PAPA 7. I plan on arriving in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning; you should be able to track my scores via the PAPA web page. Last time I played Pinburgh, in 2002, I finished about in the middle of the pack in the B division, and didn't qualify. This time I'm hoping to at least make the playoff round.

Will James make the playoffs? (And, if not, will he be able to scalp a ticket to the Steelers-Raiders game on Sunday afternoon?) Stay tuned!!!

Well, I'm no Tommy. But I do love pinball, as everybody knows.

I started playing pinball in the video arcade at Holiday Village mall in Great Falls, Montana, as a kid, playing '80s classics like Eight Ball Deluxe. A few years later, I found I could score high enough for free games on Steve Ritchie classics like Black Knight 2000, Terminator 2, and Rollergames (based on the show!). The lure of free games totally hooked me, and my high school and college years coincided with the Golden Age of Bally/Williams, a Chicago company that led the field (and is now, sadly, no longer producing pinball games, in favor of slot machines... yecch).

Wasting my youth on the silver ball has, predictably, totally paid off, as I managed to pick up a tournament win last Saturday. In honor of that, here are my top 5 pinball games of all time. These are the games that, assuming they're working, I wouldn't hesitate to drop some coins in for the express purpose of some nostalgic silverball goodness.

What a crazy weekend. First, I won a pinball tournament in Earlington, Pennsylvania. It was a lot of fun; I put up almost 2 billion points on Theater of Magic to take the top prize, and earlier had great scores on Whitewater and Addams Family to advance in the playoffs.

Then, I did unusually well gambling in Atlantic City., thanks in part to one of those bizarre Excalibur/Krispy Kreme Memorial Craps Runs that happen now and then. I hit seven or eight points in a row while shooting at a $10 table and walked away with a tidy profit. After some celebratory sushi, I decided to test a new frontier in hubris: the green chip ($25) blackjack table. And it worked out! I managed to walk away with my first-ever purple ($500) chip.

So, hooray for casino gambling, where you can always expect to win lots of money!

Apparently I've lost my touch since yesterday, because today it took me five tries (at 6 pesos per attempt) before I finally edged out the factory-set high score of 310,000 (damn you, 'SS2', whoever you are). In my defense, the scope was off by a half-inch and occasionally it jumped to random parts of the screen. I'm still fairly confident at least that nobody in Mexico can beat my score, and most tourists won't ever find that mall.

So, you can rest easy. I am still the Ultimate International Sniper. Huzzah.

Umm, that's all I wanted to say. Not that exciting really. I'd better spice things up: Bush is a fascist. Hah! Mission accomplished.*

*note: this joke is too subtle.

As a seasoned world traveller, I like to leave my mark everywhere I go. Since you?re not allowed to carve your name into coral reefs, my preferred method is to get such an obscenely high score in a local arcade?s copy of "Silent Scope 2" that my glorious initials, ALF, will forever grace that town?s machine.

Currently you can view my handiword in Spain, Switzerland, France, and England; or, if like some of our readers, you hate foreign people, check out the Luxor at Las Vegas and see if you can approach 1/3 of my score. (you can?t. I?m that good.)

So today I attempted to make my move at Playa del Carmen in sunny Mexico. The game was going great; I had many head hits and had not missed a single target in the first two rounds. In the third round, I hit the first four guys easily enough. From then on, everything would be icing on the cake. As the fifth assassin sped towards me on his skis, I took aim and fired, hitting him -- and so astounding the machine with my skills that it went blank. "IO Failure." Damn.

Next time, Mexico. Next time.

Some NYU graduate students have turned New York City into a big Pac-Man board. Four players take on the role of ghosts, and one is Pac-Man:

It's a little game they like to call Pac-Manhattan. Looks like fun.

Mario Party really has it in for me. I?m not sure if it?s just our Mario Party, or if it?s all Mario Parties, but I?m definitely sensing some hostility. I have played as Player 1, and I have played as Player 2. I have played as Toad, and as Yoshi. It doesn?t matter. Always with the hate. What did I ever do to you, Mario Party? Granted, I proclaimed (loudly and frequently) that version 3 was inferior to version 2, and I spurned your fourth version altogether. But through our ups and downs, I always loved you! So why does someone always have to land on Tweester when I?m about to reach the star? And why, even if James has twice as much coin as I have, and more stars than the rest of us combined, do the CPU players always choose me to duel, or to steal stuff from? At least when I get my ass kicked at Kart I know it?s because I lack the basic motor skills needed to keep from steering my little kart into the water (or the lava, or the giant chasm). But this, it?s just mean.

And for some reason, I just keep coming back for more.