Houston, TX
Bug Smasher
123 Posts | Well I was only able to go to Saturday's show, but I still made it, at least 
Several games weren't working (always happens) and ones that I were really looking forward to aren't here, namely Death Race and Computer Space, dammit. This was the biggest amount of 'no shows' I've seen. Sure, every year a few can't make it, but there were over a dozen when I went through like half the list as a review. Dunno what was up with that, but oh well.
A few highlights (to me, anyway) was Baby Pac-Man, along with spending some time on home stuff, like the Vectrex (I'd never seen the Sean Kelly multicart before), Atari 7800, 5200 and 2600 homebrews. Super Pac-Man follows pretty closely to the real thing, as my patterns for the original work, and Beef Drop is good too for the 5200, as is Lady Bug for the 2600. That was a first for all of those for me, along with Tempest 5200.
Unfortunately the Batman pinball machine...ugh. I walked away from a game; it was too easy and taking waaaaaay too long. I'm starting to NOT feel sorry for Stern any more, being the last pinball machine company left, their new machines are costing nearly $5000 each, which a lot of arcade owners don't want to risk spending that much on a game that might not work out, and THEN you have a game that won't make much money because it doesn't get a lot of play because it's too easy? Gads, now I see why this older woman's game was taking so long. Least it's pretty neat to look at, with there being a long-assed crane that the Sandman operates who blocks your shots and all, and a cannister at one point will swing around and reveal the Joker. Pretty wicked, but a game goes on for far too long. I just LET some guy take over my game.
Better is some NBA game one (forget the name), where, instead of just shooting your ball up a ramp, it has to go into a basket! Now that's pretty spiffy. I think that came out in the 90s or something but I hadn't played it before, along with the Star Trek: Voyager video game. I saw that several years ago at a movie theatre and thought 'what the hell is this?' Wow, Trek gets gnarly! An FPS gun game with the Trek enemy Borg overrunning everything. If the polygon graphics weren't so dated I think I'd have nightmares about it. The Borg are violent as hell and slash your ass to pieces. Now I can see why people kept on hogging it all day, it's a fierce quarter sucker. I kept on hitting the continue button, but then, it was late anyway...plus anyone could have joined in as a second player.
Well enough talk, pics!
The brand new Avatar machine...you can't tell by the photo, but the backglass has a kind of 3-D effect
"Batman FOREVER" indeed...
I'm no pinball expert, but I had never seen Arena before...neat game
"I'm no expert, part 2", totally forgetting there had ever been a Star Trek pinball game (when the movie came out; note the blue uniforms that were never used again since no one liked them)
Reeeeeeeal old pinballs
A multicade-type game with...a Multicade Ms. Pac-Man (a lot of the time the screen was displayed upside-down on that one; note there's an error message on it  )
Screwed display on Tempest, other two seemed to work fine
Some home stuff: Commodore, Colecovisions, Atari XE next to that, Genesis next to that (probably can't be seen, which is going from right to left, by the way)
Guy's big-assed Tron collection...he needs to be killed, he's always winning game tournaments...brought home another two trophies over the weekend too!
I'll add my video once I put in the audio for it (which the quality won't be good, but oh well. All I have is a digital recorder for that. I got an external microphone several months ago and it's good for cutting down on crap, like wind. Unfortunately I had it set on high, rather than low, which is good for dictation and all, NOT when recording stuff all around you. Dammit...)
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