Houston, TX
Bug Smasher
123 Posts | I went there to the annual show over the weekend, having over 150 dedicated video and pinball games going back to the 1930s (for the latter; most video games were from the classic early 80s period). There were several home consoles (played the 2600 homebrew Lead, which seems cool) as well, along with all kinds of other stuff.
Some of what I played included Tron (both the regular and Discs of), Bubbles (tabletop version?! I'd never seen one!), Defender, Pac-Man for the first time in over 20 years, Reactor, Phoenix, Krull (whoa...movie supposedly wasn't very good, but I made it through all five stages to the point where it started over!), Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Satan's Hollow, the Joust pinball machine, pinball machines of all kinds and ages (the Avatar one's pretty good), some gambling machines (shame, shame! Gives me a taste for what Vegas is like...minus having a damn cup or sack around my neck...if I ever go), home consoles, lotta stuff.
I also played Midnight Magic, my first time playing on an Atari XE ever. Interesting. First time playing the ColecoVision version of Bump 'n Jump too.
It was also nice to be able to buy some stuff, for once: there was a really cool Space Invaders bag that's in my video. I just asked out of curiosity how much it'd be, figuring it'd be like $10-12 or something. Three dollars?! F(*# yeah!
I also got four buttons as well, being the birds that hatch from eggs and the mother ship from Phoenix, the saucer from Asteroids and the one from Space Invaders...50 cents each. I also got Tempest and Discs of Tron t-shirts too 
But so what, enough blabbedy blab, lets get to some pics!
Here's that Bubbles tabletop
Don't think I played High Speed since college...and I know Avatar was a lot more recent than that! Like not even a week ago!
ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Apple II
For the last few years, a local Star Wars group comes in full costume (original Storm Troopers pic didn't come out, but there'll be a link below to another one). Why this Ghost Busters guy was there is beyond me though
The one-armed bandits vs. the two-armed bandit. Winner? Me! Video games are more fun!
Look real closely at the playfield here. Maybe you can't tell by the photo, but it's all FLAT. That's an artificial pinball machine (i. e. computer generated), having dozens of tables on it. I wasn't able to play it though, it was turned off for a while. Maybe next year 
T-shirts, and the Pac-Men monsters and Berzerk robots at left are soap!
YouTube video
Link to a few more images |
