It's not Pachinko: The classic silver ball pinball machines are all but extinct, save for a few machines here and there and new Virtual Pinball machines being pushed out here and there. But there is still a place for the original machines here with Einstein and Pencil Shavings seeking out the machines, wherever they may be.
The irony of the thing, a pinball machine is not unlike a gravesite. You've got the headstone, and you've got the plot, and inside the coffin-like machine, you've got the heart of the matter: wires, lights, buzzers, solenoids, and the odd smell that of warm electric circuits and wood. A smell that would remind you of a basement.
Reviews & Other Stuff:
Pinball Arcade Spring 2012
Pinball Hall of Fame: Gottlieb Winter 2012
Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection
Pinball FX2 DLC: Ms 'Splosion Man, Sorcerer's Lair, Paranormal
Pinball FX 2: Epic Quest
Visual Pinball: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3
Pinball FX2 Marvel Collection:
Blade, Iron Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, Wolverine, The Fantastic Four, Captain America
Vengeance & Virtue
Below: Ghostrider, not featuring Nicolas Cage
Above: Mars Below: Sorcerer's Lair
Below: Make Mine Marvel
Above: Centaur Below: Metallica's table
February 5 2012: Zen Pinball & Pinball FX2 are getting yet another expansion, this time in the form of a RPP, a Role Playing Pinball title called Epic Quest. Check out the video, and expect the game to drop sometime in February:
December 24 2011: Pinball Arcade is a new entry into pinball emulation, and they look to mean business. Created by the guys behind the Williams Collection, they are bringing dozens of tables to anything that plays games. Some entries are: Harley Davidson, Black Hole, Ripley's Believe It or Not, Dr. Dude, and more are planned every month starting in January 2012. They are also working on other licenses, including "90% of the Top 40 tables of all time."
December 16 2011: Anchorage, Alaska, home of snow, ice, the midnight sun, Eskimos, and.. pinball? Kato's Kave brings you those arcade memories. Check out the link for the article in the Anchorage Press. Also, we're checking out the new Pinball FX2 Marvel set, Vengeance and Virtue on the XBLA and PSN.
December 7 2011: National Pinball Museum is now located in Baltimore, Maryland. They've got 200 machines on display, and 40 tables are playable. Sounds cool if your in the area.
December 6 2011: Pinball FX2's final Vengeance & Virtue table has been announced. Joining Ghostrider, Moon Knight, and X-Men will be Thor. The tables will release for $10 the week of December 12th 2011. Sold!
November 14 2011: Jersey Jack Pinball and Rock Fantasy are two of the sponsors of the 2011 Washington Heights Pinball Open at Le Cheile in New York City.
November 12 2011: Marvel Pinball's Vengeance & Virtue list of tables grows larger. So far we have X-Men, Ghost Rider, and now, the just-announced Moon Knight. I am not familiar with Moon Knight at all, but the table looks good (below).
August 9 2011: Jersey Jack Pinball posted a video of "whitewood shooting," a WIP video of how the table is coming along. We've linked the video to the right. We also stumbled upon this awesome story at Hack-A-Day. Building a small pinball table and having it run PinMAME, and to have it come out looking so incredibly cool? Cheers!
July 27 2011: Zen Studios is definitely keeping busy to keep us pinball-files satiated! Recently at ComicCon they announced the Marvel Pinball: Vengeance & Virtue collection, a pack of 4 new tables. So far the one table announced is Ghost Rider- most likely without Nicholas Cage. Thank God.
July 12 2011: Aside from Pinball FX and Zen Pinball carrying the flag for pinball lately, who else is working on pinball tables? Well, there's a new company out there making traditional pinball machines, Jersey Jack Pinball. More specifically, Jersey Jack is working on a machine based on The Wizard of Oz, as seen from Pinball News (pinballnews.com.) I was actually surprised that a license that has been around for quite some time, the Land of Oz has never been the subject of a pinball machine. Check the above links to check out the news & progress of The Wizard of Oz.
July 10 2011: Zen Studios announced the next pinball table to be released will be Ms 'Splosion Man, based on the upcoming sequel to the popular 'Splosion Man (available now on XBLA.)
July 1 2011: Our Marvel Pinball Collection for Pinball FX2 and Marvel Collection on PSN is now up! Before you read it, you should probably know that we're going to tell you to buy all of the tables.
April 19 2011: The newest Pinball FX2 table is out as of today, and it's Mars. Looks pretty sweet, and it's currently on my 360 HDD (only $3.) Looks to be a good multi-level table with lots of animations and a few levels of playfield. Nice. Also, on PS3's Zen Pinball, the Sorcerer's Lair table is now out, with some hidden tables and a backglass portion of the table. Am I drooling? Sorry... Some pinball love coming down the pike, and a lot more on the way according to Zen Studios. What can I say but.. Awesome!
September 29 2010: Pinball FX2 coming this October to the XBox Live Arcade as part of the XBLA Game Feast 2010! Check our revised Pinball FX review for the details! Each new table will be available individually, and the old tables get graphical upgrades and more achievements for the older Pinball FX tables! Count us in!
August 4 2010: There are still tables coming out for Zen Pinball, in case you haven't noticed. The PS3 version, which dropped May 2009, has received 5 add-ons: Ninja Gaiden Sigma Black, Earth Defense, Excalibur, and most recently Mars (July 2010), all in the 2010 calendar year, not to mention the Street Figher 2 table and its expansion. The other tables, Shaman, Tesla, El Derado and V12, have already been released as a $9.99 package over the PSN (I think it's a $9.99 package on PSN). The World's News Team has been slacking, so I don't fekkin' know. Great news, right?
November 15 2010: Pinball FX 2 has been out for just a short time, and it's already slated for 4 new tables for DLC! The Marvel franchises are getting some love from Zen Studios, and it looks like their handiwork will be bringing a good amount of pinball goodness in December 2010, and already is planning more tables for 2011. Awesome! Wesley Snipes made a good Blade, but the comic artwork is just that much more sinister.
November 3 2010: After being delayed a couple of weeks, Pinball FX 2 landed on October 27th on the XBox Live Arcade. Was it worth the extra wait? Definitely. As one of the community of pinball players out there who has neither the money nor the room for a real pinball machine, I have to say it's great to have more tables brought to us in the virtual arena. (continued...)
October 12, 2009: Some more Pinball Gravedigging. The webs are filled with pinball stuff, and we're culling some of our favorites here at the Four Tokens Media Arcade. Way back when, I found a machine called Centaur II, in the basement of a ski lodge somewhere in Lake Placid, New York. I played it for a couple of hours on 50 cents, as my buddies proceeded to trash the room, the bathroom, run around outside, break stuff, pretty much everything teen hoodlums would do. Except me. I was hunched over the machine, listening to the Centaur's voice and the click of the flippers, and the smell of wires and pinball case mixing together. Until the flipper took off and flipped onto the playfield. Game over. It's pretty much the same as Centaur, but it looks a bit more flashy (in black, white, and.. pink?) :
Of course, what pinball player hasn't played and wanted to own The Addams Family pinball machine? I'm sure they are out there, but I don't know where they are. I found one of these things in the basement of an old mall in Middletown, New York, called the Orange Plaza. It has since become some weird Wal*Mart with a mall built underneath it. But it used to be a two-level mall, with two arcades called Just Fun. The lower level had the Addams Family, and the nice guy who ran the place. The upstairs Just Fun had the terrorist guy who was mean to people who wanted to spend money on his machines.
Anyway, the basement Addams Family machine was perfect, you could nudge it a bit, and it would warn you, but you really had to abuse it to get the thing to tilt. As I played, I kept getting the Bear Kick (heading up the center ramp which cut left, and dropped into the Thing Flips flipper), and getting more and more windows in the Addams Mansion lit up. Quick Multiball. The Mamushka. The I Never Get Any Points During the Gosh-Darned Raise The Dead bonus round. Then I lit the Tour the Mansion, after all windows were cleared. I check the score, it was 1,500,000,000 or something crazy like that. So what happens? The ball kicks up and gets stuck on top of the area near the box that holds the hand for Thing. I tell the guy, and he says the machine will reset if he opens it, and I know if I fiddle with the machine it will most likely SLAM TILT, because the ball was wedged in there good. So he opens it, the machine resets, and he gives me 50 cents more to play.
Ok, what are the chances of doing that again? Actually, they chances were pretty good. Another hour or so, playing past closing with the Just Fun guy watching, fetching another 1,500,000,000 or something, and finally giving up because I was playing too long, and I was tired. He said "you're done? You've got 4 replays, do you want to play them?" Of course I wanted to, but my fingers would probably not flip past what I had already done, and the marquee was filled with my initials, COR, for all names, Grand Champion and Family Members. This was over ten years ago, and my memory may be fuzzy about the exact details, but to this day I still would love to own one of these machines, it's just that damned fun.
October 7 2009: Where the hell do they keep the pinball machines? Good question. The machines can be found, you just have to be patient, or rich. In this day of online gaming, of XBox 360s and PS3s, they can be easily overlooked or ignored. Maybe at the bus station down the street, or the pool hall stuck into the shopping center, right between Price Chopper and that party store that never seems to be open. Maybe check out a bar, or in the back of what we used to call "arcades", but are now bizarre places where they give out tickets for prizes like stuffed animals and plastic swords. Be warned, the machines in the bars may have the tilt set to super-sensitive, and if there's a female voice in the game, forget it- it'll be turned up to mock you like many women in a bar are most likely to do. That includes Dave & Busters, but at least they have more than one machine, so we can't complain about it. Below is Steve K, owner of the Rock Fantasy & The Orange County Pinball Club in Middletown, New York, and a big-time collector or pinball machines since forever, if not since I've been going to his store (since the early 1990s).
The next place would be at weird shops or music shops or head shops, or, one great location that is all three combined with your toy box and your old porn collection, Rock Fantasy, in Middletown, New York, owned by our old buddy Steve, the guy who got me into that really loud insane heavy metal that annoys so many people, and who also sold me my first and only machine (RIP to a fire!). Steve owns many machines and keeps some at his home and at The Rock Fantasy, open now for over 20 years, awesome! He even has a sort of league that gathers on Thursdays. Apparently, there are many more freaks like me that like to play pinball!
The last place, would be the digital pinball community: PinMAME, Pinball Nirvana, and Future Pinball.. There are people re-creating arcade machines, as well as creating there own machines. There's some really good stuff in there, all you have to do is look, and check the legal disclaimers. And do have patience when you try to install it, it's a pain in the fekkin' ASS, I tell you! But when it works, it's a pinball lover's bastion of hope for the pinball community. But it's a PAIN IN THE ASS!
October 7, 2009: Somebody made a Metallica pinball from a modified Earthshaker pinball machine. Looks pretty cool, although it's most likely a one-of-a-kind, unless somebody in Metallica's camp sees it as a marketing possibility. Furthermore, the machine was apparently commissioned by none other than Mr. James Hetfield, so if you want to play it, you'll probably have to hang with James!
September 14, 2009: Pinball Hall of Fame: William's Collection It's been out on the Wii for some time, now it should be coming to the XBox 360, toting along some extra tables, and an attractive price of $39.99. Apparently it's also coming for the PS3, so we'll be watching the shelves. Sounds good to me. I wonder what they have planned for DLC on this title? Addams Family? Terminator 2? Black Knight 2000? Attack From Mars? Star Trek: TNG? Although considering the licensing of some of the titles, it's not likely.