Baltimore Jones
New member
- Jul 25, 2013
- 51
- 0
Since moving to San Francisco 3 months ago, I've wanted to visit the nearby Pacific Pinball Museum. I finally got around to it this weekend. I'm used to having a car and would have likely gone much sooner if I had one here, but I don't and so I had to be a big boy and take the train and bus all by myself (more complicated than it sounds).
The area that it's in is the main street of a nice suburban neighborhood. They don't serve food or drinks (vending machines), but there are some places to eat nearby and you are welcome to come and go after paying the $15 admission.
The place is set up with different rooms roughly representing different eras. The first large room has 20+ playable pins from the '40s-'60s with some brief written histories, as well as some older non-playable stuff. Then there are a couple of rooms with '80s-early-'90s games that are a bit more advanced but still pre-DMD, and then a more DMD focused room. There are also some random rooms with random machines; the layout isn't perfect!
Overall I had fun, as of course would be the case when going somewhere with 100+ pinball machines on free play. The one complaint I have is that it's too loud. There are era-appropriate jukeboxes in every room, also on freeplay, but this can present a bit of a problem with noise.
The DMD room in particular was problematic. You can hear almost nothing from the machine you're playing in that room. I don't know if it's the layout (it's a relatively small and enclosed room) or the jukebox or what, but it's not good. TAF wasn't as much of a joy to play as it should have been because I could barely hear anything! If I didn't know what I was supposed to be hearing during the multiball buildup, I wouldn't have gotten anything at all out of it. So I got basically nothing at all out of the machines in that room that I wasn't already familiar with.
"Nothing" is an overstatement of course, but to me the sound is such an important piece of DMD pinball games (and many prior to DMD); it tends to be where most of my pinball nostalgia comes from. It's a shame to not be able to hear anything from a machine.
In a way this is ok, because most of these machines I'll get to play on TPA at some point where I can enjoy the sound without interference to my heart's content. Definitely looking forward to an eventual TPA release of Road Show, which I played for the first time there.
Interestingly, one of the better times I had there was with Lethal Weapon 3 just because it was in an isolated and quiet room where I could hear and see everything that was going on.
Also, CFTBL's DMD was broken! Big disappointment...
The area that it's in is the main street of a nice suburban neighborhood. They don't serve food or drinks (vending machines), but there are some places to eat nearby and you are welcome to come and go after paying the $15 admission.
The place is set up with different rooms roughly representing different eras. The first large room has 20+ playable pins from the '40s-'60s with some brief written histories, as well as some older non-playable stuff. Then there are a couple of rooms with '80s-early-'90s games that are a bit more advanced but still pre-DMD, and then a more DMD focused room. There are also some random rooms with random machines; the layout isn't perfect!
Overall I had fun, as of course would be the case when going somewhere with 100+ pinball machines on free play. The one complaint I have is that it's too loud. There are era-appropriate jukeboxes in every room, also on freeplay, but this can present a bit of a problem with noise.
The DMD room in particular was problematic. You can hear almost nothing from the machine you're playing in that room. I don't know if it's the layout (it's a relatively small and enclosed room) or the jukebox or what, but it's not good. TAF wasn't as much of a joy to play as it should have been because I could barely hear anything! If I didn't know what I was supposed to be hearing during the multiball buildup, I wouldn't have gotten anything at all out of it. So I got basically nothing at all out of the machines in that room that I wasn't already familiar with.
"Nothing" is an overstatement of course, but to me the sound is such an important piece of DMD pinball games (and many prior to DMD); it tends to be where most of my pinball nostalgia comes from. It's a shame to not be able to hear anything from a machine.
In a way this is ok, because most of these machines I'll get to play on TPA at some point where I can enjoy the sound without interference to my heart's content. Definitely looking forward to an eventual TPA release of Road Show, which I played for the first time there.
Interestingly, one of the better times I had there was with Lethal Weapon 3 just because it was in an isolated and quiet room where I could hear and see everything that was going on.
Also, CFTBL's DMD was broken! Big disappointment...
