Midwest Gaming Classic

[brakel]

Here's my overview of the tables. I covered the number and general selection of machines. Now for some specifics. First, the plunger is generally a good place to rest your cane. Becky and I could only attend on Saturday but would have anyway had we had a choice. Sunday was half price and kids free. I can't imagine how crowded it was on Sunday. As it was on Saturday if more than one person was waiting for a machine or watching someone play, it would cause gridlock and no one could get around them. The machines were lined up about two inches apart. This makes nudging next to impossible. Through all of this mess there was one five year old kid, one of the few kids that I saw, running around making a complete nuisance of himself. While I was playing STTNG he ran up and started "shooting" with the launch trigger, knocking over my cane which hit me in the sac on its way down. His Dad, I hope, finally scooped him up and took him out of the pinball area.

General condition of the tables were excellent. I didn't play any tables that had anything broken and no obvious bulbs missing or burned out. There were only two machines that were broken. An old EM wasn't powered up and a newer table refused to serve up a ball into the launch. Fun House was ever so slightly leaning to the right but it didn't make any shots more difficult. Becky said that Pinbot had a weak plunger making it impossible to hit the highest point skill shot out of the plunger. They had several staff working the floor but they should have given each of them a box of sanitizer wipes and had them wiping down the machines. Too many sticky buttons.

One thing that I noticed playing some of the real machines that are in TPA is that dead flipper passes and post passes are easier in TPA. I just wasn't getting big bounces off the flippers unless the ball was really moving fast. Generally I'd say that the ball moves slower generally in real life than on TPA. On the real tables I found that trapping the ball was much easier than TPA mostly because the ball was usually moving slower. The exception to this was STTNG. I was getting good dead flipper passes and it was really hard to trap the ball.

I really did enjoy playing my tour of TPA tables and I am still impressed with what FarSight has done with TPA. There may be a bug list as long as my waist line but when I walk up to a STTNG never having played a real machine before and I can play like I already know the game, well that just speaks for itself.

 

[Jeff Strong]

Thanks for that, Brakel. I enjoyed your detailed writeup.

I noticed that Pinball News added more stuff and pictures to their article. Were you able to try the Cactus Canyon Continued that was there? Sounds like they were selling upgrade kits for it too.

http://www.pinballnews.com/shows/mgc2013/index.html

 

[brakel]

Thanks for that, Brakel. I enjoyed your detailed writeup.

I noticed that Pinball News added more stuff and pictures to their article. Were you able to try the Cactus Canyon Continued that was there? Sounds like they were selling upgrade kits for it too.

http://www.pinballnews.com/shows/mgc2013/index.html

No, when I got to the room with Cactus Canyon update I couldn't even get into the room. I was able to get a shot of the zombie table though. It would have been cool to get to play some of these but I could have used up all my time there waiting and not gotten a chance to play.

 

[Bonzo]

Good read. Thank you for sharing.

 

[Crawley]

I spent awhile in the room with the Cactus Canyon Continued table - going in twice. I've only played the PA version of it, and love it, so for me to see and play Continued was my show highlight. The second time I went in it was really slow there so I got to play it and speak with the programmer (Eric?) for awhile about what he did with the table. He was also kind enough to set up the triggers for a few of the Continued modes so I could try them. So what are those extra modes? This is what I remember:

Super Skill Shot: Hold down the left flipper button a which sets up the Super Skill Shot. The values one the spinner rewards change to offer much higher rewards than they normally do. Then, depending on the reward that gets selected from the spinner, you have to make the lit shot on the table. There's a short time limit so you basically have to make the shot right as the ball comes to the flipper. It's also an all-or-nothing shot. So if you miss (which I did) you get nothing.

Cowboys vs Aliens: He set this up for me to trigger so not sure how you go about enabling it during the normal game. But all I had to do was shoot the bar to start the mode. On the DMD the alien ship from Mars Attacks (where Eric took it from) flys in with the "Cowboys vs Aliens" text on the screen. The alien ship then starts to hover on one of the sides of the DMD and the lane its hovering over is lit up. You have a short period of time to make the lit lane shot before the ship moves to a new spot lighting that lane. Each time you make the lit lane the ship gets damaged.

After shooting down the alien ship the aliens pop up (using the yellow pop-up targets) and you need to hit those targets next.

I was able to damage the alien ship a few times but not enough to trigger the shooting aliens part so not sure if that was a multiball or not. I think Eric said two targets pop up at a time.

Last Call: If you score a match after you're game has ended Last Call goes off and it's a 30 second multiball where you just shoot anything and everything. I had actually gotten the match on my game but was asking Eric for the details on it and by the time we were done talking it timed out on me. So I didn't actually get to do it.

Midnight Madness Mode: This is another mode Eric triggered for me. I hadn't realized some other pinball machines have this special mode that triggers exactly at Midnight. From what I recall the entire table goes dark except for one lit target. When you hit that target another one lites up. You have to keep hitting the lit targets to light up the entire table. When you do that a 60 second multi-ball session triggers where all targets are an insane amount of points. I was able to trigger the multi-ball. Eric was right warning me that the table would go crazy because that's just what happened. 4-ball multiball, lights flashing all over the place, audio going crazy. It was loads of fun. And thankfully there was a bug where the multi-ball didn't end at 60 seconds. I think I played that way for about 2 minutes or so to get up to a billion points and then just let the balls drain which eventually ended the mode.

Those were the modes I tried but I know there were a few others. Some mode with the beer mug which I didn't see and I didn't see the Bionic Bart mode but heard him describing it to some other players - too complicated for me to remember much of it.

A few neat tibits on creating the Continued features was that Eric wanted these extra modes with some of the original voice actors. One of them was one of the original people that worked on the table. But he, nor the two other project members, would give their blessing on using the voice so had to do without that voice. However Eric was able to contact the voice actor that did the Mayor. He was contracted for his work so Eric called him up, told him about what he was doing, and the guy was gun-ho about providing lines. The voice actor apparently didn't want anything for providing his voice but Eric gave him $100 and he now has a bunch of new dialogue for the Mayor which is seamless.

Even though I had a great time at this show, for me, this was my best take away from it.

 

[smbhax]

Man, that Midnight Madness mode sounds awesome. Now I wanna know what other tables have a midnight mode!

 

[brakel]

Nice, thanks Crawley! I appreciate the write-up on that. My time was so limited I couldn't even see it.

 

[shutyertrap]

Man, that Midnight Madness mode sounds awesome. Now I wanna know what other tables have a midnight mode!

I can't remember which table (I'm thinking it was MM), but I had one do it to me while playing TPA, and it was fun! So play TPA at midnight!

 

[smbhax]

You would kind of think Funhouse would...

EDIT: Oh and Theater of Magic!

 

[Kolchak357]

I played a midnight madness on Junkyard once. But it wasn't midnight. I guess the clock wasn't set right. But I'm not complaining. It was crazy fun.

 

[SKILL_SHOT]

Can you set the clock on PS3 to midnight to get this to work?

 

[brakel]

It seems like my daughter and I would have found midnight mode naturally if the PS3 clock would trigger it. 11pm - 1am is kind of our sweet spot for playing TPA on Friday and Saturday nights.

 

[mudtoe]

I didn't get a chance to play the modded Cactus Canyon but I was able to watch a talented kid play it for about 5 minutes, including a "drunk multiball" option (!!!) which reversed the flipper buttons and looked awesome.

It was a great show, if more than a bit overcrowded. Played my second real AFM (in excellent condition and I will try to own a real one someday), a nice Centaur, a very rough Whirlwind and a few others.