Go to the UK Pinball Party website and look at the image at the top of the page. That's me!
Blue tshirt, glasses? Wow you're a lot younger than me.
So if it's too far, are you coming instead to the NLP show in Manchester on 10-11 October?
were you there when Andy took people upstairs to view what's done on Alien?
I liked it - the whole colour scheme of the cabinet was basically black (or star scape) but with a ghostly green on the side for the alien head thing, or on the backglass for the egg thing.
We got to see a video of the video-pinball gameplay of Alien, which is a 4 flipper game with lots of ramps and a screen in the playfield. We saw videos showing a choice at the start between playing Alien or Aliens; we saw various versions of the egg-shape bumper-covers, and we saw a mother-alien model that will sit top and centre and ....... and we heard of some other toys like a xenomorph head thing which apparently opens its jaw and grabs the ball with a sticky-out inner mouth magnet bit, and a space jockey thing in the left outlane that may allow a way back into the game. The general feedback in the room was positive, so fingers crossed for a popular game at the end of the day when it gets released. I don't know when that will be, but I'm sure he will get plenty of interest.
Seeing the video emulation of the game made me wonder why / if manufacturers will one day release games digitally, as Pinball Arcade now does, but at the same time as, or before, the physical machine. If I was Gary Stern, I'd be looking at the economics of releasing the digital version at the same time, of TWD or WWE or Kiss or whatever. I'd figure that the 10,000 (or whatever) copies I'd sell at £3 each may not make me a lot of money, but would be seen by a crapload of people who would then be interested to see the real game if they encountered one. Most of these people could never afford a real £6K new game, so I don't believe (as Gary Flower said that Gary Stern told him, in answer to the same question) that it would reduce the number of games sold.
But that's just my opinion. Maybe operators don't want people playing who already learned the rules while playing on their phones sitting on the sofa. But we will never know if a pinball-arcade-type version, released in sync with a real full size game, would drive sales down or up until someone sticks their neck out and tries it.
Anyway. A few pics of this place: