The great-ish midwest pin search

[Blueshirt]

As a local minnesotan, as Farsight started to get me into pinball big (curse you guys!), I feared finding pinball machines would be fruitless and disheartening. Boy, was I wrong. There's a surprising amount of great machines in the twin cities here, and I thought I'd share a few finds with you all. Warning: Big Lists incoming!

Firstly, there's the big ones. There are two big pinball places near here, SS Billiards and Blainbrook Entertainment Center. The former has a rotation of tables, mostly popular and gamers' games. The latter just has tons of tables, and some of my favorite old ones! There's a list below for those curious.

Blainbrook
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Bram Stoker's Dracula
The Getaway: High Speed II
South Park
The Addams Family
Cleopatra
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Solar Ride
Jacks to Open
Royal Flush Deluxe
Lucky Seven
Eight Ball
Counterforce
Devil's Dare
Panthera
Amazing Spider-Man
Superman
Hercules
Big Guns
Medusa
Funhouse
Playboy (Data East)
Comet
Pinbot
The Machine: Bride of Pinbot
Red & Ted's Roadshow
Whirlwind
The Bally Game Show
Mousin' Around
Xenon
High Speed
NBA Fastbreak
Centaur II
Sorcerer
Jungle Lord
Demolition Man
Jurrasic Park
Checkpoint
Big Buck Hunter
James Cameron's Avatar
Tron Legacy
Iron Man
Wheel of Fortune
Eight Ball Deluxe
Spider-Man
Orbitar 1
Strikes 'n' Spares
Lord of the Rings
ACDC Premium

SS Billiards
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Attack from Mars
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Big Bang Bar (Original)
Medieval Madness
Corvette
Taxi
Twilight Zone
Pirates of the Caribbean
Spider-Man
Wheel of Fortune
Family Guy

Some highlights: I absolutely love a lot of the late 80's/early 90's stuff Blainbrook has! They have my all-time favorite machine, Bride of Pinbot, as well as Funhouse, Pinbot, Whirlwind, TAF, Centaur, and more. They have good prices too. For their really old SSes it's only a quarter, 80's to 90's machines are 50 cents, and new Sterns are a dollar. They have some of my favorite Sterns too, with LotR, Spider-Man, Tron Legacy and ACDC (The premium version is incredible!). They also have some great oddities, like Hercules and Orbitar-1. Interesting tables, those! All in great shape and playing more or less like they should, save a couple bubbles in the protective plastic on a couple tables. Great place, tons of tables!

SS, on the other hand, is a smaller place, but packed with gamers games. Tons of great 90's stuff, all on 75 cents to play, more or less. Heck, they have an original big bang bar! Not to mention great tables like AFM (With a colorDMD mod), TZ, MM, CftBL, and Taxi. Apparently they have even more in their rotation, we've yet to go back there actually. Great place though, and they'll be getting a Wizard of Oz when that comes out, so I'm excited.


Beyond that, there's just some little places here and there with a couple tables. A small italian place called DeMori's had a Theatre of Magic me and a friend checked out one night. It's a little broken sometimes (the sensors for multiball etc broke sometimes) but still very playable. That's more than I can say for the Twilight Zone we played tonight at a theatre called Woodbury 10 (iirc?). Broken as heeeeeeck. 6 games for 2 dollars wasn't worth it spitting out 2 balls all the time, for no reason, never sensing power ball, ball getting stuck all the time. What a nightmare. On the other hand the same theatre also had a Scared Stiff in very fine shape that I played an hour of on only 2 dollars. Got so close to monster multiball once, too. We found another TAF at a little roller rink near here, and nicely the janitor let us in when they were closed to throw some balls around. Very good shape, aside from a broken tilt. Which we abused the whole time. Another theater near here has Iron Man (drain monster! SO hard), 24 (surprisingly fun) and Corvette, which I didn't play. And Another nice surprise was the local bowling alley, which had a nice-playing Spider-Man (one of my favorite Sterns) and Monopoly, which I, again, didn't play.

All in all not a bad little local haul as far as table variety goes. Also, I'd post pics if my phone had a camera. Yes, it's very, very ghetto.

 

[SKILL_SHOT]

Wow a BIG GUNS, mine was from minnesota.

 

[Blueshirt]

Yeah, Bug Guns is an interesting machine, definitely. Those launchers make things very exciting.

 

[Tartpop]

Hi! I'm a Minnesotan too. I've played that TZ in woodbury, frustrating!

Which theater has 24? I've only ever seen that machine at an airport once.

Blainbrook is an absolute blast. I took my kids a few weeks ago, early on a Sunday. The pinball room was dark, so i asked at the desk. She said she'd hit the breakers, and that we could turn the machines on as we wanted to play them. We were the only ones there for the first two hours, and it was a real treat being able to clearly hear each machine with very little competing noise. I must have played Roadshow ten times.

According to the Pinside map, there is a place near me in Little Canada, Rocco's Pizza, that has 4 machines, Royal Rumble, Lethal Weapon 3, No Good Gophers and Gladiators. I haven't been there yet, but maybe tonight's the night.

 

[Blueshirt]

24 is at Marcus Cinema Oakdale. At least, it was last time me and my buddies were there (we went to see Brave). It's a surprisingly fun table, and MUCH less frustrating than the Iron Man next to it.

And yeah, that TZ we saw as we were going in to see Wreck-It Ralph (cute movie, btw) and I was like AW YEAH TWILIGHT ZONE. Then we actually played it. Or tried to. What a headache. The Scared Stiff was thankfully in great condition. Me and my pals go to Blainbrook a lot, since one of 'em's a big Lawlor fan and they have a lotta older machines I like, plus my favorite Sterns.

 

[Tartpop]

Rocco's was pretty great. In addition to the machines i mentioned, they also have Red & Ted's Roadshow. All five machines have very clean playfields & everything seems to work. It's a tiny place, take out & delivery only, basically a room with 5 pins, two drink coolers and the take out window. West on the Lil' Canada Road exit off the 35E, only 2 blocks from the exit. It's gonna be hard to resist popping in for a couple games of roadshow any time i run an errand now.

 

[Blueshirt]

Well, after returning to the theatre in Woodbury to see skyfall (great flick btw), it seems they have replaced a perfectly working Scared Stiff with a MOSTLY working Lord of the Rings. Why they didn't replace the broken as heck TZ is beyond me... but whatever. I say mostly working because there's 2 bad parts on it. The first is the ball sensor on the left kickout near the flipper doesn't work most of the time, so you have to wait for ball search for your ball. The other bad (and major) problem is that the ball gets stuck on the pathway into the left tower a LOT. Ball search doesn't always save it and I titlted the machine a lot last night and lost many a game because of it... But at the very least it was cheap. 50c or 5/2.00 is the best price in town I've seen on a LotR. So at least it's cheap practice.