Tourney Tomorrow At Flippers in NC

[Robert Hunt]

www.flippersarcade.com

Just happened to wander into Flippers Variety & Arcade in Grandy, North Carolina (wink wink) to find the place mostly empty of players (4 or so) but full of gleaming pinball machines. Then I noticed that nearly every machine in the place had a credit in it, just waiting for me! After five free games (on Cactus Canyon, Stern's Rolling Stones, ST:TNG, Medieval Madness, and Lord of the Rings) I pointed out the bounty to someone passing by and they told me it's a shakedown for the tournament tomorrow!

It turns out that Flippers has two tourney's every year and the Spring version is tomorrow. The ten tables in play for your twenty bucks are as follows:

Black Rose
Tales of the Arabian Nights
The Addams Family
TRON:Legacy
The Avengers
X-Men
Creature From the Black Lagoon
Batman (Stern)
The Shadow (Gotta love it!)
and...
Cyclone

I haven't played them all yet, but I will before the night is over. I gotta be ready for tomorrow!

 

[Pinballwiz45b]

I can't believe they chose TotAN. Hopefully they don't know about the Harem-Genie bug. That's why it's not a good idea to choose this game for a tournament.

 

[Robert Hunt]

Played in the tournament and had a blast, but I somehow failed to qualify! I'll confess to not trying too hard; I quit trying to improve my scores just a little after 4pm in deference to folks closer to the bubble for instance, but by way of further confession, I doubt that any effort by me on Saturday would have lifted me into the top half of that field. There were no TOP TOP guys, but there were plenty of seriously strong league types.

I enjoyed every machine in the tournament, and was able to play them all as much as I wanted the night before, so I was at least familiar with all of the games by Saturday. I remember beating the heck out of the crane on Batman for instance, and putting up a decent score on that machine in particular, making what would happen to me when I finally played it during the tournament so hard to swallow.

Earlier in the day I had gotten in a short line to play Batman, but after about fifteen minutes (!!) I realized that the guy playing was still on his first ball! I had no choice but to get out of that line and play something else. So it got to be around 3 o'clock and I still hadn't played Batman, and I had no choice but to get in line behind two strong players and wait for each to finish so I could get my turn. A half hour later and I was pulling the plunger. First ball: instant drain. The same thing with the second ball! My score sat at about 2 million, where the night before I had no trouble scoring fifty million! Third ball: Bang, bang, drain! The game had taken about a minute! I was so dejected I couldn't even bring myself to report it. I just immediately got in line again behind, you guessed it, two strong players. So it was four o'clock before I got another crack, and wouldn't you know the first two balls were rapid drains? I was pretty disgusted when I launched my third ball, but I started to feel better when it actually lived for a bit. Soon I had a score I could live with, but the ball was still alive and soon the crane was swinging around and my shots were banging off of it, and before too long I was really scoring. When the ball finally drained I had around sixty million and a top ten score on the machine. What a relief!

Anyway, while I wasn't playing I was taking pictures, so I sent off this report to Pinball News:

http://www.pinballnews.com/shows/flippers2013/index.html

 

[Jeff Strong]

Great report, man. I enjoyed it.