Comments | prog: FunSpot trip, Sat Dec 10

prog

FunSpot trip, Sat Dec 10

Nov 28, 2011 10:01

On Saturday, December 10, I am going to travel to the FunSpot arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, to celebrate the end of the semester. We visited it for the first time last year to celebrate Amy's graduation, and I still have a whole mess of tokens left over from that trip. It seems only appropriate to cycle them back in now that I too will soon ( Read more... )

Comments 6

mmcirvin November 28 2011, 15:32:20 UTC

Yeah, I remember those poor pinball machines. That's also the problem with the Canobie Lake arcade: its wall of pinball would be an awesome thing if more than a few of the machines were actually playable.

prog November 28 2011, 16:09:12 UTC

I recommend checking out Pinball Wizard (http://www.pinballwizardarcade.com/) sometime, which is essentially the ACAM inverted: IIUC, it's based around the private collection of one extremely pinball-passionate individual, who does somehow manage to keep the machines in playable condition. We visited it last summer, and it's just as advertised. (It's also way classier than their kind of cheesy website, oh well.)

mmcirvin November 28 2011, 16:17:03 UTC

Say, that's not far from here at all.

chocorisu November 29 2011, 21:54:55 UTC

Oh man, I haven't been to a proper arcade in YEARS. Some guys recently started up a small venue specialising in fighting games and vertical shooters--super hardcore modern Asian style arcade--but nowhere to get my Rainbow Islands on.

There's a phenomenal pinball arcade over in Oakland. Still haven't been over there but apparently they're all beautifully well-maintained. I never "got" pinball so it would probably be pretty educational to this wannabe game designer.

mmcirvin November 30 2011, 11:03:52 UTC

Pinball is an interesting case in that it really started as mostly a game of chance to which skill elements were gradually added (first by players learning to whack the table, then by design), until it was undeniably a skill game but one in which you're always surfing on the edge of chaos.

chocorisu November 30 2011, 19:46:52 UTC

Yeah, that's really interesting--whereas videogames, by necessity, come at the problem from the other direction.

Pinball always struck me as being about setting up the state of the table so that when you (inevitably) fail you don't immediately lose the ball. Everything seems to follow from that.