My work closes early on Fridays during summer, so I took a pinball road trip to Loudoun County, VA, where there were a purported five locations with games. It took about 5 hours and I ended up driving about 100 miles, but I managed to investigate them all. Four of the five were still there, and I spanked three of them, getting high scores on a Family Guy, Revenge from Mars, and almost a billion on old-school Indiana Jones.
Now, to be fair, RfM and IJ were 5 ball games, and instead of specials they gave out extra balls. But still... where is this kind of playing on league nights? The locations were two bowling alleys and two pizza places. One pizza place had a Road Show and Hurricane, which was awesome until I started playing them: They were in terrible shape. The bulldozer didn't register hits in Road Show, and Hurricane had bad switches and weak flippers. Barf. I won't even Google Map the location because the games were so bad. On t'other hand the second pizza place, Lovettsville Pizza & Subs, was frickin' awesome. This place is in the middle of Bugfuck, VA, but the games were in awesome shape. Three of the four games were working, they were clean (!!!), and they were all 5 balls. Granted, it was cramped because apparently the Little League season had just ended and the party was there. But I was really surprised at how well the games were maintained, especially coming from the previous pizza place. I also found a bunch of Gameboy games in one of the bowling alleys, and instead of turning them in I kept 'em. Probably bad in the long run karmically, but what the hell... until Karma strikes me down, I'll be playing Mario DS.
I did a little more work on the Google Earth KML file of pinball locations... mostly in the form of correcting issues with the Pinball Locator database. Here is the file if you want to download it (right click and save as... no browser I've seen knows what to do with it). Note that it won't work in Google Maps, because GM has a 60-200 point limit and this file has 850 or so active sites.
At first I offered the file to the Pinball Rebel himself, suggesting that he could post it on his site. But he did what he usually does: Send me two emails, then just when I think we're making progress he stops replying. This same thing happened a few months ago when I mentioned that I might be capable of fixing some bugs (a few of which I consider serious) and adding a spatial search to the Locator. I don't know if the Rebel has a short attention span or if he and I email in different dialects of the English language... if I were to go to Texas speak to him directly, we could probably hash it out pretty quickly. For now, if I can't get my point across to him in two emails, I'm pretty much doomed. Whatever.
Finally, I made a Mr. Pinball Classified sale today. A guy in Florida needed a transformer and everything downstream from it to the wall socket for a WPC game. I didn't think I had a spare transformer, but I had the rest, purchased years ago from my old pal Pinball Chuck (who is selling again on eBay, I was happy to see) for something or other. Anyway, even though this FL guy is working on a "Black Knight" (I'm assuming it's really a BK2K) he went for it, even after I raised the price from $10 to $20 (the receipt was in the box when I found it, and it looked virtually brand new, so I couldn't let it go for the lower price). But then as I was looking for the post where I mentioned this purchase, I found a reference to the High Speed transformer...! So I went downstairs, and what I thought was the Data East transformer I pulled out of Doctor Who was the one from HS. So I just emailed back the guy to see if he's interested. Looking at some of my other posts, transformers sell for some serious shekels, so if FL Guy is interested I might get some serious bank. w00t!
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