Posts tagged Pinball

PAPA 13 – The World Pinball Championships start August 12 and continues though the 15th. Players of all skill levels will be at the event. Will repeat champion Keith Elwin earn the three-peat? Some of the pinball players who I compete with will join me in the A division, either by choice, or because they made the B-division finals last year. I wonder how they will handle all of the weirdness that happens while playing the A-division machines.

Some examples from previous years:

• The Spider-Man pin where if you shoot the right loop too well or too fast, it will glance off of a little notch at the left loop exit and send the ball careening down the middle.
• The Shadow: See Spider-Man (Yes, the exact same thing!)
• The Cirqus Voltaire, where anytime you shoot the juggler lock, when the ball gets kicked out, it bounces off of the stupid Ringmaster target and goes SDTM. You can almost hear the game mocking you as it goes down the drain, slowly but surely.
• The Monster Bash where any shots to the middle hole have a high probability of going SDTM.

Want more horror? How about Attack from Mars with no outlane posts and lightning flippers?! I defy you to survive a spaceship hit or a missed lock ramp shot with that setup. I can only imagine what bastardization is going to happen with Iron Man. If the incline is too steep, and shots to the right ramp stop on a dime at the top and go SDTM at sub-light speed, there may be lots of harsh words screamed at random times. I’m talking F-bombs and S-bombs galore (not from me though… I’ll try hard to behave myself).

These examples are only from the A-bank , but I realize that crap happens the other divisions too. For instance, I’m glad I didn’t have to play Paragon in the B-division last year. I’m afraid to think of what happened with that difficult drain monster of a game.

I hope I can qualify for the playoffs this year. If not me, then at least someone who I know and play pinball with. We are going to have to band together, come up with some strategies for these games, and play some defense by knocking down some of the scores of the higher ranked players. One of us has to make it.

Also, don’t sleep on the Classics tournaments. There are lots of World Pinball Player Ranking (WPPR) points to be had in those two tournaments on Friday and Saturday. Especially since players from all divisions can participate. I received the bulk of my PAPA 12 WPPR points from one of last year’s Classics tournaments, and I think I’m getting better at handling the ball physics that happen in the older games.

Will this year’s mini-tournaments live up to the standards of previous years? The mini-tournaments are always fun to try. There is usually a one handed competition, a split-flipper competition, a two minute drill and more. Once there was a World Cup Soccer USA ’94 pin with the legs removed and with a soccer ball in a box wired to each of the flippers. In order to flip, you had to literally kick the soccer ball. This also meant, in order to to a double-flipper save, you had to jump to kick both soccer balls. Another fun mini-tournament was “Attack from the Back” where there were flipper buttons wired above and behind the Attack from Mars game for a different perspective on the action.

Well, good luck and fair play to everyone. I know that, along with trying to qualify, I’m going to have to try all of those obscure games that I won’t have the opportunity to play again… until PAPA 14 that is.