Pinball Bay Area

Some Metalli-pics for ya

May 22, 2013

What a cool night. I didn’t get around to playing Metallica at Pin a Go Go so I went down to Legionnaire Saloon to try it out. Four other guys were already down there playing it so I had to wait in line. Then three more people showed up. About that time I had to leave to meet some friends to see Studio Ghibli’s latest film (which was great) so I only got three games in.

Initial impressions? Overall it’s good, and with some rules refinement it definitely can be great. It has that “fun to play right away” feeling. Other games take awhile to warm up to but this one feels good from the start.

In terms of difficulty it feels a little more forgiving than ACDC and Ironman, and probably on par with TRON if you could take the GEM shot out. Being brand new it was crazy fast.

The playfield design is very good and easy to get into. I can’t say I love it as much as TRON but my first impressions put it above ACDC. It features in-line drop targets which haven’t been seen on a pinball game in quite a long time. The main electric chair shot reminds me of the castle shot on Medieval Madness.

The art is better than anything STERN has done in the last decade. Again, I really love TRON and feel the “graphic design” style art is actually a good fit for that theme, but Metallica just drips with attitude. You look cool playing it.

Gene X was down there with us and took some fantastic photos. Check out more here.

PAPA Circuit Finals Rounds 7 and 8

May 21, 2013

Metallica Pinball at Legionnaire Saloon!

May 21, 2013

2274 Telegraph Ave in Oakland. Cross street is Grand. One block from Luka’s tap room.

Pin a Go Go Tournament Full Results!

May 19, 2013

For the third straight year the Pin a Go Go pinball tournament has been an awesome success. Everyone had fun, people made new friends and lots of people tried out competitive pinball.

I’d like to thank our sponsors. In no particular order:

Playland not at the Beach
STERN Pinball
Oakland Pinball Mafia
Pacific Pinball Museum
QuinceXV Apparel
Flipp’her Club France
Pinhacks.com
Professional and Amateur Pinball Association

Next, I would like to thank all the volunteers and people who supplied games:

Brad Grant – Pin a Go Go Director
Steve Faith
Damien Charletty – co-tournament director
John Lautmann
Greg Ong
Eugene Gershtein
Masha Hass
Chris Kochan
Jeff Fehervari
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
Per Schwarzenberger
Eric Waggonsonner
Tom Collins
Eric Johnson
Pacific Pinball Museum
TJ Beyer
Todd DeStefani
Several others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

Damien (right) ran the tournament with me.

Volunteers don’t get paid to help so they’re forced to be somewhat “entrepreneurial”. :-)

So how does the whole thing work? In regular Pin Golf, you try to get the replay score with the fewest number of balls possible, like strokes in golf (hence the name). The Bay Area twist is that we use game objective goals instead. For example, on Centaur, you had to knock down three drop targets in the Queen’s Chamber (in-line drop targets behind a captured ball on the left side of the game).

This particular goal resulted in a lot of swearing.

If you’re playing Centaur purely for score, this is a shot you would never go for, and that’s one of the fun things about it – playing familiar games in a totally different way.

The rest of the goals were:

Earthshaker: Advance Billboard value to 70,000 OR Lock a ball (players could do either one)

ACDC: Start 2X scorinG

Cyclone: Advance bonus to 3x OR light Extra Ball via right standups

Time Machine: Collect Energy Hurry-up value

Transformers: Start Mudflaps and Skids Fast Scoring via right standups OR start Bumblebee 2X scoring via Captured Ball.

Another view of the tournament area.

The top 12 players overall advanced to the Open Finals. That’s only about 19% of the total players, so it’s not easy to qualify. The next 12 players who qualified as novice played in the Novice Finals. This allows players who qualify as novice to still have a chance to win the whole tournament, which actually happened the first year. Dave Easterla won the whole thing, and it was his first tournament ever. This year, novice qualifying went down to the 36th place overall so to qualify as a novice you had to finish around middle of the pack or better.

Sorry ladies, he’s taken.

Some of the prizes that were awarded.

The tournament ran very smoothly this year. I got a lot of help from volunteers. Eugene of the Bay Area Pinball Association (BAPA) made a really clever spreadsheet on Google Docs which featured some real-time statistics, such as a player’s best and worst possible ranks based on how they had done up to that point. We also fine-tuned the score entry so it was much less of a time sink. There were other improvements but the long and short of it was over 60 people played six games each in under five hours.

The spreadsheet had real-time statistics.

These are my best plaques ever. Thanks to Michael Schiess of Pacific Pinball Museum for loaning me his router.

Not everything was rainbows and kitty cats, though.

Pin a Go Go is a crowd-sourced show. Collectors spend a lot of time and effort (and money) to bring games. If not, there’d be no show. But as a result, whether a collector comes through is not a sure thing. The show organizers have a sense of how many games are coming but it’s not an exact science. This year, the collector response was overwhelming. Pretty much everyone who said they’d bring a game came through, and in many cases, they brought extra games. There were so many games they even ran out of power.

Originally, the tournament was supposed to accommodate 100 players and to accomplish that we were going to use two banks of games and split players up into two groups of 50. However, with all the games that came into the show, the tournament space had to be reduced. It was either that, or tell people who brought games to take them home. I feel that “collectors bringing games” is really at the heart of what Pin a Go Go is all about, so I didn’t see it as an option. We bit the bullet and removed half the tournament games, and dialed things down to 64 players like last year (it ended up being oversold by 1 player, so we actually had 65).

So to all the people who did not get to play, I’m really sorry about that. I myself didn’t play and I had to turn away over two dozen people. It was just the nature of the beast, and an unfortunate situation as the show hits some growing pains. Next year we’ll have to rethink things so we can accommodate more people.

Okay, let’s get back to the tournament action.

Yessss!

In the Kids tournament, each player played two games each on Volley, Avengers and Johnny Mnemonic, and their better score of the two was the one that counted. They were then ranked against their opponents across all three games.

1 Tim C 53
2 Josh F 52
Daniel B 52
4 Nick F 49
——————
5 Bella G 46
6 Leyla F 45
Nick V 45
8 Ryan W 42
9 Connor 36
10 Kiersten G 35
11 Jared H 34
12 Rhys L 33

Josh F and Daniel B managed to tie for 2nd! Fortunately, neither of them picked up their plaques, so I can make a new second place plaque and mail it out to them along with their Playland not at the Beach Gift Certificates.

Tim C took first by a hair! Congratulations!

Nick F. took fourth. He also placed in 2011.

The Novice Finalists were (in order of seed):

Jim Sousae

Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen

Kevin Lee

Rick Turner

Cary Carmicheal

Challisa Parisi

Kiana Lee

Chris Gershtein

Aaron Humphries

Bob Schwarzmann

Mark Birsching

Larry Blazier

In the Novice Finals, I only caught the last couple games but on the final game on Time Machine, Mark Birching immediately got a hole-in-one to lockout the other three players and win first place. Congrats to Mark!! Next year, Mark will have to compete as an Open player. Mark got a Plaque, T Shirt and Avengers translite.

Mark was super amped up on his win. Some of you may recognize Mark as one of the organizers of California Extreme.

From left to right: Kevin Lee (3rd), Chris Gershtein (2nd), Mark Birsching (Novice Champion), and Andreas Pedersen (4th)

The Open Finalists were (again, in order of seed):

Tim Hansen

Josh Lehan

James Squires

Kyle Takigawa

Per Schwarzenberger

TJ Beyer

Eugene Gershtein

Brenn Oosterbaan

Chris Harkins

Usama Farage

Chris Heilig

Josh Warren

The big surprise Open Finalist this year was Kyle Takigawa. He has no IFPA record so presumably this is his first tournament ever and finishing qualifiers as the 4th seed is an amazing feet.

Brenn Oosterbaan was visiting from the Netherlands. He’s currently ranked 69th in the world and recently finished 7th out of a field of 192 at the German Pinball Open. No surprise he made the finals!

Usama Farage was eligible for Novice but finished high enough to compete in Open. He also won the bodybuilding award.

In the Final Round, nerves and fatigue really start taking their toll. On game one, all four players got a hole-in-one. That basically makes the margin of error that much smaller for games two and three. Game two was on Cyclone and both Josh Lehan and Chris Heilig finished the goal in two balls. Tim Hansen set several house ball records and Brenn Oosterbaan also struggled. They both got a 6.

Brenn Oosterbaan in the final four.

Chris Heilig of EBPL in the Finals

Josh Lehan of BAPA

Tim Hansen of BAPA

Josh and Chris were still tied going into the final game on Centaur. Tim and Brenn were most likely fighting for third and fourth place. Technically they could still win but it would mean they had to get a hole-in-one or a 2, and both Josh and Chris would need to both get a 5 or 6.

All four players could not destroy Centaur. It just kept pounding them into the post-apocalyptic radiation-filled dirt. After none of the players got the goal on ball two, Josh and Chris knew they just needed to finish before the other to win the tournament. Finally, Josh took down the goal on ball four, and since Chris had already played his ball four, that was that.

CONGRATULATIONS TO JOSH LEHAN REPEAT PIN A GO GO CHAMPION

With Josh’s win he cracks the top 100 on the IFPA Scoreboard and is now a probable for the IFPA Finals.

From left to right: Tim Hansen (3rd), Josh Lehan (Grand Champion), Brenn Oosterbaan (4th), Chris Heilig (2nd)

Below are the full results. Note that for world pinball ranking points, only novice qualifying finish counts towards rankings.

Final rank	Player
GRAND CHAMPION	Josh Lehan
2	Chris Heilig
3	Tim Hansen
4	Brenn Oosterbaan
5	Kyle Takigawa
6	Eugene Gershtein
7	Josh Warren
8	Per Schwarzenberger
9	TJ Beyer
9	Usama Farage
11	Chris Harkins
11	James Squires
13	Jim Sousae
14	James Edes
15	Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
16	Jeff Fehervari
17	Chris Kochan
18	Kevin Lee
19	Rick Turner
19	Rodney Olsen
21	Eric Wagensonner
22	Kevin Riekki
23	Cary Carmicheal
24	Challisa Parisi
24	Alex Samonte
26	Darren Ensley
27	Damien Charlety
28	Chris Lindboe
29	Jim Vierra
30	Kiana Lee
31	Chris Gershtein
31	Walter Hurwitrz
33	Aaron Humphries
34	Bob Schwarzmann
35	Mark Birsching
36	Larry Blazier
37	Martt Sarnoff
38	Aaron Schneickert
39	Larry Ozeran
40	Carey Binford
41	Louise Wagensonner
42	Erin Rey
42	Jessica Rodgers
44	Spencer Clingan
45	Justin Kelly
45	Kenley Fritts
47	Rory McClure
47	Chris Murray
49	Russell Dare
50	Mark Skoff
51	Nicole Anne Reik
52	Melissa Carlson
52	Echa Schneider
54	Darrin Bebout
55	Jay Sandy
55	Nick Fitzpatrick
57	Keith Parkins
58	Nina Ghiseli
58	Bella Gershtein
60	Masha Hass
61	Mark Fitzpatrick
62	Liz Keiser
63	Malcolm Clingan
64	Sally Sparks
65	Danny Olson