Arcade Expo in Banning, CA
Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2015 4:17 am
I drove out to Banning (Where all the windmills are on the way to Palm Springs from LA or OC, if that helps you at all) on Saturday for the first Arcade Expo. Hopefully it's not the last, I guess that depends how this one did. It was in a warehouse space which is now "The Pinball Museum", and if I understand correctly this was the first time it's been open. The plan is to make this a semi-annual event and if they can get the funding open it up year round. The turnout seemed good to me, but it wasn't so crowded as to be annoying. I could always walk up and play something, and out of everything there, there was only a single machine that I would've had to actually stand and wait to play (the brand new Stern Star Trek table).
Here's the Vine I made if you need a six second nostalgia fix.
It was definitely more on the pinball side than the video game side, with 500 pinball machines and 200 video arcade machines. That's not a bad thing, I played my share of both as a young ogre, but while I found I think every single pinball game I could remember, there were a lot of video games I didn't find. On the other hand, I recognized nearly every video game there, and at 200 games there were LOTS I had forgotten about or thought I wouldn't ever see again. The highlight for me was playing several games of Marble Madness on a real, well maintained, arcade cabinet. That's an experience you just can't replicate without a big ass trackball. Most of the machines were in good shape control-wise, though a lot of them had pretty faded or burned-in displays. There were of course broken machines all day, but they had repair people working non-stop so it wasn't always the same set. The biggest disappointment out of machines they had but never had working was a sit down cabinet Tail Gunner 2 by Exidy, which is funny, because if I had to list all the arcade games I ever played before going, I probably wouldn't have remembered it at all.
On the pinball side, my very favorite machine ever was High Speed, and out of my favorites, it was the only one they never had working the times I went by. At one point it did have its attract mode going properly, but was either not on free play or just wouldn't start. It was various kinds of broken all the other times I checked. I did get to play Pinbot and Bride of Pinbot, The Getaway (High Speed 2, which I didn't play nearly as much when they were new), Black Knight and Black Knight 2000, Star Trek: TNG (as well as two other Star Trek tables I'd never played before, but as mentioned above I didn't wait to play the brand new Star Trek table), and a bunch of other machines that were new to me.
Some highlights on the video game side were:
Of course they had the big names you still get in restaurant lobbies sometimes. (Ms.) Pac-man (and some of the obscure pac-mans), Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Space Invaders... I avoided those on purpose.
They had a Fixit Felix Jr cabinet that if you didn't know was a fake game from a recent movie wouldn't have looked at all out of place, right down to the 1982 copyright notice (from a fake Japanese company). I played one game. I didn't do well. Highly realistic! They also had a Turbo machine, which if you aren't a huge nerd you might also mistake for a fake game from the same movie, but was actually a real game. I'm slightly disappointed they didn't put them next to each other just for the geek test factor.
Here's the Vine I made if you need a six second nostalgia fix.
It was definitely more on the pinball side than the video game side, with 500 pinball machines and 200 video arcade machines. That's not a bad thing, I played my share of both as a young ogre, but while I found I think every single pinball game I could remember, there were a lot of video games I didn't find. On the other hand, I recognized nearly every video game there, and at 200 games there were LOTS I had forgotten about or thought I wouldn't ever see again. The highlight for me was playing several games of Marble Madness on a real, well maintained, arcade cabinet. That's an experience you just can't replicate without a big ass trackball. Most of the machines were in good shape control-wise, though a lot of them had pretty faded or burned-in displays. There were of course broken machines all day, but they had repair people working non-stop so it wasn't always the same set. The biggest disappointment out of machines they had but never had working was a sit down cabinet Tail Gunner 2 by Exidy, which is funny, because if I had to list all the arcade games I ever played before going, I probably wouldn't have remembered it at all.
On the pinball side, my very favorite machine ever was High Speed, and out of my favorites, it was the only one they never had working the times I went by. At one point it did have its attract mode going properly, but was either not on free play or just wouldn't start. It was various kinds of broken all the other times I checked. I did get to play Pinbot and Bride of Pinbot, The Getaway (High Speed 2, which I didn't play nearly as much when they were new), Black Knight and Black Knight 2000, Star Trek: TNG (as well as two other Star Trek tables I'd never played before, but as mentioned above I didn't wait to play the brand new Star Trek table), and a bunch of other machines that were new to me.
Some highlights on the video game side were:
- Marble Madness
- Star Wars (in a sit down cabinet)
- Discs of Tron (in the stand up enclosed cabinet!)
- Tron, except the knob controller was broken. They had two of these but I never tried the other one.
- Gyruss (you have no idea how many quarters this sucked up when it was new. Controller was slightly flaky but playable. Pretty much like when it was new too, that controller was unique to Gyruss even though it felt like a normal Joystick. It was 32? or 64? directional, not 8 like most games.)
- Mappy (which I don't actually like very much... but my Mom did for some reason, so I played it for her sake
- Major Havoc, which really isn't a very good game
- Defender, which reminded me just how terrible I always was at Defender
- Red Baron, which if it weren't for Star Wars would be the coolest vector game there was
- Battlezone
- Venture, which is still frustrating
- Joust
- Pole Position, which is so much harder than I remembered.
Of course they had the big names you still get in restaurant lobbies sometimes. (Ms.) Pac-man (and some of the obscure pac-mans), Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Space Invaders... I avoided those on purpose.
They had a Fixit Felix Jr cabinet that if you didn't know was a fake game from a recent movie wouldn't have looked at all out of place, right down to the 1982 copyright notice (from a fake Japanese company). I played one game. I didn't do well. Highly realistic! They also had a Turbo machine, which if you aren't a huge nerd you might also mistake for a fake game from the same movie, but was actually a real game. I'm slightly disappointed they didn't put them next to each other just for the geek test factor.