WBPT Trip Report: Part 4 - Pinball Hall of Fame #WPBT

#FACEPALM

I was going through the posts view in Blogger and noticed, um, Hi! My name is OhCaptain, and I'm a dumbass.

This post was from back in January. January 4th to be exact. I formatted the pictures, typed up some words, hell, I probably even spell checked (but I wouldn't count on that). But apparently, I never actually published part #4 of my WPBT Winter Classic recap. WTF? How did PirateLawyer not say something? CK...I have proven you correct again. Son of a biatch! Here's the rest in grouped link form if you need to go back and read anything...

This is probably still OK. There was no Eh Vegas! this year, and the Gentile Summit gather isn't for [looking at watch] less then 48 hours away...I got my entire recap done before the next blogger gathering..right?

Without further adieu (screw it, I'm not rewriting this. As is from the past...):

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The holidays are both awesome and suck. All the time off from work rocks, spending time playing with the kids and the Mrs rocks, but this year I failed in my goal to process all the pictures I took in Las Vegas during the Winter Gathering. I do have a photo dump here that might have made PirateLawyer's day had it not been for recent entry into the Uncle's Club. Huge congrats, BTW!

This time around, I seemed to have a lot of planned options for my camera. I had seriously considered hanging out with the golfing crew, but I wanted to make sure I got to the Pinball Hall of Fame and the Neon Graveyard. Without PirateLawyer organizing this, I pretty much failed at getting a big group going. I have to make a huge apology to Maigrey. She had asked me the night before to call her when we are going. I completely forgot! I'm very sorry.

This first picture is the new front of the Pinball Hall of Fame. Yeah, it's not much. From what I gathered, they moved just weeks before we got there. Yestbay had rented a car for the weekend and after a nice breakfast at Harrah's buffet, we headed over.

I'm hoping for the future of the place, they do just a bit more with the front. If we hadn't been specifically looking in this very location for the place, we would have never just stumbled upon it. The old front had a big painted window that really looked awesome. In all actuality, the inside was as I'd hoped...roomy with plenty of room to grow.

The rest of this post should be just a photo dump. Yestbay mostly played like a rock star. I kept hearing the crack of the free game on the machine he was playing. At one point, we played some doubles. I was always good for a lose of a credit, so this really helped him work down that count.

I was inspired to photograph some of my favorite games. I played a few because how could you not? But mostly, I just walked around and shot. For you photography buffs out there, I'd like in the future to bring a few things:

• A faster lens - this place is poorly lit and all the glass makes flash photography virtually impossible.
• A sheet or some other blocking device - there's a lot of glare on the top of the glass from the lights above.
• A tripod - something that always hinders me in Vegas. I never bring one with because of space concerns. Next time, I might just buy a cheap disposable one or a really nice one and ship it home.

This first shot was a game I hadn't seen in YEARS. Dragon's Lair. This was pretty much the first and only game I had ever truly mastered. This was a game driven by a laser disk, think of it as a precursor to all of the stupid DVD games to come. There was only one set path in the game to the ultimate high score. Memorize this path, and you'll get there. My friends growing up came up with challenges to the game to make it interesting. Since most of the game could be played by timing and audio cues, we would play blindfolded and see how far we could get.

This year, I noticed more of the great video games. There were a few last year, but there just seemed to be more this year. I dropped a few quarters in this one. I still sucked at it, but it was fun.
The structure of the games is pretty much the same as last year, only bigger.
They seemed to grouped a little, this wall isle seemed to have old school video games on one side, old school pinball on the other.
When I was walking around, I started to really think about the art and design that went into these machines. As a kid, you mostly just think about the winning. I thought this was particularly interesting, you see that red dress? Yeah, it moves out of the way to reveal a sexy night gown. Inspiration to win the game for a teenage boy can come from my places, usually it's just the groin.
I had never really stopped and looked at this one before, I had seen it countless times, this was one of my favorite pinball machines. There are many iconic figures on this one. I'm sure at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to be a timeless character, like Marilyn Monroe and Santa, but I'd guess that any under the age of 35 has no idea who he is or could even spot him on the back of a pinball machine.
Yeah, more huge spacious isles. I think it could accommodate each and every blogger at the gathering.
Old school number wheels rock.
I took a couple hundred pictures here and might post them on Flickr later. I hoping to prove CK wrong and get all of the recaps I want to get done posted before March. Still to come, the Neon Graveyard, Steel Panther and football in lap of luxury.

Stay tuned!

{Note: I left the last paragraph in after just reading it. Funny as hell, huh? Those other posts...they've been up for months. Hehehe. I rock. #FACEPALM}