I remember seeing this machine at an old arcade. Just Fun 2 at the Orange Plaza Mall in Middletown, New York. This mall is now located underneath a bizarre collection of a Wal*Mart with some other stores on the top, in front, and a Staples, EBGames, Old Navy, and still more stores in the back, on the bottom. What it is, take a long mall, cut the back off, and shove it under the front.
The old mall was a long cavernous tomb-like dark dusty crapfest in 2 levels. I think it had a Sears and a JCPenney as anchors. There was a lower level, but it was odd. Take the escalators in the middle down, make a right at the wall at the bottom, and there was the lower level. An ungodly expensive music store, a smelly Burger King, a shitty Pizza joint, and some other randomly placed shops. In one corner was an elevator and escalator back to the top floor- to the entrance of the JCPenney.
The top floor had an arcade, nice enough, with 3 pinball machines and some Indian guy who smelled really bad managing it. Just Fun. Oddly enough, the lower level had another arcade, Just Fun 2. These days, one arcade in a mall would shock you, but this place had two! Just Fun 2 had the Addams Family, and I'd never seen it. Well, it was the mid-90s (1993? 1994?) so the machine was new. The manager in JF2 didn't know how to set the tilt bar, so high scores would be coming soon, and replays turned $1 into 2 to 3 hours of non-stop play. I think my unofficial high score was 2.25 billion- 1.15 billion until the ball got stuck on the top of Thing's hand; another 1.1 billion after opening the machine, losing the score, and getting the ball back into play. Tour the Mansion twice and completed.. use Thing Flips until the flipper is so weak, that it's useless to use, and I end up letting the ball drop to attempt more Bear Kicks, by now reaching an insane 100 total kicks.. how many tunnel hunts? How many times had I smacked Cousin It? Why is the electric chair empty? (pre-Uncle Lester):
This machine, the sounds, the lights, the play, was (is) one of the better machines I'd seen, and I've played tons of them: the bad Gottlieb tables, the SuperPins, those goofy Williams titles like Funhouse, Whirlwind, and Earthshaker (immortalized in Mr. Bungle's debut album).
In the later part of the '00s, pinball is pretty much all but nostalgia, save Stern making machines, and the Family Guy, Simpson's Pinball Party, and South Park machines attempting a comeback. I've yet to see those virtual pinball arcade machines, but I would love to have one. Until then, there is PinMAME, thanks to the patience of ROMdumpers and table creators, pumping out near-perfect machines to play on your PC: Star Trek TNG, Attack From Mars, Black Knight 2000, Haunted House... the list goes on... even that horrid machine, GorGar- even though it was the first talker and blazed a trail, this machine was crap.. and forget about KISS pinball. Is that your doorbell, or is somebody playing KISS?
The XBox Live Arcade for the XBOx360 has Pinball FX, with 4 fairly decent tables for around $10 after translation of MSPoints on the service- another 4 tables are coming soon! Totemball on XBLA has a pinball table stuck in there, too. Admirable effort, but not all there. There must be some type of pinball for the PS3 and Wii coming, but I've yet to see them pop up.
Hopefully pinball will live on, as long as there are people who collect and upkeep the machines, and realize there is a market for gamers, beyond the graphic violence and blood splattered fun of many of today's videogame titles. Just, please, nothing like Cactus Jack or Spy Hunter or NES Pinball or Caveman or Baby Pac-Man or... yeah, there were lots of bad ones.
But I'll always have that arcade in my memory, with the Addams Family machine beckoning me to get another replay, and waste another hour of my life, which had many hours waiting to be burned. Because there was nothing else fun to do in Middletown, New York.
The Internet Pinball DatabaseGame ArchivePinball.comPinMAMEVisual Pinballbroken link?
TFB
