Pinball in Education
On Sunday we took a trip to Athens for some good food and to visit with some old friends, and took some time to stop in at UGA’s Tate Student Center, particularly the game room (surprised?). They had seven pinball machines there!
- Medieval Madness — Filthy, absolutely filthy, broken bridge targets.
- Addams Family — Also ridiculously dirty, but very playable. Or at least I got a lot out of my $0.50.
- Monopoly — Also terribly, awfully filthy, but somewhat playable, although I didn’t really enjoy it much.
- Austin Powers — This game sucks. Do not play it. It was also broken.
- World Poker Tour — Looked very clean.
- Elvis — Looked clean, too.
- Ripley’s — Didn’t get a good look at it.
All in all, an extremely respectable set of pins (!!!), even if the best ones were dirty and slow as hell and sporting credit dots (meaning the machine has detected errors). Well done, UGA!
Now let’s look at the Georgia Tech Student Center’s selection of pins:
- ….
Oh, that’s right… there are none anymore. Instead (and they had a few of these at UGA, too), they have these lame console gaming systems. Isn’t the whole point of an arcade to have things people don’t generally have at home? There were people playing them (for $3/hr), though. Sigh.
I’d like to end this on an upshot, but all I can think is that I wish I’d been into pinball when I was at Tech and they had a really respectable arcade. Instead I was playing multiplayer internet games (Quake, Age of Empires II, etc.) on my PC. At least Vince got some games of Whirlwind in during the last few years of pinball.
Hopefully one of these days we’ll open up a pinball arcade and be able to rest easy that people have a place in town to play well cared-for pins.