The Pinball Factory pre-PAPA18 tournament - The Pinball Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, USA - 10/03/2015

After a long drive back to Pittsburgh via West Virginia, we were in for another tournament. I had originally thought we'd be going to the PAPA HQ, but this was a smaller arcade where the local pinball league is played. And true to its name, the Pinball Factory was in the middle of an industrial area.

Checking out the line-up I noticed something interesting - the first America's Most Haunted pin I've come across. Naturally we couldn't leave it to just seeing it!

The blondie VS America's Most Haunted

The arcade itself was a large room, with long line-up of pins on each wall. They had all the usual suspects from WPCs and modern Sterns, with couple of EMs here and there. From the line-up I also spotted a lost favorite from the Tykkimäki amusement park in my home town - Bally's Transporter The Rescue. I immediately had to play it to relive those late 90s again!

The tournament itself consisted of playing 20 entries on 9 machines; 5 best machines counted. The line-up was: Future Spa, Big Game, Fireball Classic, The Shadow, Ironman, TX-sector, Road Show, Scared Stiff and Hot Tip.




I started out with Future Spa only to realize the $25 entrance fee didn't actually include the game prices, so we were actually paying to play as well. With over 200k in Future Spa I left it for now and tried the Ironman. It was its fast playing self as expected, on my 2nd attempt I had virtually everything lit, but I somehow failed to start 2 out of 3 multiballs and just rolled with the Ironmonger, only getting 12.9M. Still, at the time it was a tolerable score. I tried my chance at Hot Tip, but it turned out to be a bit hard as it was set up. I also played couple of entries of Scared Stiff, but the crate set to very hard made it just tedious to play and not fun.

I had high hopes for TX-sector, on which I spent most of my entries to get that one perfect entry in, but no. I also tried the classic Stern's Big Game just for the laughs, but that went nowhere in a hurry. The Shadow got couple of entries, but it was faster than expected, with wobbly legs. I could have done a lot better in that.

We went to visit the local Starbucks for a coffee break, but that didn't help much with the remaining entries. By the dinner time I was out and had nothing else to do, but play the free play machines, which also weren't on free play.

The outcome

I was 25th of 42 players, with no chance to play in the B-game thanks to my high IFPA ranking.

The official results:
http://www.lefkoff.com/pgh/t1.html


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)