FunSpot trip, Sat Dec 10

[prog]

On Saturday, December 10, I am going to travel to the FunSpot arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, to celebrate the end of the semester. We visited it for the first time last year to celebrate Amy's graduation, and I still have a whole mess of tokens left over from that trip. It seems only appropriate to cycle them back in now that I too will soon have a schools-out event to cheer about. I plan to be there from lunchtime through dinnertime, more or less. If you have the means to visit a true mecca of digital games on that day, I invite you to join me.

Why this is cool: FunSpot (http://www.funspotnh.com/) is also the home of the American Classic Arcade Museum (http://www.classicarcademuseum.org/), caring curators of many coin-operated arcade games that they maintain on-site. As much as possible, the museum keeps these machines plugged in and playable, collecting tokens just like they did when they were brand new. These lucky games are having the happiest retirement they could hope for, and I wish to drop my remaining tokens into them. If you are standing nearby when I do this, I might be able to tell you weird trivia or personal anecdotes about the game at hand. (And where I can't, there are often signs and placards nearby that can fill it in.) It'll be great.

FunSpot also has a lot of pinball machines, which frankly are largely in crap condition, poor things; unlike the videogames, they have many moving parts that become increasingly irreplaceable as the years go by. But they're nice to see all plugged in and lit up anyway, even if their flippers aren't quite as strong they were in their youth.

And there's, like, bowling alleys and mini golf and an entire floor filled with skill games of the ticket-spewing variety, including a counter where a friendly person will eagerly exchange your won tickets for kewpie dolls and coffee mugs and Elbonian grey-market iPod knockoffs and so on. I'm not so much into these games but I live with at least one person who is, so there'll be that going on as well. And finally, there's a pizza parlor and a bar on-premesis, though I cannot speak to their quality since they were both closed for some reason the last time we were there.

Anyway, yeah. December 10.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember those poor pinball machines. That's also the problem with the Canobie Lake arcade: its wall of pinball would be an awesome thing if more than a few of the machines were actually playable.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I recommend checking out Pinball Wizard (http://www.pinballwizardarcade.com/) sometime, which is essentially the ACAM inverted: IIUC, it's based around the private collection of one extremely pinball-passionate individual, who does somehow manage to keep the machines in playable condition. We visited it last summer, and it's just as advertised. (It's also way classier than their kind of cheesy website, oh well.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Say, that's not far from here at all.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I haven't been to a proper arcade in YEARS. Some guys recently started up a small venue specialising in fighting games and vertical shooters--super hardcore modern Asian style arcade--but nowhere to get my Rainbow Islands on.

There's a phenomenal pinball arcade over in Oakland. Still haven't been over there but apparently they're all beautifully well-maintained. I never "got" pinball so it would probably be pretty educational to this wannabe game designer.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Pinball is an interesting case in that it really started as mostly a game of chance to which skill elements were gradually added (first by players learning to whack the table, then by design), until it was undeniably a skill game but one in which you're always surfing on the edge of chaos.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's really interesting--whereas videogames, by necessity, come at the problem from the other direction.

Pinball always struck me as being about setting up the state of the table so that when you (inevitably) fail you don't immediately lose the ball. Everything seems to follow from that.