Houston Area Arcade Group Expo!
Entry posted by Mezrabad
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My son and I took the trip to Houston yesterday and had a blast.
We got to see some rare cabs, (PONG, Q-berts Qubes) and I got to play a few arcade games I thought I'd never get to play on the "original hardware" (Major Havoc, Quantum). I took a ton of pictures, but my camera memory card is being used by my son today in a school science experiment so I won't be able to make an album until later.
We entered the Parent-Child tournament which was to be on a Gilligan's Island pinball machine, one person controlling each flipper. In the middle of the second pair of participant's game the ball got stuck on the playfield so tournament play was moved to a Xenon machine.
Xenon was the second pinball machine I'd ever seen, back in the day, that used spampled digitized sound for some of its effects (the frist I ever saw to do so was Black Knight). The funny thing about using Xenon in a Parent-child tournament is that the sampled effects sound very similar to a woman experiencing, let's say, "intense" pleasure. I didn't have a problem with my 10 year-old being exposed to the "content" but I did think it was pretty funny.
The most fun we had during our visit was playing some very non-pinball, non-video games. There was a Foosball Table and a Hockey game (www.icegame.com). we had a great time playing each of those, probably because we could face each other.
Together we also got to play Smash TV together which was a lot of fun. We tried to play some Atari game called Killer Robots from Space (or something, I'll have to check) but one of the player's controllers was broken. There was a wicked-cool multi-vector arcade machine, but we weren't able to get two player simultaneous on Armor Attack, nor could we get it to boot-up Rip-off, which would have also been cool.
The most interesting thing there was a Homebrew Starfighter cab. I've got some pictures and some video of it. The concept is very cool, but I think the controls need to be tweeked a little, as I was unable to control it at all. Then again, since it is supposedly a recruiting tool, maybe it's meant to weed out feeble gamers like myself.
Anyway, I'll post pictures and movies a little later.
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