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The day started with pretty amazing news. A new Lee Herring podcast is up and running on iTunes. Check it out here. Hope you enjoy it. With thanks to @markveness.
I had hoped to do a little bit of work this afternoon, or at least go for a run, but instead I realised that I could download Pinball Arcade onto my laptop (I’ve previously only had it on my phone, which to be honest is a bit too small to play the tables effectively). I then paid for the Terminator 2 table, which I had played a lot back in about 1993 and although it took a few minutes to master the flippers and remind myself of how the table worked, within an hour I was quite adept and about four hours later I was still playing and had managed to "get the CPU” and hit the jackpot a few times and racked up some quite impressive scores. It’s not exactly the same as playing a real table, but it’s not far off and I found it immensely enjoyable. Then I felt a bit tired and weird, but I carried on playing anyway. It’s been a long time since I’ve lost most of a day to a video game like this. It’s still officially my holiday. But I fear that I might spend the rest of the year downloading tables and playing them until my eyes bleed. I had baulked a bit at paying £3 for each table, until I remembered that I would happily put in pound after pound to an actual pinball machine. I certainly invested enough in Addam’s Family Pinball to pay for a table of my own. When that comes out on Pinball Arcade (which it will do if the kickstarter campaign is successful) then you can kiss the rest of my career goodbye. Though you can probably do that anyway to be honest. I might as well try and Hit Cousin It a few thousand times before I die.
I am not being paid by Pinball Arcade for this post - in fact I have paid them for the games and also the kickstarter campaign. I just really love pinball and if you love pinball too then I think you'll enjoy their stuff. Look at me eschewing filofaxes as old-fashioned and then going on about jigsaws and pinball. I guess try as we might none of us can eschew our Luddite tendencies and have some sort of UKIP-style nostalgia for a past which was only better because we were younger (though Farrage is nostalgic for a false memory of a 1950s Britain and wasn't even born in that decade). But at least I am using modern technology to indulge my retro-interest.
The Terminator pinball gameplay transported me back twenty years. I was back in a pub in Barnes, wasting away the afternoon whilst I waited for my girlfriend to finish her play rehearsal. I did really well that day and I think probably managed to play most of the afternoon on just a coin or two. But the memory’s were vivid and sprung by these particular sights and sounds and I was amazed by how many of the almost instinctive reactions to various situations came back to me. If the ball comes in this way I need to flick the flippers very specifically, in a way that I couldn’t manage if I thought about it. But I suppose if we learn through repetition that pinball skills must lie dormant and ready to be used for our entire lives. The nice extra touch with this table was a pin right between the flippers which would rebound the ball back into play if hit from the correct angle. So sometimes you had to know when to not flip and leave the ball to do its thing. It’s no Addam’s Family, but it’s a good one and I am delighted to own this table, even if it’s only in tiny and digital form. There seems to be a glitch with the app (as there was on the phone) so I can’t log in to my account and have my scores recorded against other nerds (maybe you have to be in America for that to work). But as in all sports, I am really only playing against myself. I know I had a few fun two player games back in the day and occasionally Me3 and Me4 would come out to play too.
I couldn’t believe it when I looked at my watch and it was 7.30pm. Between pinball and jigsaws and Yahtzee the rest of my life is mapped out, regardless of when my actual death date is. I mean I will never give up on the snooker podcast obviously. I will have to do SOME work. But there aren’t enough hours in the day for writing and 24 hours of Terminator 2: Judgement Day pinball. Get the CPU.
