The Professional Amateur Pinball Association is in Pittsburgh through this weekend. If you dig pinball even a little I highly recommend a visit -- there are a ton of machines that aren't dedicated to tournament play so you can just drop by, get some quarters and lose yourself for a while.
The Pittsburgh Perlmongers visited last night and had us some fun. Unfortunately traffic was horrendous and I missed most of Dan's presentation, but we did get to talk about the possible Pittsburgh Perl Workshop for about a year from now (More on that in the next few weeks...)
Fellow South Hills resident Tom brought his camera and took some nice shots, including this one of yours truly showing Diner who's the man. (I got about six free games off it last night and I'll make a Namath-like prediction that more are on the way.) Tom and I were both bummed that they didn't have our old favorite Sorcerer -- I played this at least a hundred times my freshman year of college since it was in the dorm basement.
My time with pinball goes back quite a ways -- I bowled a lot (with brief pauses for moving and such) from when I was about eight until about the last year of high school. As night follows day, that means I I also played a lot of pinball. So my nostalgia was running deep as I recognized a lot of the machines there; what struck me most of all was how simple most of the games were -- my feelings were more tied to the artwork and my age at the time rather than the gameplay. Normal, I guess.
(Not normal is the state of my wrists and forearms after banging on Diner (and others) for a few hours -- ouch!)
(Regarding the title: I was trying to think of a clever phrase mixing Pittsburgh and Pinball but none of them sounded right. So in the absence of cleverness insert reference to the 70s!)
