DISCLAIMER: These early Las Vegas entries were the first blog posts I ever did. They’re VERY antiquated compared to the rest of the blog.
Meanwhile, at the Flamingo…
tweet ‘v’
EDIT: Yes, I know these early posts are awful. I really need to visit Vegas again and redo them.
You get to play with these ones.
The pelican is awake!
Just when I thought The Flamingo couldn’t get any better, it turned out that they have turtles!
Okay, I just popped in while waiting for the bus. I wanted to see if the Cockatiels were back from their vacation.
This discreet building is our actual destination. I think it used to be an auto parts store or something. In the last years of the Riviera, there were many fliers for this place. I think they were storing their excess Pinball machines there.
This isn’t a place I was going to pass up seeing. It’s wall to wall to wall pinball machines. There are so many that capturing even a fraction of it in a single photo is impossible. There are like six rows just like this one. All the machines here belong to local collectors, pooling their rare games into one giant arcade.
I’m not the biggest fan of pinball, but even I’m impressed.
Thankfully, it’s not all pinball. They’ve also got a bunch of weird old relics of past arcades like this. Google says this Star Trek game is from 1982. Most of the machines have little index cards attached that tell you the history of the device, but this one sadly didn’t.
It wasn’t working, but here’s a classic Tapper machine. The left and right levers are made to look like the levels bartenders use when getting beer from a tap. This game is notable for being officially licensed by Budwiser, so their logos are all over it. There was also a non-alcoholic variant of this machine released at some point called “Root Beer Tapper.”
Q-bert, Spider-man, and Superman pinball. Q-bert is one of the few that I took the time to play. I’d have been here all day otherwise. The essence of Q-bert Pinball is that enemies come from the top and sides, represented by lights, and you must keep hitting the bumpers to keep them at bay. Along the way, you must collect cubes to build the tower Q-bert climbs up. This machine is interesting because it has four bumpers: two vertical and two horizontal (although the bottom two are partially cut off in this photo). The index card says this machine is quite rare.
On the far left, you can also see Goin Nuts, an unreleased arcade machine that runs on the same hardware. They were pretty proud of having that here because only ten were made.
In this machine, 12 targets represent the 12 Street Fighter characters. Some of these have to be hit, while others open up after clearing bonus stages and such. Amusingly, M. Bison is one of the first and easiest ones you beat. In the middle of the machine is a toy car that comes out of the floor, so you can play a pinball version of the car-destroying bonus level from Street Fighter II between listening to Chun-li’s annoying girl power phrases.
VS Super Mario Bros arcade. I’ve never seen one before, but we’ll get to the VS machines again.
UPDATE: I originally had a musing here about how two different people somehow came up with the same Mario voice. Two years after I wrote this post, it was confirmed that this was Charles Martinet’s first official time voicing Mario in a video game. He went uncredited for it.
There were two Mario Pinball machines. The most unusual thing about this game is that you could earn tickets by playing it, which is rare for a pinball machine. It’s also noticeably smaller than most regular pinball machines. A third Mario Pinball machine exists, but they didn’t have it here.
I don’t remember if I’ve ever seen Punch-Out in the arcade before. It plays much differently than the NES version, so they might as well be completely different games.
Vs. Duck Hunt/Hogan’s Alley are two games running on Nintendo’s VS system. The VS system was an arcade board made specifically for emulating NES hardware so that they could make arcade ports of popular NES games. Most of them have minor differences to make them more arcade-friendly.
Two 7-11 stores across the street from each other. Why?
Who cares, it’s SHARK WEEK baby!
