We had 140 games to go through in 10 hours. I made a decision to bypass some of the more recent and popular games even if I hadn’t played them because they had so many classics that are hard to find. That’s part of the reason I didn’t play Toy Story more. I know I’ll see those games in other places, but Bad Cats and Banzai Run? Those are so much rarer.
Both my daughter and I are huge Lawlor fans. He is the best designer hands down. My daughter was saying that there’s 2 kinds of play - a stop and shoot style and more of a flow play. Lawlor is a stop and shoot designer. We were excited to play a bunch of his older games.
I’d heard of the flipper zipper but never seen it. It was a good innovation. I wish they’d bring it back on a new game. It’s unclear if some of this old IP is available now or still locked up.
I played Jackbot at No Quarter and I liked that one a lot. They had Bride of pinbot there and at Game Galaxy. I played it for a while. I can’t get into it the way I do Pinbot, but I think it’s a more complex game and if I were to have time with it I’d get into it. That’s the problem with these trips where we play so many all at once is we just have time to sample the games at a surface level and not give them much attention.
You should be able to see a number of cracks in the old one, as well as some pretty obvious signs that it’s almost entirely held together with glue. You can also see how yellowed it has gotten over the years.
Here’s a couple of videos of it in action. I’m not sure I had realized that all three colors (Red, Blue, and Yellow) were represented until this replacement, since the yellowed plastic (and glue) were blocking so much light.
Oh, I forgot to add that I played for a bit after installing it, and managed to eventually get withing 100K of my best score ever, so that’s nice. Unfortunately, when my daughter went to play it a few days later, the mechanism to kick out a ball into the shooter lane failed, so now I have to figure out what’s going on with that…
Sorry, I neglected that part. My father-in-law found a new old stock part. Then, after giving up on 3D modeling it from scratch, used a 3D scanner to produce a model, tweaked it a bit, and then sent it off to a service to 3D print it in resin.
If you’re curious why he went through the trouble of 3D printing one when he had the actual part:
He was waiting on me to loan him the original, and a part became available, so he didn’t intend to buy a part in the first place.
His other intention was to be able to produce multiples so that a local parts supplier could potentially sell them.
He’s a retired engineer, and working on pinball machines is one of his hobbies.
Just based on the surface features, I’d be tempted to try building a cheap vacuum molding setup to reproduce it rather than 3D printing. Though there could be something hidden underneath that would make that more difficult.
I’m pretty sure the original was vacuum molded, or some similar process, so that would likely work well. He had already used that service for PCB manufacturing and other 3D printing, so it made the most sense to him from that perspective.
