{"id":636,"date":"2012-03-07T19:07:13","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T19:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=636"},"modified":"2012-03-09T13:56:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T13:56:01","slug":"we-will-watch-your-career-with-great-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=636","title":{"rendered":"“We will watch your career with great interest!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always had a love\\hate relationship with pinball.\u00a0 On one hand, what’s not to like about the colourful chaos that comes with getting on a point-scoring rampage?\u00a0 Lights are flashing, the immaculately shiny ball is dancing and darting its way all over the place…\u00a0 it can be mesmerizing.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, they’re fairly limited in terms of presentation.\u00a0 With older tables, it was common to have a theme, maybe a scoreboard of some kind, or anything to jump out at you and scream “PLAY ME!!”\u00a0 Even though our local arcades had a\u00a0section in the back for them, I rarely expended my valuable quarters for them.\u00a0 I couldn’t play violent fighters, fun beat ’em ups\u00a0or light gun games at home, so I stuck close to them.<\/p>\n

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before or not, but I have family in Bristol, Connecticut.\u00a0 About an hour away sit two rather large casinos; Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.<\/p>\n

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Foxwoods Resort and Casino - Huge, and in the middle of nowhere.<\/p><\/div>\n

Not only am I not big into gambling now, but I had been\u00a0dragged to these two places before actually being of age to play anything.\u00a0\u00a0I had to find stuff to do while my parents had fun with slot machines, and luckily, each complex\u00a0had a pretty cool arcade to kill time in.<\/p>\n

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1999 - Williams Pinball<\/p><\/div>\n

When I came around a corner and\u00a0saw this at Foxwoods, I’m fairly sure there were bells ringing, angels singing and Duel of the Fates blaring from the heavens…\u00a0 well, that might have been from the machine itself.\u00a0 In any case, I’m not sure if I ran or floated to the thing, but I downed a fair amount of tokens into it\u00a0right then and there.<\/p>\n

The first thing that popped out at me was the lightsaber.\u00a0 I just friggin’ wanted to bust the glass open and take it for myself.<\/p>\n

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Best Christmas present ever, though the one from the machine would have been nice, too.<\/p><\/div>\n

What the image\u00a0above doesn’t show\u00a0are two remarkable things I had never seen on a pinball\u00a0machine before.\u00a0 The first is a video screen that reacts to your ball reaching different parts of the board, and shows various clips from the movie.\u00a0 That’s not too bad, but what blew my mind was a hologram<\/strong> (!!!) on the inside that would react to the ball going through it.\u00a0 It wasn’t always there, but would pop up whenever you got on a roll.\u00a0 Sometimes it was an animation of Anakin’s pod racer, and others it could be a batch of battle droids.<\/p>\n

I was quite obviously fascinated by it, but I never again saw it with my own eyes.\u00a0 In the video below, I can’t quite make out exactly what the hologram is showing, but it does make an appearance or two.\u00a0 I think it’s just the angle at which it’s being recorded.<\/p>\n