www.oddchange.com

Yesterday I found out that several employees at Stern Pinball were laid off. A few of these were good friends of mine.

This news has bothered me in two ways. On a personal level, it is sad to see some really talented people lose their jobs. We’ve had layoffs here at RadiSys many times over my career, and it’s never easy for anyone. The choice of who to keep and who to let go is always complicated, and frequently unfair. All you can do is hope that those affected will get by, and that whatever led to it will get better so that it won’t happen again.

On a more selfish level, it’s a bad sign for the only remaining pinball company to be letting go of their top talent. With the state of the world as it is, whether or not some gaming business survives is certainly not the most important thing to worry about. But for me, pinball is an important part of my life, it has been on the endangered list for a while, and now there are signs that the situation is going to get worse.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The quality of recent games has been lower than I would like. That’s not a slam to those who worked on them — I’m sure it’s frustrating working under the current constraints of limited time and money to churn out a product. Creativity is the first thing to go. Depth and amount of polishing are directly proportional to time. There’s already been cost cutting. And it wasn’t enough.

The business aspect depends on selling games. And when people aren’t buying, there’s really very little you can do to change that, except hang on. Hopefully, we’ll get through this.

… things are going well. A few items of interest:

The drive from the airport to the hotel took way longer than it should have. Instead of trusting my own directions, I decided to follow the Hertz NeverLost, which took me straight (in a roundabout way) through downtown San Francisco.

I was looking forward to seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, except the fog was so dense that I barely realized I was on a bridge.

The airline crew from Atlanta was very accommodating to those who wanted to watch the VP debate. They enabled the builtin TVs sooner than usual, and adjusted the safety instructions, etc. around lulls.

The turnout at the PPE has been lower than I expected so far, but maybe that will pick up today. The number of machines is impressive, there are quite a few games I’ve never seen before, and the tournament is basically going smoothly.

Yes, I haven’t been posting much here lately. There’s really only one good reason for it:

Facebook.

I’m finding less and less that I want to write about here. A one-sentence Facebook blurb is often enough to convey what I’m doing or how I’m feeling; do I really need to say any more than that?

I’ve read many blogs about blogging, and they all usually say that you should just keep writing even when you have nothing interesting to say. I guess I don’t subscribe to that theory; maybe it’s the programmer in me striving for efficiency.

I’m disappointed. This celebrity-lookalike detector didn’t include Neil Patrick Harris in my results.

But the actual matches aren’t too bad.

As always, I’m a little late posting details, but here’s a summary of my trip to the PAPA 11 World Championships last week.

First, I finished 41st out of 52 players in the A division. Not my greatest performance. Looking back, I really didn’t approach some of the games well, and I also didn’t seem to care as much as I have in the past. Normally I would get jittery enough to force me to concentrate a little extra. I didn’t feel that this year, and I really need that extra push — I think most people do — to do well in that caliber of competition.

Despite that, I had an amazing time and have to agree with most people that this was the one of the best PAPA tournaments ever. PAPA has a long list of people’s pictures/videos. The machines worked fantastic throughout the weekend with very few mechanical problems. I was happy with the game choices in A, and eventually settled with these 5: Getaway, Congo, Demolition Man, Tommy, and Wheel of Fortune. Actually, I mostly alternated between Wheel and World Cup Soccer, which despite owning the game, I could not get a good feel for. I had many sub-100M games on it.

Congo turned out to be my best game, even though I barely know the rules. There’s really not that much to it. Top score was 1.8B, other scores were mostly in the 1B range. Getaway was second-best, but here I was inconsistent and had some truly awful games. Getaway did screw me over once; a software bug unlit my Redline Mania for seemingly no reason at all, unless there’s some rule I’m not aware of.

The two, one-day Classics tournaments were fun as usual, and here my performance was upper middle-of-the-pack. I probably played more entries in Classics than in A. I started Classics II with a great game of Cyclopes, but not much more than that.

I also played a couple of the mini-tournaments this year. In one, called “Attack from the Back”, an Attack From Mars machine was placed on the ground (without the legs), and the player operated the flippers from a specially built console placed behind the machine, on a raised platform. Here’s a short video of it. Playing backwards was surprisingly natural after a short time. However, there was no way to nudge or shake the machine in any helpful way. It was funny how everyone — myself included — would continue to try.

The other was a World Cup Soccer (apparently *the* game of 2008 as it appeared in A, B, C, juniors, and seniors divisions also!) where the flippers were controlled by kicking actual soccer balls, each mounted in some boxes to the left and right of the game (which was also sans-legs). This was much tougher and quite a workout. It was impossible to control both flippers at the same time, and many times I kicked the box rather than the ball, which didn’t help.

In between qualifying attempts, I played plenty of games in the practice area, where there were hundreds of games to choose from, mostly grouped according to theme. For kicks, there was some Future Spa and Class of 1812 thrown in there. I had some good runs on Twilight Zone and World Poker Tour, but otherwise nothing outrageous. I added a few games to the list of never-played-before games which is always nice.

Away from the tournament site, not much else happened. Trip and I did go out for food mostly and stayed away from the on-site food, which most people claimed was better than in the past, but I’m not so sure. We had the car, so it was no trouble going elsewhere. We had dinner at Max and Erma’s one night and ran into Bowen there by chance. We also ate at Vincent’s on recommendation from Keefer and ran into the Columbus area crew.

The finals on Sunday started a little late, around 2pm, but turned out to be the most suspenseful I have ever seen. (If ever we needed a camera crew around to film an exciting ending, this was the year! But there weren’t any…) First, all 16 competitors were good players, and quite a few other good players didn’t make the cut. Final games were on Family Guy, Dracula, Whitewater, and Addams Family. (Doctor Dude was also in the mix but got very few plays.) The final game ended around 10pm, and came down to the very last ball of the final player. Keith Elwin was way behind, but came back passing all of the other players to take the championship. Had he not won, there were various other scenarios, most of which would have involved a tie for 1st place. That would have been even more suspenseful, I guess.

After it was all over, a bunch of us went out for a late dinner. Trip and I came back to the hotel and hung out in the bar area for another hour or so before calling it quits. On Monday, we headed back home and landed just a few hours before the winds of Hurricane Fay became noticeable.

I did not play any pinball for the next six days.

Next tournament is several weeks away, at the Pacific Pinball Expo in the San Francisco area.

Today I’m heading to PAPA for this year’s World Pinball Championships. You can track the results of the tournament live on their site. I’ll be competing in the A division in the main tournament, and in both of the Classic Tournaments which are for smaller stakes and played exclusively on older machines.

It’s been many months since my last pinball trip so I’m definitely ready for this one. Aside from the pinball, the only definitive plan is dinner at Max and Erma’s one night. A 7-11 run for slurpees is highly likely, too.

Trip and I just returned from 5 days in Orlando for the Scrabble Nationals. He’ll go into plenty of detail about the tournament itself; I didn’t compete but was there for moral support and a mini-vacation. While he was playing, I had free time to do whatever I wanted. I haven’t had a vacation like this in some time, and I wasn’t sure going into it exactly what I would be doing. In the end, I didn’t do that many noteworthy things, but I sure enjoyed the time away from the office and the freedom to drive around and explore.

Friday night, before the tournament started, we hit Uno’s for classic deep dish pizza and then saw The Dark Knight. I also remembered how terrible the traffic is on International Drive. I would try to avoid it all weekend long.

On Saturday, I met up with my friends Adam and Ryan at Rocky’s Replay, a great pinball arcade just north of the city. We planned to meet at 2pm; I actually got there a few hours earlier. We played together for about three hours, then I returned to pick up Trip from the hotel. I then realized that his schedule was such that Saturday night was the only possible time he would be able to go to Rocky’s. So after five hours of it, we both drove back for another two hours. It was really the only thing I did that day. And yet, it’s still not as much pinball in a day as goes on at PAPA.

Sunday, I decided to scale back a bit and wander around downtown Orlando proper. Honestly, I didn’t see much. After a few hours of driving and making a few disappointing stops, I gave up and drove back to the hotel. I was content to enjoy the insanely cold A/C and free Internet in the room for a few hours. That evening, there was a reception for the Scrabble participants and guests, which gave me a chance to mingle and socialize a bit; that was particularly nice after so much solo time today. A few of us went out for dinner and dessert after that, before turning in.

On Monday I had an agenda again: a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. It’s only about an hour’s drive from Orlando — that despite numerous toll booths and some late afternoon traffic on the return trip. I had about 5-6 hours there, most of which was on a tour bus driving close to some of the more familiar shuttle facilities: the ginormous 525-foot VAB, the two launchpads, and the landing strip. I also watched the Tom Hanks IMAX film about the moon landings. Sadly I had forgotten to bring a camera for it all.

Tuesday, the final day of the trip, was a lot like Sunday: driving around, stopping here and there as urges struck me. On this day, the urges were coffee, a milkshake, various shopping, and watching the new X-Files movie, which I found rather boring.

We drove back late Tuesday night after the final 28th game of the tournament. Trip is off to California now for business. In a few weeks, we head to PAPA for the second World Pinball Championship of the year.