Disclaimer: The opinions herein do not necessarily reflect those of Press Start as a whole or even of the staff members who post them. Take these with a grain of salt. If you are easily offended, avert your eyes now. You have been warned...

Easy Site Navigation:

First time visitor?

PAPA 11 Review

Nick - writer - posted on Friday, 08/22/08 23:38:15 EDT

You might remember one of our last arcade reviews of Castle Video, where I mentioned I found the place off of a website. Well, this one is going to start the same. This time I found a nice little pinball site from the UK called Pinballnews.com. Over on Pinball News, they review the newest machines and have tons of free articles all about pinball.

On one slow night I went through their entire site checking out all the old archives. I stumbled across their section for events. Some members of the site will write up reviews of different pinball gatherings from all over the world. There I saw one that struck me, PAPA.

I read into it and found out that PAPA, otherwise known as the Professional Amateur Pinball Association, was held once a year in Pittsburgh, PA. I checked the link and I was in awe of what I saw.

According to the article, the place is privately run by a huge pinball fan. It’s only open once a year for four days to the public to hold the tournament. The PAPA HQ in Scott Township PA is home to over 300 pinball machines, so I knew we had to check it out.

People from all over the world gather there for four days of pinball, competing in a number of different tournaments. The money collected in the tournaments goes into a prize pool, and then the rest of the money collected in the other machines gets donated to charity.

Since 2600 got a new job, he wasn’t able to join us. So on Friday night, Craig, The Cap’n and I set off from Long Island to Pittsburgh. The trip to PAPA is a bit longer then FunSpot. Even though you get a lot of roads straight through PA, it took us about 8-9 hours to get to our hotel that was 20 minutes away from PAPA HQ.

On Saturday we got up early and headed over to PAPA, after getting lost we finally saw a small sign on the road that just said “Pinball Tournament” and we found the banner on the side of the building.

We walked in and were amazed at what was in front of us. You’re first greeted by the nice front desk, on top of the desk were this year’s tournament trophies. They looked like little mini pinball machines, with pop bumpers and flippers, and they even lit up too! Much cooler then the pictures I saw of last year’s trophies.

Behind that was the HUGE sprawling arcade of pinball heaven. To me the place might have been an old factory that was just empted out and they just put 300 pinball machines in it instead. I knew doing a walkthrough tour on my own would be impossible to capture the place in less than 10 minutes, but I tried my best.

The arcade is set up really nice. Most of the games are just set up side by side, not really in any order, but some places you’ll see a theme of machines. One row was all of Sylvester Stallone machines, (Demolition Man, Rocky, and Judge Dredd, even though it’s based off the comic book), car themed games (Indy 500, NASCAR, High Speed), recent movie-based games (Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, LOTR, Spider-Man), and even the older games had their own little section. Most of the newest games were right out in front and got a lot of attention.

Now I’ll talk about the tournament. This is the way it <strong>SHOULD</strong> be run. Over on Neo-Geo.com we have a pinball thread going. Another member from Vegas wrote about how bad the tournament was at the Pinball Hall of Fame and I had my own horror stories from FunSpot. At the PAPA tournament there’s a rule that’s list for everybody, <strong>no flash photography in the tournament area</strong>. When one of the judges in the A Division saw me with my camera he kindly asked me if I did want to take pictures, I wouldn’t use my flash to disrupt the other players.

To enter a tournament is simple. You go up to the counter and you ask them what tournament you’d like to enter. You can choose from the following tournaments, A Division for the Professionals, B Division for the Semi-Pros and C Division for the new players. There is also a tournament run on Classic machines and a Juniors/Seniors division as well.

I decided I’d try my luck with the C Division. I always wanted to see how I’d rank with other pinball players, other than my friends and at the few arcade I play at. The entry fee was 15 dollars (5 dollars covers the basic entry fee, the C is 10 dollars and the other two are more expensive, which means larger prizes) for the tournament. I signed up, got a name badge and headed over to the site. It was there I could pick five of these machines,

Now this is how Pinball tournaments SHOULD BE RUN. You hand the sheet of paper to the judge and he/she asks you which of the five games you would like to play. You then either go to an open machine and play, or you can sit and wait for a machine to open.

The machines are at a nice volume so you can hear everything. They’re also spaced out between each other. So if you like to move around when you play pinball, you’re free to go nuts. Watching some of the A Division players really working the tables is a sight to behold. They get really into it, where I’m more like the verse from Tommy “He stands just like a statue, becomes part of the machine…”

Now here is where I failed. When you go to play, you only get ONE game. You don’t hog the machine like at FunSpot, where some people will sit there for a good hour on one machine. You play one game and you’re off for the next player. If I would have known that getting in there, I would have spent the day practicing the five machines I wanted, AND THEN entered the tournament.

The best I was able to do was over 100 million in Spider-Man which was only good for fourteenth place. Some folks are hardcore about getting the best scores to that they’ll enter a tournament more then once to better their scores. Keep racking that up at 15 bucks a pop and it gets pretty expensive!

PAPA also hosts cool mini tournaments as well. They have a “Split Flipper” tournament where two people play on one machine, each takes one flipper. There’s also a “Blind’s Eye Ball” where you have to play a game and get close to the mystery score without going over, it’s like that game with the climber on the Price is Right…just with pinball. The “Tense Two Minute Drill” is a timed two minute game. The winner got 58 MILLION on Whitewater!

The two other special tournaments were awesome. First one that I didn’t enter was the Football Tournament. They converted a World Cup Soccer 94’ machine, put it on the floor and you use your feet to kick these soccer balls to activate the flippers. The set up reminded me of World Kicks.

The one tournament I DID enter was a really insane tournament called Attack from the Back. They took an Attack from Mars machine, took the legs off and modified the flippers and launch button to work on the TOP of the machine. You get on a ramp, and you play looking down at the machine. It was so weird playing it, almost backwards. The biggest problem was a lot of people were trying to tilt the machine but it wouldn’t do anything but shake the back box. I was lucky enough to beat one saucer and get multiball but wasn’t able to get the neat 3 BILLION points scored by one of the pros.

Now since PAPA has over 300 machines, I couldn’t play all of them and I don’t want to go into full in depth reviews of each of the games I played. Needless to say almost every game I played worked great. Some of the games would eat your quarters but other than that, they worked fine.

This is where the place became really bad for me. Unlike at a normal arcade, there are multiple machines of the same game, so if you want to play Twilight Zone or any of the other games, you will find an open table to play. So during the course of the few hours we were there Craig and I dropped a ton of money there.

The only time we stopped was to use the restroom and get food, which was also very good. The PAPA people set up a nice BBQ dinner menu of food to choose from, like cheese burgers, tacos and pulled pork sandwiches. Top it off with a big soda and some great fries, you’re good to go.

PAPA also has some arcade games, including Sinistar, a stand up Discs of Tron (out of order) and another game, Tattoo Assassins. TA was going to be Data East’s answer to Mortal Kombat. The game’s story was created by Bob Gale, who helped write Back to the Future, how he did this game is WAY beyond me. There are a few good sites all about the history of the game and I-Mockery also did a really funny article on the game, so check it out.

Unfortunately, the TA game did not work when I went to play it. The reason why is a sad story. Back in 2004 the PAPA HQ was in a huge flood and they lost nearly all of their games. The water went up a good five feet and threw the machines around like they were nothing. Thankfully they recovered from it and everything is well.

I have nothing but high praise for PAPA. Almost all of the games are kept in excellent shape, the people are very friendly and even the food was good. The biggest problems are it’s in Pittsburgh, so it’s a haul to get to from Long Island, it’s only open once a year so you can’t visit it whenever you like, but the biggest problem is there is WAY too much good stuff!

If you do go for the weekend, do what I didn’t do: PACE YOURSELF!! It’s very easy to go through 10-20 dollars in a few hours. I’d reach into my pocket for more change and I’d grab at lint. I went with 25 dollars in quarters that I had rolled up and went through it all, and I still got another 30 at the counter and came home with 4.50 in quarters I could have spent there.

I really hope we go back next year. Next time I’ll practice some more BEFORE I enter the tournament and hopefully I do a bit better. Getting to meet people from all over the world that love pinball together in one place was an amazing experience. If you’re a fan of the silver ball, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Not only is it THE best place to play pinball, but most of the money goes back into PAPA for their expenses with some of it going to charity, so it helps keep the game alive and helps others as well.