New Year Robot Bash

New Year Robot Bash pinball meet & competition
Tuesday 30th December 2014
At Broadstone, nr Poole, Dorset

This was a great competition hosted by Gregg Mott at his house in Dorset. With 16 pinball machines on the day, it's no surprise that Gregg's house is well kitted out for pinball, with a dedicated (converted) garage space which holds 10 machines, and a cabin in the garden with the other 6. Also in the cabin is a pretty spectacular selection of classic arcade games.
I was thankful for previously meeting Bristolians, Helmut & Emma who were also going to this competition, so managed to tag along in their car instead of tackling with a bit more of a complex public transport route to Broadstone.

The competition
The competition rules were slightly different and in depth than the previous competitions. Gregg had setup a website for the competition, also emailed and communicated the rules on the day before we all started playing.

After working out the format it was pretty clear, well thought out and worked well. For some people the downside is waiting around for all the games to finish before moving to the next round - but I used this opportunity to play some more practice games.

The group sheets were handed out before each game and you had to find the other players and your machine!

For qualifiers there was eight rounds of 4-player games with all players competing in each round. Before each round begins all players were ranked. For the first round, rankings were based on players' current WPPR ranking (I'm at 0 by they way!) After each round, players' points were added together and all players were re-ranked according to their total points. The groups are then changed according to their new ranking as per the first round.

Roadshow

Me being a low scorer I stayed around the bottom groups and played competition games on AC/DC (4th place), Road Show (3rd place), Spiderman (3rd place), X Men (played twice - 3rd & 2nd place) and Indiana Jones (3rd place).

Indiana Jones playfield

I really liked the thinking of this setup as it allowed the lower ranking players to work their way up through the groups, and also as all the higher ranking players were in one group it would split them up and there would be some work required from them to get back to the top groups then commence through the knockout stages into the final.

Monster Bash Playfield

The structure of the machines also meant that in the most part, nobody would be playing the same machine twice. I played the X Men machine twice because we were drawn another which had already had a game playing - but this system was great for me to get a good variety of different machines played and meet a range of different players and see how they play.

 Results
Congratulations to the top three players who won trophies on the day:

1. Ivan Miles
2. Craig Pullen
3. Tim Thornton

see all the results... 

Unfortunately my professional Pinball career has not taken off yet - it's back to work as normal after the holidays for me along with the shame of coming in last place again! Hopefully they will make a trophy for last place - but I'll probably have to make my own.

What's this all about?
This post is from my journal on MA Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking.
I am currently proposing a project based around arcade games, specifically Pinball (see the assignment brief).
Part of my research and understanding is to play see the seperate post about the machines I have played recently.