Houston, Texas gaming expo :)

[VectorX]

I went to night #1 last night. I'm leaving soon for most of a day of gaming

This is the 10 year anniversary of the local show, having old (going back to the 1930s!) entertainment machines, pinball, coin-op video games and home systems, along with door prizes, tournaments and all.

I played some Tron (both, the regular AND Discs of were there), Bubbles (tabletop version?! I'd never seen one!), Defender, Pac-Man for the first time in over 20 years, Reactor, Phoenix, Krull (whoa...movie supposedly wasn't very good, but I made it through all five stages to the point where it started over!), Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, Satan's Hollow, the Joust pinball machine, pinball machines of all kinds and ages (the Avatar one's pretty good), some gambling machines (shame, shame! Gives me a taste for what Vegas is like...minus having a damn cup or sack around my neck...if I ever go), home consoles, lotta stuff.

An Apple II was there as well, and it was my first time playing Midnight Magic on an Atari XE ever. Interesting. First time playing the ColecoVision version of Bump 'n Jump too, along with K. C. Munchkin (I've hardly played any O2).

Nice to see I can still crank it out on the Grid Bug and Tower screens of Tron, but I got some pain with all the rapid firing of my trigger fingers (plus my legs hurt with all the standing and shifting around for hours too! ). Nice to break 100,000 though, even though I had forgotten my Light Cycle and Tank patterns (I could literally get nine times that score back in the day).

It was also nice to be able to buy some stuff, for once: there was a really cool Space Invaders bag that I'll put up a pic of later. I just asked out of curiosity how much it'd be, figuring it'd be like $10-12 or something. Three dollars?! (*# yeah!

I also have four buttons sitting right here, being the birds that hatch from eggs and the mother ship from Phoenix, the saucer from Asteroids and the one from Space Invaders...50 cents each. I'll get a t-shirt today too...maybe Major Havoc.

But who cares, lets see some pics dammit!



Here's that Bubbles tabletop





Don't think I played High Speed since college...and I know Avatar was a lot more recent than that! Like not even 24 hours ago!



ColecoVision, Atari 5200, Apple II



For the last few years, a local Star Wars group comes in full costume (Storm Troopers pic didn't come out; I'll try again tomorrow). Why this Ghost Busters guy was there is beyond me though



The one-armed bandits vs. the two-armed bandit. Winner? Me! Video games are more fun!



Look real closely at the playfield here. Maybe you can't tell by the photo, but it's all FLAT. That's an artificial pinball machine (i. e. computer generated), having dozens of tables on it. I couldn't get it to start but maybe today...



T-shirts, and the Pac-Men monsters and Berzerk robots at left are soap!

[sj]

Looks like a proper blokes day out.

[gamezone]

Awesome!! Thanks for the pics VectorX! I am a big fan of Krull the movie, 2600 version and arcade. Haven't played the arcade version in about 25 years. Also a big O2 fan.

Those look like my kinda people. Very nice setup!!

Sounds like a good time and hope to hear more of your adventure.

[VectorX]

Nov 12, 2011 22:50:34 GMT -5 gamezone said:

I am a big fan of Krull the movie, 2600 version and arcade.

A friend of mine liked the 2600 game a lot. I played it once but don't really recall it.

Funny, here I got all the way through it yesterday until it repeated, today my playing of it sucked! ;D But then, the controls were starting to go out...

Nov 12, 2011 22:50:34 GMT -5 gamezone said:

Also a big O2 fan.

There were several O2 games, it was really impressive to see, all of them were in good shape. Played Alien Invaders Plus. Kind of odd how that bottom row is indestructible...I think?

Nov 12, 2011 22:50:34 GMT -5 gamezone said:

Sounds like a good time and hope to hear more of your adventure.

Unfortunately I cut it short today--I should be there right now--but then, I played quite a lot and was there from 1-6 p. m., along with being there several hours last night. Plus I start getting depressed there after a while, being by myself; it's WAY better with a second person. The nephew ended up not going, so that didn't help...

That blasted Hyperpin (or whatever it's called; the pinball emulation of real machines) was out of service for most of today, so no playing around with that. I went through many pinball and some reruns of video games. Funny how I had never gotten past level 2 on Venture (great to play that again for the first time in over 20 years!), then I made it to level 3, of all shockers, as every single room was new to me.

Me and some guy both pounced on Super Mario Bros. at the same time and decided to play doubles. He said he wasn't very good at it, as well as "I suck; oh no, I just hit the Pow button" and later "you might want to bail out now and save yourself!" It worked out decently though, as we got to the ice creatures. I had forgotten about them. I was able to talk during my last couple of lives (as he had lost all of his) and that I had the 2600 version, which he never knew there WAS one. So that was cool, thanks to him, whoever it was, that was fun.

The Major Havoc t-shirt was gone though; oh SH*T! But then, the shirts were marked down to half price today: $5 each So, thinking I was going to spend $10 on one shirt, originally, I ended up getting two And at least one of them was still vector, as I got Discs of Tron and Tempest.

Nov 12, 2011 22:50:34 GMT -5 gamezone said:

Those look like my kinda people. Very nice setup!!

A nice bunch too. Marble Madness wouldn't work, or at least the controls didn't. When I saw two guys working on it today I asked if it was in operation, which one of them said yes, clapping me on the shoulder. I played a game of it several minutes later, realizing too late that I was never very good at it, getting my butt handed to me on a platter. Another guy next to me was playing Venture (possibly for the first time) as I was playing Star Trek, who kept on shooting Hall Monsters over and over. I told him you can't shoot them and to head into a room, returning the favor/passing the karma along, I guess. He thanked me and was able to get a bit further into the game then. Wonder what he thought of it...

Well, more pictures coming up! Lot to go through!

[VectorX]

Here's that Invaders bag I mentioned earlier...



Some old pins...wasn't able to play Space Odyssey, but I played everything else in that batch though...



As I had mentioned this in the other thread, Star Fire made it! And I got my butt kicked during it, for some reason!



Some Storm Troopers...from behind though. Oh well, you get the idea



One to add to my miscellaneous gaming stuff from that thread from the other week, as I now have two more gaming shirts!



And one LAST thing to add: my buttons!

[gamezone]

Nice shirt and buttons. The effort those people put into their costumes is amazing.

I liked Alien Invaders Plus just for that reason. It made it somehow different than Space Invaders(SI). Not many people have had much good to say about that game but then I think it always challenged you more then SI.

[VectorX]

Nov 13, 2011 1:25:27 GMT -5 gamezone said:

The effort those people put into their costumes is amazing.

There was also a guy in a rebel flight outfit and one in an imperial officer's uniform as well.

Just make a donation to the local group and they'll show up at your outing.

[VectorX]

Video, with a couple of pics and several brief video clips not seen in the above posts:

[VectorX]

It's that time of the year again!

The Houston Area Arcade Group (H. A. A. G.) gaming expo will probably include over 100 pinball and video game machines (too early to say right now; over 40 games are confirmed, and the list will grow!), as well as home consoles, contests, door prizes, and all sorts of merchandise (gaming and non-related) available, plus more!

$20.00 a day or $30 for a weekend pass (with kids 4 and under are free) allow players unlimited access to games set on free play. Prepaid tickets are $15.00 with a weekend pass at $25.00.

www.arcadecenter.com/

There are always vector games (and sometimes a Vectrex) at these expos; right now Star Wars and Tempest are confirmed to appear (and usually do!).

As usual, I won't know until the last minute if I'll be going or not. Hopefully...!

[TrekMD]

Nice! How well attended are these events?

[VectorX]

Pretty well, aside from the other year when I was saddened when, for some strange reason, there wasn't much of a crowd on a Friday night.

Turns out some idiot had brought in a gun earlier

They're not as crowded as some real popular ones where I've heard you have to wait 15 minutes to play a game of Major Havoc. I'd say they're just about "right", especially when you can take a time out from some of the arcades and move onto the home consoles when they're not busy, or vice versa.

[TrekMD]

Cool. Wish we had something like that here in South Florida.

[VectorX]

OOH! Spectar was added to the games list! Be nice to play a "new" game that I haven't before (if I can go). I've played it on MAME but never even heard of the game until several years ago (I had seen its predecessor of Targ once). So that would be cool.

[VectorX]

Hah! I only just saw this, since the guy who founded H. A. A. G. only just now updated the site with last year's show info.

I'm at the very beginning (didn't know the guy was behind me!), plus a glimpse can be seen of me at 2:08, and at 5:13 me and some guy both lunged for Super Mario Bros. at the same time, so I said lets just play doubles. That was pretty cool. (Video's nearly 10 minutes long though but you get a good feel for the place.)

The list is up to 76 machines, consoles and computers so far for the next show!

[sj]

Sept 14, 2012 21:26:15 GMT -5 VectorX said:

me and some guy both lunged for Super Mario Bros.

I wondered who the bloke was who kept hogging that machine...