Zapcon 2015 - Day Two Pinball Wizard

For the second day of Zapcon I suggested to my significant other - Vanessa that she should come along. While hesitant due to her relative lack of gaming skills and perceived “dude’s day out” she relented and eagerly tagged along. Day two will be a bit of a couples outing conquering some games together and competing to see who will wear the pants in the relationship. Neither of us are very fond of pants so there may be some attempts at throwing matches to avoid wearing them.

Vanessa was wide eyed and wanted to scope out everything there. To my surprise she told me that she had never played a pinball game. Of course Zapcon is the best place to play pinball so she went to the nearest machine and fired it up. For a beginner, she did fairly well although the game, Johnny Mnemonic, is probably a bit advanced for a beginner but she did as well as one could. I have played that game before and it is a lot of fun with some clever gameplay, such as manipulating the claw, thrown in.

80 gigs of storage

Things got a bit more competitive as we headed to the WWF Wrestlemania arcade machine. Developed by Midway, it was almost like Mortal Kombat but with WWF superstars. I have only barely played this game once or twice before so we were basically both brand new to this game. Vanessa resorted to button mashing (as I did too for the most part) and that was enough to dominate me in the few matches we had. She was so enthralled with winning that she wanted the machine. At only $450, who could say no to that!?

Doink the Clown

We decided to take on a game together and that was House of the Dead. I’m a huge fan of the sequel and the Typing of the Dead games but I have admittedly never played the first one. It was only ported onto the Saturn and that one costs more than $100. House of the Dead II was the game I usually saw in arcades and I would pump most of my quarters into that. House of the Dead is a standard light gun game with B-movie sensibilities with an outrageous plot, paper thin characters, and ridiculous acting. Basically everything needed to make for a fun and memorable experience. We completed the game and it became another one to add to the ever expanding home arcade. I definitely think that a MAME cabinet would be cheaper. Although having some actual arcade machines would be nice too.

I'm here to kick ass and chew gum and I'm all out of gum.

From there we played a couple of games of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (this time with blood and working controls) and then met up with my friends. I played a bit of Elevator Action which is basically just get on an elevator and shoot bad guys on the floors. We hit both hit up Tempest for our next game. I was really digging it this time around and even managed to make the high score a couple of times on this particular machine. I’ll definitely have to revisit this title the next time Zapcon happens.

At least I'm on the board.

We wondered around a bit playing as we went along such as Centipede, Ghouls N Ghosts, Castlevania, Arabian Nights, and Creature from the Black Lagoon among others. Another year has been wrapped up at Zapcon and I eagerly await for the next year to do it all over again with attempts to make some more high scores and play more games.