I'll say it again: last year, GDQ provided a transcendent pinball experience in its free play arcade. It brought me from being a vague pinball fan who didn't really know how to play, to my current state of "pinball is my life", with excellent machines like Swords of Fury, Metallica, and eventually Godzilla. (There were also some bad machines, like Baywatch, and Star Wars (2017)).
This year, the arcade has returned to a focus on rhythm games. There are only two pinball machines, both from Spooky Pinball: Scooby-Doo and John Carpenter's Halloween.
Scooby-Doo is fine. It's a good machine. It's mode-heavy without much meaningful gameplay outside of modes, but that's most machines these days. It's got that cool bookcase flipper. There's a line to play it.
Halloween has many things that I don't like about pinball, but the worst feature of the machine is also its most impressive: the ball movement is completely silent.
I'm sure this fits the theme very well. The ball sneaks up on you and scares you. It means you have to learn the complex rules of diverters and subways to anticipate where the ball is going to go, because some of the feedback you usually use to play pinball -- the sound of the ball and the vibration of pinball mechanisms -- is just not there.
Everything on that machine is way too smooth, and that combines with hidden subways that put the ball on a flipper (behind a cover where you can't see it). Yes, the flippers blink when they're doing this, but you've got to learn to pay special attention to those subtle blinks and not anything else on the table that's blinking. In multiball, as far as I can tell, you're just fucked. If you're not deeply familiar with the table you might as well just mash the flippers like a child, because then at least you'll flip the ball.
Anyway. I played some good Scooby-Doo. It's set up harder than the one in Charlotte, which is fine, it means games don't go on forever. And when I want to play more than that, there's the LITT Pinball Bar.

