Quoted from Brijam:

Fantastic show! I had a great time with my son. Thank you so much to the organizers and generous people/companies who donated their time and machines. Special thanks for the people who brought Atari Football, Basketball, Sub and any two-player simultaneous games!
Regarding game hogs, while most people were very polite, I experienced about a dozen instances of people hogging games, and one or two people playing a four player game. The people I politely asked not to play more than 1 game looked indignant, claimed they didn’t know, or “they wanted to experience the game” or some other entitled BS. Typical tragedy of the commons stuff.
Would it be possible to have the people handing out the wristbands say “1 game per player” to everyone and ask them to make sure their children and everyone in their party understood the policy? I’d also like to see prominent signage (I mean those 6 foot tall standing banners) scattered throughout, and cards on the backglass. With the right art it could be funny and really set the tone.
I would also like to see more vendors with pinball gear there. I came away with some ramps, thank you Starship Fantasy, but I wish I could have picked up some more pinball-related swag, esp. shirts for my favorite games.
On to the games:
I came expecting to hate Iron Maiden, but I really liked it. Super fun game. Stern keeps getting better with the LCD, but they have a long way to go to catch up to JJP’s quality. Their screen art used to look like bad ‘90s Flash animation, now it looks like bad ‘00s Flash animation. And WTF is the deal with not showing the score and the ball in play at all times? Lunacy.
I enjoyed playing more Houdini, that’s one I will be adding to my collection. I hope American ups their game on the animations next time, though. I found those to drag down an otherwise excellent game.
JJP Pirates was a lot of fun to play, but the lines were so long I didn’t get enough time to really dig in like I did with IMDN. The characters added a lot of depth and I feel like there is a ton to explore on that game. Looking forward to playing more of that one.
Regarding Thunderbirds I will limit my comments to the positive and say that the playfield was colorful, and I liked the way multiball started. I don’t know what they were aiming for, and I didn’t look at the innards or build quality. But as a player, if they were going for a Data East circa 1992 they got most of the way there. More than anything I was disappointed to see a Homepin rep attacking someone here for critiquing their game. Deeply unprofessional. That certainly didn’t win me over as a customer.
It was great to play an Orbitor 1 that seemed to be completely working!
There were also some fun hobby/early development machines there. I was most impressed with the potential of Proto. That’s definitely one to watch. I was frankly astonished at what was possible at the FAST Pinball lounge.
My son and I will definitely be back next year!