I think it's necessary if people are serious in saying that the future of pinball is on location. Just go through the nearest Dave and Buster's or Chuck E. Cheese's, and I bet that more popular games have the LCD screens now. At my local D and B, there always seems to be a crowd around the fruit ninja machine, as well as the various shooting games or rows of driving games. How is a 4 x 8" DMD supposed to draw attention over a 42 inch LCD with video?

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That's not true. The display is just as much part of the sensory experience of a pinball machine as the playfield itself. It will not kill the game if some of the focus is moved to the backbox. It would certainly improve the attract mode, and for mode starts and video modes, it could prove more exciting as well. I like the effect of keeping track of progress on WOZ, but I think it's split up poorly. I don't think the RAINBOW targets need an entire quadrant, for instance.

Let's encourage design advancement and progression there, not on a superfluous piece of eye candy located in the backbox.

What exactly is there left to do on the playfield? Another magnet? Another diverter? More upper/lower playfields? More lights? It's all been done before. An LCD screen and its respective attractions are the only thing that I see in a modern machine that help it stand out from the 90s B-W pins that seem to get so much attention. Maybe you put the LCD in the playfield itself, like what Heighway has done, or Captain Nemo.

Well, that's because you're sitting in the Pacific Northwest, which is an outlier in terms of interest. I live in the Midwest which is...OK outside of Chicago. There's Marvin's Museum. There's Pinball Pete's, but that isn't really kept up well. Otherwise, it's just one pin here, two pins there, and you're never sure of the maintenance.

Well, I'm looking at it from the standpoint of getting new kids as well as adults. No matter how many barcades open in metro areas, that's not going to affect tweens in the 'burbs. As much as I like pinball, I am not convinced that we aren't in a temporary boom or fad period. If these establishments do not work, we will have a few hundred routed pins and not much else to show for it. There were still new arcades opening in the early 90s when I was a kid, but by 2000 most of them were gone. There needs to be something for kids as well, because I think they represent the future, and after listening to the most recent edition of Coast2Coast, I think that Stern might be addressing it with their next license. Godspeed to them, but I think you will have another WOZ situation: the hard-cores will turn up their nose at it, while it does well on location.

Looking at the YouTube videos out there, Baby Pac-Man was a pretty tough, truncated pinball machine with a very hard version of Pac-Man jammed on top. Having good pinball play lead to an easier video game was inspired, but seriously...NO power pellets to start? Sheesh. The main problem with that is that the gameplay started with the game, so if you lost three lives fairly quickly, you never played pinball. That's an issue of execution, not imagination.

I'm not convinced that the under-21 market is that important. Most players I play with aren't boomers gripped by nostalgia. Most are younger than I am and almost all are better. They play because they have been raised on games and they've been exposed to pinball at places that they go to for other reasons.

That may be true, but I don't see how an increase in 21 to 34-year-olds playing means you can ignore under-21s.

You don't need raise a kid on pool to get people to shoot stick at a pub.

It doesn't hurt, though. It makes it as nostalgic for them as it is to people who grew up with it when it was ubiquitous in the 70s and early 80s. They may walk away from it at some time, but they could come back. I doubt that happens much to people who play for a couple months in their 20s or 30s. Once they move away from the pins in the big cities, does the fascination still follow?

I play pinball on location at least 2 times a week. I never play at barcades, I play at bars that have some pins. I honestly don't even know where any of the large barcades are in the bay area. Barcades might be important in some locations, but most of the joints I see on pinball map are old-fashioned bars with a couple tables, and giant flashy displays would not be appropriate in most bars.

It doesn't hurt Big Buck Hunter or Golden Tee.