Well, my Pinburgh dream ended at the close of qualifying, but I still had a blast and wanted to share my thoughts on the event.

This was my first Pinburgh outside of PAPA HQ, and after reading some comments about last year, I have to admit, I was a bit nervous. Would it be too loud? Would the games suffer from being trucked across town? Were there too many people playing? Would I miss the tailgating in the PAPA HQ parking lot?

The answer is no, no, no, and a little.

Let me just say one thing straight away: what Mark Steinman, Doug Polka, Bowen Kerins, and the entire PAPA crew have done is nothing short of astonishing. To have that many games and that many players, plus a massive set of public play pins and video games--and not have it simply implode--is quite a feat.

If you're worried about all this video game stuff being a distraction, it helps to know that Pinburgh is pretty well-shielded from all of the commotion on the other side. The games in the competition are all nicely spaced, and even though the floors and ceilings are bare, I didn't think it was any louder than PAPA HQ... in fact, I thought it was actually a bit quieter. There were a few times when some annoying noise came from the other side, including some a-hole on a cart that kept blowing his horn while we were trying to play.

The machines are all dialed in, and there are tons of techs on hand to fix an issue relatively quickly. We had to ring them a few times, but the fix was never more than a few minutes away. Overall, the games are in tip-top shape, and the selection is very eclectic. For most players, seeing an EM and 2 solid state games can be daunting, and any relief you'd feel stepping up to a DMD is quickly dashed by the realization that the game is set up to be PAPA hard. But, that's Pinburgh.

The seeding and scoring software seems to be much improved this year. Matches are scored fairly quickly, and new banks are posted well ahead of time. Having everything on an app keeps the number of announcements to a minimum. In fact, I don't recall the PA ever being used while we were in play.

Having increased the players to 700, I guess one could be concerned that there would be a larger proportion of players with poor etiquette, but that wasn't the case for the most part. It seems that nearly everyone who played had complete respect for other players, and refrained from breaking eyelines and kept outbursts to a minimum. People also showed up pretty much on time and played their turns quickly. Having more players certainly didn't bog the system down.

While I do miss tailgating in the PAPA parking lot, the tradeoff is a much bigger public floor, with all of the games on free play (no more tokens necessary!). There's also several restaurants in the area, and even a bar, so you don't have to run to some seedy bar down the block to get carry-out like you do at PAPA HQ, and you aren't forced to either leave the area completely or subsist on concession stand food. That said, the PAPA parking lot seemed to breed a bit more camaraderie between rounds, since it was literally the only place to go, rather than having a massive show floor of free-to-play games and vendors.

I do have a few gripes and some suggestions for improvement:

1) Since the Pinburgh website is the main source for groups and standings, and since no one has a computer with them, they should make the website a bit more mobile-friendly. Adding a search feature to the top of the page would help, and making it easier to click on your name without zooming all the way in and cropping out all the useful data would be nice.

2) The big break in the day is a bit odd... it's too late for lunch and a bit too early for dinner. I suppose this is so we aren't out during the lunch rush and have more time, but it would be nice to have more time near lunch to grab a quick bite without feeling rushed.

3) I thought it'd be nice to have our names on our badges. In talking with Bowen, this was a purposeful omission, since it requires you to introduce yourselves. But, sometimes, you just get so much mental fatigue that it's hard to keep people straight, and at around the third round, people start making errors on the score sheet. That said, I totally get why they did that, and I think they're right. Maybe if we just had our initials on there... we'd still have to introduce ourselves, but a quick glance at a badge could remind you who is who, using the score sheet as a reference

4) The floors are concrete slab, and there is a lot of standing. I stand for a living, wearing 40lbs of lead, so I thought I had pretty good stamina, but by the time tiebreakers rolled around on day 2, my body was on fire. Though I'm sure it'd be expensive, it would be nice to have the competition area covered in a low-pile carpet, like PAPA HQ. Another advantage of this would be that they wouldn't have to put the legs on rubber feet. I found that having the games on rubber feet meant that there was zero give. The net effect was that tilts seemed way more sensitive because the machines didn't slide.

5) Having more sitting areas near the games would be nice to prevent pain and fatigue, maybe even a line of benches in the middle of the rows. There's certainly enough space to accommodate this.

6) The bathrooms are a bit far away, and are only on one side of the room. This isn't PAPA's fault, but I wish the convention center had some bathrooms closer.

7) The entrance is all the way at the other end of the show floor. From front door downstairs to the bank is a couple hundred yards. It'd be nice for Pinburgh players to have a separate and more direct entrance (restricted to players only).

8 ) The room could be a few degrees cooler

9) It'd be nice to have some food trucks outside. The on-premise food is expensive and pretty terrible. It'd be nice to have some vendors outside for snacks between rounds, especially if the break schedule remains the same. This year, the only outside vendors were selling desserts and carnival food.

10) Provide more advance warning about the full calendar. A few events were added very late in the schedule, and because my travel plans were solidified several months ago, and didn't account for them, I will be missing out.

11) Invent a time machine that lets me fast-forward life until the next Pinburgh

This is about as harshly critical as I can be. ReplayFX and this modern incarnation of Pinburgh are really fantastic, and the folks at PAPA have knocked it out of the park. If you're on the fence, don't be. This is the best event of the year.

I should also say that having the viewing area for the A finals was nice. It certainly was a lot more comfortable and accessible than the viewing area at PAPA.

I'm with you about lock-stealing games. I am also not a fan of having RoboCop in the tournament, if only because the "skill shot" is anything but. The ball gets delivered to the right rollover no matter how you plunge, and the lit lane for the shot isn't player-determined. In my round, my skill shot was always lit at the left rollover, meaning I got nothing, but the guy who won had the right lane lit for all three of his balls. I lit the spinner and ripped it, but he still won by 200,000 points, and 600,000 came from his skill shots. When every point counts, that's a huge blow.

As for practicing the competition games, there is a brief warm-up, but it's not practical to have the games always on for play, IMHO. These things need to be dialed-in and error-free. The more people play them, the more chance there is for the game to break or get wonky. Learning the shots on the fly is also part of competition (even though I suck at it).

I don't think the one-player wedgeheads are unfair. Play order is based upon seeding or performance in the previous game, so the order of play is under your control to a certain extent. We all learn by watching others (which is why the player with first choice almost always decides to play last), so these games are no different.

I would say, however, that games that don't require a tremendous amount of skill (like Slick Chick, which is just a pachinko game) shouldn't be used.

Finally, while I can see your point about paying for an additional entry into ReplayFX, I think it's the only way to go. Pinburgh entry fees mostly get put into the prize pool, so there has to be another revenue stream. Renting out that convention center and moving all of those games cannot be cheap, and the entry fee is how they are able to pay for it all, especially on Thursday, when the attendance is pretty much limited to Pinburgh players. Plus, you get a ton of free entertainment. All of those machines on free play was awesome, and even though I focused on the tournament, I sure got my money's worth. And when you choose to buy a pass for your kids, they have tons of things to do at no additional costs: climbing walls, trampolines, bounce houses, and loads of games, all in what seems to be a pretty safe environment. That's a pretty good deal, no matter how you slice it!

Slick Chick is an overly important plunge followed by the ball trickling down a set of bumpers to flippers that are too wide and not powerful enough to get the ball more than halfway up the playfield. A gobble hole worth more than 3 minutes of flipping encourages you to end your ball early. It's 80% luck.