Conyers, GA
Holy. Crap. Best. TPF. EVER.
Load in, super easy IMO, but I got there very early. Hotel rooms, nice, not the best mattress in the world to me, but is what it is..they're not going to put in SleepNumbers. 
Was a genuine shock to find a shower with a curtain that actually was not falling off the hooks or the bar. Don't even get me started on happy hour and free booze. The free breakfast was actually pretty good for a basic breakfast buffet type setup.
Tourney games were: Star Trek (Stern), Mustang, Metallica, Medieval Madness, Stargazer, Seawitch, Slick Chick, and Atlantis. By far the best tourney lineup in the three years I've gone so far. I played my first round of qualifiers early on friday and did well enough that I almost immediately qualified for "A" division in most of the tourneys... I didn't really start getting knocked down until Saturday morning. I think the highlight of my qualifying scores was posting over 1 million on Seawitch (clearcoated and restored, fast as hell), 750k on Stargazer (Also clearcoated and restored, massive spinner action and super active pops and slings...thanks for that. Now it's on my want list.).
In the end, I ended up qualifying for A on EM's, B on Classics, C on Texas Tilt (MM and Metallica), and C on Modern (Star Trek and Mustang), I think. I ended up taking 2nd place in A div EM's (!!!! HOLY ....) after playing 2nd being 7th seed (!!!) and then watching a LOT of really good players not make it to the 57k mark that I had. I beat one person by 290 points on Atlantis, which is to say they lost by THREE POP BUMPER HITS. The games were SUPER CLOSE this year across the board, and I actually had to bust out my calculator on Spider-Man on the parent and child tourney where my opponent's kid pretty much matched my score dead on, and he matched my kid's score nearly dead on. Tilts were VERY reasonable this year IMO with maybe one or two very small exceptions that were manageable, not egregious. Also ended up taking 10th place in Texas State Champ A div (!!!! HOLY ....) which is just way better than I really had any right to do. Mad props to Cary Fishman and his kid Zach (who was the top qualifier for A div BTW...he was the one I had the 290 point lead on Atlantis in EM finals, he finished 3rd. 
)...they're both awesome player. I don't know anything about the guy who won so I'll stick to people I met and played with.
So yeah...I did very well in the tourneys, which I'm extremely pleased with. There was only one small hiccup with the new tourney software, not sure of the whole story on that, but they took scores on paper for an hour or so, restarted the tablets, and all seemed to be copacetic from there on out far as I could tell.
So, we get to the end of the show, I'm exhausted, ready to go. And I finally got my Safecracker token for this year (Thanks Marc...I know you don't have to put those things in there, but it sure does make it something special to get it.) after watching my wife get two back to back the night before, when she was HAMMERED to boot. That was a good smile and very satisfying to beat that game. Anyone that hasn't played it has missed out, and anyone that didn't at least look at the Warlords cocktail missed out too. As far as I can tell it was occupied by small children most of the weekend....pretty cool to see 4 kids get competitve on an arcade game at the same time. Days gone by and all that.
2:30 rolls around and they call up everyone to announce the "Best of Show" awards. We won 1st place for "Custom" category for our STTNG, which is still kind of outrageous to me. I was not expecting that at all. Getting a ribbon at TPF for a game is a nice vindication of all the hard work I try to put into my games. We got TONS of compliments both on STTNG and Jackbot all weekend long. I checked the audits and both of them got over 500 plays. All of my games survived the show, the only minor malfunction was on Jackbot's lift ramp...coil locked on, don't know why, asked Rob Anthony to look at the board and no go on that, as there was nothing wrong with my board, so I've got some digging to do to locate the actual problem, but it was playable all weekend long with the ramp disabled and everyone could still get credit for the double points shot that way. I had 5 pins there, STTNG, Magic, Metallica (In the tourney area, opened NIB on thursday! 350 plays!), Jackbot, and Future Spa. Also had a Raiden Fighters arcade. All survived.
Played MMR, was fun. Played Mustang, was fun with horrible callouts but good play and mode implementation. Played Predator, but only one game so dunno what to think....the ramps light up from the blacklight. *shrug* P3 was freakin' cool. Star Trek Mirror Universe looked fantastic, especially the nixie tube displays, and it won Best of Show for the whole thing.
Didn't have a single rude or bad experience all weekend long. I'm begging to keep this venue. Now I'm looking forward to modding Metallica out, making Jackbot even better, hopefully restoring Magic, and bringing them back next year. Awesome time, awesome show.
Halifax, NS
