I suppose this is a bit of a morbid topic. I guess what triggered it was when I ventured down south to oregon to play some on-location pinball. I suppose I forgot how many neglected pinball machines are out there, rotting away in some dirty amusement facility. I was sad to find once beautiful machines in this state. So I decided to start this topic about some on-location horror stories. Here's one:
Funland amusement: I had been here a couple years ago, and the games (AC/DC, Spiderman VE, TWD, GOT) were not too bad. Yes, they had somewhat dirty playfields, but were fine mechanically. Of course, they were relatively new new games then.
I had hoped that they would have had some basic maintenance since my last visit, but I seemed to be mistaken. The first thing I noticed was that JP had replaced AC/DC. Alright, that was fine. Upon closer examination, JP was actually not bad. Just old code. But then, it's a new game. Next I played game of thrones. Dang, was that playfield dirty. It almost resembled mold. I didn't really want to know. Besides old code there was not much wrong with the game. The only other problem was the dragon shot, which did not register. This really caused a problem, making the game extremely messed up. Any mode including that shot could not be completed. One could not get an extra ball or start wall multiball. I'd had enough at that point. I didn't bother to play TWD or spiderman ve. Just from looking at spiderman, I could tell that the the sandman drop bank was either stuck with all the caked on grime on the playfield, or it was mechanically broken. I also noticed that several plastics were missing. TWD was very dirty, just like the others, but it almost fit the theme with this game It looked fine other than the dirty playfield, but I never played it.
I wanted to ask the people there who even took care of these neglected games, and why they didn't care and/or were incompetent in taking care of pinball machines. I refrained.
There we go, that's my rant of the day. Any other horror stories?

aaaaah yes. I figured this might come up, but I hoped it wouldn't. My camera does not work, and could not get anything into focus. Sorry

Here's another one. The game itself was maintained fine, but this flipper adjustment...wtf???

Beatles gold wonky flipz (resized).jpg