In yet another assault on the pinball senses Stern Pinball has released a new video from several events related to the launch of the Metallica pinball machine. From launch partied hosted throughout the country to footage from the Comic Con convention hosted last week there are lots of enthusiastic people that had a chance to play and enjoy the game. 

After what may seem like an eternity for pinball fans who crave new pinball information, JJP has released another detail drawing of The Hobbit and gives us another clue to the playfield design. 

Greetings Pinball Fans,  

Today we are happy and very excited to release another section of The Hobbit Limited Edition Pinball Machine playfield. This game will have several new and innovative features which will be detailed in coming weeks.  

As of September 1st the price of The Hobbit LE will increase $500 to $8000.00. We ask that you are current on the payment schedule for The Hobbit by 8/31/13. Those who are not current will see a $500 increase in the price of their game after 9/1/13, making their game $8000.

Many people are paying according to the schedule which enables us to develop the game as we did with WOZ. We need to reward those who are loyal and stay on the payment plan while others who do not pay now will pay more later. There may be another price increase before the game goes into production. We have several distributors around the world looking to increase their orders so demand is growing for the game as more information is released.

We will proudly show the full playfield before the end of August. This is going along better than WOZ as much of the basis of the platform is already created.

We are excited to reveal the top right portion of  
The Hobbit Pinball Playfield - Click here to view the PDF
  

This area shows multiple entrances into the pop bumper area which can be controlled by the game or by skill or luck. We also show one magnet and one spinner and a target above the banana shaped insert. There is a lot in this 25% of the main playfield to absorb. We will release another section of the playfield next week. The playfield is packed and the game is very different than WOZ.           

If you missed this in the previous update,click here to view the lower portion of The Hobbit Pinball Playfield

Wizard of Oz games continue to roll off the line. Getting through the first few days of massive orders has taken time but we are now into group shipments and we have 180+ ECLEWOZ games in the queue for August with only 18 of them as WOZ. We are also expecting another code update in the next several days.    

It has been a long road but we got here as fast as we could. We are producing the best game we can which gets better every day. We thank our loyal JJP customer base for their patience and support and we will soon announce a reward system for those loyal customers for parts and goodies at reduced cost.    

Jack definitely did not do it alone but that's the name of the AOL segment. If anyone missed this, we were recently featured on anAOL.com/Huffington Post segment called "How I Did It - Here's the link to view - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/jersey-jack-pinball_n_3504566.html     

Stay tuned here for more Hobbit pinball news as it's released.

Johnny Beaver carries a piece of paper with his pinball high scores written on it. He uses it as motivation to top his previous score. It’s also a way to relive his best moments.

Beaver, 32, is part of a quietly growing the pinball scene in Corvallis. Pinball lovers are slowly expanding the availability of pinball machines in town. And they want bargoers who are focused more on beer instead of the game to join their community.

The Northwest far surpasses other regions in number of pinball locations, according to international machine tracker pinballmap.com. For example, Portland has 246 pinball locations, Seattle has 102 and Eugene is listed with 13, but insiders say there are far more.

Corvallis has five. Beaver and Brian Morrissette, the 18-year-old godfather of pinball in Corvallis, struggled to name even that many.

“(Pinball is) a growing renaissance in America, especially in the Northwest,” Morrissette said.

Contributing to the movement are men in their 30s and 40s who want to relive the game they grew up playing. In the past two years, Morrissette said, the number of collectors in town has at least doubled.

Jeff Obermann, 43, is one of them. He thought his grandparents having a pinball machine in their basement was the coolest thing in the world. He resolved that when he grew up, he would own pinball machines.


Play every pinball game Corvallis has to offer with this interactive Corvallis map. See what each location has to offer by viewing Corvallis pinball map in a larger map.

Now, at least 10 machines are practically stacked on top of each other in his kitchen.

Ben Metzger, 31, is hoping to provide people of all ages the same thrill he gets when he plays pinball. His restaurant and arcade, The Dam, is scheduled to open sometime this fall and will showcase at least a dozen 1970s and 80s era pinball machines, some rare.

Metzger is already building his collection with the help of Morrissette. Metzger keeps three in his future kitchen, where he plays his favorite machine -- Gottlieb’s 1981 Mars God of War -- because the dark basement workshop scares him.

He knows The Dam will make more money from beer sales than 25 cent pinball games, but games like the vintage Panthera 2 are converting guys like Beaver into a zealous community of pinballers.

-- Emiko Bledsoe, Parkrose High School sophomore

See the video here 

Here is the second and final part of our walkthrough tour of The Pinball Wizard's Arcade in Pelaham, New Hampshire. This final part of the tour shows off more of Sarah's arcade game collection as well as the ticket redemption games. Some games to note in this video include a really rare Atari game called Arabian, Atomic Punk 2/Bomberman World. Nudge-It! from Gottlieb (Be sure to check out both video reviews 2600 did!) Super Mario Mushroom World, Mr. Driller inside of an 80's Taito cab and Hot Rod from Sega.

Also at the end of the video I show off what's behind the prize counter. When I got there Sarah and her crew were working on two games and you can even see the very rare Williams tester board that she can use to help diagnose any problems on any late 80's game. She also has a Data East one in her workshop as well. Unfortunately I missed out on one area of machines. On the first part of the tour you'll see the back "party room" that also doubles as storage. The back room is massive and has almost the same amount of machines that's already out on the main floor. Sarah told me if she had the room to put out all of the games she owns she'd have over 600 games!  The back party room has a Pump-It Up machine (the only music game in the whole arcade) Stern's Rollercoaster Tycoon, William's Terminator 2 and a very rare home use only version of Fireball that was sold in the 1970's in the good ol' Sears Wish Book for 700 dollars.

Hope you enjoyed this look at The Pinball Wizard's Arcade. We've still got tons of videos from FunSpot, and one more from Pinfest that will be uploaded soon! Thanks for checking out the video and be sure to like, subscribe and follow us on all your favorite social media sites!

Via www.arcade-hunters.com

DIXON – The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” is not welcome in the city.

According to city codes, it is unlawful for any person to keep or use a pinball machine in any public place.

Or as the code says, residents are prohibited from keeping “any game played with any number of balls or spheres upon a table or board having holes, pockets or cups into which such balls or spheres may drop or become lodged and having arches, pins, and springs, or any of them, to control, deflect, or impede the direction or speed of the balls or spheres put into motion by the player.”

Maybe readers missed it, but the Dixon City Council repealed Monday its ban on allowing fortune tellers to advertise, leading me to ask if there are any other odd codes on the books.

City Attorney Rob LeSage said the city has done its best to stay in front of outdated codes, but some slip through the cracks.

In this case, a fortune teller showed up at City Hall asking what she needed to do to open a business, and the city clerk discovered the odd law.

The tone was light when commissioners voted in favor of repealing the code that LeSage told them was unconstitutional.

Upon inspection of the city’s codes, nothing seems as strange as the city’s advertisement ban for fortune tellers. Most of the codes make sense.

However, I learned an arcade or youth center may have its work cut out for it installing a pinball machine.

At one time, and maybe still, it was common to gamble on pinball in taverns. Points tallied could be turned in for money.

Old hat games, such as bagatelle and pigeonhole, also are outlawed. So is any sleight-of-hand or card trick game used to swindle people.

For many obvious reasons, swine cannot be kept within the city limits, but any person may keep up to 3 Vietnamese potbellied pigs, a pet craze popular in the 1970s.

Upon some research, these types of pigs that reach as much as 150 pounds can be house-trained, and make decent pets.

It is unlawful for any pig owner to build a barbed-wire fence to keep them on their property, or any resident for that matter.


Read more here saukvalley.com

Anyone who thinks adults playing video games and drinking beer in Boba Fett costumes is a bad thing needs to get out more.

Spacebar Arcade—aka Boise's final frontier for any geek, male or female, who just wants to blast enemy ships while sipping a cold one in peace—opens its doors for the Pinball Wizard Tournament on Thursday, July 18. Sign-ups begin at 7 p.m. and the battle starts at 8 p.m.

Pinball Wizard is a three-machine tournament in which players are randomly paired off to duke it out for the ultimate title and some out-of-this-world prizes.

Each pair will compete in a two-player round on the Star Wars, Star Trek and Hook machines. Competitors will be ranked according to score, with the highest score receiving the most points. First place winners on each machine are awarded 100 points, second place earns 90, third place gets 85, and so on.

In the event of a tie, finalists battle for the crown in a head-to-head deathmatch for the highest score.

It's not exactly rocket science, but it is a chance for all grown-up arcade goers to test their skills against like-minded nerds, while enjoying brew specials from Crooked Fence Brewing Co.

Admission is free, and yes, Spacebar's technically an arcade, but it's a bar nonetheless, so the tournament is reserved for those old-school gamers 21 and older.

Costumes aren't required, but losing the title of ultimate Pinball Wizard is socially justified if it's lost to an intergalactic bounty hunter.


Via boiseweekly

Pinball, y'allTilt! Pinball enthusiasts, rejoice — Brandy and T.C. DiBella of Asheville are planning to open the Asheville Pinball Museum in downtown in mid-August. There will be 20 to 30 machines available to play, said Brandy DiBella. Many of the games are old classics, such as Cyclone, Harlem Globetrotters, Spiderman, Superman and Captain Fantastic games.

Visitors will pay one entry fee, $10 for adults and $7 for children, and get unlimited free play, she said. There will be snacks and drinks for sale, too.

D

In a Business Insider article citing US Industrial production a reference to Stern pinball and their manufacturing highlights made in the USA production. While no company is specifically mentioned in the article it, Stern is referenced in the image and it is nice to see pinball inching ever closer to the forefront of awareness in the general public. 

U.S. industrial production grew 0.3% in June, which was right in line with expectations.

"For the second quarter as a whole, industrial production moved up at an annual rate of 0.6 percent," said the Fed.

"In June, manufacturing production rose 0.3 percent following an increase of 0.2 percent in May. The output at mines advanced 0.8 percent in June, while the output of utilities decreased 0.1 percent."

Capacity utilization ticked up to 77.8% from 77.6% a month ago.

From the Federal Reserve's G.17 report:

The production of consumer goods increased 0.5 percent in June following a decline of 0.3 percent in May. The output of durable consumer goods advanced 1.1 percent in June. Every major component of consumer durables either increased or was unchanged, with automotive products and home electronics posting the largest gains—1.4 percent and 2.2 percent, respectively. After having decreased 0.4 percent in both April and May, the output of nondurable consumer goods rose 0.3 percent in June. The index for non-energy nondurables stepped up 0.5 percent, driven by gains in the indexes for foods and tobacco and for paper products. The output of consumer energy products declined 0.3 percent, marking the third consecutive monthly decrease for this index. The index for total consumer goods moved up at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the second quarter, a rate of expansion substantially below the increase of 5.6 percent in the first quarter but about the same as in the fourth quarter of 2012. The smaller increase in the second quarter reflected a deceleration in the output of both durables and non-energy nondurables.

The index for business equipment moved up 0.5 percent in June after having fallen 0.1 percent in May and 0.2 percent in April. The gain in June reflected increases of 0.5 percent for transit equipment and 1.1 percent for the industrial and other equipment category. Conversely, the production of information processing equipment dropped 1.0 percent. For the second quarter as a whole, the output of business equipment rose at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, about half of its rate of increase in the previous quarter. The indexes for information processing equipment and for industrial and other equipment recorded substantially slower gains in the second quarter than in the first quarter. By contrast, the index for transit equipment rose at an annual rate of 6.4 percent last quarter to more than reverse a decrease of 2.9 percent in the first quarter.

The output of defense and space equipment increased 0.1 percent in June, the first monthly gain for the index in 2013. The index decreased at an annual rate of about 3 1/2 percent in both the first and second quarters.

Among nonindustrial supplies, the production of construction supplies edged up in June after having edged down in May; output decreased more than 1 percent in both March and April. The index fell at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the second quarter after having jumped 14.3 percent in the first quarter and 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. The index for business supplies edged up 0.1 percent in June, its first increase since March; the index decreased at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the second quarter to reverse about half of its gain in the previous quarter.

The production of materials to be processed further in the industrial sector advanced 0.2 percent in June, the same rate of increase as in May. The output of durable materials gained 0.4 percent in June, led by an increase of 0.8 percent for equipment parts; the index for consumer parts moved down a little, and the index for other durable materials was up slightly. The production of nondurable materials edged down 0.1 percent, as decreases for paper materials and for chemical materials outweighed the rise for textile materials. The output of energy materials stepped up 0.4 percent. For the second quarter as a whole, energy materials advanced at an annual rate of 5.2 percent after having increased 2.2 percent in the first quarter. In contrast, the indexes for both durable and nondurable materials decreased last quarter after having recorded increases in the previous quarter. The output of total industrial materials increased at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter, well below the gain of 3.4 percent in the first quarter.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/industrial-production-june-2013-2013-7#ixzz2ZE33fLTS