Texas Two Step

Song of the Week

This album has been sent to me several times by a few different readers over the last few months. The album is called Pinball Wanderer (hence all the sends) by Andy Bell, who is probably best known as the lead singer of British band Erasure. Usually, when I get sent pinball-themed songs, I don’t get my hopes up. Outside of a few rare cases, they can be mostly hokey affairs. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it makes for a tough way to set the tone for a semi-professionally written newsletter that I want people to read 40-50 times a year.

Pinball Wanderer, however, I find myself pleasantly surprised by. Our Song of the Week pick, “apple green ufo” is a vibey lo-fi track with some toe-tapping percussive beats and is fairly representative of the material found on the rest of the album. Clocking in at just over 8 minutes long, it’s also a great track to have on in the background while you read this week’s TWIP!

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Pinball News of the Week

Multimorphic Releases Portal Pinball

The first major release of TPF week is the latest game from Multimorphic for their P3 game platform, Portal. Based on the Valve game series of the same name, this release sees Multimorphic experimenting with additional playfield modules that add interactive features to the lower third of the playfield, addressing a long-time point of feedback among pinball enthusiasts. The game has a ton of additional neat ideas that showcase strong theme integration. I can’t wait to try it out!

Turner Pinball Releases Merlin’s Arcade Pinball

The second major game release of the week comes from Turner Pinball. Merlin’s Arcade is the follow-up to their surprise debut hit Ninja Eclipse. It’s another original theme, though it traces its origins to the failed deeproot project and a playfield design created by long-time designer Jon Norris, who makes his official return to commercial pinball design with this release. Lost a little in the shuffle (IMO) is the use of Norris’ patented finesse flipper system, which he first demonstrated in a YouTube video in 2017.

The Electric Playground Releases Pulp Fiction Topper

Our friends at The Electric Playground are on a roll! I love their latest topper release for Pulp Fiction for a whole bunch of reasons. The mechanical pinball action and use of SFX to better highlight game rules for the player chief among them. Check out all the details on the release and an interview with TEP co-founder Rob Rath in our release article.

DPX Shares New Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Code

A few days ago, Dutch Pinball shared an early draft of their rules document for the upcoming release of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But did anyone see it? In this post, I dive into why it’s a bad idea for manufacturers to rely on Pinside for their marketing activities and how DPX could have used this update to more effectively engage its audiences and drastically expand its reach in the process.

New Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye Tutorial

Noah Crable explains how to roll a critical hit with Stern’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye. I’m really looking forward to getting more time on this game when one hits a public location that’s a little closer to home.

Other TPF Odds & Ends

• Pinball Brothers released a new wizard mode for their 2024 release, ABBA.

• Stern released the long-awaited Venom accessories. According to public comments made by George Gomez, it sounds like the delay was due to Stern’s attempt to use real ferrofluid in the symbiote containment unit until an explosive incident during extended testing caused them to change to the current LCD implementation.

• Planetary Pinball announced the upcoming release of a new run of Medieval Madness games (dubbed the Merlin Edition) as well as the long-awaited upgrade kit for Cactus Canyon, complete with the Lyman Sheats code updates and saloon door mech.

Pinball Map Location of the Week

Ryan and Scott from Pinball Map run a regular series that highlights one new or interesting pinball location each week. This week, Ryan writes about Elston Electric.

Spring is in the air, and if you know where to look, it’s on the calendar. I, personally, do know where to look to find a calendar, and in doing so I also saw that I have just turned 45. As a 45-year-old, I was overdue to brush up on my long division (when was the last time you crunched some long division?), and after rounding to two digits, I found that I’ve been working on Pinball Map for more than a third of my life?? The new locations keep coming - they never stop! Today is no exception, with this fresh spring day erupting in a dazzling new… place to play location pinball.

Logan Arcade, which won a 2024 TWIPY award a few weeks ago for Best Location in the Midwest, is opening a second spot! Elston Electric is located in the old Morton Salt Factory in Chicago, which in recent years has been re-established as a major music venue peppered with eateries, dispensaries, and loungeries. Now, you can add pinballeries to that list. According to Eater Chicago Elston Electric will be tucked into the old boiler room of the factory. Morton used to consider their boilers to be gods, hungrily devouring coal and in return sparing their workers from the deathly chill of the nearby lake. So basically what I’m saying is this old boiler room is expansive and luxurious and not dank and scary. In addition to having 19 pinball machines, Elston Electric will have a span of arcade games - not sure how many since we don’t map those, but possibly thousands - as well as really good pizza, super special jello shots, and more.

I’ll be curious to see if Elston Electric can topple Logan Arcade in the forthcoming 2025 TWIPY Awards, and furthermore, if that will create genuine animosity between the opposing managers. I’m also curious to know whether you can lick the ground at Elston Electric and taste salt. Seems like salt would be everywhere at that place, despite whatever futile powerwashing has occurred.

Elston Electric opens on March 22! And, finally, to the 300 million readers of ours who celebrate Nowruz, I’d like to express a warm “Nowruzetan pirooz.”

Elston Electric
1357 N Elston Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
Website

Links of the Week

• There’s a new content creator that I’ve been casually obsessed with in recent weeks (Dirty Pool Pinball). Check out his recently released trailer for Nudge Magazine’s 2nd issue. Can you tell that he has a background in media production?

• Hot media IP The Last of Us is officially open for business, having recently announced a slew of tie-in products for the HBO series based on the Naughty Dog video game. Could pinball be in the mix?

• LoserKid Pinball Podcast interviewed some of the production team for Portal.

• Cary Hardy chatted with Chris Turner about Merlin’s Arcade.

• Please note a change of address for fan-favorite podcasts Triple Drain and Silverball Chronicles. Both are transitioning off of TPN-associated feeds onto their own solo feeds.

• Rob Berk was featured in a video by the Guinness Book of World Records for his record-holding pinball collection. I want to see more early Sega games!

Poll of the Week

Last Week’s Poll Results

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