Closing Out The German Pinball Expo

Today we went back to the last day of The German Pinball Expo. We met up with Spencer, our new Berliner /Seattleite / Portlander friend I mentioned yesterday at a bakery and had some breakfast before heading over. We arrived just after opening with the goal to play machines I hadn't played the previous 2 days. 

We started in the homebrew area. There were a few homemade pinball machines. This one had very innovative projection mapping technology. 

The projections animated to highlight shots that should be hit. It was really slick. 

The projector was above. It was great not having the lights from the machine shining in your eyes. 

Someone else spent a lot of time on a Trump Pinball Machine. To be clear, it was pretty critical of Trump. 

The inserts said Epstein, ICE, Fake News, and other things associated with Trump. 

You could build The Wall for an outlane save. 

Next we went down to play machines that were, until today, reserved for the women's tournament. 

It's fun to play machines that you can mostly only find in Europe. 

Next up was playing the new 3 Musketeers by the French company Hexa. I doubt we will see many if any of these in The US. 

Donna played and then it broke so we watched the tech frantically try to fix it.

After about 10 minutes it was working again so Spencer was able to take his turn. 

They had it set to one player only so we each played separately. 

Next up Spencer and I played a round of linked NBA Fastbreak!  This may we the only pinball machines you can link and play head to head. 

Spencer dunked on me this round. 

We are in Germany so we went up stairs for a beer and I played Kewpie Doll on the way to the bar.  It was broken every other time I walked by. 

I made it more than half way to The Score To Bea!

We had a good beer and talk with Spencer and  learned a lot about what it's like for an American living in Berlin. He loves it here and is working on becoming a citizen but it's a long process. When we were just about done with our beer Donna checked the former tournament area and people were just playing the machines so we joined in. 

While waiting to play I learned a lot about pinball in Germany from Spencer. There is one, very busy, Stern distributor and the machines are way more expensive over here. This leads to, what I believe, is an overuse of playfield protectors. These are plastic sheets that go over the already high quality, long lasting modern playfields making them feel different and look bad. 

You can see the plastic edge around all of the elements and they make the graphics on the playfield look blurry. Some are even bubbling. 

It's hard to see in the photo, but it just looks bad. I understand wanting to protect your game but I feel like this is overkill. 

We stayed until machines were being folded up and then went to late lunch. Spencer had a bit of time before his train home. Late lunch was fun and the conversation continued. We learned a lot about things here in Germany. 

This is my "Burrito". It was good but it wasn't what I would call a burrito. 

It was an excellent last day in Bielefeld. We were so glad to play and talk with Spencer. Hopefully we can have another pinball adventure with him in the future. That's the way it is with pinball friends.