Handheld Hotspot: Pinball and arcade mini haul

 

It's the middle of my "short" week, and it happens I have a backlog of retro gaming junk. A week ago, I put in an order for two items that definitely run the gamut from old to new, one of which I unpacked and tested while watching Starship Troopers 3. One's a reproduction of the earliest "handheld" based on an arcade game, the other is an example of a new trend I've been actively avoiding. First up, here's a reproduction handheld pinball game.

Our item this time is a Schylling pinball game, of a design I previously sighted in the wild. I doubt very much if the artwork dates earlier than the 2006 copyright date (it seems more like a tribute to the manufacturer's "vintage" tin toys), but everything else is spot-on for games first made in the 1950s. The back is metal, which I confirmed with a magnet, while the front, the "targets" and the channels for the balls are all 1 piece of clear plastic. The goal and only action is to launch the balls one at a time for the highest score, then turn the game upside down to roll the balls back in. There's a tiny plastic plug sort of thing to hold the balls up during reloading, which should also stop them from rolling around during storage or travel. It looks like you could tilt the thing for a better score, but the balls really move too fast and the thing's just too big to make much difference. Here's the outcome of a typical game.

What you'll notice if you look closely is that the highest score is 600 while the lowest is 10 and the next is 200. That makes it difficult to get a good score if more than 1 ball lands in any of the four 10-point spots. The spring mechanism is also unpredictable, which has left me wondering how it really compares to vintage specimens; if other toys are anything to judge by (see the Marx Japanese soldiers), they would have launched the ball with enough force to kill small animals.  For some reason, the feed tends to get stuck with the last ball half in and half out. There's an extra wonky factor in that red robot, which grimaces like a Terminator and has a peg seemingly protruding from its forehead. Finally, I have certain suspicions about the little guy on the right, who looks a lot like a certain droid. Here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and the Gas Station Duchess (aka Connie) plus the Tomy Centipede knockoff. I said this thing is big...

"You can play with my plunger any time you want..."

Next in line is a Galaxian mini arcade machine, the smallest of at least 2 out there. I could probably have gotten a bigger one for just a little more, but the alternate design I ran across was one of the ones that try to combine a joystick and a D-pad, which just looks clumsy and unintuitive to me. The manufacturer seems to have tried to make up for their good sense by trying to make it a key chain, which just means an awkward and very load clasp bang on the back. Here's the unboxing pics.

For the background, Galaxian is a 1979 arcade game that was followed by its now better-known sequel Galaga. I had played both for NES (or emulators thereof) and personally prefer Galaxian. It's simpler, yet with a fair amount of strategy, particularly since it has the Space Invaders handicap where you can only have one shot on the screen at a time. It turns out the "mini" has the original arcade version, which I admit is quite a bit harder even with the tiny screen and controls factored in. It's particularly difficult to hit the "boss" Galaxians (I'm sure based on the ships from George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds), which go back and forth along with the escorting ships and then disappear after one or two passes. Initially, my biggest problem was that the screen would flicker or reset randomly, a problem which disappeared entirely when I took a pair of pliers to the ludicrous key chain. Here's a pic of it turned on; note the marquee lights up along with the screen.

The unavoidable fact of this little thing is that it is a model or prop far more than a functioning game. Even as an action figure accessory, it's a little small and definitely oddly proportioned. Here it is with Sidekick Carl to show what I mean.

Then it occurred to me, it was about right for Husky, who's a bit shorter and a lot stouter. Jackpot! And man, he looks terrible.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. These have both been interesting acquisitions, though if it came to it, I'd rather keep the pinball game. The lesson is that nothing is quite the same as holding the real thing, but that's not always reason to keep it. That's all for now, more to come!