Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Best Buffet in Las Vegas

If you're wondering where the best buffet in Las Vegas is, I can now tell you with absolute certainty that it's on the corner of Tropicana and Pecos about 30 blocks west of the Strip. You're wondering what can be good that's so far away? I'll tell you - it's the Pinball Hall of Fame.

This is a great place. It's smoke-free, cheap, clean and filled with geeks who like pinball. And, they've got a little 4x6 card on each machine with a little background on the machine - when it was made, who restored it, and any little anecdotes that might be interesting. All the old games are just 25cents and the newer ones are still only 50cents.

Some of the machines were from the 1950's. They had a good number of video games from the 70's, including Asteroids, Centipede and even an old Tetris machine. There were a lot of very old baseball machines. Who knew that there were so many?!

And there are a lot of machines, more than I realized, that are associated with television shows and movies. There were three Star Trek games. One from the 60's based on the original series, one from the 70's (also based on the original), and a later one from Next Generation. I also lost a few quarters in the Terminator pinball machine. Evidently degree of fandom does not allow for any additional skill.

As we were walking out, we saw a tall, wide machine that looked like a multi-level pinball game. It wasnearly as deep as a traditional game and it was about 2 1/2 feet tall. I can't remember the name of the game, but it was one of only two machines ever made like this. It was based on a circus and featured different levles of mini-games, a few hard to see flippers, and a pretty fast ball. It also cost four quarters to play. It was a great game and a shame that more than two weren't made. They needed two cards to tell the whole story of the machine, most of which I don't remember anymore.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

but you can't win any money playing pinball!