3030 Dundas West's Pinball Crawl!

I recently got to visit the Junction and the bar 3030 Dundas to check out their pinball line-up.

During my visit to 3030 Dundas, I spoke with one of the fellas that worked there. We talked a lot about pinball in the city, where our favorite machines are, what are some good places to play and shared some knowledge of pinball locations. During our conversation, he mentioned to me that 3030 was going to be putting on a special pinball event that would span the city. I just caught official word of this on their Facebook page. Dig it!

Just as the picture says, follow 3030 Dundas online for any further updates! I think there's gonna be a lot of cool things coming up!

There isn't much news right now besides this map but there was a comment stating this is only one side of the map... I'm excited to see what else pops up on the map. I provided the guy with the name of my pinball map, Pinballin' in The Big City, which I have been keen on updating lately! Maybe we'll see some of the tables I've found on the pinball crawl map and maybe we'll see some that I'm not aware of...

If you're wondering what "A TILT at Handle Bar" is, TILT is Kensington Brewery's latest beer, obviously named after the dreaded pinball term. I'm no beer connoisseur but I believe it is an IPA. I had a can of it this past weekend and it was pretty tasty! I'm not the biggest fan of IPA's, little too hoppy for me, but this one was pretty decent. It had a cleaner taste than most IPA's I've had... but enough beer review, I'm supposed to be reviewing pinball!

Ottawa Pinball Expo 2013

On the weekend of September 13th, I headed out to my first Canadian pinball expo, the Ottawa Pinball Expo!

All the way out in Ottawa... Actually it was in Gatineau... Actually, it was in a little town called Alymer that is a part of Gatineau. I'm not quite familiar with the area and thankfully my buddy Penstone was able to successfully navigate us to the centre that the Ottawa Pinball Expo was being held at.

The event ran for two days on Saturday, September 14th, and Sunday, September 15th. We decided to go on the Sunday as Saturday was the day of the tournament and several machines would be used for tournament play only. I figured that going on Sunday, all machines would be free-play and there would be more available to play. It was kind of a good idea... and a bad idea. Good in the sense that there were many machines available for free play, bad in the sense that some machines were being moved out or had been sold so they were not available for play. I was sad to see a Who Dunnit? machine available for about 5 minutes when I first stepped in to the Expo then get packed up and hauled off. It was not all that bad though because there was still plenty of great tables to play!

STERN'S LATEST ANNOUNCEMENT: STAR TREK

Rumors have been floating around that Steve Ritchie has been assigned to design the latest playfield for Stern, coming off the heels of John Borg's very well-received Metallica. Stern released some BIG NEWS this week, announcing the latest table in their line-up! Here is the teaser video that Stern released for... STAR TREK!

Pinball Update: The Junction

I always like to say that I know of nearly every pinball machine in Toronto. I don't say I know of every single one because I know there are still a bunch out there I've yet to find. There's so much of the city to explore and I bet a few pinball machines to still find as well!

This past Friday, I ventured out to the Junction, a neighborhood of Toronto that gets its namesake from the four railway lines in the area. I heard a lot about 3030 Dundas West, a cool bar with some sweet beers on tap and a couple of vintage pinball machines. Let me tell you, I was not disappointed. 3030 had a really good collection of old school Electro-Mechanical and Solid-State tables from the 70's and 80's. Dig this line-up!

So, you have there Gottlieb's Sure Shot, Bally's Mata Hari, Williams' Comet and Blackout and Gottlieb's Strange World. It's really cool to see a line-up of all vintage tables when most of the selection in the city are late-model Stern tables.