Johnny Mnemonic

In my previous review of Georgian Grill's pinball arcade, we took a look at "the woman of the 90's", The Machine: Bride of Pin·bot so how about we travel into THE FUTURE and review Williams' Johnny Mnemonic!

Like Demolition Man, this was a table based on a Sci-Fi film that flopped in theatres. It seems as though Williams was trying to recreate the success of Terminator 2: Judgment Day but had a string of bad luck, basing their pinball machines on movies that became box office bombs. Despite the quality of the movies, both Demolition Man and Johnny Mnemonic are solid but underrated tables released in the golden years of the mid 90's. Johnny Mnemonic takes full advantage of the trappings of the film the table is based on which makes for some interesting designs. The feature that catches one's eye upon stepping up to the table looks like Nintendo's powerglove.

Not quite though! It's the DATAGLOVE, a piece of the VR equipment that Johnny uses to cyberhack the 'net. In the movie, Johnny has to "physically" navigate a virtual reality landscape of the internet in order to obtain some information. The dataglove acts as a part of the ball lock, capturing the ball and dropping it into the Datamatrix (WHOA)

The Machine: The Bride of Pin·bot

For a little place up in cottage country, Georgian Grill has a really good offering of pinball. When my brother Shane mentioned swinging by the arcade, I was hopeful for a good line-up but remained a bit skeptical, thinking most machines would be in barely-working order due to being in a bit of a remote area. I must say, I was quite surprised! Every pinball machine was in fine working order and seemed to be well taken care of. One of the employees at Georgian Grill even gave the glass tops of the pinball machines a wipe-down!

One of the tables that I was most surprised about was The Machine: Bride of Pin·bot! It was the oldest table in the line-up yet it was looking pretty dang good!

The good looks aren't just because of the condition the table was in but the artwork. Bride of Pin·bot has to be one of Python Anghelo's finest works from head-to-toe. There are so many little details packed into BoP with all sorts of astronauts running around the playfield, a signature in Anghelo's work.

Take a look at tables like Taxi or Hurricane for other examples of Anghelo's "world building"

There is also a ton of innuendo which is par for the course with Anghelo. I'm not going to point it out because this is a family-friendly blog (well... relatively speaking) but take a look for yourself and see if you can spot it!

Georgian Grill in Balm Beach TRIP REPORT PREVIEW

Shane and I hit the road one weekend in June in search of the American Dream but I think we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque as we ended up in Wasaga Beach. I can't complain though because we had some beautiful weather on Saturday and saw some even more beautiful cars!

Nothing better than cruising along the beach, checking out all the sights and catching some sunshine!

but HEY this is a blog about pinball! Our trip did not go without some pinball and on Sunday, we headed over to Balm Beach to check out the legendary Georgian Grill.

Despite what the site says about "Summer 2014", I can confirm that it is open for Summer 2015! I have heard that Georgian Grill has a decent arcade and I was not let down! There was a full arcade available at this little beach grill complete with shooting games, racing games, ticket dispensing games, and of course, pinball!

It was like stepping into a time machine; there were arcade games from all eras. Ticket games I haven't seen since the 90's and my time spent at North End Bowl (that's for you folks from Oshawa!), a brand new Big Buck Hunter featuring the Duck Dynasty, even a Cruis'n' World cabinet upgraded with LCD monitors! The pinball lineup was also quite varied, from System-11's to new Stern tables. All the tables were in decent to great condition with a few small exceptions here and there, like the upper flipper on Family Guy being unresponsive or Fish Tales having mismatched flippers...

That's what we call Hard Mode