Pinball in South Wales

October 24, 2010 10:00 AM

I have the desire to re-live my youth, and rekindle my addiction to pinball machines, problem is I can't actually find any left! So does anyone know of any in South Wales (nearer Newport the betterer).
posted by couch to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

You should try asking on the pinball usenet group. You can access it via Google.

rec.games.pinball
posted by ecurtz at 10:10 AM on October 24, 2010

And then plan your next vacation for Las Vegas to visit the Pinball Hall of Fame and Museum where you can play to your heart's content. Plus, at the bottom of that page you'll see some links that may help you find games more locally.
posted by BlooPen at 11:16 AM on October 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

There are also some great pinball simulations - not as good as the real thing, but still fun. Check out Virtual Pinball on the PC, and Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection on Wii/Xbox 360.
posted by Earl the Polliwog at 1:03 PM on October 24, 2010

Pinformer - "where to play in the UK"... South Wales is part of the UK... right? Ugh I'm such a fucking American, sorry, okay I looked it up. Nothing in Newport anyway but several in Cardiff, I'll leave you to root around the town listing or check the map.

Here in the Midwest of the USA anyway pinball enthusiasts have a pretty tight thing going so if you tap into the UK enthusiast subset of the internet (which is definitely out there) you will find forums that will do a better job with this than Metafilter. Your market seems a bit underserved actually, maybe your calling is to open a retro arcade...
posted by nanojath at 1:33 PM on October 24, 2010

Response by poster: doh! Pinformer sounds just right (Cardiff is just down the road, and I've failed to find any there when I've looked) but the page is 403 & 404ing me. Is it just down, or is the url wrong?
posted by couch at 1:45 PM on October 24, 2010

Cardiff results are here.

3 of them are in the not-Cardiff but closer-to-Newport, Cwmbran Bowlplex
posted by handybitesize at 1:59 PM on October 24, 2010

Best answer: The link is working fine for me, here are the detail results if it isn't working for you for some reason -

Date of sighting: 8th Nov 2009
Venue details: UWIC
Colchester Ave
Type of venue: Students Union
Machine seen: Indiana Jones

Date of sighting: (several listings)
Venue details: Bowlplex South Glamorgan CF15 7QX
Type of venue: Other
Machine seen: The Simpsons Pinball Party, Indiana Jones, World Poker Tour (a comment states this was missing)

Date of sighting: 17th Mar 2010
Venue details: The Blackweir Tavern
North Road
Type of venue: Pub
Machine seen: Pirates of the Caribbean

If you continue to have trouble with the site feel free to post other towns you'd like searched, I'll check for them sometime in the next day or two and paste in the results as above.
posted by nanojath at 2:49 PM on October 24, 2010

There is apparently some serious pinball in South Wales...

The Welsh Classic Pinball Open. You missed this year but there are bound to be some relevant links around that site.

Here are just the urls, these links are working fine for me.

http://www.pinformer.co.uk/
http://www.rawdistribution.co.uk/silverballs/welshclassic/
posted by nanojath at 2:56 PM on October 24, 2010

Finally, a blog of UK Pinball websites. Looks like they gave up on it after not to long, but there are 20+ entries.

url - http://www.ukpinballsites.com/
posted by nanojath at 3:01 PM on October 24, 2010

Response by poster: Nanojath,

You are truly a star!
posted by couch at 10:01 AM on October 25, 2010