mmcirvin

Mike of NewsPlusNotes rides Hersheypark's new coaster. I haven't ridden it so can't speak personally, but while he liked the ride a lot, these reviews are giving me a little trepidation again.

He actually greyed out a little on the second curve. But the thing that's getting the most attention is the extreme negative g-force on the first two airtime hills (which is of course what they were designed for), and what this apparently does to your thighs (maybe not so intentional). The ride has lap restraints, and they look like these big molded things, but they're tilted at an angle so that only one edge of them is pressing on your lap, which means that they dig in quite a bit on those hills. I've seen two people on The Coaster Critic's thread make the "should have been called Thighcrush" joke already.

It also sounds like they have serious capacity problems with the station design; maybe fewer people per hour than Fahrenheit. Well, it might ease up crowding on some of the other rides.

I've been playing, and talking about, Farsight Studios' Pinball Arcade, their multi-platform game project to release simulations of classic pinball machines as periodic DLC.

Thus far, nearly all of their releases have been of machines with unlicensed themes (I think Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, probably a relatively cheap license, is the only exception). But some of the all-time fan favorites (Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Addams Family) are media tie-ins with presumably expensive and complicated licenses to negotiate. I'd assumed we'd never see them.

Several days ago, though, having determined that they couldn't make it work with their revenue stream, Farsight announced a Kickstarter to raise the license fees to do The Twilight Zone. I'd have dismissed this as a quixotic act of desperation, were there not a response that raised a substantial fraction of the required $55,000 in just the first few days. The contributions have leveled off since then, but with 18 days to go, I'd say they have a good chance of making it. They've already acquired the physical machine and are clearly serious about starting development.

I actually kicked in a few bucks, mostly for sentimental reasons. The Twilight Zone isn't my personal favorite pinball (that would be Star Trek: TNG), but it's a good one and historically important. And they specifically mention doing Star Trek: TNG if this succeeds. (The Addams Family sounds like a tougher case.)

I downloaded the Android version of Pinball Arcade because I was tired of waiting for the DLC on the XBox 360 version and because it was cool to be able to play it on my phone, albeit on a very small screen. It was fun for a while, but I had to uninstall it because it was choking my phone. Seems that even if it was installed on the external SD card, data was being stored on the internal SD in such a way that it became full. Trying to download more than two tables got it into a state where the external media scan on boot would fail, such that the app wouldn't be installed so it could be managed in any detail, and there was no way to unjam the situation short of uninstalling the app.

It's frustrating how dependent Android phones are on their limited internal storage even if you have a huge external card. Lots of things can't be moved off the internal storage, or have to store their data there; there are things apps on external storage can't do that apps on internal storage can. I suppose I should be thankful that it has an external SD slot at all.

Update: This Facebook post notes that external SD storage for table data will be available "soon". Some people seem to imply it's out now. Maybe I just needed to update the app (or maybe I was in such a constipated situation that that wouldn't have worked...)

...Yes, this is much better.

Playing Pinball Arcade reminds me of the unfortunate fact that the voice actors in these pinball machines rarely got any visible credit (unless they were celebrities associated with a licensed property, like The Addams Family or Star Trek: TNG). It's well-known that one of the princess voices in Medieval Madness was a pre-stardom Tina Fey, but nobody seems to know who those great voices in Theatre of Magic were.

And now I'm wondering about the main female voice in Tales of the Arabian Nights (not the captured princess, who you only hear briefly, but the friendly genie). She also sounds to me like she might be the same person as a prominent female voice in Cirqus Voltaire. I could be imagining things, but both voices sound to me remarkably like Mrs. Sparklenose, the miniature teacher in the "Abby's Flying Fairy School" animated segments in recent seasons of Sesame Street.

Mrs. Sparklenose's voice is Jessica Stone, who seems to have had an extensive theater career and a long list of one-shot and recurring TV appearances. IMDB doesn't list any pinball credits, but, then, nobody ever does. So all I can really do at this level of effort is guess.

Update: IPDB lists full attract mode credits from Cirqus Voltaire, which actually did credit all its voice actors. Those suggest that the voice there is most likely Cathy Schenkelberg.

Another update: OK, Tales of the Arabian Nights actually does have voice credits deep in its DMD attract mode, and... the voices are someone else again. So I'm zero for two.

A nice explanation at Washington Monthly: If Same-Sex Marriage Is So Popular, Why Does It Always Lose at the Ballot Box?

This is still a key talking point of SSM opponents, that gay marriage hasn't won a referendum yet. There are two reasons for this: first, most of these referenda on constitutional bans took place years ago when there was less popular support than there is now, and, second, most of them have been in states where support was lowest. There was a wave of them in conservative states in 2004, which helped turn out the base for the presidential election. California in 2008 may have been the highest-profile case, but it was also exceptional.

He doesn't get into it there, but there are pretty obvious reasons for this. The votes on the subject have in most cases been for constitutional amendments to overturn a judicial ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, or to preempt an imagined one. Those campaigns are run by opponents. Proponents of same-sex marriage have indeed been ahead of the public-opinion curve, but they also usually have little motivation to legalize it in a referendum even if they possibly could. They generally regard marriage as a basic civil right that shouldn't be determined by plebiscite. Referendum campaigns are also generally ugly affairs, in which opponents have a strong motivation to drum up anti-gay fear in the general population.

Nowhere is this clearer than in New Jersey. Same-sex marriage has pretty clear majority support there in opinion polls. The legislature attempted to legalize it by statute, but it was vetoed by Governor Chris Christie, who said he thought there ought to be a referendum on it. Gay-marriage supporters refused to take the bait, saying that they'd work on overriding the veto in the legislature instead, even if it took longer.

2012 looks like it might be slightly different, since referenda are happening in the fall in three states where a win is actually possible, with varying degrees of likelihood. Washington state and Maryland have both passed laws legalizing same-sex marriage, but both states have provisions allowing opponents to force a referendum. If they can collect the necessary signatures (which is likely in both cases), the law doesn't take effect until the referendum passes.

Meanwhile, Maine is actually having a referendum to pass same-sex marriage by law, because they went the Washington/Maryland route in 2009 and the law was rejected by referendum then. I suppose there would be a referendum whether they went through the legislature or not.

I think I'd score Maine as the most likely place for a win, with Washington in second and Maryland third. Opponents are trying all the usual scare tactics in Maine, but the 2009 vote was fairly close, it was an off-year election (albeit an unusually high-turnout one), and opinion has continued to shift. One thing about Maine is, it's completely surrounded by jurisdictions where same-sex marriage has been legal for some time, so the more lurid fantasies about what happens in SSM states are probably not going to fly.

A while ago I made a series of excited posts here about one of my favorite games, Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection for the Wii, which gave us faithful simulations of several classic pinball machines, mostly solid-state ones from the 1980s. Later there was an XBox 360 version that added some later, more elaborate tables, including Medieval Madness; I don't have that one, though I've played it briefly.

But lately the same developers have come out with a lower-priced sim released across a large number of platforms, called simply Pinball Arcade (warning: site has auto-playing video with sound). It's available for XBox 360, PS3/Vita, MacOS, iPhone/iPad, and Android.

I have the XBox 360 version, released on XBox Live Arcade. It's got just four tables, produced by different companies (Theatre of Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, and Black Hole; I think the last was already featured in PHoF: The Gottlieb Collection several years ago). I think the idea is to release more tables as downloadable content, though there haven't been any yet.

( The controls and the tables )

Coasterforce links to videos of Verbolten (the elaborately themed replacement for Busch Gardens Williamsburg's late, lamented Big Bad Wolf) and Skyrush (Hersheypark's 200-foot megacoaster, which looks kind of like a smaller version of Kings Dominion's Intimidator 305, but with more open restraints and floorless outside seats). They're both at the point of testing with water dummies, which approximate the mass distribution of human beings.

Skyrush looks epic, though they're currently hauling the trains up the lift hill much more slowly than they are supposed to go in actual operation. There's not much open space left at Hersheypark, so the thing winds over and around the Comet, the 1940s Herbert Schmeck woodie, and much of it is over the creek behind the Comet.

Also, the new Gerstlauer trains (Facebook link) have arrived at the sooperdooperLooper. They look worthy. I wonder if the orange and white color scheme is a nod to the Looper's original paint.

Spaceflight Now's mission status page is showing the shuttle orbiter Discovery being lowered onto the carrier 747 for what may be the last time, to carry it to my old hometown of Chantilly, Virginia, where it will take the place of the test orbiter Enterprise at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum (Enterprise is in turn going to the USS Intrepid museum in New York City).

As I've said here before, I happened to spot the Enterprise coming into Dulles Airport on its previous ferry flight many years ago, long before the Udvar-Hazy Center was actually built. It'd be interesting to see a space-flown orbiter there, though I no longer make frequent trips to that neighborhood since my parents moved out.

In other Shuttle-retirement news, here are some nice photos of Endeavour's cockpit powered up for nearly the last time.

Same-sex marriage repeal fails in the New Hampshire house by an overwhelming margin. This is a legislative body dominated by Republicans largely elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010.

The talk I'd heard leading up to this was mostly about whether or not they'd have the votes to override the governor's veto. But they just killed the thing outright.

Now that they've got the lift hill completely done, they've moved the big crane away from it, and they can put in the track that previously would have blocked it from being removed:

http://keystonethrills.megabb.com/t365-hersheypark-skyrush-construction-update-86#6028

There's going to be a great headchopper on that second airtime hill that crosses under the first one.

That first photo shows the vertical lift hill of Fahrenheit, Hersheypark's very twisty coaster from 2008 that I rode last summer. I liked it a lot, but the coaster fans seem to regard it as inferior to Storm Runner, the launched coaster, which I didn't get around to riding.

The other coaster-related Hersheypark development for 2012 is that the old sooperdooperLooper, which I did ride and considered my personal favorite, is getting an overhaul with brand-new trains from Gerstlauer (makers of Canobie's Untamed). Word is that these trains will stick with lapbar-only restraints, which is a very good thing to hear. I don't know if we're actually going to get back there this year, but I'm sure we will someday, since Hershey is conveniently located along our route for extended-family-visiting road trips (as are Lake Compounce, Quassy, and arguably Kings Dominion and Six Flags America).