By Todd Russell
Last Wedesday 4/2/2025 we had a special impromptu live stream of the Humpday Wednesday Pinball Show. That’s right, this week Season 2 officially returns with episode #1 and we’re going to be doing a bunch of pinball stuff again on Wednesdays including finishing reviews and ratings of all Pinball FX and M games, documenting the process of the 2025 Stern Spike 2 rankings overhaul, using the same system and much more in the coming weeks and months.
Magic Pixel is releasing new games, bug fixes at a weekly pace!
Magic Pixel has not so quietly been killing it in the virtual pinball space the last couple months. They’ve had releases of new games and this past week released three-screen support for pinball virtual cabinet players. This is a feature people have been asking for, literally, for years. Well done.
Curiously enough, these changes have been coming on Thursdays with last Thursday 4/3/2025 bringing update #96: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/444930/view/496065977009570181?l=english
Final training for April 19th Marathon 3-year Birthday Party Pinball Stream continues
If you haven’t heard yet, the plan is to attempt to play 17+ hours of pinball, all games while standing, to celebrate the PGM 3-year birthday. This will start somewhere between Friday night April 18th around 8-10pm PST (GMT-8) to Saturday morning 5am PST and run as long as I can go with the following stream goals:
- Play 100+ games of real pinball (will be one or more of our three HUO machines, unless we acquire something else in the meantime)
- Perform 15-25+ songs Karaoke style
- Stream for 17+ hours – the previous record for longest PGM stream is a little over 16 hours. This birthday is an attempt to break the previous longest stream record and it is an attempt, not a guarantee that the stream will last 17 or more hours. It might end less than 17 hours. In the event the stream ends earlier than 17 hours, there is also no guarantee that we will ever attempt this again
- Run a Pinball FX Fish Tales tournament starting Friday evening and running for one day, this way virtual pinball players can join in and play. There will be no limit of number of plays for this tournament, and would love to hear how many games *you* will be playing
- Fishing in the stream will be running and anybody who catches the Evil Fish Monger fish will receive a winning spin on the Steam gift card wheel where an amount from $10 – $200 in Steam gift cards will be awarded. NOTE: Winners, we must be friends on Steam to collect the prize, so type !steam to add me (Todd Russell) as a friend. No purchase necessary to fish, only requirement is to follow the Twitch channel and type the !fish command every 30 minutes (for free).
What if I don’t make it the 17+ hours has been asked and the answer is: then I don’t make it. I’m not planning on attempting this again, nor do I have a plan to do this every birthday. The primary reason I wanted to do this event was because the prior long stream was celebrating the iiRcade and games not played on the system. Since they went bankrupt, it seemed like it would be better for the longest PGM Twitch stream to be on something that hasn’t gone bankrupt like: pinball.
As for the standing up part, that only applies while playing the pinball games. I will take breaks and sit down at other times, I’m not literally planning, here’s my disclaimer, on standing for 17+ hours without ever sitting down during this stream. However, I do want to play the games — all of the games — standing, because this adds an additional challenge. I’ve done plenty of streams standing for hours and hours at a time, so I think 6-8 hours of gaming on my feet is already proven. This will be over twice this amount of time, which is definitely possible, although by no means a guarantee.
Pinball FX VR released April 3, 2025 – 3 games for $9.99
Some VR pinball news from Zen pinball. They have released their Pinball FX VR platform with three original tables for $9.99: Pinball Noir, Curse of the Mummy, and Sky Pirates: Treasures of the Clouds — available here: https://www.meta.com/experiences/pinball-fx-vr/7255396864545733/
There are currently 6 add-on packs, which are offered at various prices:
Bizarre pinball dream!
So, on Monday night I had this bizarre pinball dream. It’s too long and detailed to put in here, but I’ll tell the story on the Humpday Wednesday Season 2 Week 1 pinball live stream today. Yes, there is going to be one — or so I hope. If you can’t make the show, I’m writing it all down for a future article. Maybe it’s here next Wednesday or another day or maybe it’s too bizarre to publish!
Do you ever dream of pinball? Have you had any pinball dreams or nightmares? Share them in the comments. Do tell!
Pinball FX is by far the better game all around, however with Magic Pixel adding new deluxe tables and the long awaited 3 screen support to the table helped them close the gap. Zaccaria tables are mostly old and not fun to play, but the newer deluxe tables will keep me coming back to check out their product. The pin cab may need to be assembled to check out the latest from Magic Pixel.