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Shunt is pretty much the most amazing space in London. I won't go on about it but it is.

We were wandering and we found some pretty old pinball machines. The oldest one was Wood's Queen, a machine so old that the score is counted up on a noisily rotating barrel-counter (like in a mileometer) rather than on lit-up numbers. So when you get points, you hear this clunking sound from above as the numbers klunk round. Wow.

Since it's such an old pinball machine it doesn't have any of the hyper-complicated snazz that's now normal. The main target is a row of six little tiles at the right-hand side, each with a flower painted on in a different colour. All very pleasant. I'm sure it wouldn't take too long to get bored of it since it's so simple, but as a little bit of history it's v good to come across. From 1976 apparently.

They had quite a few. We also had a go on Galaxy which has lovely classic 8-bit sound effects (the main sound is a big PWM square-wave sweep, mzzzeeeeoooowwwmm). Also Dolly Parton which was pretty good - it had a nice selection of things to do, like the little alley of in-line drop targets (that's a technical term I just learnt off the web) - but it gave us loads and loads of goes, so we got kind of bored of it...

At the Classic Gaming Expo yesterday they had a great selection of pinball machines, some old, some new. The best one there was Junk Yard, which featured a little dangling wrecking ball which you could whack with the pinball and cause it to swing around and smash things. It also had some good ramps and you could swing the pinball right round the wrecking-ball area in a really fast tight loop.

The two modern games were The Sopranos and The Shadow, both featuring plenty of gimmicks. In the Sopranos game the ball moved quite slowly - it was easy to spend a very long time in multiball without losing it - and went really easy into all sorts of traps, so it wasn't very demanding but quite fun. The Shadow had some eye-catching innovations - an area where the ball would suddenly "freeze" thanks to a hidden magnet, and a "battlefield" where you used the flipper controls to play a breakout-like game - but they detracted from the playability and the game was a bit incoherent.

Another good one was Road Show which featured two plastic talking heads and some good old curves and ramps.

I played a pinball machine called "Bram Stoker's" Dracula while in Cambridge this week. It was rubbish - very inert, with plenty of boring bits while waiting for the ball to get from one place to another. That's not how pinball should be...

Much better was the Elvira pinball we played while on holiday a couple of weeks ago. It was fun and had some very coherent "stories" which you had to complete.