There are pinball machines, and then there is Frontier, which seems to have been dragged in from some forgotten wilderness where men are men, shirts are apparently an unnecessary luxury, and the proper response to encountering a bear is not retreat but to square one’s shoulders and commence the fighting. It is a wilderness in every sense: the cricket sounds chirp somewhere beyond the playfield, the art evokes that vast and lawless country where nature waits just beyond the firelight, and there, in the middle of it all, stands a magnificent, bare-chested specimen of frontier manhood grappling with a bear as though this were the natural conclusion to a long day outdoors. Harry Williams once quipped that what makes pinball special is that “the ball is wild,” and Frontier seems to take that notion as both theme and gospel, turning the unpredictable violence of the pinball into a kind of miniature wilderness of its own. The ball wanders, escapes, returns, and strikes with the same untamed spirit as the frontier it depicts, while the rules, shots, art, and sounds come together with such confidence that the whole machine feels less like a game about the wilderness than a machine that has somehow brought the wilderness indoors—crickets and all, with one exceptionally manly man left to fight the bear.

Swangin’ on Westheimer All Night. If you’re not cranking those stand-ups, you haven’t lived, prob the deadliest inline drops ever. Light spinner, rip spinner