Space City Pinball League Season 3 Week 4: Ghost in the machine?

Note: Due to recent events, Shawn no longer recommends participation in Space City Pinball League events until further notice. Please see the Bayou City Pinball League website for alternatives.

Unfortunately due to real life and other things coming up, I didn’t get around to posting this until now. Better late than never, I guess. I will be following up shortly with a post about week 7 (which was last week; I missed both weeks 5 and 6) and shortly after that week 8 (which is happening tonight). I will reserve detailed commentary for after my week 8 post.

Another Wednesday night, another week of pinball. I arrive shortly after the nominal start time of 7pm; luckily for me at least a couple of others were running behind schedule as well. Our lineup this week would be: Kiss Pro, Ghostbusters Pro, Metallica LE, Spider-Man Vault Edition, Medeival Madness, Game of Thrones Premium, and The Hobbit.

The highlight of the night may well have been my unexpected grand champion on Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, this came during warmups, and not during actual league play.

I’m going to make this more or less a brief summary because there was really only one noteworthy event, which I’ll explain when I get to it. This week I was grouped with Brian Foytik, Rick Garcia, and Robert Clauson, and we were assigned to The Hobbit, Ghostbusters, Metallica, Spiderman VE, and Medieval Madness (remake).

The first game was on Medieval Madness. I never really got a lot going on this game, and for some reason that seems to be the case in a lot of games once I approach them to play in actual league play. I manage to put up a 1.6M+ good for third. Brian ran away with this one early with 49.9M+ which if memory serves me correctly included the one allowed extra ball.

Next game would be The Hobbit. I would sign off with a 43.0K+ which would be edged out by Robert’s 45.1K+ and completely dominated by the other two players, leaving me with fourth place.

The next game would be Ghostbusters, and this is the game with the irregularity. For some reason the game decides to launch Robert’s (second player) ball while he is away from the table. We have to wait quite a bit of time for Phil to make his ruling, and it’s a pretty obvious and standard one: Robert gets another ball after the current game is over, and the score from that one ball is added to the score from the previous game to determine the final score. To say the least, Robert isn’t too happy about it. While understandable, arguing a ruling the way he did reflects badly on all of us. Anyway, after the dust settles, my 25.8M+ would hold up for second place (Robert put up just less than 1.2M on his replacement ball, he needed around 5.75M to take second).

Game four was Spiderman, another game that Brian just ran away from the pack on. I put up 38.0M+ which is good for second, but still rather disappointing as with better focus and ball control I probably could have put up a score closer to if not higher than Brian’s 65.7M+.

We wrapped up with Metallica, the one game of the night I actually win with an 8.04M+, surpassing Rick’s 6.45M+ and Brian’s 5.50M+. Sum total of the night, 8 standings points of a possible 15.