I had high hopes for this year’s installment of the Valentine’s Day Stoplight Party at Cidercade Houston. I have looked forward to this event with anticipation both last year and this year, especially after the unfortunate Valentine’s Day ice storms of 2021 (which does not have an official name despite the practices of one particular weather news outlet).

As usual, I mainly stuck to pinball, with the occasional video game here and there (though the picture gallery may seem to contradict this, as the number of pinball and non-pinball titles are almost evenly split, keep in mind that I often post only the highest score from each individual pinball or video game title).

The most notable scores: 46949 on Centipede (the devilish 2 lives/10k settings one which for some reason I seem to do better on), the 36k on this particular version of Skee Ball (easily a personal best, though I put up a 33k not shown in the gallery just two minutes earlier), the 705M+ on Ghostbusters, the 711,980 on Toy Story 4, and perhaps most surprisingly, the 10.1M+ on Heavy Metal, which wasn’t even enough to get on the high score list despite being my personal best score ever.

The biggest disappointment: a dearth of green wristbands on women. The few I did see were women I had no interest in dating. These type of events can be very hit or miss with regard to the romance aspect, and for me so far they have been misses. Here’s hoping that changes in 2024.

Not a whole lot to elaborate on with these. The score is still legible in the first picture (6,879,320) though unfortunately it did glitch (a bit of a learning curve with the new phone’s camera). The Wheel of Fortune score is the best one in recent memory as it’s a difficult game to really run up the score on.

The first two are from 2/9, the latter two from 2/13.

Technically this was the first week of the Bayou City Pinball League Monumental Mondays near Montrose league. I’m not going to go too far into the gory details but suffice it to say that this week, turnout wasn’t what I expected. I did get a total of three players counting myself, which is better than many previous attempts.

Some pictures, including one of the league game score pictures, didn’t come out with legible scores (phone camera issues). I had the highest score in the multiplayer games except Attack from Mars where I came in second. I’m not going to post a narrative of the games this time, because there really wasn’t anything all that out of the ordinary to write about. It was the predictable result of two relatively new players going up against someone who has played in multiple league seasons and many other smaller tournaments outside of those seasons. About the only thing noteworthy is that I didn’t get first place across the board, which is another testament to just how hard that actually is to do.

I’ll get right into the score pictures and just add light commentary per outing:

January 17, Continental Club. This is the BurgerTime game in the back room with the pool tables:

January 18, Poison Girl. This was originally supposed to be the first night of the Bayou City Pinball League. Given a completely avoidable conflict caused by reckless scheduling on the part of others, the league night was a complete bust. But I did put up a few decent scores (yes, a lot of Jurassic Park in here but there were that many categories of mode-specific high scores/records):

January 30, Little Dipper. Good run on Creature, decent run on Fireball. Duplicate high score photo posted to show it has not been beaten/reset as of this date:

February 3, Poison Girl. Decent scores on Wheel and Deadpool, pretty much poo-poo on AFM: