So today was the Space City Open, a long awaited pinball tournament. First, before I get into the meat of this post, Phil was kind enough to host this tournament from his house with his quite well-maintained and diverse collection, and I would like to extend my thanks to him for doing so.

I went into this tournament with the most positive mindset I could put myself in. I’ve been having a pretty lousy week, to say the least, and it took quite a bit of energy to block all of that out this morning and afternoon and focus on the goal at hand.

For the most part, I feel like I succeeded in maintaining focus through the ups and downs. I had some great games and moments in this tournament; I also had quite a few not-so-great games and moments.

We’ll start at the beginning. We had 14 players, and there were eight different games: Diner, Dr. Dude, Dracula, Firepower, Iron Man, Tales from the Crypt, The Simpsons Pinball Party, and Whirlwind. Phil does have other games there, but those were the eight chosen for the tournament. (Judge Dredd was also on the list but due to technical problems it was a last-minute scratch.) The tournament format was a seven-round match play tournament.

Groups were drawn, and I wound start the first round on Iron Man with Brian, Blake, and Dick. I’m pretty sure I’ve never played Iron Man before today, so I had no clue what to do as far as strategy. So, I just sort of winged it, basically just trying to make the shots that were lit and taking hints from the score display as the game went on. This worked as I took first place in this game and was off to a great start. I put up a 9.1M+ with the next highest score being 7.3M+.

My good fortune would be interrupted by an absolutely crummy game of Dr. Dude against Ruben and Rob. I could barely muster a 1.9M+, but there was still a contest between Ruben and Rob with the former eeking out a victory with 5,049,580 versus the latter’s 4,910,970. I just could not get it going. I would have a decent start to a ball, and then BAM! Right down the toilet. I finally got the Mix Master lit (the next-to-last step before multiball) and then lost the ball down the left outlane (I think).

I would quickly return to form in the next game on The Simpsons Pinball Party against James and Garrett. It was not an easy victory by any means as I also began this game with outright disasters on my first two balls (of a 3-ball game). However, I managed to get a monster of a ball going on my third ball of the game, stacking several modes and both multiball modes. I was pretty sure I had won the game early on but kept playing because I was “in the zone” and needed to ride the wave to build my confidence back up. I would sign off with a 29,926,940 (oh, so close to 30M) with the runner-up (Garrett) finishing with 5.7M+.

On to the fourth round. I drew Diner with Rob, Danny, and David. I know the ruleset of Diner even though I have had very little experience actually playing it. This game brought the only stuck ball of the tournament for me; I managed to get the ball wedged behind the spinner. It wasn’t going to budge with any reasonable amount of nudging (defined as any amount that would not set off the tilt sensor), so we had to pull the glass and put the ball back on the plunger lane. This was a minor distraction in the grand scheme of things; I managed a 1.7M+ for second place next to Rob’s 2.1M+ and sub-1M scores from David and Danny.

The fifth round was probably the most dramatic moment in the qualifying rounds. I drew Whirlwind against Phil, Rob, and Blake. (For some reason the software liked to keep putting Rob and I in the same group.) Phil got off to a fairly early lead, and my back was against the wall going into my third ball. Again, I started off with a couple of lackluster balls, and I wasn’t building on that great of a score going into the final ball of the game. I was facing Phil’s score of 5.1M+ or so (it may have been a little higher) with a score of somewhere in the 1M to 2M range. I was able to complete multiball and score a “Million Plus” shot (scoring 2M). I would sign off of this game with 6,056,720 and could only sit back and wait for Phil to complete his last ball. To my amazement, Phil drained fairly quickly and after his end-of-ball bonus, his score only added up to 5,841,910. It held up! I managed to win a game against Phil! I couldn’t believe it.

Round six saw me playing Dracula alongside James and David. By contrast this was a pretty ho-hum game and the scores were nothing really spectacular, but I did manage to win with a 21.9M+ with David in runner-up at 11.1M+.

For the seventh and final round, I drew Tales from the Crypt alongside Cory, Garrett, and David. This was another game where I had the first two balls go rather badly. It wound up being mostly for moot, but I did score 146.7M+. It was only good for third alongside Garrett’s 237.8M+ and Cory’s 246.5M+.

So after a brief intermission, we began the semi-finals. Our first game was on The Simpsons Pinball Party. To say the least, I did not get off to a good start at all. I managed only 1.2M+, which probably wouldn’t have been enough to beat a couple of grade-school kids much less the tournament finalists. In fact, I would dare say this is the worst game I’ve ever played in a pinball tournament, ever.

The silver lining to that cloud was that I got to pick the next game. I thought about it for a few seconds, and then selected Whirlwind, as this was one of two games where I had outscored Phil in the qualifying rounds (the other being Dr. Dude which I was much less familiar with). I was able to put up a 4.6M+ to Phil’s 6.1M+.

Ruben then selected Dr. Dude for the last game of the semi-finals. Basically, this game decided who would advance to the finals, as Phil had pretty much clinched his spot in the finals at that point. It was a pretty uneventful game until the last ball. I got a multiball going, and was able to get enough Mix Master bounces to score the jackpot (which on this game is a flat 5 million). Not only was this good enough to beat Ruben’s score, it was good enough to beat Phil’s as well, which was a much-needed confidence boost.

The finals began shortly thereafter. I was playing alongside Phil, Garrett, and Brian. We would start, again, on The Simpsons Pinball Party. I didn’t do much better, with only 4.9M+ good enough for third. If I was able to come close to the score I had put up earlier, I might have been able to eek out second and top the 16.1M+ put up by Garrett. On the other hand, Phil’s 76.9M+ was going to win barring a miracle.

The next game was Whirlwind, selected by Brian. I was only able to put up a 3.1M+ to Phil’s 8.8M+ and Garrett’s 4.8M+. Had I been able to make at least one Million Plus shot during multiball, it might well have been a different game altogether. This finish was good enough for third place in the round and kept me in a position to at least salvage a decent showing. The question was, could I refocus and get it done?

Brian selected the machine for the third and last game of the finals, which was Firepower. It’s a game I feel very confident playing, having been the very first pinball game I remember playing as a young kid (I think I was all of 5 years old when I played it the first time). I selected to go first, which I felt would give me an advantage in this situation. Whether it actually did or not is up for debate, but I had an absolutely great game with a good multiball during my third ball. I would sign off with 310,200, good enough for first place on the game and putting me in second place overall for the tournament. Second place was Brian’s 188,260, and third was Garrett’s 106,110. Phil managed all of 15,270; not that it really matters, as the only way he was in danger of not winning was if he finished last and Garrett finished in first place, and even this would only have forced a tiebreaker for first.

I am glad I was able to salvage a second place finish, but it’s still one place short of where I want to be. It was disappointing to do so well during the qualifying rounds and semi-finals only to run into the trouble I did during the finals. It’s not even a case of putting up an otherwise decent score and then having someone (like Phil) come in with a monster score that dwarfs it. A sub-5M score on The Simpsons Pinball Party is embarrassingly low and I am still frustrated at myself a bit, as I picked a really bad time to “lay an egg.”

I experimented with strategy in Whirlwind a bit. I was having difficulty making the plunger skill shot. Back when I was a teenager playing Whirlwind at arcades (such as Fame City and the Time-Out at Northline Mall, if anyone remembers those), I had mastered the art of plunging really short, and sweeping the drop target bank for 600K (the best you can do with just a plunge is 500K knocking down the middle and bottom targets). For the third ball in the finals, I simply went for a full plunge to feed the upper flipper and try to make the million and multiball release ramp shot. Of course, I missed it, and eventually had to settle for the right saucer shot to start multiball. I figured this gave me better chances to win the game than a possible 300K (which was the best I had done on the skill shot on this game all day) and the ball cradled on a lower flipper if I was lucky, or down the outlane if I was not.

Oddly enough, I think Whirlwind was the only game where strategy as such required that much thought. On all the other games, it was either very obvious strategy, or in the case of Iron Man, I was just winging it. There’s a point at which the strategy becomes so obvious to me that I no longer even think about it. The tables that come to mind where this is the case for me would include High Speed, Firepower, Black Hole, Beat Time, Liberty Bell, and Roller Disco. This is by no means an all-inclusive list, and it is likely no coincidence that every table on that list was made before 1987. Earthshaker, for example, has enough complexity to it that the strategy is not always obvious to me (though one can rarely go wrong pounding the ramp shot to oblivion, one reason it’s not well liked as a tournament game). As counterexamples from the EM era, Fireball and Blue Chip stand out as examples of tables with relatively deep strategy. I could probably write a whole post about strategy in pinball, and at some point I may do exactly that.

In conclusion, I had a great time despite the result. Phil was a great host and hopefully this is the first of many tournaments he will be hosting at his place. The crowd was fantastic despite the turnout being a bit low; fourteen players was still enough to have a very fun and interesting tournament. And, I’m not giving up the hunt for the ever-elusive first place. I didn’t expect it to be this hard to catch.

So tonight was the first week of the second season of the Space City Pinball League. I didn’t play in the first season, for a variety of reasons, but I plan to play as many weeks of this season as possible.

The venue is Eighteen Twenty Lounge, next door to Joystix (the corner of the building closest to the intersection of Hamilton and Franklin). It’s a relatively nice bar (I didn’t take that many pictures of the bar itself, if anyone wants me to just say the word and I’ll take a few next week). The games in the lineup are: Game of Thrones LE, Batman: The Dark Knight, Spiderman, The Walking Dead, KISS, and Star Trek. All are fairly recent games from Stern, and all are well maintained, clean, and play as fast as jackrabbit sex.

So, it started off being a decent night. I had the lead through the first two balls of Game of Thrones LE, and I’m thinking it might turn out to be not so bad. I have some 14 million points and change, which looks like it might actually hold up for first place. (I know it’s probably a fairly low score, and as the weeks go on I’m hoping I’ll be able to look back at it and laugh.) And then Justin Niles plays his final ball. And it becomes obvious I’m settling for second place that game in rather short order.

The next game is KISS. For whatever reason, I never really got it going. I would sign off with an embarrassingly low 4.7M+, good enough for dead last. Not surprisingly, Justin would win this one too with a 25.8M+. I’m starting to doubt myself right about here.

After this, we played on Star Trek. I got a little bit going on the third ball, enough to eek out a 14.8M+ good enough for second. Justin, of course, dominates with a 38.7M+. At this point I officially readjust my goals to just try to put up a decent showing for the rest of the night.

Next came Spiderman. This might be a fun game to play, but the ridiculously conservative tilt setting made it more of a chore. I would barely eek out a 15.8M+ good enough for third. Justin, of course, smokes us with a 58.9M+ and mathematically eliminates the rest of us from any hope of winning the group that night.

We would wrap up on Batman: The Dark Knight. As if getting used to finishing out of first place was not bad enough: my final score this game was 6,532,970. Ruben, one of the other players in the group, would take second place with 6,538,030. A difference of a mere 5,060 points, which on this game is probably around what a single bumper hit scores, separating my third place from Ruben’s second place score. As you might have guessed by now, Justin walked away with this one with an 18.8M+ and becomes the only player in the entire league to win all five games for 25 ranking points. The other three of us (Ruben, Chris, and myself) tied at 10 ranking points for the night, in a four-way tie for 19th out of 26 players (one player from a different group also finished the night with 10 ranking points).

Given I’ve never played at least two of these titles before (Spiderman and Batman: The Dark Knight), my previous experience with Game of Thrones was on the Pro version (the LE adds an upper mini-playfield), and my experience with the other two titles was very limited at best, maybe I didn’t perform that badly after taking everything into account. But I still feel like I “laid an egg” tonight (thus the title). I really should have been able to put together at least one performance good enough for first place, and it just didn’t happen.

I did have a good time, all things considered. I got to see some familiar faces again, and meet some new people as well. I am uploading the pics below, and for those of you who want to follow along (and don’t mind the occasional spoilers between league night and when I write my post about it), the results will also be available at http://scpl.league.papa.org.

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After a considerable amount of time away, I was able to make it back in front of a few pinball games on Friday night 1/15. This post has been sitting on my server in various stages of completeness since then, with most of it having been completed on Monday 1/18 and just awaiting a few final touches. Suffice it to say, life has been hectic but is slowly getting back to normal.

Highlights from the night, with photos posted below:

• 1,459,320 on Space Shuttle (first player of a four-player game someone else had abandoned early on, I forget the player 1 score when I started but the majority of the points scored are mine over balls 2 and 3)
• 104,955 on Q*Bert’s Qubes
• 19-12 against the AI in Tournament Cyberball (my Flash vs. AI’s Lightning)
• 345,100 on Firepower (5 ball game)
• 13,059,280 on Ripley’s Believe It or Not
• 158,320 on Evel Knievel (5 ball game)
• 449,220 on Blue Chip (5 ball game)
• 515,660 on Rock Encore
• 223,250 on Roller Disco (5 ball game)
• 3,801 on Beat Time (5 ball game)

The QBert’s Qubes game came towards the end of the night and I came quite close to my previous personal high score (I didn’t realize how close until I compared my previous photo). I still have relatively low confidence I could ever make a decent world record attempt on it, though I may post a score just for “been there, done that” purposes. Assuming the constraint of starting at L1R1 (level 1, round 1), I would like to think 100K+ is a respectable score. Then again, QBert’s Qubes is such an obscure title that even a lot of hardcore gamers are unlikely to pay it much mind…

I did get in a game of (one-player) Tournament Cyberball before the night was over; I’ve done better, but knowing I can win games that come down to the wire like this one is a great confidence booster. I don’t know how much I’m going to practice this one to try to get back to where I once was (I used to be at least decent, if not good, at this particular title). It is a fun one to play between rounds of pinball, I’ll give it that. I have, in the past, stuck to the Flash as my team of choice. Back in the day I would play a lot of games as either the Crush or the Flash, though i have given thought to switching up to a passing team as my team of choice (either Lightning or Invasion).

And the rest of the scores are the usual pinball suspects. Roller Disco finally appears to be working a lot better than it was, it no longer scores points just by flipping the flippers or nudging the machine. I consider the score I posted on this night to be a bit more “legitimate” as a result; my unofficial goal is 400K by either the end of this year or whenever this game makes its exit from The Game Preserve. The high game to date on it is in the 550K range so 400K shouldn’t be all that hard if I get the right rhythm going.

It’s the same for my eventual goal of 10K+ (score counter roll) on Beat Time, one of the few games I’ve seen at The Game Preserve since the very beginning. I have posted a 6K+ score on this game so I’m pretty sure 10K+ is doable. It would just be a question of either winning enough extra balls to keep the game going, or having at least, say, three balls in a game scoring 2,500+ each, one extra ball, and the other three balls being at least decent (900 points each). The problem is that actually getting the extra ball on this game involves a lot more luck than usual; either getting the bumpers to knock the ball through the top 3-6-9-12 lanes, or hitting the rotating target which is placed such that a hard shot makes an “insta-drain” quite the possibility.

As a parallel, I eventually rolled the score counter on Liberty Bell when we had that one available. Realistically, I didn’t expect to ever do that, having once posted a few scores in the 700K-899K range and then finally a 900K+ score. The stategy on Liberty Bell was not that dissimilar; rip lit spinners enough times (which is, by the way, much easier to do than on a game like Blue Chip), try to keep making drop targets, and make sure to have at least a couple of doubled 100K bonuses to help out. Beat Time has no spinners, but having the bumpers and bumper area targets lit increases the scoring from 1 and 10 respectively, to 10 and 100 respectively, and is usually key to getting a good score. Yes, the 3-6-9-12 lanes are key to both this and the extra ball, but in at least one game on this night, I was not able to convert a lit extra ball. That was quite painful, too…

The only other particularly noteworthy score is the Blue Chip score. As a single player game, the strategy is a lot different than it would be on a multi-player game. (In the electromechanical (EM) era, only single player games carried forward game features such as lit targets, made drop targets, etc. from ball to ball. The move to solid state (SS) or “computer” technology made this difference irrelevant; only one single-player SS game was made to my knowledge, before what could be done with the technology was fully realized by manufacturers.) Anyway, the main goal of Blue Chip is to light the numbered targets 1 through 8 to light special on the right eject hole and outlanes (though it can be set such that only 1 through 6 are required to light an outlane special). Other numbers light other features, such as 2 lighting the left spinner, 5 lighting the right spinner, etc. “Rip the lit spinner” will get you quite a few points on this game, though it’s far from the only good strategy; I would prefer to build up bonus and then make a lit “double bonus” lane.

I would be content with a personal high score of 600K on Blue Chip, though a 1M+ (score counter rollover) should be possible with enough luck, even assuming a game not set to award extra balls.

During the past month or so, I’ve been playing a few games on Pinball Arcade on my Android tablet, mainly the free pinball table that the app comes with, Tales of the Arabian Nights. I usually don’t bother with pinball simulations, but seeing as at least one of the tables on this app is one I would almost certainly never get to play in real life (that being Goin’ Nuts, a Gottlieb table from 1983, of which only 10 engineering samples exist as the new management felt widebody tables were too expensive to mass produce), this may well become one of the few apps I wind up paying for at some point.

Interestingly, until I played it in Pinball Arcade, I had completely forgotten just how good of a table Tales of the Arabian Nights was. The settings they give you for TOTAN are: 3 balls per game, extra ball lit after 4 jewels (I’m not sure if this is operator adjustable on a real machine), extra ball for scoring 8M points. So that’s at least two extra balls one can earn on a 3 ball game.

I also put up some decent scores on the free table for December, Victory (Gottlieb, 1987). I used to own this table in real life, though I never once put up a completely legitimate high score on it due to one of the spinners continuously malfunctioning.

Then came the night I purely by chance tuned into the Buffalo Pinball stream on Twitch when they were giving away Pinball Arcade passes. As it happens, I got drawn for the Season Four pass. The games from that season are: The Addams Family, Cyclone, Earthshaker, Jack*Bot, Party Zone, The Phantom of the Opera, Red & Ted’s Road Show, Safe Cracker, Starship Troopers, and Xenon. I’ve put up some rather high scores on a few of these as well; see pictures at the end of the post.

Finally, this month (January) the free table of the month is High Speed (Williams, 1986). I remember this one from my middle school years hanging out at the bowling alley after school. It was the rightmost of three machines in a row in the corner of the arcade, the other two being Road Kings (Williams, 1986) in the center and Secret Service (Data East, 1987) on the left. I spent more time on Secret Service, since the replay score was stuck at 400,000 (pathetically low). Even back then, I noticed the unmistakeable similarities between the playfield designs of Secret Service and High Speed, and as it turns out I was not the only one. (To be fair, the rules are different enough that the games play completely differently despite this.)

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I’ll get on to the meat of this one in a few. First, I wanted to get through at least some of the highlights from Friday night:

• 105,740 on Q*Bert’s Qubes
• 44,930 on Hyper Sports
• 287,200 on Blue Chip
• 1,074,090 on Space Shuttle
• 3,356 on Beat Time

I’ll elaborate on these in reverse order. I’ve put up scores well into the 4,000+ range on Beat Time before, with an all-time record of 6,859. For a nightly highlight, though, 3,356 is a score I’m happy with. It’s above the second of four replay levels (the settings are 2,600/3,300/4,000/4,600).

The Space Shuttle score is again far off of my best, but again quite respectable for a nightly highlight. I had trouble making the lock shots and at times the center drop target and center ramp. If I can consistently hit the lock shots and the ramp, and keep starting multiball after multiball, I’m damn near unstoppable on Space Shuttle. That’s how I ran up the 6,190,550 score back in early August; incidentally, that score is still on the board in second place as of Friday night when I left (someone managed to put up a 6.4M+ since, I have no idea who).

The scores on Blue Chip I put up were pretty good, but the bigger story on that game is that I am now getting to the point where I can consistently make all 8 targets, though getting special afterwards is another story. This is quite noteworthy given the left flipper doesn’t go quite full stroke on this particular table; it’s good enough to make most of the shots except the right saucer, but it is rather difficult to cradle a ball on the left flipper. The right spinner is also not working as of at least the tournament, probably sooner. (Not that it’s particularly easy to really rip the right spinner given the left flipper, so in part that’s just as well…)

The Hyper Sports score represents the first time I have made it all the way to the pole vault stage on an actual arcade machine. In case you have forgotten which game this was, it was the follow-up to Track & Field and featured swimming, skeet shooting, long horse, archery, triple jump, weight lifting, and pole vault. Unlike Track & Field where the hammer throw was usually the game-ending event due to its difficulty, the only truly difficult event is the pole vault. (It is much harder than Track & Field’s high jump, for example; the high jump allows one to change one’s trajectory in mid-jump while the pole vault does not.)

Finally, the Q*Bert’s Qubes score, the video game highlight of the night, is my best on an actual arcade machine. Historically, I have not considered Q*Bert’s Qubes a game I am particularly strong at. I only ever got to play it once or twice near the time of its release “back in the day” (scoring, I think, around 40,000 or so), but I have played it on MAME since then and grown quite a fond appreciation for it. Assuming those are marathon settings, that score would have been good for fourth on the Twin Galaxies board for Q*Bert’s Qubes, however first place on that board is a staggering 10.1M+ by Donald Hayes back in 2007. More on this later.

I did make a pretty solid run on Millipede, trying to better my previous high score. I succeeded in pushing another MAJ score or two off the list (this Millipede has a modified boardset that keeps all 8 high scores, not just the top 3 like original Atari boards). Since I didn’t set an actual new high score, I don’t have a picture.

I did play a couple of quick rounds on Junkyard, which was a recent addition to the lineup at The Game Preserve. Even though the score is rather unremarkable (at least by how I remember this game scoring back in the day) I did take a picture. Along with Junkyard, Congo (re-)joins the lineup in what I’m guessing is a temporary spot next to the tech room.

But the main highlight of the evening would have to be the last game of the night (I didn’t take pictures, for better or worse). I played a six-period game of Tournament Cyberball 2072 against Joe Reyna, one of the owners at The Game Preserve. It was a close game, with Joe’s Tokyo Flash defeating my Moscow Machine by a final score of 28-20. I was able to keep it a competitive game (within a touchdown) for most of the first five periods, though in the end an errant pass was intercepted by Joe’s team which wound up being the deciding factor in the game. The quote in the post title is from Joe, and I chose to make that the post title for a reason.

There is a fine line between being confident and cocky. I know Joe said what he did at least somewhat in jest, but there is an element of truth to it. My ego does tend to get a bit over-inflated from time to time. Yes, I do get rather proud of setting a high score or achieving other important milestones in whatever video game or pinball table I happen to be playing that day; maybe in a few cases, more proud than I should be.

However, there are games I am not good at, that I will probably never be good at because I either find them less interesting, or other reasons. There are also games that I once was somewhat good at that I will probably never take up again. Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up, and similar games would likely qualify as games for which my time to have played them has come and gone. However, the only DDR tournament I entered, I think I wound up busting out in the first round. I enjoyed the hell out of DDR when it was “the game” to be playing in the arcade, particularly when I could hop on the machine and play 8-panel (“doubles”). I did get to the point where I could pass some 6-foot songs playing doubles (this was when I was in my late 20s). Now, if you were to ask me to try even a 3-foot doubles song on DDR today, I’d probably laugh and go back to whatever pinball game I was playing.

I am primarily a pinball player now, though I play enough of certain videogames to be able to show I’m not just a “one-trick pony” and also because, as odd as it seems, a lot of people are more impressed by videogame performances than pinball.

Going back to my previous post, if I hadn’t played enough Millipede on MAME over the years to know what it’s like to play the higher levels of difficulty, I probably would have just looked the other way when I saw MAJ all over the high score list. At most, trying to get the top spot would have been an afterthought. Until I got all the way to where I start at 300,000 points and have to deal with eight spiders at the start of a new game, I had some doubts that I had what it took to beat MAJ’s scores. Even after playing a few times with a 300,000-point start and not cracking the high score list at all, I kept up with it.

To be at the top of the high score list, you don’t have to be the best every time you play, you just have to put up a score higher than what’s on there once.

This is one reason playing in pinball tournaments has been tricky for me at first. There is a huge difference between being able to run up a massive score once or twice over hundreds of attempts, and being able to have a great game right there on the spot in a tournament setting. A lot of tournament games have all four players end the game with what would be otherwise embarrassing scores. There are also situations where the player in fourth place of a four player game (i.e. last place) finishes with a score that ordinarily would be rather impressive. Say, 3.5M+ on Space Shuttle, 150M+ on The Addams Family, 750M+ on Twilight Zone, 500K+ on Mata Hari, 300K+ on Trident, 100K+ on Wizard of Oz, etc. But yet, the other three players managed to top even this. The famous saying of Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ’till it’s over,” may well have originated with pinball tournaments.

Anyway, back to videogame records before I close this out. Obviously, Q*Bert’s Qubes is not the game I would prefer to try for a world record on. I could put up a decent score, maybe as high as 300K+ given enough practice. But this would only be good for second or third place on the Twin Galaxies list. So what else does that leave?

I have been eyeing the Klax record and the Centipede 3-minute record. Klax was a good choice if I had jumped on it a couple of years ago, but now the record of 2,833,216 by Paul Hornitzky is quite formidable. I wouldn’t go as far as to say insurmountable, but it took a great deal of effort to top 1 million when I last tried this title in MAME. Part of the reason I consider the Klax record to be as formidable as it is, is the fact that the Twin Galaxies settings include difficulty ramping, a feature intended to shorten game times dramatically (otherwise wizards could sit there and play all day on one credit, something arcade operators really do not like).

The Centipede 3-minute record is a more tempting goal. I am pretty sure the ROM dump of the timed variant ROMs will play on a standard Centipede board. The only catch is that two-player games become unavailable in the process, and Twin Galaxies has not published the settings for this particular record. Donald Hayes, again, holds this record for now with a score of 59,106, and for better or worse it was verified by referee and no video appears to exist, so I’m going to be “in the dark” as to exactly how he did it. I’ve been able to crank out 36K+ scores with regularity playing with a mouse in MAME, though that would only be good for 11th to 13th on the current list I am looking at.

I may consider others, particularly more obscure titles. I probably won’t be in a position to ramp up to a fully publicized videogame record attempt until the latter half of 2016, so pinball is likely to stay my main focus for a while.

Finally, I am to the point where I can write about the goings-on at Houston Arcade Expo a couple of weeks ago. Remember, even though I’m writing about it now, this actually happened a couple of weeks ago (weekend of November 12-13). My primary reason for attending was, of course, the pinball tournament. This was my first big pinball tournament, and I am certainly hoping it will not be my last.

After reading the rules, I knew I would have to spend at least $40 on entries in order to have any realistic chance. That’s pretty much exactly what I did. I’m not going to go into detail on each machine, but I am going to mention a few highlights.

The first highlight was that the first time I ever got to play Wizard of Oz (full LCD game from Jersey Jack Pinball) was in the tournament qualifier. I worked my way up to it after posting some decent and some rather embarrassing scores on some other games. I knew up front that in all likelihood I would either be playing each game only once and maybe trying again on a couple of machines if I had fairly decent scores across the board, or aborting after spending my first $10, $20, or so if I just didn’t have it. I had maybe $5 to spend on retries. My game on Wizard of Oz was either the seventh or eighth game that I posted a qualifying score on, and I would like to think it was a decent score given it was the very first time I played it at all. As shown in the gallery, my score was 65,371. At the time I posted it, it was near the top (I want to say fourth or fifth). By the time the dust settled, it was a somewhat disappointing 20th of 37.

The second highlight would have to be my score of 70,537,370 on The Addams Family. I hit a double jackpot during multiball and rang up a good number of points on other features, so again, I felt like this was a decent score at the time, but it would be pushed all the way down to 25th of 37 by the time qualifying ended. Not long after I played it, I noticed it resetting in mid-game on another player.

The third highlight, which is perhaps the biggest, was my score on an EM Gottlieb called Captain Card. I posted 56,120, good for 6th out of 35. This ranked higher than the scores posted by Phil Grimaldi (41,470), Carey Fishman (43,190), and Jon Drew (54,210).

It became obvious well before I even left to head back over to the hotel, that my scores would not be good enough to qualify. On one hand it was disappointing, on the other it freed me to enjoy the rest of the expo. More on that later.

Most of the games in the tournament area (14 out of 16) were in good condition with no noticeable issues, or perhaps minor issues I didn’t notice. The two notable exceptions were Wild Wheels and Earthshaker. Wild Wheels would not complete the startup sequence without power-cycling the machine, and in fact had a power switch installed on the power cord to make this easier. Once started, the game played fine. Except that I wound up starting a two player game without realizing it (I must have hit the start button again after the initial reset thinking something didn’t register). Fortunately, the tournament director was cool about it and even gave me the benefit of the doubt (higher score of the two players).

On the other hand, Earthshaker had at least three obvious problems. To be honest, the case could be made that it should not have been in the tournament lineup at all. The specific problems I found were the plunger not being strong enough to make the 100K skill shot (the best I could manage was 50K), the fault line diverter was not opening, and I was unable to get a proper three-ball multiball (multiball started with one ball locked and another plunged into play). The second of these is perhaps the most frustrating problem, as the ramp is difficult to make, so making it when lit for lock only to not actually lock the ball is a huge downer. I’m not saying this excuses my rather embarrassing score of 1.26M+ (31st of 36, when I needed around 4.4M to place in the top half) though it should be kept in mind.

Yes, I realize this is a 25+ year old game we are talking about, but four older games (two electromechanical-era pinballs and at least two older solid state games) played fine with no issues. So it’s not just the age of the machine. I do appreciate the effort that goes into setting machines up for a tournament (or for free play in a hotel ballroom in general), but I can’t imagine the owner not knowing about at least the plunger and multiball issues (unless the thing had been sitting in storage just prior to the event, in which case the safer assumption after any substantial length of time a game has been in storage is that the game is not tournament ready until otherwise verified).

Oddly enough, there was a Gilligan’s Island in the tournament room, apparently intended for a side tournament that either never happened or is somehow missing from the results (partner play, I think?); it may have been played later in cash games. I got to play it a bit and I noticed no major issues. I’m not sure what the full story is, but even though I’m much less familiar with Gilligan’s Island than I am with Earthshaker, I would rather have played the former than the latter.

Anyway, the sum total of this is that my tournament experience wound up being just a rather expensive pinball lesson. So, what did I learn for my $40? For that matter, what can you learn that cost me $40 to find out?

First, I learned this format is somewhat biased towards those with deeper pockets. I say somewhat biased because you still need the pinball skills to qualify for and win the tournament. That is to say, of two equally skilled players, one with enough money to play each game twice and another with the bare minimum to play each one once, the first player will probably qualify in a higher spot. I’m not saying this is a bad format, just that it can get rather expensive, unless one is very lucky and strings together top quality performances on many games in a row.

I really needed to show up with $60 minimum, ideally closer to $100, to have a decent chance at qualifying. Given it’s $25 to get into the show, then add in plus food, and I’m looking at $100 to $140 for the entire weekend, not even counting a T-shirt (which I will want next year).

Second, I learned I probably still have quite a bit to go as far as pinball skills to be truly tournament ready at this level of play. I’ll just come out and say it here: I’m a lot older than I look, and years of not playing and having to spend months for what I had to finally come back to me probably didn’t help. The window I have to be known as a pinball tournament champion and/or videogame record holder may be as short as two years or even less. On the other hand I may have good enough health (physical and mental) to make competitive pinball tournament attempts and videogame record attempts for another decade or longer. Garth Brooks said in a song lyric, “I’m much too young to feel this damn old.” That’s exactly my sentiment.

Third, I learned (in the figurative sense) how to make lemonade out of the lemons I was handed. I still had a good time and posted a few pretty damn good pinball scores, which showed that I still “have it” even though I wound up coming up with bupkis in the tournament.

I posted the pictures I took in no particular order. Some are tournament scores, some are not. The higher score on Wizard of Oz is in the main arcade area (look closely, you can see the Mata Hari I played later in the background). One is from a console videogame (a homebrew Atari 2600 game I forgot the name of). I’ll go back and label these when I have more time.