The beginning of June brought the opportunity of a work-related trip to Port Arthur, after which I swung by Colorado Canyon for an almost-obligatory session on Avengers: Infinity Quest. I should note that most of the games in this arcade are ticket/redemption games. Not surprisingly, I’ve racked up a fair number of tickets over my many visits here in the past couple of years. I finally decided to go ahead and cash in what I could. (To my credit, there were a couple of times between the departure of the Ghostbusters pinball and the arrival of AIQ that I noticed the promised new pinball machine had not yet arrived, and immediately left for home. Despite the distance from home I treat this the same as any arcade visit for which my primary objective is to play pinball.)

The best score for this particular session on AIQ was decent but not superlative: 109.5M+ (it is difficult to read as the picture didn’t come out very well). After this and a few other ticket games, including a 16K on Skee-Ball (equivalent to 160 on “old school” Skee-Ball alleys which score in tens not thousands), I headed over to the redemption counter. I had some 2600+ tickets, enough for a couple of LED neon-style lamps.

All things considered, I’m pretty happy with my haul. Both of these lamps take three AA (R6) batteries, for an apparent nominal operating voltage of 4.5 volts; they could probably be modified to run off of 5 volt USB, possibly with an appropriate series resistor. (I have a Pac-Man ghost light which runs on USB and I was kind of hoping these would be powered the same way.)

So even at an event like Comicpalooza, where I spent about 8 hours volunteering (over two days, Friday and Saturday), I still managed to find some time to get a little pinball in, courtesy of Joystix who brought some arcade games to the event (on free play of course). The lineup consisted of Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic Park, Avengers Infinity Quest, and The Mandalorian, all titles which I have played before (unfortunately I didn’t take notes on if these were Pro, Premium, or LE; I think AIQ was at least a Premium).

The Guardians score was perhaps the highlight of my time behind a pair of flipper buttons: 297.0M+ with no player benefit malfunctions. That’s mainly the result of a couple of good Groot Multiball rounds. The AIQ score was perhaps one of my better runs but not a record breaker.

The Asteroids score was an emulated cabinet that was out on the show floor. I post it only because I feel like 4800 was a good score given the highly unusual control layout: a joystick for rotating, then buttons for shooting, thrust, and hyperspace (X was hyperspace, Y was the fire button, and B was thrust if I remember right; it took significant trial and error to figure this out).

Yeah, I even found a gap in the long line of kids at the face painting booth to sneak in. (I am mindful of when the majority of expected guests at a face painting booth are children and avoid taking time that would have otherwise gone to a child. Had I not seen other adult guests get painted I may have passed on the opportunity, or actually, not considered it an opportunity intended to be open to me.) This pinball-inspired design was done by Cassi Moon who was at the show Friday and Sunday.

The weekend ended with a couple of games of Ultimate Werewolf, which I’m mentioning here in passing as it may well become something I play a lot more often. I’m not giving up pinball, whether competitive or casual play, but I do need to broaden my horizons. For those who have never heard of it, Ultimate Werewolf is a published version based on the original Werewolf game by Andrew Plotkin, which was in turn modified and adapted from Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff.

So yeah, the mysterious number 7 and 16 cards against the carpet of one of the rooms of the George R. Brown convention center are what signify the two games of Ultimate Werewolf. The game doesn’t lend itself easily to documentation nor are the games themselves something I would consider blog-worthy narrative. I will say I was a villager both games, and wound up getting eliminated (“killed off”) prior to the end of both games. Once being lynched as a suspected werewolf, the other having my body taken over by someone with a special role (which is a strange way to end my time in a game, I will admit).

All in all it was an enjoyable weekend, and a very different volunteer experience than what I have been used to. I definitely plan to return to Comicpalooza next year, hopefully with more money to buy from the many vendors on the show floor.

There were a few highlights to this particular trip out to Einstein’s. Yet another high score on Hoops (9.56M+!), slowly but surely inching my way up to taking over the high score board on this machine. Also of note was the surprising 665K+ on Meteor; it’s amazing what a few well-timed spinner rips can do to your score on this game. My Foo Fighters score (54.1M+) isn’t a record-breaker by any means, but one of my better runs of the few times I’ve played. I am slowly working my way up and learning this new game; at first I had serious doubts it would become a game I’d enjoy playing, and it does have its own rhythm and flow different from a lot of other titles.

With the twin monster scores of two nights ago still fresh on my mind, I decided once again to descend upon Poison Girl for a few more games of Whirlwind, and possibly other games, depending on how the first few went.

Let’s just say that I surprised myself by putting up a score I didn’t even think was possible. But first a bit of history…

I have some very fond memories of playing this game growing up. I don’t think I ever broke 10 million all those years, not once. Getting the million plus shot (basically, the multiball jackpot) once was enough to put me over the moon. I don’t have any notes from back then but I think my best from that era was something like 9.3M+.

Fast forward to today, and a “good game” for me starts at 10M. To get an idea of the scale of this game on this particular evening, my score had already rocketed to 38.7M+ by the end of the first ball (including extra balls). I would sign off with 48,150,810 including three multiballs and a maxed-out 99 skyway tolls. Good for a new grand champion score, and good enough to have completely taken over the high score list on this particular machine.

What really stands out about this one, though, was it was my very first game on this machine after walking into the bar. There is a definite parallel here between this and a typical tournament situation where I would need to “catch lightning in a bottle” as I once described it.

No, I’m not done playing Whirlwind at Poison Girl yet. It’s still a fun game to play (possibly even my all-time favorite at this point), even if I don’t run the score counter up to stratospheric numbers.

Saturday night was another trip over to Poison Girl for a well-earned pinball break after an afternoon/evening at work. I actually walked past some credits someone had left on Iron Maiden to coin up Whirlwind. Now I didn’t set a new grand champion score or, for that matter, even make the high score list, which I myself have inflated with some stratospheric numbers (see previous posts).

No, the surprise here may not seem like much to wizards who think nothing of rolling the score counter on a game like Whirlwind. But I do feel it’s a potential watershed moment in my progress as a pinball player. For the first time in a long while, I put up two monster scores on the same game, not just in the same outing, but back-to-back: 32.5M+ and 28.1M+. In one of these games I had 97 skyway tolls (and I’ve previously finished with 98 skyway tolls before as well, one short of the 99 needed to max them out), and in one of these I think was the first time I’ve hit multiple million ramps in quick multiball.

Since I have only been posting the very highest score for non-tournament outings, it’s impossible for most readers of this blog to realize this next point unless I come out and say it. My usual pattern of play almost never involves two games this good, this close together. Prior to the 32.5M+ game I had five games all under 10M, with only one of those over 8M and at least one not good enough for a replay.

The replay score, incidentally, was at 5.0M on arrival, and not too long ago was at 4.6M. I would venture a guess that a lot of that increase is my handiwork. (Any reasonably modern game–and Whirlwind is recent enough to quality as “reasonably modern” here–has a feature called “auto-percentaging” for replay scores and sometimes other features. This feature automatically adjusts the replay score based on how many have been awarded; if the percentage is higher than the set amount, the replay score goes up and, likewise, down if the percentage is lower.) It’s also notable that the number of extra balls I’ve been winning has caused the first skyway toll extra ball level to go up to 8, and I predict it will probably settle down at 10 or higher sometime in the next month or so. (I think the factory default is 6.)

I know this took a while; this event was such that it needed its own post. The next one needs its own post as well…

April 28: Travels took me back through Beaumont once again, just in time to check out the new pinball arrival at Colorado Canyon, Avengers: Infinity Quest. Not really one of my all-time favorite games, but I still think it’s fun. To be honest, I spent more money on redemption (ticket) games, most notably a Spongebob Squarepants-themed coin pusher game. No pictures from that, but the other picture is one of my better scores on Skee-Ball.

May 5: My first stop turned out to no longer have the pinball machine listed on Pinball Map, so it was off to Del-Mar Lanes to play some Godzilla as I was already about halfway there and had meant to drop by for quite a while. After I was done I played Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship Edition (yes, the name is actually spelled like that) because I noticed someone had put in 50 cents towards a $1 credit, and I figured, why not. Yes, that’s five pictures for Godzilla because of all the mode high scores.

May 7: I finally make it down to Einstein’s Pub in Katy. My main reason for this trip was to play Foo Fighters and properly evaluate this game for once, a little over a month after playing it in the tournament. Of course, that’s not the only noteworthy item: I finally made the high score list on Hoops. Now that I’ve learned how to score the big points on this game, I’ll probably be playing it a lot more often. Admittedly, most of the best scores on this trip are kind of blah save for Hoops, Stars, Foo Fighters, and maybe Beatles.

May 8: Trivia night at Little Dipper. No other takers for a pinball social night as advertised, unfortunately. Of particular note was my run of 288.4M+ on Creature of the Black Lagoon, good for a new third place on the high score board, including the first time I’ve made the super jackpot shot during multiball. For once I feel like I’m finally within striking distance of the current grand champion score of 310M+.

May 9: Poison Girl. Whirlwind has a working coin mechanism once again, so that’s what I spend most of my time playing. And it was time well spent: 36.3M+ after a series of games where I had trouble breaking the 10M mark. Later in the same session I was able to make three Million Plus shots during multiball for the first time. The 36.3M+ game here featured another “Skyway Paid For” max-out of the skyway tolls, as well as three multiballs and collecting two specials (one from the sixth multiball lock, one from the Mega Door Bonus). Between this and the previous night’s run on Creature, I’m really starting to feel like I finally have my pinball groove back. I just need to carry momentum like this with me into a major tournament somehow.

(Edit 2023-05-12: Replaced picture of 3rd and 4th high scores with a different frame from the same video, as the previous photo actually had a couple of artifacts from the start of the animation leading to a potentially wrong reading of the scores.)