I had time to drop by both Poison Girl and Little Dipper on this particular evening. The main highlight of the trip would have to be the 2.83M+ on Quicksilver. Actually, spoiler alert, it might well be the highlight of the entire month of February. Most of the other scores weren’t all that great save for Earthshaker at Poison Girl, which I am slowly relearning as time allows.

We wrap up the month of January with another quick trip by Little Dipper and a longer visit to Cidercade to finish off the day.

The main highlight of the Little Dipper visit was the 1.02M+ on Quicksilver. It was at this point I finally felt like I was on the way to mastering this very fun and exciting game from 1980.

Moving on to Cidercade, I got to play the new Metallica Remastered machine which had recently arrived, though admittedly my score wasn’t all that great. Other highlights include 3.66M+ on Heavy Metal, 321.3M+ on Black Knight Sword of Rage (Pro, no upper playfield), 210.7M+ on Star Wars including R2-D2 champion, 113,970 on Pepper II, and 40,048 on Centipede (3 lives/12k).

This is not a post I wanted to write. Early Friday morning (2/7) the computer I usually use to edit blog posts has developed an issue where it will not stay running. It is either power supply or cooling related.

It will likely be quite a few days before I’m able to diagnose and fix it. In the meantime I may have sporadic access to another computer to post from. (The images require editing which is difficult to impossible from a phone.) I hope to be back to normal by the 16th (a week from Monday).

Update 2025-02-11: Computer’s back up and running, I should be back to normal updates within a day or two.

Cidercade (Houston location is at 2320 Canal Street) announced the Valentine’s Day Stoplight parties for all locations. I attended this event in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and I am looking forward to an even better event in 2025.

Tickets are available here on Eventbrite for the Houston event. (You will have to search for the others if  you are closer to location outside of Houston.) As I write this, tickets are selling quickly (and we’re not even in February yet). I will be there, and hopefully I’ll get to meet a few of you.

This past Saturday brought another trip over to Star Pizza. As part of an outing with some friends, I indulged in some pizza and breadsticks, and then headed over to the pinball machines to get in a couple of games on the Dolly Parton pinball. (I only had $1.50, so it was either three games on Dolly Parton, two on Monster Bash, or one of each with 25¢ left over. I chose the first option.)

I had at least one decent game with a score of 198k+, with the others not coming anywhere close.

Next up was Einstein’s. Nothing all that out of the ordinary here, though the 4.33B+ on Attack from Mars was the best I have done in a while, and the 678k+ on Total Nuclear Annihilation was good enough for a replay.

,And now for something (almost) completely different.

Work-related travels took me to Austin this week. My last stop was closest to the Pinballz location on Research Boulevard (US 183 ). So, I would hop in there for a few games of pinball.

I first took a walk around to see every game in the arcade. I didn’t take any pictures of the lineup, but the place has quite the lineup for a building of its size. There were 71 pinball machines there at the time of my visit. (This count includes Baby Pac-Man as a pinball.) There was also a selection of mostly classic arcade video games. (Notable exceptions to the “classic” were the entire four-game series of The House of The Dead, a Time Crisis 5, and a VR game that cost $5 per play.)

At least three of the pinball machines were out of order; sadly, one of them was Black Hole. I was able to play Black Hole at Hamby’s while in the San Antonio area a while back, so this wasn’t quite that big of a loss.

I did,  however, get to play a Hercules for the first time in a few years. This is the insanely large game Atari made in 1979. Hercules measures 93″ (2.36 m) long, 39″ (0.99 m) wide, and 83″ (2.11 m) high, per IPDB. For reference, a standard machine is 51″ (1.30 m) long, 28.5″ (0.72 m) wide, and 75.5″ (1.92 m) high.

Hercules uses an oversized ball (a billiards cue ball?) and plays rather slow. It’s fun for the novelty, but that novelty wears off after a couple of games. It’s also in the most expensive price tier at Pinballz, which is $1.50. Looking at Pinball Map, it’s a surprise to see there are 22 locations across the US that have a Hercules. Most of them are east of the Mississippi. This Pinballz location, another Pinballz location, an arcade in Garland, TX, and one in the Denver area are the four of that 22 west of the Mississippi.

What really made this trip worth it, though, was getting to play some now-relatively uncommon machines. Those being Grand Lizard, Banzai Run, Swords of Fury, the original TMNT (Data East), etc.

I have a soft spot for Swords of Fury. I am aware Steve Ritchie, the designer, doesn’t like the game (referring to it as “**** Swords” on at least one occasion). I’ve never had a run on Swords of Fury where I’ve started with a single credit and played for over an hour. That changed this evening. None of my individual scores were quite enough for the high score board. I did, however, manage a 5.55M+ near the beginning of that run of close to two hours (taking a couple of breaks due to power issues).

Banzai Run was a drain monster at first, but I did eventually put up a 1.24M+ (the uppermost flipper on the vertical playfield wasn’t working, though I was never able to get the ball on to it anyway). This is a game I’d really like to sit down with and get into. I consider it one of the best games of this era. In fact, I wish the backbox vertical playfield had caught on and really became a thing. (Unfortunately the vertical playfield made the game quite a bit heavier and more expensive than your average pinball machine.)

Among the other highlights was a 13.2M+ on Funhouse. This score should have been over 17.2M+. My third trap door shot for Million Plus, which would have scored 4 million, did not score as it should have. Besides that, about the only real beef I had with this one was that the plunger skill shot was more difficult than usual to make. A full plunge sent the ball all the way around. Any attempt to short plunge and find the “sweet spot” resulted in the ball falling back into the bumpers on the right side. The lock shot was quite “nailable” though. Funhouse wasn’t the drain monster that Banzai Run was for most of my games. Thankfully.

I didn’t really get a chance to play the arcade video games, most of which I either weren’t in the mood for or were titles I could find a place to play locally.

All in all, I had a great time. It’s a shame we don’t have something quite like this in Houston. I am hoping at some point Pinballz decides to branch out into the Houston area.