I realize I have not posted in a while. Due to a variety of factors I have decided to take a break from competitive pinball, but I hope to resume before the end of the year. I have remained active doing some research related to the video game high score record attempts (the “record quest” in the original site’s domain name).

I would prefer not to reveal too much, as the games I have in mind have few or no record attempts per the Twin Galaxies site and I don’t want anyone “beating me to the punch”. Klax is still on the list along with a few other “household name” arcade game titles from the early to mid-1980s, however, for a lot of games I am scaling back going from the #1 record to putting up what I call an “I’m no slouch” score. Something along the lines of 100K+ on Centipede, 200K+ on Galaga, 60K+ on Dig Dug, etc; enough to prove I’m one of the better players at the game, even if not the world’s best.

On a lot of these games, it’s a question of endurance and/or how long can the player keep doing the same pattern over and over. Pac-Man is one such example, perhaps the most obvious one in fact. Robotron: 2084 is arguably another such example. Feats such as completing the entire 255 mazes of Pac-Man or running up 100M+ on Robotron: 2084 are still impressive, but to me they just aren’t satisfying to accomplish. As nice as the fame may be from being the guy to finally break, say, 6M on Centipede after almost 40 years, I would find it boring to get there and knowing that a couple of screw-ups halfway through would end it, the pressure to perform would be enormous and would really take most of the fun out of it.

I close with a long overdue, belated post of the one game of pinball I played while in Las Vegas. This was at the KISS by Monster Mini Golf attraction inside The Rio. It was, of course, the Stern KISS table from a few years ago. It was admittedly in rather sad shape: missing a flipper rubber and the lock shot was somehow not accepting balls. I had originally gotten $2 in change intending to play 3 games but after taking a quick look at the machine settled on just one for $1. Again, it’s a score that would probably not even hold up on league night if I still played but it did feel good to step up to a pinball machine again and play.