This didn’t fit in the other updates, so I’m going to go ahead and add it here to make sure it’s in before the Texas Pinball Festival recap, as that one is going to be not only immediately forthcoming but rather long.

Basically, it’s another monthly installment of BurgerTime scores. Apparently the machine at the Continental Club is never powered off as my high score from February 21 (!) was still up there.

I don’t consider myself a BurgerTime expert or to have any aspirations of a world record run on this game, but this is a fun game to play before Grown-Up Story Time as well as during the intermission of same. Speaking of which, Grown-Up Story Time has become part of my monthly routine (third Tuesday of every month) and is a great entertainment value if you are in the area.

I’m going to try to keep this brief in hopes that I can catch up to current before TPF this weekend.

While I did attend both days, I wound up not staying long on Friday for a variety of reasons. The fact that I had a “mulligan” due to there being another crawl on Saturday did somewhat factor into that decision (something I did not have with the Onesie Bar Crawl). I did take a couple of selfies on Friday but most of the partying and socializing was on Saturday.

There are a couple of videos from this event I will be adding later due to time being at a premium (they need to be edited and/or re-encoded). As far as the event itself, I did have a great time with the crowd I was with, comprised mainly of a bachelorette party from a city which is a good 5-6 hours driving time away from Houston. Toward the end of the evening we were once again at FAO. I didn’t play a whole lot this time around but did get in a few games, so yeah, there are as many selfies as game score photos, for better or worse.

This weekend (upcoming, March 24-26) is the Texas Pinball Festival including the Wizards tournament. I am confirmed for the Wizards tournament and a hotel room in the area (no hostel or cheap “Tobacco Road” room this time around).

Once again, links for those looking to follow along:

• Main scoreboard (note that I am only in the Wizards tournament, so you will not see me with results for Classics or others)
• Jump straight to my scores
• Live stream for finals (4pm Saturday): Wormhole Pinball
• Mastodon (Twitter workalike) feed (toot.community) — will have scores and possible brief commentary, relatively close to real-time, subject to internet and other technical functionality. Note that this is a different link than last year as I have changed Mastodon instances.
• Peertube account (video.hardlimit.com) — will have live-streamed and/or recorded content made available during the event, directly from me and my devices, subject to internet and other technical functionality. Generally I will only go live on this for ~5 minutes at a time, possibly longer if people have questions/comments.

I’m really looking forward to this year, especially with last year’s experience and what I learned from it.

I’m going to just combine most of these into one post, with light commentary about the noteworthy games. Because if you’ve been by Poison Girl and/or looked at the Facebook page, you’ve seen evidence of a noteworthy game (or three) on Whirlwind.

But, first things first. February 15, Poison Girl. Nothing really noteworthy, decent scores but I wouldn’t count on this level of play to win a tournament.

February 20, Poison Girl. The first of many high scores on Whirlwind. 25.9M+ is up in the range of tournament worthy, though keep in mind true tournament games would be played without extra balls. Either way, I feel this was an accomplishment.

February 21, Continental Club. Not a whole lot to comment on here, as this was just me playing BurgerTime. I was never that great at this game but I am slowly improving.

February 22, Big Top Lounge. Just a quick game each of Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man.

February 27, Poison Girl. Not a whole lot out of the ordinary but the score on Iron Maiden is pretty nice.

March 6, Poison Girl. Finally we get to a true highlight, a personal best on Whirlwind that will probably stay on top for a good long while. This game was the first time I have ever maxed out the skyway tolls (you get a nice “Skyway Paid For / 200,000” display and a unique sound effect for each ramp shot). At least three (full) multiballs, at least a couple of quick multballs, and two Super Door bonuses.

March 13, Poison Girl. High scores on both Wheel of Fortune and Whirlwind. This particular high score is noteworthy for being the first time I have ever made multiple Million Plus shots in one multiball. I just squeaked by JNM’s score once again to push him/her down to third.

There will be two more posts about events/outings before Texas Pinball Festival. The following post to go live tomorrow will be about how to follow my progress at that event.

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.