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.)