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.