Last Friday I was in Beaumont yet again for work. Of course, after work was over it was time for the nearly-obligatory stop by Colorado Canyon. It was a well-timed trip as there was a second pinball machine there joining AIQ. Specifically, that game was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I would call Turtles one of my modern favorites (probably not the #1 favorite but still high on the list).

It took little time for me to post a 50.8M+ score. This score would be good for high score #2 (second below grand champion) as well as Donatello champion for the moment. I would put up a 47.7M+ right after it good for the high score #3 slot. In the first game I made it as far as Team Up multiball. This is about as far as I have ever made it in the game. I hope one day to make it to the wizard mode.

Fast forward to the 20th, last night (Tuesday) when I got in a quick game of Galaga at Shoeshine Charlie’s. Yes, it was the high score, but that’s kind of meaningless as the game had just been powered on. (Actually, it was power cycled as it has developed an intermittent RAM fault, but obviously nobody had played it earlier in the evening so it would have been at the default of 20K either way.) Settings are 3 lives, 20K/60K/+60K, and apparently easy difficulty (not sure how to tell the difference but no enemy bugs dropped bombs during the stage 10 entrance). My 135K+ is nowhere near a personal best but pretty good for outdoors with Houston’s latest heat wave (I was sweating by end of game).