The story continues with another evening of exciting silverball action at Einstein’s in Katy. This was shortly after Fathom Revisited was brought in to replace Meteor. Honestly, of the two, Meteor is the game I like a bit more, though Fathom can be a fun game to play as well. Indeed, this remake of Fathom was the one that got at least a plurality if not an outright majority of the quarters in my pocket that night.

The score of 1,359,050 on Fathom only barely missed the high score list. The 2.24M+ on Beatles is not my highest of all time (I did slightly better back in May when I was last here) but still what I consider to be a pretty good run. The 163K+ on Stars would likely be a solidly decent score in a tournament, depending of course on how other players did. The rest range from okay to “bleh”.

I’m going to go ahead and lump all four visits into one post, cutting out a lot of the records which were beaten once only for me to beat them myself again later on. The pictures from the 18th show most if not all of the surviving records which still had my initials up at the end of it all.

The highlight of this four-visit stretch would of course be the smashing 348.7M+ second only to the grand champion on this particular machine, and not by a whole lot at that (grand champion is/was at 375.6M+).

Some of you are no doubt familiar with Track 21, which was primarily a go-kart facility which also had mini-golf, laser tag, and arcade games. By the end of their run on September 4 of this year, the arcade games had been taken out in favor of an additional party room. The mini-golf and laser tag remained, and these were the attractions I took part in on their last day of business this past September 4.

I would start off the afternoon with a round of mini-golf. Admittedly, this mini-golf course doesn’t have much to it, and was clearly something of an afterthought as it was only 9 holes. I had played it once or twice many years ago. It was pretty good for what there was. The first hole had the par stroke count missing, and scoring on the ninth and final hole is unclear, with no par listed. There were no physical score cards so I kept score using a note app on my phone. My scores were:

This wasn’t too bad all things considered, though admittedly par on these holes was rather generous in a lot of cases. (There is no governing body for mini-golf to uniformly decide par on a given hole, for better or worse. In full-scale USGA/R&A golf, it’s decided by distance from the pin to the tee box; in mini-golf there is much more in play to decide relative difficulty.)

After two rounds of mini-golf (equivalent to the usual 18-hole round at most mini-golf courses), there were finally people showing up for laser tag. I didn’t know what to expect, despite playing laser tag here once many years ago, and honestly, not having played laser tag at all, anywhere, in easily a decade.

I did relatively well, given I was thrown into a team game and there were two employees playing out of the eight players. I had the third most points out of four players on the team (eight players total), and third most points overall (no individual on the blue team scored more than the lowest scoring player on our team, the yellow team).

With go-kart racing sold out long before the laser tag game was over, there was little else to do, but I did have a great time on my last visit to Track 21. I wish all the former employees continued success on their respective career paths, and the former owners an enjoyable retirement (assuming what I have heard is correct).