This past Sunday brought one of my longer sessions at Einstein’s. Of particular note are games on The Beatles (2.76M+) and Total Nuclear Annihilation (860k+) which I consider very good to excellent, and one of my better runs on Stars (134k+). The TNA score certainly felt like one of the most satisfying games I had played on that title in quite some time, and I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of The Beatles (though it still plays as vicious as most EM titles of the late 1960s to early 1970s).

Also of note, for better or worse, is the prices have gone up on many of the games, with almost all of the relatively recent titles at 75¢/1 or $2/3. Maybe one or two games were moved down to 50¢/1; I didn’t really have a detailed record of what the old prices were. The change may have been based simply on demand as one of the price hike games was Attack from Mars. Still, I can’t complain too loudly given $1/game or higher is typical for newer games.

Most of this session on Godzilla was pretty normal. This is as close to an actual “quick game of Godzilla” as I will typically get; even then, this was actually the best game out of three played (one paid credit, two replays).

This particular wound up being quicker than expected, but I did put up what I felt was a pretty decent score for just walking up to the machine after work and laying one down. (The two scores after this were much lower.) I know I’ve done far better than 191.4M+, this isn’t to brag but just to add another page to the story.

While in the area for work, I ventured down to Quasars Arcade in Corpus Christi. I picked Quasars mainly because of the presence of certain pinball titles. Specifically, these are games I wouldn’t get to play in the Houston area very often, if at all. The list includes The Beatles, Dialed In, Twilight Zone, and Ghostbusters. I did play on some other pinball titles besides those, as well as a few video games.

The pricing structure is kind of strange: you buy a game card and you get a certain number of “Q-Bits” depending on how many you buy. At the time of this writing, $20 for 90 Q-Bits was the cheapest buy-in I saw posted. The more you buy the better deal you get, up to $100 for 650 Q-Bits.

Thankfully phones have a calculator function so I can figure out how much each Q-Bit was worth. (I think they are supposed to be roughly analogous to quarters.) Pinballs and newer video games were priced at 2.9 Q-Bits (around 65¢). Older video games as low as 1.2 Q-Bits (just over 25¢) with some a bit higher. The prize games priced at 5 Q-Bits (around $1.10) and up. Of note, most if not all pinball games at Quasars are set not to award replays except for matching. Instead, the games award extra balls for score (usually one extra ball by score per game).

Despite the presence of a price structure designed for the “leave credits on the card so they’ll come back”, I did by chance swipe my card on a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga combo cabinet with only 0.4 Q-Bits left (about 9¢) and got a credit anyway.

A lot of my scores from the night weren’t that great but I did have good games on The Beatles, Aerosmith, and Cactus Canyon, and a decent game on Dialed In. In the video game department I put in at least one fairly good run on whatever version of Initial D this was (I think this was 4 but don’t remember) and a passable run on Ms. Pac-Man near the end of the evening. In the case of Dialed In, I was just glad to get to experience the game with all the music and sounds. Getting a decent score was just a nice extra.

There’s not a whole lot to report on this visit. I did manage to put up a 306.7M+ to bump the high score #4 that much higher. However, there was an interesting first that happened on this visit. I was in the middle of the follow-up game to that 306.7M+ score, and during a rather frenetic multiball, all of a sudden the sound went silent and the display froze. While the flippers stayed active for another 15 to 20 seconds or so, they too went dead. Of course, the machine then rebooted, and there was no record of my score (the score that came up was the same 306.7M+ from the previous complete game).

Fortunately the rest of the session went by without incident. The replay score has yet to catch up to how well I usually do when I come by and play, for better or worse.