So I finally made it back down to Little Dipper for trivia for the first time in quite a while. Of course I took the opportunity to play some pinball, including the most recent arrival (at the time), White Water. Rounding out the games I played were Creature and Spider-Man, the latter of which had a (since repaired) dead upper flipper.

Trivia had an unfortunately low turnout, so for the first time I played solo against a team and one other solo player. (This was likely due to a lot of other Halloween events competing against it.) Despite this I stayed surprisingly competitive despite coming in third of three teams.

Another pub crawl, another set of pictures.

I debated even showing up for this as I had other social opportunities in front of me. Looking back on it, the term “sunk cost fallacy” comes to mind. I bought my ticket for this crawl way back in April. Obviously, I could not have any idea what the coming months had in store for me both personally and professionally. I had lightly considered letting someone else have my ticket in the weeks before, but in the end chose to show up sans costume. (This somewhat echoes the experience of the Foam Glow fun run/walk from July, but the tickets for that event may not have been transferable due to requiring a waiver to participate.)

That said the nights weren’t a total flop, I did make a bit of conversation with a few people and I got some much-needed relationship/dating advice. Most of the vibe of the previous crawls just wasn’t there for me for whatever reason; I didn’t even take a selfie, which is kind of rare for me. The reasons were specific to me and my state of mind, though; I still encourage everyone to try at least one bar/pub crawl for themselves and form their own opinion about whether or not it’s something worth doing. As Meat Loaf famously sang, two out of three ain’t bad.

So given all that, this post is going to be surprisingly light on details and stories. It’s pretty much an excuse to post pictures. This time around, it’s more high scores (for the night, anyway) on the games at FAO. These include a rare pic from Pac-Man Battle Royale which I just happened to snap in time. As a bonus, there’s a not-so-random picture of the decor at Playground.

At this point I still plan to return for my second year of the onesie bar crawl. It’s only apropos that I type this on this season’s first night of honest-to-goodness onesie/kigurumi weather here in Houston. (We went from near-summer weather to what’s basically winter weather in the span of a couple of days. It’s nuts.)

Monday, October 2, brought a business-related trip out northeast of Houston. The area of Humble or Atascocita was not on the most direct route there and back, but on the way back I found myself hungry and in the mood for pinball, and at least one location that had both was in that area. My first stop was Mojo’s Sports Grille, which had an AC/DC per Pinball Map. I get there only to find out it’s “not working” and turned off for this reason. Unfortunately, the bartender doesn’t know details on what’s wrong with it. I leave with a relatively full stomach but with the pinball urge still unsatisfied. Hopefully this location will get a working pinball machine soon, whether this AC/DC or something else.

So my travels then take me to Center Court Pizza and Brew just up the road (West Lake Houston Parkway, to be specific). I find a Star Wars in great condition, though the volume is turned down to an essentially inaudible level, but at 50 cents per play the price can’t be beat. I play a pretty solid handful of games and eventually post a nice solid 283M+. While this isn’t enough to make the high score board by any means, it’s on the lower end of what I’d consider a pretty good game for me.

While Center Court and Mojo’s are both a considerable distance from me, I endeavor to make a return trip at least once every three months or so to support location pinball in the area.

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+).