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+).

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).

Once again I find myself running way behind on posts, so most of these will have a minimum of commentary. I normally do not post something like a Cidercade visit alongside others; hopefully that will not be necessary again for a while.

August 2, Poison Girl: Except for the rethemed Mata Hari, this was a pretty blah night.

August 9, Poison Girl: Pretty good scores all around, at least when looking at just the highs.

August 16, Poison Girl: Foo Fighters is fixed. (I broke the spinner on the 9th, it literally came off the mount and eventually came to rest above the lower right flipper.)

August 23, Poison Girl:

August 25, Cidercade: The highlight of this trip would, oddly enough, be my score on Pepper II (121K+), with The Walking Dead score of 42M+ up there as well. The rest I can take or leave.

August 29, Little Dipper: A few quick games of Creature. I’m back on the high score board after it was recently cleared (except for the grand champion of course).