[Note: This post describes two visits from the latter half of February, well before the business closures and most event cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic began in the Houston area. For a variety of reasons, It took until now to actually get this post completed and ready to upload.]

Way, way back in the day, I checked out Speedy’s Fast Track (possibly operating under a different name at the time, but there was an arcade in the area) after hearing about it from a friend I had met at Exhilarama (during its downfall as an indoor amusement park, which would soon become just another Tilt arcade, but that’s another story). It had been easily 20 years since I had set foot in the place. A lot has changed since then. As I remember it, there was no miniature golf course and there was definitely no laser tag.

There was pinball alongside the video games, though, both then and now. And that’s the main reason for this relatively brief visit. The lineup: Batman ’66, Star Wars (2017), The Munsters, Iron Maiden, Deadpool, and Jurassic Park (2019). The nominal price per game was $1.75 for everything but Batman ’66, which was $1.60. Speedy’s uses swipe cards, which honestly, I’m not that big of a fan of, but apparently this is the wave of the future. The swipe card system does allow a generous discount such that buying, say, $10 or more of play at a time reduces the effective price to something a bit more reasonable ($1.35/$1.23 or less, slightly higher the first time you load less than $50 on a card because of the $1 card fee). The advantage to the arcade operator is that it’s more difficult to share the discounted rate among a group of friends (versus using tokens).

I began with one title I had only played a few times: The Munsters. I last played this when I was a regular league player, but didn’t really get the opportunity to relax and actually enjoy the experience of playing. In particular, I didn’t get to hear the sounds.

I moved on to Jurassic Park. I put up a couple of respectable games, including the 89.6M+ photographed below. I didn’t know what to expect from this game, but it turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable and refreshing experience.

On to Iron Maiden, another rather familiar game from league play. The 118.3M+ I was able to post on this title is certainly competition-quality. This is another game I could just sit back and play for an hour or so after getting a rhythm going.

Next up was Batman ’66, which I was no stranger to. This one didn’t disappoint either; I would play for quite a while on my paid credit, topping out at 293.5M+ (on this visit). A quick game of Crazy Taxi and I would call it a wrap for the afternoon.

I would return a few days later to check out the rest of the games I didn’t get a chance to play the first time through. An unremarkable 12.7M+ on Deadpool and a modest 79.0M+ on Star Wars would begin the evening, but the real story is what I would do the second time through on Batman ’66: a personal record and grand champion score of 870.2M+ as well as a bonus champion of 329M+ (from an earlier game than the grand champion score).

To be fair about it, there is an issue with Batman ’66 that could be termed a beneficial malfunction: the autoplunger does not fire as it should. However during my grand champion run I did everything I could to play it as if it was a tournament game and not leave balls in the plunger lane longer than necessary.

Other than that, there were relatively few issues with the games at Speedy’s and I look forward to making this one of my regular destinations.

I do realize it’s been fairly quiet on this blog. I am still out there and planning ahead for various events in 2020.

The records will show it has been quite some time since I have last competed in a WPPR-ranked/IFPA-endorsed tournament. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of them pinball-related, others less so. I do intend to play in a tournament or league somewhere and thus re-enter the competitive pinball scene sometime in 2020. I’m just not sure exactly when, where, or in what form, but I have not retired from competitive pinball, either voluntarily or constructively.

I do plan to have at least some non-competitive pinball-related posts in February and March, with possibly a couple of posts related to some ongoing video game efforts alongside them.

Well, I had been looking forward to it for a good couple of weeks, after there was a bit of doubt I’d even be able to go. Last Saturday, the 16th, was my visit to the Houston Arcade Expo for the first time since 2015. It felt good to show my face again given my prolonged absence from the competitive pinball scene. A lot of people probably thought I had dropped dead or quit playing, and perhaps a few even wished I had decided to up and quit playing. But no, as stated previously, no, I’m not giving it up for a while.

The highlights of the evening, as I saw them: 9.4M+ on Whirlwind, possibly the best I’ve ever done on that title; a monster 12-8 win against the computer player on World Series: The Season where I hit 9 home runs over the course of the game; a pretty solid 5.2M+ on Night Moves (International Concepts, 1989, Gottlieb hardware); 117K+ on Millipede (starting at the 24K level); 437K+ on Space Invaders pinball; 901K+ on Total Nuclear Annihilation (a deceptively low scoring game given the 8-digit dedicated scoring displays); an amazing come-from-behind win on a two-player game of Black Knight 2000; and finally, proving I’ve still got it on Ballblazer for the Atari 7800, eeking out a 6-4 win with 5.4 seconds left in a standard 3-minute game after trailing for almost the whole time.

Again, for a variety of reasons, I did not play in the tournament(s). It was more about getting out there, being seen, and just playing pinball (mostly) for the love of the game. The big turnaround moment in the game of Black Knight 2000 came when I was down by easily over a million points during ball 3. My opponent (I didn’t catch a name, unfortunately) had already wrapped up with a 2.66M+ score. I had close to a million, I think. I made the lightning spin shot, and started rooting for multiball (Double Knights Challenge multiball, lighting the W-A-R lanes for 1 million per completion). Amazingly, I get my multiball, and my opponent can’t believe it. I actually make the W-A-R lanes for a million, putting me close to taking the win. I make eight upper playfield loops in a row good for the loop champion and more than enough points to take the lead and would eventually sign off with 3.5M+. (Interestingly, the setup was some kind of code intended for tournament/league play where the normal 3-ball multiball did not light jackpot, it would only light during The King’s Ransom mode. I would, in a later game, collect The King’s Ransom mode only to lose my two balls and never have it kick out the third ball to plunge… and then get stuck in some kind of loop never even doing a ball search. Frustrating, but such is life sometimes.)

The best score on Whirlwind was on a one-player game; I’m pretty sure I played that as a one-player game all night. My goal on that title is to get two Million Plus shots in the same multiball, then work my way up to getting three or more. Still, 9.4M+ is a respectable score and it won’t be long before I’m really back in the groove and able to put up 20M+ scores like some other players.

I got to play a few games for the first time, including Genesis (Gottlieb, 1986); Butterfly (Sonic, 1977); Stars (Stern, 1978); an apparent one-of-a-kind conversion called Polynesia (not sure of the original game or who this belongs to); Elvira’s House of Horrors (Stern, 2019); and others I’m not sure I even got pictures of.

I am hoping to start off 2020 with a major tournament but I still need to spend some more time playing casual, non-competitive pinball (at least outside of a league or tournament setting). It is reassuring to know my pinball skills haven’t totally gone to pot, though in a few cases it was obvious I do need to try to practice more.

In a similar spirit to a misquotation commonly attributed to Mark Twain, any reports of my demise and/or retirement from competitive video gaming and pinball have been greatly exaggerated.

On this Friday and Saturday, we will have yet another Houston Arcade Expo. I plan to be in attendance toward the late afternoon/evening hours of Saturday, November 16. I will not be playing in the tournament, but I will be playing some of the many pinball games, and perhaps a few video games, out on the show floor. I’m still not sure what I’ll be wearing that day but I will be coming from a non-arcade-related event earlier that day that may require me to be dressed a bit more conservatively than usual. I may have time to change before I head over, I may not; if I am able to change, I plan to wear my Astros 2019 AL Champions T-shirt. (As an aside, I am still proud of what our Astros did this year; two pennants in three years is not something a lot of teams are able to pull off, much less a World Series victory after one of them.)

I have taken a rather long break, by my standards, from even touching a pinball machine of any sort. The last one I got to play was the KISS in Las Vegas at the Rio, very briefly on the way back from the comedy show. I had meant to get in a few rounds by now, somewhere, but at this point I may as well wait for Saturday.

I’m still not sure exactly when or where I will return to competitive pinball. On one hand I want that to be relatively soon and for as long as I am physically able to do the various things required to play (i.e. stand, operate the controls, see the playfield, ball, and score display, and coin/bill up the machine when required). This is not to imply that I am immediately at risk of not being able to do so, merely that there is a desire that nobody else makes the decision for me that I should no longer play competitively.

On the other, I don’t want to rush back into things and I want to be sure that my involvement in competitive pinball is a worthwhile use of my time and not an undue risk factor towards my reputation (specifically, being associated with people of questionable character and/or those who knowingly disregard the law). It is unfortunate that I have to say this, but it is the truth. I’m not going to pretend that I’m perfect, but it was a real eye opener to learn what some people are really made of over the last few years.

So yes, I am starting to miss parts of the competitive scene, but at the same time there are things I don’t miss at all that I’d rather leave behind. This Saturday, I’m going to pretend it’s 2014 again (or as close to that as I can) prior to a competitive pinball scene being established in Houston. I’m going to play as if the tournament isn’t there, and just play to have fun. Remember, the object of the game is to get the highest score, but the object of playing the game is to have fun. Don’t forget this; the results of doing so can be disastrous. Y’all have fun at Expo this weekend, okay?

Houston Arcade Expo
Houston Mariott Westchase
2900 Briarpark Drive
Houston, TX
76X6PCMX+PX

I realize I have not posted in a while. Due to a variety of factors I have decided to take a break from competitive pinball, but I hope to resume before the end of the year. I have remained active doing some research related to the video game high score record attempts (the “record quest” in the original site’s domain name).

I would prefer not to reveal too much, as the games I have in mind have few or no record attempts per the Twin Galaxies site and I don’t want anyone “beating me to the punch”. Klax is still on the list along with a few other “household name” arcade game titles from the early to mid-1980s, however, for a lot of games I am scaling back going from the #1 record to putting up what I call an “I’m no slouch” score. Something along the lines of 100K+ on Centipede, 200K+ on Galaga, 60K+ on Dig Dug, etc; enough to prove I’m one of the better players at the game, even if not the world’s best.

On a lot of these games, it’s a question of endurance and/or how long can the player keep doing the same pattern over and over. Pac-Man is one such example, perhaps the most obvious one in fact. Robotron: 2084 is arguably another such example. Feats such as completing the entire 255 mazes of Pac-Man or running up 100M+ on Robotron: 2084 are still impressive, but to me they just aren’t satisfying to accomplish. As nice as the fame may be from being the guy to finally break, say, 6M on Centipede after almost 40 years, I would find it boring to get there and knowing that a couple of screw-ups halfway through would end it, the pressure to perform would be enormous and would really take most of the fun out of it.

I close with a long overdue, belated post of the one game of pinball I played while in Las Vegas. This was at the KISS by Monster Mini Golf attraction inside The Rio. It was, of course, the Stern KISS table from a few years ago. It was admittedly in rather sad shape: missing a flipper rubber and the lock shot was somehow not accepting balls. I had originally gotten $2 in change intending to play 3 games but after taking a quick look at the machine settled on just one for $1. Again, it’s a score that would probably not even hold up on league night if I still played but it did feel good to step up to a pinball machine again and play.

While I did not announce it widely, in part due to it being kind of a last-minute thing, I did help staff the Extra Life booth at Anime Matsuri 2019 over the weekend.

Those familiar with me know I have a track record of helping out with charitable events, including a volunteer history going back a full decade now. I have been a part of the Extra Life Guild since, well, before the guilds were even formalized and Houston had an Extra Life committee (the only city that had one that I know of, as the effort started here).

It is also no big secret that John Leigh, the event manager of Anime Matsuri at least as of 2015, was accused of sexual harassment by several women that year. This has had the obvious effect on the festival’s reputation in the years since. I cannot compare to previous years, but I did notice the attendance, size, and hours don’t correspond to my idea of a healthy event, even though according to the website “Anime Matsuri is also the fastest growing convention in North America reaching over 36,000 unique attendees in 11 years” (emphasis theirs).

In this case, obviously, my desire to help the Extra Life Guild won out. However, my attendance should not be interpreted as an approval or endorsement of any Anime Matsuri staff actions in the past or present. I staunchly condemn sexual harassment and I feel it is unfortunate that the actions of an event manager have cast such a shadow over what could continue to be a great anime festival.