Yes, it’s been pretty quiet month after the Joystix visit. I have not been playing much pinball, at least much real pinball. I have been playing some Pinball Arcade on my tablet to stay sharp, though obviously that’s not quite the same as the real thing.

I have been keeping up with the goings-on, including the update to the WPPR formula for 2017 posted last week. It’s mostly minor stuff, with the headline change being the addition of an IFPA Tour of “endorsed Pin-Golf events.” For those unfamiliar with it, pin-golf is a tournament format where the goal is to complete objectives using the lowest number of balls in play. An example pin-golf course would be something like this:

1. Game of Thrones: Start Blackwater Multiball
2. Black Hole: Score 500K points
3. Fun House: Score Million Plus during multiball
4. Xenon: Score 1M points
5. Earthshaker: Get 50 ramp miles
6. [etc.]

If I were to get all 5 of these in the first ball of each game, my total score would be the best possible score of 5. If it took me more than that, say I ran into trouble on Xenon and Earthshaker and it took me 3 balls and 4 balls to reach each goal respectively, my score would be 10. Lower scores are better, just like real golf.

I have never really played a pin-golf tournament format, though it does seem like it would be kind of fun and something different. It seems I do better when I focus on just blowing up the score counter versus trying to reach an objective. A case in point would be a recent game of Party Zone I was playing in Pinball Arcade. I was trying to finally make the Big Bang, after many, many failed attempts. When I finally did my final score was in the range of 85M which wasn’t even good enough to make the high score list (I’ve had many games in excess of 100M before).

Amazingly, I made the Big Bang in a way I have never done before on either a real Party Zone machine or in Pinball Arcade: I sent the two balls up the Rock-It ramp right behind each other, such that there was this weird five-second pause on “Lock 2nd Ball for Big Bang” until the game figured out I had already made it. If memory serves me correctly, two of the three times I have made Big Bang on a real machine, it was for a maxed-out 99,999,999 score. (It’s been a while, most of my play of a real Party Zone machine was back when it was new in the early 1990s, so my memory is a bit fuzzy.)

On Pinball Arcade, the Big Bang does not carry over between starts of the app (otherwise, players would sandbag to drive up the value for when it finally does get made) and starts at 20,075,000. That’s still a fairly large bonus in this game, though there are other ways to run up that many points which are arguably lower risk (example: six shots to the far right lane when not lit would score a total of 21M).

Hopefully the next season of the league will start up soon, as I don’t want to have huge gaps between entries. This weekend I will try to find time to post some of my better Pinball Arcade scores over the past few months (there have been quite a few).

So I went to Joystix this past Friday (May 6) for Pac-Man Fever. The original reason I was going was to meet up with a couple of people I knew from the Extra Life Guild. That quickly turned into somewhat of a flop as they didn’t stick around for that long after I got my wristband to play.

I did get to play quite a few games that I had not played in years. Most notably, two videogame titles, Cliff Hanger (a Stern/Seeburg laserdisc title circa 1983 that I never got to play when it was new) and Time Traveler (the Sega hologram game from 1989 which is now somewhat rare). I also got in my first games of Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons (yes that is actually the title of a pinball game), Terminator 3, and Avatar. I also got to play, for the first time in a very long time, Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Ball. I know that last title is a game people love to hate, much like The Simpsons (the original 1990 Data East game, not The Simpsons Pinball Party which was made by Stern much more recently).

I’m not sure how good the Avatar score is, but I’m pretty damn proud of 1.24B+ on Game of Thrones and 382K+ on The Hobbit. Why the hell couldn’t I do that during league play?!

I want to keep the verbosity to a minimum on this post, so I would simply like to thank John and Michelle Costa for hosting us at their house in suburban/rural Brazoria County (near Pearland, but well outside city limits) this past Tuesday night. I would also like to thank John for the the chance to learn a little bit of tech that I didn’t know before (details below).

I also need to apologize a bit for this post being a bit untimely. The party was on May 3, which will be a bit over a week ago by the time I get this post ready for publication. I try to get them done and posted a bit sooner than that.

The Costa Casa (as some refer to it) had the following games at the time of the event: Funhouse, Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Indiana Jones (Williams), Champion Pub, Tommy, Kiss (Stern), Metallica, The Walking Dead, Batman Forever, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Elvis, Theatre of Magic, Spiderman, Pinball Magic (Capcom), Cirqus Voltaire, Scared Stiff, World’s Fair Jig-Saw (a pre-World War II-era pure mechanical game), and possibly a couple of others. I spent a plurality of my time playing Tales of the Arabian Nights and Funhouse, which I consider two of the better games to have come from the 1990s pinball renaissance.

There were a couple of slot machines made available for “free play” in a similar manner as World’s Fair Jig-Saw

I hadn’t had the chance to play Funhouse in quite some time, so seeing it in the collection was a welcome sight. Surprisingly, I never thought of Funhouse as a title I was particularly good at, so I was surprised to wind up putting up the score I did (11.4M+, which was not good enough to make the high score list, but good enough to firmly establish I’m no slouch).

The other notable high scores of the night were on Tommy, Spiderman, Scared Stiff, Metallica, and The Walking Dead. I also threw in a pic of the best performance on World’s Fair Jig-Saw I was able to pull off, just for the heck of it.

Also included are two pictures of the ball stuck on Tommy where the rubber busted. I replaced this rubber before I left (with some help from John), and also helped fix the upper flipper that had croaked in the meantime. (The screw holding the mechanism together had fallen out and had to be replaced due to being too stripped/worn.)

Finally, not long before I left, I remedied the issue of Twilight Zone having too few balls installed (it is supposed to have six: five steel, one cermaic). This was easy: I just placed the additional balls on a convenient place on the playfield (the left ramp return lane), and let the game take care of the rest. For any other Twilight Zone owners out there, nothing special needs to be done to load the additional balls into the gumball machine. What happens, the game will load the balls such that the ceramic “powerball” is first in line, using the right spiral magnet to make sure steel balls aren’t loaded first.

Also, if you are new to pinball ownership: most pinball games made during the solid-state multiball era (i.e. anything made in or after 1980) should have a sticker under the lockdown bar that reads something like “INSTALL 3 BALLS”. In this example, there should be three physical balls inside the machine for proper play. If there are only two, the game will likely complain with a message like “PINBALL MISSING” or “MISSING 1 BALL” upon trying to start a game. Older games which retain the ball in the outhole after draining and don’t kick it up into another hole closer to the plunger are one-ball games.

(Sidenote: Sometimes a game will play with less than the proper number of balls, but features will not work correctly. In the particular case of Twilight Zone, it will play with only three balls, but will get confused and think the ceramic “powerball” is another steel ball–a surefire way to get the ceramic ball stuck on the upper playfield (the “Magna-flip” won’t work on it). Black Hole will act like it is starting a game but will not actually kick the ball out until it can account for all three balls. I once, many years ago, played a Rollergames on location–set for coin play!–that had only one ball in it and gave me multiball with only one ball in the machine. I had a field day; the operator probably had some swear words to say when he/she checked the audits.)

So Saturday (April 23) was the Dallas Showdown pinball tournament. I had originally planned to attend, but decided not to. It does seem to be a bit bizarre to write about a tournament I didn’t actually go to, but given that I did plan to go to this tournament for most of the month preceding it, and some of the people who were there, I do have a few thoughts.

First, the reason I didn’t go should be at least somewhat obvious. Coming off of my absymal performance in the preceding Tuesday’s league playoffs, I had a lot to think about on my drive home. There were a variety of factors that went into my decision not to attend, but the biggest standout was that I was just not going to be in the proper psychological state to play well even if I was able to solve all the other issues.

The full standings aren’t up at the moment, but the top four places did get posted to the Facebook event. I do see that Justin Niles finished third after qualifying eighth, and that Preston Moncla (who won the A division of our last league season) finished fifth after qualifying sixth. Strong finishes from both of those players are not surprises at all. The real shockers, though, are Rusty Key finishing qualifying all the way down in sixteenth, and Phil Grimaldi finishing qualifying in seventeenth. This is out of a field of 30 players.

Looking at that, I have serious doubts I had a snowball’s chance in hell of making any kind of a decent showing, even if I had been able to resolve the issues in time. I would like to say I will try to make next year’s tournament, but my eyes are on the PAPA World Championships which would in all likelihood be only two or three weeks earlier (assuming approximately the same schedule is kept next year). Either way I’m hoping the Dallas Showdown tournament becomes a regular thing.

There’s going to be a lot of commentary at the end about this, because this is going to be one of the defining moments of my foray into competitive pinball, and not particularly in a good way (as you might be able to guess by the post title).

We get started shortly after 7pm. The situation is kind of strange with B division: since there isn’t an evenly divisible number of players, there is a playoff between the bottom four places that decides who gets to play in the rest of the tournament.

Once that’s out of the way, the quarterfinals begin. I’m grouped with Leon Moncla, Joe Cuellar, and Bryan Buckley. I select to go first and defer the machine choice to the next player down the line.

We wind up starting out on The Walking Dead, which, lucky me, I got in a couple of quick games of during warmups. My first two balls go rather terribly, though I’m still in contention given that nobody else is doing that great either. My third ball goes a little better, and I wrap up with 8.3M+. This winds up being only second to Leon’s 45.7M+ so I get three points for second place.

Our next game is on Game of Thrones. Leon has an incredible monster of a first ball, well in excess of 400M. He would wind up with 545M+. My 38.9M+ is enough for a second place, again. I really wish I had been able to start multiball and at least make a legitimate run at Leon’s score and first place, but apparently it just wasn’t meant to be. Still, three more points for a total of six isn’t too bad.

And then came the third game on Kiss. I wasn’t able to get a whole lot going, and by the time my third ball was over, my score of 5.0M+ was looking a lot like it was not going to even hold up for second. Bryan’s 9.3M+ and Joe’s 6.4M+ push me all the way down to third. (Leon’s 4.1M+ is last but that’s not even relevant.) I wind up the first round with eight points. Leon has eleven, Bryan has nine, and only the top two players advance.

Obviously this is not the way I planned to end the season. It’s one thing to only qualify for B division, but it’s another entirely to bust out like this in the first round, in a B division playoff. Words like “unhappy” and “disappointed” don’t do justice to how I am feeling about tonight.

Going back through history, which in this case is looking at my IFPA player record (snapshot as of the time of this blog post, saved to PDF), paints a curious picture. We start with 2014 July, in the first serious pinball tournament I ever played at The Game Preserve, where I came in a rather impressive third. I managed to squeak out a third in the side tournament at the Oil City Open, after flat out laying an egg in the first round of the main tournament (finishing 14th). (The side tournament was the highest football score on Gottlieb’s Touchdown, which I believe the Monclas no longer have in their collection.) The next tournament I play is at The Game Preserve in 2014 October, where I bust out in seventh. I don’t make it out to another tournament until I put up another third place at another Game Preserve tournament in 2015 June (that’s nine months later). Then, another seventh at the next Game Preserve monthly, followed by Houston Arcade Expo where I don’t qualify for the playoffs (30th out of 40 players). Finally we come to the most recent three tournaments, a second at a Game Preserve monthly, a second at the Space City Pinball Open, and a seventh at the most recent Game Preserve monthly I was able to take part in back in 2016 February.

The rankings of this league season were finalized, and I rank in a two-way tie for 25th of a 51 player league. Any other time, I might have said that doesn’t represent my true skill level as a pinball player. It’s a chilling thought to me, but maybe it is the truth, and maybe tonight was my overdue reality check.

Okay, so it’s been a while. Due to various personal reasons I’m not going to try to go into here, I missed week 7. And, due to the Astros playing a home game this Tuesday night, league night was at Phil and Matt’s house, on their collection. In the rotation for league play were: Tales From the Crypt, Dr. Dude, Whirlwind, Firepower, Diner, and The Simpsons Pinball Party.

I was grouped with Leon Moncla, Blake Dumensil, and David Pollock. I’m not going to go into where everybody was with regard to standings, as it was pretty much set. After looking at the way it played out, it was obvious I was stuck in B division at least after the week 7 no-show, possibly as early as week 6. I may go in and look at what could have been in a later post, or I may not. Staring at standings numbers gives me a headache at the moment, so now is definitely not the time.

I’m going to go ahead and touch on the second half of the post title here, since the majority of what I have to say on the topic is going to be in a post on Rant Roulette. Every week, everyone who wants to eat pizza chips in $5 towards pizzas. With the change of venue, we were out of the delivery area of our usual pizza place. Suffice it to say, this week the usual timely arrival of the pizza didn’t happen. Details and my thoughts in the aforelinked post (that’s why I have Rant Roulette in addition to this blog).

The night got off to a pretty good start on Firepower. I managed a score of 101,580, bested only by Leon’s 110,630. I had a great game even though I was not able to get a multiball going, and ordinarily I’d be a bit embarrassed by a score that barely cracked six-digit territory. Starting off with a second place that didn’t miss first by all that much is pretty good given some of the first game stinkers I have had from weeks past.

Our second game would be on Tales From the Crypt. I was able to get multiball lit; that’s the good news. The bad news is I couldn’t get it started, and really didn’t get much of anything going on this game. If there was any hope of me making A division, it was definitely gone when I posted a stinky 17.5M+ in this contest, last behind David’s 35.0M+, Blake’s 76.5M+, and Leon’s damn impressive 183.0M+. Two games, four points, and I’m a bit unhappy.

We would move on to Diner. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be proud of a 2.5M+ score on this game. But, in this case, it was good for first, with none of the other three players able to even break 900K. In fact, looking at the machine stats, only Phil Grimaldi was able to put up a higher score during league play (8.4M+). Given we were playing at his house, and thus Phil gets to play that exact machine a lot more often than the rest of us (different machines of the same title often play differently), that shouldn’t be a big surprise. I have a first place, and even if I’m only playing for pride, I’m starting to feel a lot better. Three games down, nine points, two games left to go.

Our next game would be Whirlwind. I have a terrible first ball, and a rather lacking second ball. Meanwhile David is hitting everything but the kitchen sink. I’m staring down David’s 5.39M+ score when I have something like 1.5M+. At this point I am realistically just thinking about second place. I manage to start multiball, but can never hit the Million Plus shot (the left ramp was very difficult to hit for some reason on this particular machine). I do manage to hit the cellar shot to restart multiball, but still cannot cash in.

At this point I am just thinking to keep the ball in play for as long as I can, and score whatever points I do in the process. I’m looking up and see the score counter pass somewhere in the 4.7M range, closing in on David’s potential winning score. At that point I’m still thinking to myself “back to basics, ball control, low risk, keep it in play.” I do manage to make both NE and SE shots toward lighting the next lock, but then I find out I have to light SW as well, so for the moment I forget about going for another multiball. (Hopefully those are the right directions, this is strictly from memory.) I catch a glimpse of the score counter briefly enough to see the millions digit at 5, which gets me to relax a bit knowing at least I’m not going to embarrass myself with a 4.8M+ or 4.9M+ score. The ball finally drains, and my final score is 5,790,190. Not a big huge lead, and certainly a score that either Leon or Blake (or maybe both) could top. As it turns out, they did not. Four games played, fourteen points, one game left. At this point I have clinched a personal best league night of the season (going back to week three, where I put up 13 points).

We would end the night on Dr. Dude, which was being livestreamed on Twitch for the first time ever. I made sure to tweet out the stream URL, but I don’t think too many people watched it live. I do have the video saved. I get one shot away from having multiball lit (the Mix Master shot) on the first ball, and put up a first ball score of 900,300 thanks in large part to a 200K outlane bonus, good for an early lead. My second ball isn’t that great, but I am still sitting at 1,185,650 going into ball 3, with the next highest score being 831,460. Not a huge lead, but still a lead.

The third ball of this game, however, wound up being one of my bigger failures of the night. After a botched post pass, I wind up draining straight down the middle. The save after the botched post pass put the ball in the bumpers, and I got a really unlucky bounce which wound up being unrecoverable. I sign off with 1,335,280 (not quite 150K on the third ball). Leon would jump in front with better ball control skills than I was able to muster the entire game, winding up his game with 1,769,070, which easily could have been much higher if he didn’t tilt out (the tilt on this machine was set rather conservative). Blake also tilts out early, with a final score of 385,190. David gets a very unlucky down-the-middle drain and would finish with 1,032,810. So my rather lame score is still good enough for second place, and I finish the night with 17 standings points.

The final regular season standings put me in the fifth spot in B division, with 69 standings points. All other things being equal, I would have needed 19 more points at some time during the season to finish ahead of Preston Moncla who snagged the last A division slot with 87 standings points. Put another way, Preston’s 87 standings points is a consistent average of 14.5 every non-dropped week, with a couple of allowable absences or garbage performances.

I’m not particularly ashamed of it, given it’s my first time playing in a league, but I know I’m capable of better. If I had been able to put up an average of, say, 17 points for at least four weeks out of the season (68 points, leaving another 19 split between the other two weeks, which I’ve proven I can do with no problem), I would have had a decent chance at A division going into the final week. Showing up for weeks 2 and 7 probably wouldn’t have helped as much as many readers think it would; I wound up with two weeks with 10 and 9 as my potential drop scores, and realistically I don’t think a performance of higher than that was forthcoming in those weeks had I showed up to play, due to various factors. I would have needed to put up an average of 19 those two weeks to have had a decent chance at A division (due to the two lowest weeks getting dropped).

Several pictures of pre- and post-league play games are included. I will caption as time permits.