Season 4 of the Lansing Pinball League starts tonight. It’s traditional for any new addition to the Avenue’s games to be included in the next league night, and this time the new addition is Theatre of Magic. ToM was my original favorite pinball game, back in the days before I discovered FunHouse, and it’s still near the top of my list. The volume is up nice and high so you can hear the great voices and music quite well. I think it is going to be a welcome addition to our lineup.
Matt has announced the games for tonight as the follows:
Austin Powers. I have asked Mike S. to please break it for me so I don’t have to listen to its awful yammering.
Theatre of Magic. If there is any justice, my affinity for bunnies, even devilbunnies, ought to help me.
Monster Bash. A lot of people in the league are really good at this one. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Monsters of Rock action during league play.
Junk Yard. Handle with care! And hope Mike isn’t in your group.
It’s also been decided that we are going to be changing the league format a little this season, with points determining seeding for an end-of-season playoff for final standings. The exact format for the playoff tournament is still being determined.
Super-Ball III, the post-season tourney for Season 3, happened December 16. Shortly afterward I got broadsided by the holidays and failed to write a recap. I’m a firm believer in “better late than never” but this is about as late as it gets, with Season 4 starting tomorrow!
Danny and Aaron, teamed up on Attack from Mars.
As in previous seasons, the competition took the form of a “Zen” tourney, with two players per team, each playing one flipper. This is a very fun format that evens out the skill levels and really challenges players to concentrate and anticipate partners’ moves. Communication is key, as players need to agree on a strategy ahead of time and constantly negotiate with each other during play.
The bracket was double elimination, and each round was best two of three. The assigned games were Attack from Mars, Monster Bash, and (as the tie-breaker) Medieval Madness.
Although it briefly looked like I was to be paired with Joseph again (just like last season, when we won the tourney undefeated together), a latecomer ended up changing the team pairings and I instead got paired with Mike “The Gremlin” S., while Joseph ended up with Greg. Mike and I have played a lot of pinball together over the last six months, so I think it was my next best pairing after Joseph.
When we beat the Chris and James team, Mike and I agreed (after some goading by others) to both walk up to Chris and say “In your face!” I resolved to do it, and walked toward him with my finger jabbing the air… at the exact moment I noticed that he had stuck his hand out to shake. It was too late to stop the insult from coming out of my mouth, and he stood there with his hand out and a rather startled look on his face. I’m not going to lie: I felt like a heel. “I was trying to show some professionalism,” came Chris’s reply. Oops.
(The pangs of guilt didn’t stop me from rolling down the car window and yelling “In your face!” at Chris again as we pulled up at the tournament in Fremont two weeks later.)
We did quite well, and got to the semi-final round to be knocked out by Joseph and Greg, who were tearing through the competition despite being the low seed. They went on to victory, after having to beat the formidable team of Aaron and Danny twice in a row in order to knock them out of the tournament. Joseph and Greg won four straight games in a row against them to finish the night and take the Zen trophies.
Joseph and Greg with their Zen trophies. Not pictured: Chris with his Season 3 trophy.
We also received new T-shirts for the season, designed by Sarah S., and Chris got his Season 3 championship trophy. The trophy was, once again, a very nice silver cup attached to a marble base. I remarked on how heavy it was and suggested to Chris that if a burglar ever breaks into his house, he could grab it to use as a weapon. He replied, “I’m confused. I’ve only got two hands, how will I grab all three of them?” Unfortunately I failed to get a picture of Chris with his trophy, but I’ve got two other photos like it, so that’s fine.
That’s it for Season 3! You can find all the photos from the Zen tourney and the rest of Season 3 in the Photo Gallery. See you tomorrow at the opener of Season 4!
As I have not yet completely worked out my strategy for quitting my job and devoting myself to a life of pinball hedonism, I have been kept busy by the end-of-term crunch. As a result I sadly did not find time to write my usual League Night Recap for 12/2/14. This is too bad especially since it was an exciting finale that saw the third place position decided by a mere 5 points. (Joseph still cannot believe he has gotten good enough for third place, but I don’t think he’s about to give it back either.)
Joe Cool, hanging around the change machine.
Speaking of Joseph, remember the League Night Preview for 12/2/14? The one in which Joseph was said to be scoffing at the idea we would play Getaway, due to its track record of breaking every league night? Well, during practice, the launcher broke again. Matt responded by yelling “damn it, Joseph!” and accusing him of having jinxed it. Naturally, I rushed to Joseph’s defense by blaming Mike the Gremlin instead, which Matt was willing to agree to. Mike pointed out that he had not been playing it, but I said that his mere presence is enough to cause things to malfunction.
Anyway, it’s official: we have not once actually played all the games on my League Night Preview. Man plans, the gods of pinball laugh.
Matt laughing at the existential futility of it all. Either that or something to do with the new Star Wars trailer.
Getaway was replaced with World Cup Soccer, which I was initially excited about — Getaway usually hates me, WCS usually treats me gently — but in the end my generally bad night did not take a break. I had finally started to recover on my third ball of WCS, when I got too desperate to save my ball and tilted, losing a bonus that was probably 100M or more. Joseph told me to remember what Chris told me: “If you’re not tilting, you’re not playing.” Unfortunately, as a trained logician, I know that this does not entail that if you are tilting you are playing and I am pretty sure I was not playing. On the bright side, my group’s game of WCS did lead to a remark by Aaron that gets my coveted “Quote of the Night” distinction. While (or possibly just after) losing a ball, he hit the Magna-Save, and I remarked that I never think to use it. He replied, “I only use it ironically.”
Alex thinks, “This is my chance to sabotage the Magna-Save while Aaron is distracted.”
Our other games for the night were The Walking Dead, Junk Yard, and Monster Bash. As far as I know, no one slam tilted Junk Yard this time, so there’s a small victory. I am all too familiar with The Walking Dead — in fact with that exact table since the high score table betrayed it as the one that has just left The Arcade in Brighton — and as usual the magnet threw the ball straight down the middle for me. Or that’s my excuse, anyway. A semi-decent game on Monster Bash is the only thing that saved my pride.
Tonight also saw the return of Russell at long last, whose single night of play will guarantee him a high-ranking partner for the Zen Tournament, which was surely his plan all along.
Although my disappointing night lost me the 10th place finish I was hoping for (as it would equal my last season placement), this has been a great season for me overall, and a great year of learning the joys of pinball. Thanks very much to Matt for starting and organizing the league, without which I would never have discovered this amazing hobby.
Jake found a new favorite chair.
Tonight is our traditional post-season Zen Tournament. Two-person teams are set up by pairing the highest and lowest ranked person, then the second highest and second lowest, and so on. Then it’s one person to each flipper for a double elimination tournament. Part of the fun is that no one knows who the teams are going to be until it starts, since it’s impossible to predict exactly who will show up. Well, except for the people who are guaranteed to show up; you would need dynamite to keep me away.
See you all at 7 p.m. at the Avenue for the Zen Tournament! And don’t forget you can see my latest League photos in the gallery page and the final standings summarized here.
The final standings for season 3 are in! Congratulations to Chris for winning the third season in a row, to Rodney for a runaway 2nd place finish, and to Joseph for taking the hotly contested 3rd place.
Final Standings
Chris
Rodney
Joseph
Matt
Mike St.
Danny
Aaron
Sarah
Jake
Mark
Heather
Christine
Alex
Mike G.
Greg
Terry
Shila
Todd
Amanda
James
Samantha
Russell
Jamie
Sam
For more detail, look at the results for the final league night. It’s been a great season thanks to all the great players in the league. See you at the Zen Tournament!
It goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway) that tonight is going to be a very exciting league night. It’s our final night of the season, and the points accrued by the end of this meeting will determine final standings. There will be one more league night, but it will be our post-season, unofficial tournament (traditionally a “Zen tournament”) and party.
Although the previous meeting saw Chris beaten out by an impressive tie between Danny and Joseph, he is still nearly a shoo-in to win the season, and Rodney to take second. The real action is still the #3 position. Joseph is currently #3 (he still insists, incredulously, that he is overvalued) but Matt and Mike are very close behind. Danny, despite being a mid-season joiner, has come up very quickly in rank and is also in range of a #3 finish. Many other positions have fewer than 10 points separating them so there could still be a lot of place-swapping.
The games chosen for this week are:
The Walking Dead: Well, of course. Our venue’s newest game generally gets chosen for league night. Matt reports that it has had a code update installed.
Getaway: If the launcher holds out, that is. (“We’re playing Getaway,” I told Joseph. “Suuuure we are,” he said.)
Junk Yard: “King Kong” Stewart will just have to rein himself in.
Monster Bash: A popular game that I don’t expect to hear a lot of griping about.
Season 3 is in the final stretch, as Tuesday was meeting 7 of 8. Due to snow out west, the GR crowd did not make it out and will be doing a makeup session in the coming week. Russell also did not return (no word on whether it was due to yoga this time) and everyone is starting to wonder whatever happened to Amanda, too. As a result of the low attendance, some of the groups ended up as pairs or trios this time. We were scheduled to play Junk Yard, World Cup Soccer, Lord of the Rings, and The Simpsons. As usual, events made a mockery of my League Night Preview. I don’t think we have once managed to play all of the games that were actually on the list.
Joseph and I arrived fairly close to the start time, but most people had yet to arrive, so we decided to play a practice game. My personal rule is that I will not warm up on a game we are going to play for league. This is because I have had too many experiences of playing a fantastic warmup game and then an awful league game. Somehow an awful league game, though terrible enough, is made so much worse by following a great warmup game.
We chose to warm up on Tales of the Arabian Nights, and I finished with a score in the 8 millions somewhere, which I was very happy with. Joseph got to battle the genie, his first time doing so on a physical machine, though I was over getting a beer when it happened. Chris tried to summon me to watch but by the time I got back Joseph had unfortunately lost.
During practice, I heard some commotion in the vicinity of Junk Yard and looked over to see that someone had slam tilted it again. My immediate reaction was to scold Mike, but he proclaimed innocence and pointed the finger at Chris. “If I’m King Kong Stewart,” Mike said, “then he’s Tyrannosaurus Tabaka!” Matt came by and sternly informed everyone that we were going to play Junk Yard this time regardless, so we would all just have to be gentle with it.
Mike pushes his luck with Junk Yard while Joseph warms up on TotAN.
Then Matt held out the Sorting Hat for us to draw our starting machines. I drew a little slip that read… “TotAN”?! What? Well, it turned out that as World Cup Soccer was down, Arabian Nights was to be its replacement, and worse, I was going to start my night on it. Greg also drew TotAN, making us league buddies for the night.
I tried not to let my superstition psych me out, but it was to no avail. I finished with something like 750K. Greg had a miserable game too and we both went upstairs in defeat to play Addams Family. At this point, Danny and Shila arrived and Shila joined me and Greg. This is also the point when I learned, from listening to Shila spell her name for Greg (as he was the keeper of the scores notebook), that we have been spelling her name in the league results all along. I mentioned this and apologized, and she replied that she and Danny figure that “Shyla” is her secret pinball identity.
Shila, alias Shyla, having a good ball of Addams Family.
Greg and I both had much better Addams Family than TotAN games. I had a particularly thrilling game as the 62 million I earned was a personal best, and by a significant margin. This was the second time I have set a personal best during a league game – two different leagues, but the same game! My previous personal best on Addams Family was set during the last Marvin’s League meeting. I was so excited by my finish that I began dancing around until I noticed that the group on Lord of the Rings were all chuckling at my antics.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, it was clear my group would not be playing it anytime soon, as the group currently stationed there was loaded with top players. We headed downstairs to play Junk Yard. I’m glad to have that back in league rotation, finally; it’s not a perfect game but it’s fun. At some point Joseph came up to me and told me Chris was destroying the Ring, so I ran back upstairs to join a crowd of people watching. It was a success! I was told that he was still on Ball 1 and my jaw dropped. When he did finally lose his ball, he had to throw away the next one (I presume he had already used his one allowed extra ball) and managed to make some hay of that: he successfully shot the Tower skill shot and thereby set up Return of the King.
That spectacle brought back memories for me. This league night was roughly the anniversary of my first ever league night back in November 2013, which is also when I started getting seriously interested in pinball. At that first league night, I remember seeing a crowd form around a guy I now know as Chris, and hearing that he was “destroying the Ring.” Through Joseph, I was somewhat familiar with the idea that pinball games had something like a final boss battle that amounted to “beating the game,” but I had never actually seen it happen. It did not hurt my rapidly developing interest in competitive pinball that I saw someone achieve such an exciting feat on my first league night!
Mike thinks, “Oh good, Chris warmed it up for me.”
After a very long time (during which I went ahead and had a side game of Medieval Madness) the word came down that LotR was finally free, and Greg, Shila and I finished up our last game for the night. Greg, Joseph, and I played several just-for-fun games afterward.
Chris stopped by on his way out to give me a good deal of grief about my decision to skip the Arcade League this month in order to go to Silver Bells, Lansing’s annual holiday event that includes an illuminated parade and the lighting of the state tree. Among other arguments against going to Silver Bells, he offered that he had seen the state tree already and it was a “scrawny-ass tree.” I did end up going to Silver Bells, and when I got home, Mike had posted a photo from the Arcade of an empty space where FunHouse used to be, captioned “Heather, have bad news for you.” I wailed and gnashed my teeth on Facebook all evening about this until finally, sometime after 2 a.m., Mike confessed that he and Chris had moved FunHouse to take the picture and it was still there. Never mind King Kong and Tyrannosaurus: their true identities have been revealed as the Left Troll and the Right Troll. I will bide my time until an opportunity for revenge presents itself….
This week’s league play still isn’t over, as the Grand Rapids crew needs to come out and play their games. This means that there aren’t any results to report yet. A little bird told me they will probably be coming Tuesday or Wednesday. I plan to show up for some more league fun when they do and I hope others will too. As usual, you can find more pictures of the night in the Gallery.
Tomorrow is meeting 7 of 8 for Season 3 of the Lansing Pinball League. Time for us all to channel all of the stress and frustration of our daily existence into something positive: smacking the hell out of a steel ball and watching it violently collide with things. Or maybe I’m revealing too much about myself.
As usual, Matt has done a random drawing to determine our games. As an added bonus, I am going to provide a special strategy tip for each game. You can thank me with a beer when you’re done entering your initials.
Junk Yard. Yes, Junk Yard. Chris swears the tilt is behaving. We shall see. Strategy tip: shoot the castle!
World Cup Soccer. Strategy tip: shoot the castle!
Lord of the Rings. Strategy tip: shoot the castle!
The Simpsons Pinball Party. Strategy tip: shoot the castle! Better yet, just shoot the game.
Welcome to the fourth part of my continuing series of tips by a novice, for novices. This time I’m going to share with you my secret method for approaching any pinball game. Stepping up to a machine you’ve never played before? No idea what the rules are beyond “hit stuff”? Or just too nervous to try anything fancy? No problem. The only three words you need to remember are shoot the castle!
Shoot at this thing, but try to avoid landing your ball on top of it as Joseph has done here.
Most people learn this strategy first by playing every beginner’s favorite game, Medieval Madness. The reason this game is so friendly to novices is that it goes out of its way to help you identify the castle by making it look like a giant castle. Thus, people naturally fall into using the STC strategy. The secret I can now reveal to you is that nearly every game has a castle. The designers just try to cleverly throw you off by not making it look like a castle. So your job, stepping up to a new machine, is to figure out what the castle is.
Some tips for identifying the castle
The classic castle has at least some of the following characteristics:
It’s near the center, and so can be shot from either flipper
It’s large and easy to hit
It’s near the back of the playfield
Hitting it repeatedly gets you something, even if it’s not an optimal strategy
To get you started using this strategy, I have prepared a field guide for identifying the castle in the games at The Avenue.
[table id=6 /]
I’ll see you next time… and remember, shoot the castle! You learned it here first!
