Category: Recaps

The league night of 9/14 was notable for two reasons: first, it was, at long last, the final qualifying night for Season 14, a season that began in January 2020; and second, it was the return of the Tuesday Night Smackdown side tournament. The Smackdown was the first official IFPA tournament that I have submitted results for since the pandemic started.

The bank was officially unnamed, consisting of just the games we had not played yet so far this season, plus three games determined by popular vote. (The Mandalorian was supposed to be in there too, but it turned out not to have arrived yet.) Due to the lack of a bank theme, I didn’t include it in the Labors of Hercules naming scheme. At the last minute, as we made up the scorecards, I decided to give the bank a name after all: The Augean Stables. For those not up on their Greek mythology, this was the labor in which Hercules had to clean out a filthy stable occupied by a herd of immortal cattle. He did so by diverting the course of a river into the stable. I said that the name was chosen because my favored game choice, The Beatles, did not make it into the bank, so it was therefore bullshit. Joseph said it was because the whole season was bullshit, though of course being Joseph he did not in fact say “bullshit.” As I explained the bank name to the league at the start of things, Joseph gestured to The Avenue’s leaking ceiling (it had been extremely rainy again) and said “there’s the river.”

The ceiling leak meant that the original Tuesday Night Smackdown random choice, Getaway, could not be used, as most of the games in that corner were turned off for safety. By the time I showed up, tired and harried, from the unfortunate Tuesday commute I have this semester, Joseph had already crossed off Getaway and then another game which had malfunctioned (I can’t remember what it was – Star Trek maybe?) and written “Fine. TMNT. It’s late.” on the score sheet.

The night’s crowd mostly consisted of the smaller group who have been attending since league restarted, with the addition of Nick. He had made a point of coming along with Lexi so that he would make the requisite four nights to qualify for finals. Unfortunately, just yesterday, Lexi realized that the two of them would be missing finals after all as they will be celebrating their anniversary. I pointed out that Joseph and I celebrated one of our anniversaries at a pinball tournament, but Lexi said they already had dinner reservations at the English Inn. Happy anniversary!

The Tuesday Night Smackdown championship was played off on TMNT between Josh, Jason, Joseph, and Mike, with the plastic medal going to Mike. The undercard (B division) included Shylia, a non-league-member making her Smackdown debut, along with Bryan, Donny, and me. When the random game draw for it was Deadpool I figured I was sunk as I had literally not played Deadpool since March 2020 if not earlier. Somehow, though, I pulled out a win. On my last ball I got two dangers for absolutely nothing, and if I had tilted at that moment it would have given the game to Donny. I know people will say “for what??” every time they get dangers on a touchy machine, but this one really was for nothing, I swear! I didn’t even nudge. At most I might have leaned against the game a little. Shylia was hit by it too, getting a tilt for a similar amount of nothing at all. “You can blame Danny for that,” said Mike of the overly tight tilt.

Tonight we will be having our playoffs for Season 14, which will determine final standings. We will also be giving out the coveted “Most Improved” and “Worst Game” awards. (I mean “worst game score of the season,” not actual “worst game,” whoever just yelled “TMNT!”)

Our second meeting of August was the penultimate qualifying night of Season 14. (Despite what Kyle Kaminski of the City Pulse thinks, penultimate means “second to last.”) It was the last official “Labor of Hercules” as the final bank would be determined by a combination of throwing in all the games that hadn’t yet been played and voting on the others. Traditionally, Hercules’s final and most difficult labor was to subdue Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld. (Fun fact: the Lernaean hydra, namesake of one of our earlier banks this season, was Cerberus’s sister!) The games in bank “Cerberus” were chosen because they either have vicious dogs or hellhound-like creatures in them, or because they related to Hades in some other way.

The biggest slowdown of the night was Junk Yard, with multiple groups playing very long games on it. A few people might still remember the first Silver Balls tournament in December 2015, which ran so long that we were in danger of not finishing before the bar closed. For the final game, I rigged the software to choose from only the two or three shortest-playing games we had in order to get things done as quickly as possible. The game that got drawn was Junk Yard, notorious at the time for its touchy slam tilt. Back then, it was considered a good game for someone to get 10 million on it. Times have certainly changed and now it is one of the reliably long-playing games. In my group, I felt sorry having to remind Biff to plunge off several extra balls as he was having a complete blowout of a game.

The disappointment of the night for at least some players was that Joseph’s group broke Stranger Things, and this after Joseph had put up around 100 million on Ball 1. We had to take it out of commission – I think the only time we had to do that with a game this season since Derik keeps everything playing so well – and play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead. Or at least some people played it. I did something while standing in front of it but I am reluctant to call it “playing.” At the end of my game I angrily declared, “I have just played the worst game in the entire history of pinball.” Mike tried to reassure me that my game was only terrible “so far” but he had missed the brutal fact that I’d just finished Ball 3. I think he just could not have imagined that someone could end a game of TMNT with 15K points. For perspective, the second worst game of the night on it was over 800K. I’m going to be very surprised if I don’t get the “Worst Score” ribbon this season. Someone else would surely have to slam tilt to make that possible.

We did not have a Tuesday Night Smackdown but we are going to be starting them again for our next league night tomorrow. The random drawing has decreed that our Smackdown game will be The Getaway. For the actual league play, we will be playing the miscellaneous bank which I have belatedly decided to call “Augean Stables.” If you want to know why I called it that, just go read up on the Labors of Hercules and you’ll probably figure it out.

August 10 was our first official return to league play since March 2020. We are continuing Season 14 which was already in progress when things got interrupted, changing our usual “long season league” into an “ultra-long season league.” Turnout was on the light side for our season re-kickoff but not too bad, all things considered. Unfortunately, the weather was hot, which combined with the new league mask requirement made for a somewhat uncomfortable time. Nevertheless, it was amazing to see people in person again, as I had not seen any league members face to face since the pandemic started.

We played bank “Apples of the Hesperides,” commemorating the time Hercules had to steal the apples of immortality from the goddesses called the Hesperides while fighting off a dragon named Ladon. It was a surprisingly quick-running night considering Game of Thrones was in the bank. My group only had to wait once for a game (and it was Game of Thrones, of course). I had a surprisingly good night considering I have barely played pinball since the pandemic. It felt like a lot of mediocre games, but sometimes consistently mediocre is all it takes.

Derik brought a ringer with him, long-time local player Allen who has not previously played in our league. I had to warn Allen that he could not qualify for finals since we were past the halfway mark for the season, but he was gracious and a good sport about it. Derik tried to petition me to change the rules but I told him rules changes have to be between seasons, not during the season. I will be asking the league if people would prefer to change the finals eligibility rule before next season.

Surprisingly absent was Danny. I had brought a box of karate medals to give him. He had given me the medals to strip off the ribbons for Tuesday Night Smackdown repurposing, but wanted the medals back when I was done. I brought them to the Zen tournament, but he forgot to take them and I had to bring them back home. Then I brought them to the league re-opener, and Danny was nowhere around. Was he trying to avoid having to take them back after all?

Tonight in an hour or so is our seventh meeting of the eight-meeting season, during which we will accompany Hercules on his quest to defeat Cerberus and enter Hades. See you soon! (Don’t forget a mask!)

March 10, 2020 was the fifth meeting of Season 14. As part of our “Labors of Hercules” themed season, we played bank “Stymphalian Birds” which was Attack from Mars, Elvira’s House of Pancakes Horrors, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and Iron Maiden.

Danny won the night, Derik took second, and Mike took third. Danny is also in the lead for the current season, with Mike 17 points behind him. On the other end of the spectrum, Joseph reports that he had one of his all time worst games of Attack from Mars, in which he did not so much as topple a single saucer. For full results, check the standings document that Joseph keeps updated for us.

The Tuesday Night Smackdown game was on The Simpsons Pinball party. Jason “the Mag” won the top award (a “medal” decorated with a shamrock) and Travis won the undercard bout.

Those of us who stuck around late got to meet meet a surprise visitor, Mike, one of the owners of Pinball Pete’s, and play some games with him. When we were introduced he made a wry remark about how we weren’t really supposed to shake hands anymore.

The night had a strange feeling to it, a sense of being moments ahead of a storm. At the time we were still expecting to have the quarterly charity tournament, March Hare Madness, on March 18. But the first cases of what everyone was still just calling “the coronavirus” had just been reported in Michigan. Before I left, I stopped in the bathroom and washed my hands much more thoroughly than normal, the way that has since become habitual – in other words, almost as well as Joseph has always washed his hands.

Season 14 will resume on August 10, but July will taken up by a couple of unofficial meetings in place of league nights. We will be meeting tonight at 7 for a non-season “just for fun” mini pingolf tournament, Silver Balls in July, and for an early Super-Ball XIV (Zen tournament) on July 24. See you all (I hope) soon.

Hello all you pinballers out in Lansing League Land. I hope you’ll forgive me for the brevity of this recap for the league night of 2/11, as I was first under the weather and then had a huge pileup of exam grading, all of which has left me short of time. Last time we played the bank Ceryneian Hind, which commemorates the labor in which Hercules (or Heracles if you’re old school) had to chase down and catch a deer sacred to Artemis. I went into the attic and dug out a pair of home-made Bambi ears that I wore to a costume party wedding reception (the theme was “The Movies”) back in the mid-2000s. I already have a deer hat (famously used as the sorting hat for league) and a pair of light-up antlers with ears lying around, but I thought I had to be a hind specifically, which is a female deer, so I couldn’t wear antlers. I later learned that a peculiar characteristic of the Ceryneian Hind in mythology is that she had antlers. Oops.

I went to both school and league despite being well into coming down with some sort of cold (which later turned quite nasty). I desperately wanted to avoid giving it to anyone, so I had planned to wipe down the flipper buttons and lockdown bar after each of my balls using some sanitizer wipes the upstairs bar had lying around. Unfortunately this backfired almost immediately. On Star Trek, it started registering switches as I wiped over the flipper button, then eventually fired the ball into play for no apparent reason. Our new player Jay rushed to take control of his ball, but unfortunately he drained quickly and the phantom switch hits had killed his ball saver. I called Joseph over for a ruling as I thought I might have to be DQ’d for playing out of turn since it may have been my actions that caused the ball to go into play. Joseph studied the rule book for a long time before coming over and saying that he believed it to be “accidental interference” rather than playing out of turn since it could not be expected that touching the flippers would launch the ball. We also could not be sure that touching the flipper was related to the switch hits because it seemed to continue after I was no longer touching the game at all. Joseph ruled simply “play on,” meaning I may yet avoid getting the “worst score” award again this season.

In any case, I was afraid to touch the game after my ball after that, so I switched to rubbing my own hands down with the sanitizer wipes after that. This turned out not to be the wisest idea either since that night I looked down at my hands and suddenly realized my knuckles had a red rash all over them and one spot was even cracked open and bleeding. Yes, I gave myself a chemical burn using surface sanitizer to disinfect my own hands. I really hope no one got the damn cold after that. I ended up getting so sick by Wednesday night that I cancelled my Thursday classes.

This league night saw the return of a long-ago familiar face, Rick of Nomad Kitchen (the bar’s old restaurant). We used to all love his fries with Nomad Sauce! Apparently Rick is going to start playing in the league. I can’t recall if he ever played in league before (in the Matt days) or just played with us casually. I know a couple of times he ran his own equivalent of Tuesday Night Smackdown before we started having those, which awarded a free burger from the kitchen as a prize.

We had a lot of other stuff going on this night including qualifying for Destrier of Death (the Black Knight tournament designed mainly to let people put authorized scores up on Stern’s leader board), the Stranger Things launch party, and the usual Tuesday Night Smackdown which was on Jurassic Park. I put my two Stranger Things scores in knowing I would not have time on the next league night, and I ended up ranting much too angrily afterward about how I never should have tried to do scores while sick (they were not good). This broke my New Year’s resolution not to get angry about pinball, which I have mostly been pretty good about, but I think being sick tends to make me more emotional and my bad behavior can be forgiven. Joseph did a new leader board-eligible score on Black Knight, though it has since been knocked totally off the board by a last minute rush of high scores in a tournament that got barely any attention for most of its run. Mike has also lost his first place standing and is in the middle of the pack.

The Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Jurassic Park and our champion was Danny. Joseph had designed the medals since I forgot to do it before work, and I think he put candy hearts on them. Donny won the B division on Guardians of the Galaxy and was well pleased to get his plastic medal since it was his first pinball hardware. I definitely remember how excited I was to win my first trophy (a Zen tournament, with Joseph) and in fact it is still in pride of place on my mantel.

Tonight we will be vying for the Girdle of Hippolyta, commemorating the time Hercules persuaded the Queen of the Amazons to give him her magic girdle (which unfortunately ended in tragedy due to a misunderstanding of his intentions by the other Amazons). We will also have Stranger Things qualifying before league and finals afterward, plus a Smackdown on Star Trek: The Next Generation. See you all soon!

I was very proud of the work I did creating banks this season. I had to balance having only a certain number of games designated “long” (based on looking at average scores from the previous season, or guessing in the case of new games) in each bank, along with trying to keep to having vaguely thematic sets. I spent hours switching around games to make them match 7 of the 12 Labors of Hercules. One of the banks with the tightest and most obvious themes was the Lernean Hydra, for which I chose games with dragons or serpents in them (including Black Knight which literally has a hydra in it). Unfortunately the bank may have been more thematic than intended. The hydra, with its regenerating heads, represents a seemingly never-ending task. It also lives in a swamp. And this league night threatened to never end, and we were all crammed into the morass of the alcove together.

I was looking at themes and lengths, not at where the games were physically located, so I accidentally made a bank that all takes place in the alcove. It was pointed out to me that I had done this last season too. Further, a game that had been designated as merely “medium” (Monster Bash, which used to play a lot tougher) had decided it would be “very long” this time, in no small part due to Mike having a game in which he got to Monsters of Rock on his first ball. We also had to contend with Danny putting up a huge, huge score on Black Knight, incentivized in part by wanting to make the leader board in Stern’s “Ransom” tournament. It took so long for the first round of games to finish that groups ended up stacked three deep waiting for Monster Bash. Everyone was also in each other’s way due to the cramped space, with people accidentally elbowing and kicking each other. We had a few new members this time (Alicia, Jay, and Donny), and I felt awful thinking they might never come back after this especially crazy night. I hope they took it in stride! I know people were trying to tell them that, no, league night doesn’t normally involve this much waiting. This bank will definitely be reconsidered next season. Keep in mind, though, that it’s getting hard to find enough “short playing” games anymore due to everyone in the league getting better and the introduction of more long-playing games into the lineup.

We had a Tuesday Night Smackdown as usual, and for a change Biff actually stuck around to play in it. Why? Because it was Batman ’66! Biff won the Smackdown medal (a Bat Signal logo on a bat-themed ribbon) and Pat got the Undercard win on Guardians of the Galaxy.

After league we continued to have qualifying for Destrier of Death, our Black Knight tournament designed mainly to let people qualify for the Stern leader board (Ransom) tournament. Mike put up an even higher score than the one Danny did during league, and as of this writing has the top spot in Stern’s tournament.

Shortly we will be reconvening to chase down the Ceryneian Hind. I think this should be a more chill league night than the last one, if only for being upstairs instead of in the alcove. We will also have qualifying for the Stranger Things launch party and Destrier of Death, a Tuesday Night Smackdown on Jurassic Park, and of course Royal Rumble (but that’s always going on and needs no supervision). See you soon!

The first league night of Season 14, and also the first of a new decade, saw two new members joining, Travis and Erik. Lexi and I had both been trying to recruit some new members on Facebook but were not ultimately successful. There’s still time yet to join, though! You only need to play four nights to qualify to compete in finals. We noticed the absence of Tim, who later let everyone know on Facebook that he will be unable to attend league this season. He’s become one of the big powers in the league so I hope he will be able to return soon.

League night started terribly late and I was very flustered when I arrived. Through most of this season I have arranged alternate activities for my evening class for when I need to attend league, but I could not do so this time because it was the first day of classes for me and I needed at minimum to go over the syllabus before dismissing class. Normally Joseph would start league for me in that situation but he was out of town on a work trip. Fortunately, Mike stepped in at the last minute and got attendance taken, groups organized, and the Smackdown running so that when I arrived things were all ready for me to just give the signal to start. That was a great relief as I was imagining there would be total chaos when I arrived. I tried to get out of class as early as possible but of course a student stopped me with questions, so I didn’t arrive at the bar until about 7:30. Despite this late start, we finished around the same time as usual, at least compared with our longer running nights.

This season we have a new set of banks, which I laboriously organized to take into account new games, changes of some games’ designation as “long” playing or not, and an attempt at a theme. Some of the banks are more thematic than others but there is at least some rationalization I can give for every game’s placement (even though I was constrained by not putting too many epic-length games in the same back). The theme is the Labors of Hercules, and this week was the Nemean Lion, probably one of the better known labors and also one of my more tightly themed banks. All the games had felines in them, sort of. The Simpsons (Scratchy), Deadpool (Sabertooth), Theatre of Magic (Tiger Saw), Kiss (Catman), and Batman ’66 (Catwoman).

Danny was in a jolly mood and began telling me an epic story about the time he and a friend got detained at the Canadian border returning to the US after a casino trip, for 16 hours. Just as he got to the climax of the story, I realized randos were walking up and about to start on the game we needed to play next, so I had to cut Danny off and rush over there. The rest of the night I kept wondering how the story ended.

The Smackdown game was Medieval Madness. Danny was the top qualifier and I sent Josh to find him. Josh came back leading Danny slowly down the stairs, as by then Danny was really in his cups and couldn’t really walk straight. I put up a pretty decent qualifying score but got smacked down in actual play, once again. Danny, on the other hand, completely ran away with the game, playing for ages while intermittently closing his eyes during slow moments in play. He got the catapult animation and I thought “Oh, no way he’ll hit that” and instead he got the 500K award easily on the first time through.

In between two of his balls, I thought this might be a chance to ask for the end of the story. I opened with, “So Danny, anyway, you really needed to pee and then you farted and it smelled bad…?” indicating the part of the story where he left off. He just stared at me. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I realized that I probably should have given him a little more context for that sentence.

Danny ended up winning the Smackdown, with the only person who came close to making a run for him being Lexi. This was Lexi’s first appearance in a Smackdown finals but it probably won’t be the last. Meanwhile, the B division played off on Ghostbusters, causing Josh to concede and let someone else play because he hates Ghostbusters so much. The winning score set by Derik was something like 12 million, which offended Jon so much that he later dragged me over and forced me to look at his 50 million score to prove that he could have easily beaten Derik.

After league I was tired, I hadn’t eaten dinner, and I wanted to get home until someone said the magic words “dollar games.” So, I hung around playing dollar games with people on Stranger Things (and for some reason Derik and Mike each made me do a shot with them). I put up 96 million for my last game, my best ever, but Mike still beat me. Too bad I didn’t designate that as one of my launch party games. I got home, looked in my purse, and realized the dollar I was going to pony up was still in there. I sent Mike a message on Facebook telling him I realized I forgot to put in my dollar and he immediately replied with a money request for $1. I laughed for about five minutes, and then laughed again when I told Joseph about it later. I did finally pay up when I saw Mike in person, saying, “I don’t want it to be said that I don’t pay my gambling debts.”

Our next league night is tonight, of course, and this time I should be there by about 6:30. Joseph will be present from around 5 on to take scores on our various running tournaments including Destrier of Death, Stranger Things Launch Party, and our Smackdown game, Batman ’66. See you soon!