Tag: recap

October 13 was the seventh meeting of eight for the season, leaving players with little time left to improve their seeding for the final playoffs.  We were supposed to play Getaway, but Chris managed to break it (or, perhaps I should say, failed to talk it out of breaking) during a practice game, so Indiana Jones got moved into the rotation in its place.  Then Todd managed to get a ball wedged irretrievably in Fish Tales.  An attempt was made to turn Fish Tales completely on its side to get the ball loose, but Avenue staff put the kibosh on this endeavor.  So it was out with FT and in with Monster Bash, joining Tales of the Arabian Nights and Lord of the Rings for the night’s lineup.

This was a night of homecomings, as Greg, Chris, and Todd all returned after absences.  On the other hand, Alex and Sarah were both absent as the previous day was Sarah’s 21st birthday and they apparently needed some recovery time.  Alex has missed (and made up) so many meetings this season (partly due to organizing tournaments elsewhere) that it led Jake to tell him, “You should try joining the league.  It’s fun.”

The league also had a new player: Ally’s friend Summer.  Summer had previously been a spectator and naturally anyone who watches the fun we have is going to want to join for real.  She played in my group and I did my best to share my strategy tips with her.  (“Shoot the castle!”)

Aaron’s nickname for Joseph is “The Zen Master” due to Joseph’s typically stoic attitude toward pinball, but he risked losing that reputation this time.  While my group played Fish Tales, I looked over just in time to see Joseph react to an unfair scoop shot in Monster Bash by running down the row of unoccupied machines and hitting all the lockdown bars like conga drums.  Unfortunately, Monster Bash’s fondness for straight-down-the-middle kickouts has only risen since then and I suspect it may end up out of the rotation until that improves.

Lord of the Rings, according to reports, refused to let Todd destroy the ring.  I heard that he made several shots right through it without it registering, so I think that switch might be bad.  This wouldn’t be so bad — destroying the ring isn’t even worth that much — except that the mode can’t be timed out, so the only option at that point is to drain.

I had a night consisting of three bad games and one good one (on TotAN).  As a result I am surely out of the running for playing in A division once again this season and that ambition will have to resume next season.  Well, this way I can avoid peaking too soon.

League results aren’t in yet, presumably due to makeups still being played.  (UPDATE: the results are now in, minus makeup games from Alex and Sarah.)  I didn’t take quite as many photos as usual, but there are a few more in the gallery.  Tomorrow is the last day of the regular season, and after that the total points for each player will be used to seed people for the final tournament.  Tomorrow is also the league costume night, so wear something crazy that you don’t mind playing pinball in!

September 8th was the fifth meeting of the fifth season of the League, and was the first meeting Chris has missed since he joined during Season 1.  In response to this historic non-event, some mysterious prankster posted a Chris-themed motivational poster in the downstairs alcove.  “We can’t all be Chris Tabaka,” reads the poster, “but if you can be Chris Tabaka, then by all means, be Chris Tabaka.”  The poster was already present when everyone showed up to start practicing, and the accusations soon started to fly.  Several people seemed to think I had done it (I didn’t, and didn’t know who did, though I did take the photo used in it).  Sarah floated the idea that Chris had done it himself, since he had the opportunity to put it up when he pre-played his “makeup” games the previous evening.  Chris, via texts, vociferously denied it, and most people agreed that self-aggrandizement to that degree wasn’t his style.  Since everyone accepted Matt’s contention that it was much too nice to be his handiwork, popular suspicion moved to Mike S. and stayed there for quite some time.  Mike, for his part, insisted that he would not be able to keep something like that a secret for long.  I admitted he had a point, since during the infamous Arcade League disappearing-FunHouse stunt of 2014 he wasn’t even able to go an entire night before confessing.

Chris was the most notable absence of the week; the most notable presence was Allyson, AKA Ally, a newcomer to the league.  She was put into a group with me, James, and Sarah, so I had an opportunity to get to know her a bit.  She told me that her boyfriend had gotten her interested in pinball and that the two of them had both just been starting to get involved in competitive play.  Her boyfriend didn’t come to the league meeting, but I heard from Mike S. that he played in the recent Pinball Pete’s tournament in Ann Arbor and did extremely well, so we’ll have to hope he stays away joins the league!  I was on my best behavior and definitely didn’t do any rage tilting this time so I hope Ally had fun and will keep coming.

I confess I didn’t have much reason to rage tilt this time as it was probably the best league night I’ve ever had.  I started Monster Bash during my game of… well, you know.  I think that’s only the second time I’ve ever done it at all, so having it happen to me during a league game means that the pinball gods Matt often speaks of were smiling on me.  I got so over-excited that I jumped up and down and did the Pete Townshend windmill strum during the starting animation.  Then I managed to get 4.5 million on The Simpsons Pinball Party thanks to a frankly lucky break starting Itchy & Scratchy.  Believe it or not, Matt said that my score was something like the second highest in the league; Aaron almost doubled it, but I saw a lot of scores in the one millions.  That really tells you how ludicrously brutal The Avenue’s Simpsons is.  Sarah had extremely unfair bad luck as two of her three balls hit the center post upon launch and then drained immediately, resulting in a 10K score on each.  There should be at least a brief ball saver on that game to stop the skill shot from being instantly fatal.

Evan returned for his second league night as I thought he might, despite saying he was just going to drop by once. Once you go Lansing, you don’t go… uh, dancing? Nevermind. The point is, our league has a charm all its own and has a way of bringing people back.

After league, several of us went over to Theio’s for the traditional league night breakfast-dinner (brinner?) and then Mike, Joseph, and I went back to the Avenue to play a round of the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill.  Over the summer, we had been in the habit of arriving early on league nights to play, but as of this meeting I could no longer do that.  Sadly, class has started up again for me, which prevents me from getting to league meetings more than a few minutes early.  So we hung around until the Avenue closed playing Betrayal interspersed with pinball.

Chris had a great week (I guess without our hijinks to distract him during his makeup games) and Alex had a not-so-great one, resulting in Chris closing some of the gap between his second place and Alex’s first, but he still has a ways to go.  As for me (hey, offer to write a guest update and you can talk about yourself too), I managed to pull 1 point ahead of my frequent league rival Jake (at 9th and 10th) but am still outside the magic number 8 that will get to play in A division.

For more detail, check the full results for this week.  I didn’t take so many photos this time (not ones that came out, anyway; my clearest shots were of the bumper pool table), but there are a few more in the gallery for your viewing pleasure.

The league night of 8/25 was the fourth meeting of Season 5, putting us halfway through the season.  League Night #4 also had the most players of any meeting yet this season (and, I think, any meeting for quite a while), 19, though some of those people were absent from the actual meeting and did makeup games.  That brings us to 21 total players on the roster this season.  The games of the week were Lord of the Rings, Iron Man, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Junk Yard.  Fortunately, no one slam tilted Junk Yard during league play this time, though I believe Mike S. did it during a practice game and then somehow acted surprised.

Some recent rearranging in The Avenue has resulted in the bumper pool table, formerly located on the mezzanine, being moved into the downstairs pinball alcove.  Conversations around the bumper pool table usually go something like this: “What’s that?” “It’s called bumper pool.” “Oh.  How do you play it?”  “I have no idea.”  This time, however, Jimmy offered to explain how to play, and started setting up a game to demonstrate.  This was quickly quashed by Matt cracking the whip and telling all of us to get to our league games already.  (The next time we came to The Avenue, Joseph printed out some instructions he got from the Internet and left them sitting on the bumper pool table.  I hope that helped someone.)

Mike G. made a surprise reappearance.  Despite being one of the original members of the League and the source of a previous tagline of this blog (“The same thing as in every game: shoot the farthest target and every ramp three times,” the all-purpose strategy advice he once gave me), Mike had not made it to a league meeting in quite some time due to his work schedule, and it was great to see him again.  For some reason he seems to have decided not to play any official league games.  I think he may have decided he’d started drinking too early, but that doesn’t make sense.  After all, it never stopped Aaron.

The other surprise appearance of the night was Evan, whom I know from The Arcade League in Brighton and the tournament he ran at Pinball Pete’s in Ann Arbor.  This was his first visit to the Lansing Pinball League; he said he was just dropping in for the night.  I hope he’ll be open to coming back sometime.

The results for the night included a surprising three-way tie between Chris, Greg, and Mike S., for ninth place.  Speaking of Chris, at the halfway mark of the season he is in fourth place after Alex, Mike S., and Joseph.  Longtime members of the league may recall the days when Chris was an unstoppable force, nearly always taking an early runaway lead and staying at the top all season.  Those days are certainly over as the reigning champ now has serious competition, both from newer members of the league and longtime members who have leveled up their games.  It’s certainly going to be exciting to see how the rest of the season plays out.  Since we now (as of last season) settle the final rankings with a tournament, the biggest battle in the second half of the season is really going to be who will make the cutoff for A division.  If the same rules used last season apply, the top eight players will play in A and everyone else will play in B.  Right now, Matt is ranked unusually low at eighth place, but has a healthy lead (17 points) over Jake in ninth.

After league play finished, Jake, Sam, Mike S., Joseph, and I had our after-party at Theio’s.  It had been quite some time since our last visit, since at the two previous meetings folks had gone once each to the two Chinese restaurants on the block.  If the Theio’s staff were offended by our infidelity, they didn’t show it.  After we ate I tried unsuccessfully to convince people to come back to The Avenue for more pinball.  I just wasn’t ready to give up my last league night before the start of school.  Now that school has begun, I will arrive later (no more pre-league games of Betrayal at House on the Hill with Mike S. and Joseph) and leave tireder.  Alas.

The next meeting is coming up very soon (Tuesday).  In the meantime, you can have a look at the results from meeting #4 and some more photos.

I was not present for the league meeting of August 11.  Instead, I was just wrapping up an amusement park tour of New England, with visits to six parks in Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.  At the end of the trip we drove to New Jersey in order to visit a couple of our old familiar haunts before I flew home and Joseph stayed behind for another week to call in at his workplace in Trenton (he has worked from home since moving to Michigan).  So on the very evening league night was happening back home in Lansing, we were at the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, New Jersey.  We even played make-believe league games on all but one of the night’s chosen games.  (We could not do a dry run on The Walking Dead, as the Silverball Museum doesn’t have that one.  In fact, they have only two Stern games: The Simpsons Pinball Party and The Sopranos.)

So all of that is just an explanation for the lack of a League Night Update for meeting #3.  I wasn’t there, and probably shouldn’t do another attempt at writing a recap of a meeting I didn’t attend.  It was apparently a rather small crowd.  I know that at least Alex, Sarah, Aaron, Joseph, and I were all missing.  (Joseph and I did makeup games after Joseph got home.)  And the standings show a shakeup in the upper echelon.  Chris, though the week’s highest point earner, is still wounded from his slam tilt of Junk Yard during the league season opener, and Alex was set back by the missed week.  As a result, Mike S. is number one in the overall standings for the first time ever, with a 13 point lead over Chris.  Joseph is currently third, trailing Chris by 10 points.  The season isn’t half over yet (though it will be by the end of the night), so there is still a lot of possibility for further position swapping at the top.

The selected games for the second meeting of Season 5 were Fish Tales (new at the Avenue), World Cup Soccer, Medieval Madness, and Getaway.  Chris was so excited about the prospect of playing Fish Tales’ video mode that he kept saying “I want to shoot waterskiers!” in, for some reason, a Marvin the Martian voice.  I asked him, “Why are you Marvin the Martian?” and he replied, in the same voice, “I don’t know.”  If he doesn’t know I certainly don’t.  It will have to remain one of the mysteries of League Night #2, alongside why I’ve forgotten how to shoot the castle and whether anyone has ever successfully used the Magna-Save in World Cup Soccer.  (Joseph did in fact try to use it, which is more than I have ever done.  Aaron once again asserted that he only ever uses it ironically.)

Greg was absent this week, due to having moved from the area.  Word on the street is that he will be coming to league meetings irregularly from here on out.  I ended up running into him when he made up his league games the following week.  (No, not literally, even if sabotaging his scores would have helped my awful performance.  I swear, I wasn’t even tempted.)  Mark, on the other hand, made a reappearance after missing the season opener.

After my rage-tilting during last League Night, I had pledged to show better sportsmanship henceforth.  It took exactly one ball of Getaway to break that resolution.  My group had begun with Getaway.  I stepped up as Player 3 to play my first ball, and had an amazing ball by my standards, including a multiball jackpot and several consecutive upper loops.  I thought I was on top of the world.  When I drained I turned to my group, about to remark on my good fortune… to be told, “You realize you just played the third ball of a single player game, right?”  Apparently, the first player accidentally started a single game, and no one (including the second player, and me) noticed until I was midway through my ball, at which time everyone was afraid to interrupt me to break the news.  I was so crushed by this revelation that I shouted “What?” and then turned around and began shaking Getaway.  Marrying Joseph certainly did not grant me any share of his stoicism, to my regret.

The last game of the night for my group was Medieval Madness.  We had to wait a while for the prior group to finish.  Eventually they were down to their last ball and the final player, Jake, was nowhere to be found.  Someone looked around for him and eventually found him hanging around out back with a crowd of folks whose games had finished.  It turns out he had pulled a Mike S., thinking his game was over when he actually had a ball left.

Chris had a strong first place finish this week, despite being cheated out of a ball of Fish Tales by a mechanical failure, but he still has a long way to go to make up the ground lost by slam tilting Junk Yard during the first meeting.  Aaron and Mike S. tied for second, with Mark at fourth and Alex and Joseph tying for fifth.  In the overall season standings, Alex is still on top, but with Mike S. only four points behind.  Joseph has narrowly pulled into third, one point ahead of Sarah at fourth.  The reigning league champion, Chris, has his work cut out for him at seventh.

Instead of the traditional Theio’s visit, Jake and Mike S. wanted to go to the Chinese restaurant next door to the Avenue, so that’s where they ended the night, alongside Joseph, Sam, and me.  There was some concern expressed that the Theio’s staff might have hurt feelings over our absence, but somehow I suspect they weathered any disappointment with grace.

The complete results from the meeting are up, as are some more photos.  Mark your calendars: due to the new semi-monthly format, the next league meeting isn’t until August 11.

For the sixth meeting of Season 4, we were slated to play Austin Powers, Getaway, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings, with Attack from Mars as the contingency game for a turnout over 16.  I knew this was almost certainly not going to happen because Austin Powers had still been unplayable when I visited the Avenue the night before.  For weeks now, a ball has been stuck in the bonus lanes due to a bit of debris lodged there.  All it would take to fix would be for someone to open the glass and clear the lane, so I can’t understand why it hadn’t been fixed yet (and still hasn’t, as of Friday night).  Meanwhile, Addams Family was back, but could not be played either due to intermittently failing to load balls even after a ball search.  Since exactly 16 people showed up (a close enough call that people kept re-counting), we only needed to play four games, so Attack from Mars ended up replacing Austin Powers.  No one wept.

I got put into a group with Joseph, Matt P., and Greg, which brought back memories of Season 1, when we were all regulars in a smaller league.  I hadn’t been grouped with Joseph in quite some time.  The highlight of our group’s play for the night was Matt destroying the Ring, which managed to overshadow my own game of Lord of the Rings which, while not up to wizard standards, was very good by my own lights.  I need to learn not to talk while I play, though.  I almost always lose concentration, followed by my ball.  At one point I had a Gollum multiball going and was tearing things up, then decided it would be funny to reply to one of Gollum’s utterances with “Shut up, Gollum, I’m trying to concentrate!”  I was well aware of the irony when my blathering distracted me just enough to cause a double drain.

Our group’s night ended with an unfortunate incident on Getaway wherein we had to replay the game due to a slam tilt.  This one was decreed to be no one’s fault; the ball got stuck in the lock during Greg’s game, and the slam tilt happened when Matt tried to dislodge it for him.  We replayed without incident, but a little while later, another bit of bad luck happened as Indiana Jones decided to break at the end of Chris’s game.  The idol rotor lock decided it wanted to keep all the balls for itself and could not be coaxed to spit any out.  The game has, unfortunately, been broken ever since, which has stopped James from being able to do a makeup for his missed league game.

Earlier in the night, Jake had told me that he would have to bow out of Theio’s this time, as he and Sam had tickets for a punk show at Mac’s Bar.  Eventually he talked Mike S. into going too.  By the time my league games were over, the two of them were already long gone.  Joseph and I stuck around playing games with Greg until I got a call from Mike.  The show was over and he and Jake were at Theio’s; did we want to meet them there?  We finished up a game of Theatre of Magic, Greg bowed out, and Joseph and I headed to Theio’s.  When we arrived, we found the trio looking rather worse for wear.  Jake informed me that he could barely hear anything I was saying over the ringing in his ears.  Mike’s face was bright red and he was acting a bit addled.  Sam was mostly quiet and seemed worn out, though seemed the best off of the bunch, perhaps indicating he went a bit less crazy at the show.  Evidently it was rather exciting.  According to Jake, Mike had managed to get up front and stay there through the entire show, hanging onto a lighting rig or something to keep himself from being swept back by the crowd.  Mike showed off some spectacular bruises from the adventure, in between eagerly shoveling Eggs Louie (which he kept calling an “omelet” even as Jake insisted that it was certainly not an omelet) into his face.

Eventually, after quite a bit of lingering over midnight brunch, we all went our separate ways, and that was the end of another fun-filled league night.  Although Matt P. had an impressive first place finish two weeks in a row, Chris did well enough to regain his top spot in the season rankings and knock Alex down to second.  As always, you can see the complete results here (pending James’s makeup game on Indiana Jones) and I have a few more photos up in the gallery too.  Though I usually end by saying “see you next time,” I’m very sorry to say I can’t do that this time.  Joseph and I will be missing Tuesday’s meeting to go see Walk the Moon in Detroit – my first absence since joining the league.  So I’ll end with this instead.  Hey Walk the Moon: you had better play a damn good show, because I am missing pinball for you.  I expect to hear “Anna Sun” at least three times.

March 10th was the fifth meeting of Season 4, and it seemed as though a lot of people were feeling a bit off their games and disappointed with their own performance.  The absence once again of our beloved leader Matt P. (on a trip to visit family during Spring Break) as well as other regulars including the everpresent Mike S. (gone early to PAPA) may have contributed to an atmosphere that was rather subdued.  Perhaps PAPA nerves were shadowing others; Alex and Chris were in attendance but getting ready to leave for PAPA in a few days.  We did have a couple of new players (Corey and Tim) to help fill in the gaps and bring some energy to things.

The show must go on, however, and Aaron reprised his duties as Matt’s second, getting things organized and underway.  Instead of the famous Sorting Hat or the newer computerized method of drawing groups for the night, Aaron hit on the clever idea of having everyone draw playing cards, and afterward announcing which cards went with which machine.  Aaron once again sent people to move counterclockwise through the games, but this was quickly sent awry by at least one group thinking we were to move clockwise; for the rest of the night people ended up jumping on whatever table was free at the moment.

We had been scheduled to play Monster Bash, Junk Yard, The Simpsons Pinball Party, and Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Prior to the start of play, I decided to practice starting Mosh Pit Multiball on Monster Bash and see how often I was successful.  This was prompted by having it as a goal at a pingolf tourney, and realizing that it wasn’t as hard as I’d thought, especially if I focused all my efforts on it.  It turned out that in several practice games at the Avenue prior to league play, I only failed to start it once, so I resolved to try that as a new strategy.  Later I saw Chris trying out Monster Bash too and I told him, “I have a new strategy for this one: shoot up the middle.”  He said, “Thanks, Heather, I can always rely on you.”  If his voice had been any more laden with sarcasm, the words would have fallen and crashed through the glass.

During his practice game, Chris determined that the scoop was shooting down the middle all too often.  He convinced Aaron that Monster Bash should be removed from the rotation.  I was none too pleased by this and began, well, wailing might overstate it.  I’d spent all my warmup time practicing that Mosh Pit Multiball!  Alas, but Aaron’s word was law for the night and so the switch was made, Monster Bash for Attack from Mars.

I ended up in a group with Sam and Chris, starting out with Tales of the Arabian Nights.  Chris urged us to hurry so we could get our game started while there was still light in the pinball alcove.  This was definitely sage advice, since TotAN is the worst game to play when the room is dark.  It makes you want to get out the glow sticks, as Matt P. once said.  I had a really good ball one in which I got quite a lot of lamp spinning going and had a multiball with two jackpots, to the tune of eight-odd million.  Sadly my next two balls only totaled about one million points between them and that was almost all my held bonus.  Still, I started out the night with a bit of confidence, which was quickly dampened by a mediocre-to-bad Attack from Mars.

While we were playing Attack from Mars, a new player, Tim, arrived.  He had come late to the league meeting but had been added to my group.  While Chris and Sam played, I tried to show Tim the basics of pinball with a credit someone had left on The Walking Dead.  Tim had just about never touched a pinball machine before and didn’t know the first things to do.  Situations like that really trigger my teacher reflexes and I probably start over-helping sometimes.  I just love giving people the guidance Joseph gave me when I was new, that helped me gradually understand the basic structure of pinball.  Tim joined us when we got to The Simpsons Painful Party and didn’t do much worse than anyone else.

My group’s last game of the night was Junk Yard.  I hadn’t played my first ball yet when suddenly I looked back from a conversation I was having with Joseph and saw that the game appeared to have reset.  I asked what happened and was told Chris slam tilted it.  The league rule for slam tilting is that the culprit takes 0 and everyone else replays the round.  Chris walked off, and the remaining players along with a few bystanders discussed the unfairness of it.

I didn’t see it happen but I was told that he had certainly earned a tilt but it really should not have been a slam tilt.  Jake suggested we should just pretend it didn’t happen and I said I would be fine with that, but Chris reappeared with quarters he had presumably acquired from Aaron, dropped them into my hand, and said, “Have fun.”   (UPDATE: Chris tells me that they were actually his own quarters, acquired from the change machine.)  He then went upstairs to practice The Walking Dead (which he would be playing at PAPA that weekend).   Presumably Chris will have to stop teasing Mike for slam tilting Junk Yard on a past league night (resulting in a new nickname for Mike, “King Kong”).  Chris later said that although Junk Yard’s slam tilt is too sensitive, he also knows better and had earned his penalty.  Now that is what my father would call “the sportsman’s way.”¹

After league play was over, I dithered about whether I would go to the “after party” (the newly traditional visit to Theio’s) as I still wanted to play.  It was relatively early, so Jake suggested we could go eat and still come back to play more.  He had me at “play more pinball.”  It was only a small group that assembled at Theio’s, perhaps our smallest yet.  Jake, Sam, Mike, Greg, Joseph, and I made for a relatively sedate crowd this time.  Afterward we returned to the Avenue and played a bit more before things broke up for the night.

That didn’t actually end League Night, though.  Matt P. and Mike S. elected to play makeup games, and so they came back to the Avenue the following Tuesday.  So did Aaron, Greg, Joseph, and I, though our own games were just for fun, as much as I would have liked to substitute my even better game of TotAN (11 million and a replay!).  Joseph and I played with Mike, and Aaron and Greg played with Matt.  Mike had some good games, but apparently Matt did even better.  We were on different floors from him for most of it so I didn’t see what he did, but whatever it was, it earned him the top score for this league meeting.  As Matt is frequently plagued by below-average games during league play, perhaps he’s hit on a new method: play his games when no one is looking.

Before he headed back home, Mike suggested we should play The Lord of the Rings, since the high score table had apparently been reset.  During our game, I finished ball two somewhere in the 30 millions, and Mike remarked that I must be getting close to the high score table.  Then I started to sweat.  I started Return of the King multiball at the start of ball three, but hit only two jackpots.  Then Destroy the Ring was lit.  I have only gotten to the Destroy the Ring mode once (and didn’t last long in it).  I knew that if I started it, I would be on track to get on the high score table.  I shot at the ring… and I missed.  Game over.  The bonus counted up and I had fallen 1.5 million short of the 40 million needed for the #4 high score, and about half a million short of hitting a personal best.  I was crushed… but it was getting late and glory would have to wait for another night.  We said farewell to Mike (who was leaving) and the others (who were still playing) and headed home, concluding Bonus League Night.

That’s it for my epic League Night Update, just in time for a new league night in two days.  I would be remiss to conclude, however, without commenting on an unprecedented event in league history.  To the best of my knowledge and recollection, this is the first time in the history of the Lansing Pinball League that Chris has not been at the #1 position in the current rankings.  Thanks in large part to his “slam tap,” Chris has relinquished his place to Alex, at least for now.

As always, I have some more photos to share, as well as the current results and standings.  See you soon.

¹Like most of the sayings my father used all the time when I was a kid, this one comes from a movie: The Wanderers.