Tag: season 7

Games played: Getaway, Metallica, Medieval Madness, Iron Man, Theater of Magic.

The league night of August 9th was the third of the season, but only the second I’d been able to attend, so I kept getting mixed up about whether it was the second or third night and having to be straightened out on that.  It was a disorienting kind of night for me.  I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 17 years now, and just can’t get used to the sudden vanishing of most of the 2000 block of Michigan Avenue (across from our league venue). The demolition of the block happened between the second and third league meeting, so this was the first time many league members got to see the empty hole in the landscape.  I used to buy comics in that building, sometimes; I used to eat dinner with my parents on special occasions in that building; more often, I used to stand in front of that building waiting for a bus to take me to campus for grad school.  I know it (knew it) like I know my house.  And now it’s gone, just to remind me that I am old and grad school was a long time ago.

But I digress.  Pinball, right?

Some pinball was, most certainly, played.  Matt had to come late again due to work and had me and Mike organize the start of things.  (That will be happening at tonight’s league meeting, too, and seems to be the new normal.)   The night began with Jason’s group being put on Metallica.  Jason, who said he had not played Metallica before, played a blockbuster game, something in the high 200 millions if I remember correctly.  Joseph was in Jason’s group too, and had his best ever game on Metallica, which would have been more impressive had it not been something like a third of Jason’s score.  Between the two of them, their game lasted so long that my group ended up having to skip past them and come back later.

Speaking of tearing up games, Chris ended up battling for the kingdom in his game of Medieval Madness, though unsuccessfully.  I’m sure he didn’t go home crying over his score, in any case.

For some reason the random number generator decided we should play Getaway too.  This seems to be the season of Getaway.  At least we won’t be playing it again tonight – probably.

We were supposed to play Addams Family, but apparently something catastrophically broke on it while the first group was playing (I don’t recall what).  I wanted to declare that we’d play T3 instead, since it has never been played in league since being installed, but the right ramp was registering only about 50% of the time.  I thought it was still “good enough” by league standards, but Mike insisted he didn’t want the league to play something that was known to be defective.  I agreed to do a random draw between three games Mike thought were working fine.  One of them was Theater of Magic.  I had in the back of my mind that something was wrong with ToM but couldn’t remember what, and when I mentioned that, no one else seemed to remember anything wrong with it.  So we did the random drawing and Theater of Magic ended up being selected.

When my group got upstairs to play it, it all came back to me.  The left flipper was permanently slightly raised, meaning that the two flippers were not even close to even and it was nearly impossible to shoot anything on the right side of the playfield.  More importantly for me (and many others), it made shooting the center ramp extremely difficult.  I ended up bombing out with a score of under 100 million.  When I went back downstairs to complain, Adam said he didn’t see what my problem was, since he and Chris both scored over a billion.  I was dumbfounded until I remembered that the pros just shoot the left loop over and over.  In response I can only attempt to claim the moral high ground in that I was trying to play the game as intended.  That said, we are scheduled to play ToM again tonight and I may not be quite so wedded to “how it was intended” this time.

After this grueling night of long-playing and cockeyed games, we all agreed that we were in no shape to go to Theio’s, and we all went straight home to bed.  If you believe that, I have a vacant lot on Michigan Avenue to sell you.  Actually, several of the Theio’s regulars went over there as usual.  If you haven’t been coming with us on our Theio’s forays, you should!  Just ask Mike or me after league if you’d like to tag along, because we just about always go.

See you all tonight at 7, I hope!  Oh right, this is the part where I’m supposed to link to the photo gallery (though I don’t actually have any additional photos this time) and the results for the night.

Games played: Junk Yard, Getaway, The Addams Family, Tales of the Arabian Nights, The Walking Dead.

July 26 was the second night of Season 7, but the first night for me and Joseph.  We had missed the first night due to a family vacation, and did makeup games when we got back. For me, Season 7 got off to an unusual start, as Matt asked me to run league night while he was on vacation himself.  It was my first time running the league by myself!  I would need to be very organized and do everything just right to impress all my friends.

Well – not all my friends.  I knew that a lot of people would be missing league night because they would be traveling to Pittsburgh the next day for Pinburgh, and didn’t want to have too much pinball fun.  Joseph and I would be off to Pinburgh too, but we understand that others may not be as tour ready as we are.  So several people, we already knew, would not be coming.  We were expecting a light crowd.  We were not expecting only four people, but that’s how many people were there at 7 p.m.  I began wondering if this would be the first ever night with only one group.

I had arrived early to start checking whether the games Matt had selected would be playable.  We had to scratch a series of games.  T3 wasn’t registering the right ramp.  The newly-arrived Demo Man (which I still have not played) played fine for about 30 seconds until a ball ended up in the Retina Scan saucer and would not kick out.  Indiana Jones was resetting almost every game.  Monster Bash’s scoop was still kicking out straight down the middle.  I ended up using a random number generator to fill out the card with games that seemed to be working well enough.  One of the games it selected was Junk Yard.  I felt an ominous shiver, but shrugged it off.  At Matt’s direction, we would be playing five games regardless of how many people showed up.

We had a couple of new members (new to me at least), Tim and Steve.  (No, a different Steve from the Steve who played last season.)  Steve was in my group, and he let me know that he discovered the league by seeing the flyers at Pinball Pete’s.  That’s how Joseph and I first learned about the league too, except in our case, we saw the flyers at Pete’s in Ann Arbor, which is en entirely sensible way of learning about something that happens a couple of blocks from my house in Lansing.

I decided to stall and see if anyone else showed up, and finally at about 7:15 four more people rolled in more or less at the same time, so we divided into two groups.  League went by very fast because I made sure the groups started a couple of machines apart, and so there was never any waiting for machines.  At one point the other group sent an emissary to ask me for a ruling.  Someone had, of course, slam tilted Junk Yard.  (I heard later that it was Tim.)  I ruled that the perpetrator would receive zero and everyone else would get however many more balls were affected, as compensation.  (I was reminded later that Matt usually allows people the choice of compensation balls or restarting the entire game.  I had forgotten this, and having to make a decision in the moment, I defaulted to the rules that I use for my Avenue tournaments.)

Then my group got to Junk Yard.  Russell was having an awful game.  The machine just was not cutting him any breaks.  His third ball drained (he was player 1 or 2, I forget which) and he grabbed hold of the machine and went to rage-tilt.  Imagine this next part in slow motion for best effect.  I lunged forward yelling “Russell, don’t…!” but it was too late.  The screen blanked and the game reset.  Russell took a moment to register what happened, while I glumly informed him that he slam tilted.  The rest of us got compensation balls, but in Junk Yard that’s pretty painful, since the bonus is very cumulative.  Joseph had been having an outstanding game by the end of Ball 2 and while he wasn’t sorry with his overall score, he wasn’t able to do much with his compensation ball.

When people finished, things dried up pretty quickly and we went home to pack for Pinburgh.  It really didn’t feel like a normal league night, with so many regulars missing and so few people attending in general.  The results aren’t available yet, between the delay in my getting the notebooks to Matt (when I got back from Pinburgh he left on another trip before I could give him the results, so he just got them last night) and the fact that so many people still need to do makeups.  There are a few more photos in the gallery.

Here’s hoping that we see a great turnout for tonight’s league!  Just don’t expect to play Demolition Man.  Last night it stole four out of five quarters Joseph and I tried feeding it, so we shut it off in disgust.