Continuing on ``things that happened today'', or at least this week. Tuesday was the Lansing pinball league where, not bragging, I had an awesome night, playing way above average. Lansing league we have everyone play the same set of games, with your standings based on how many people whose score you beat on that game. But owing to the size of the league we have to split the play between two banks of games each week, playing one set and then the other. So I could use the time today at the Lightning Flippers women's tournament that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger also runs to try the games I'm scheduled to play next time and get some practice in.
Also, making some assumptions about sampling bias, I can figure out whether I'm likely to have a good league night next time. Because you get ranked on your game versus everyone else's, you can know, basically, you're doing well if you get above the median score on a game. A couple of them I'd be surprised if I didn't beat the median: 21 million points on Elvira's House of Horrors is a very attainable score, at least for me, and a billion points on Attack From Mars is about what I expect even if I'm not playing well. (Attack From Mars is the poster child for ``pinflation'', the 90s practice of scores getting extremely large compared to the gameplay done. Modern games can score in the billions now but you have to be very good.) Of course there are always unhappy surprises: bunnyhugger, who also expects at least a billion on Attack From Mars every game, didn't get that when she played on Tuesday.
So I played the full set and there were a couple non-surprises. Attack From Mars I can beat a billion points on. Elvira's House of Horrors I played three games on and 21 million was the lowest score. Rush I can pretty consistently beat the 51 million median, although this time I failed to in one of the three games I played. Something about it is scoring rougher and I wonder if they did a code update that messed with the scoring. Game Of Thrones, a game that the skilled players can put up two billion points on and that I think I've never broken a half-billion, the median was 25 million points, which shows how brutally low-scoring the game can be. I put up three games at over a hundred million points each, to my surprise, but also leaving me as winning a replay on every game played which is the sort of thing that leaves you feeling really good.
The one that gets me is The Munsters. This is a game with a pretty good use of a fun theme, the sort of thing with enough quick cornball jokes to go really well as a pinball machine. But the table is brutal, just, full of shots that are instant death. Made worse because on factory settings there's no ball save when you start a game. Pretty near every game made the last thirty years has given you a grace period at the start when if you lose the ball you're given it right back, because it royally sucks to plunge, hit one bumper --- or none at all --- and lose the ball. For some reason Stern wanted to try something different this table and while we've got ball save turned on, that the game wants you not to have a ball save tells you something of how hostile it is.
And somehow the median on this game was just under 39 million points. This is a game that even experienced players routinely struggle to break ten million points on (when there's a ball save; five million without). Last season the median for all players was six and a half million. And, I mean, on Game Of Thrones --- where you can expect the power players to put up one or two billion points --- the median was a paltry 25 million.
What the heck were people doing that three of the nine people who played it put up scores above a hundred million? That four of them put up scores above 39 million? bunnyhugger put up a relatively anemic 45 million, which is still so far above what anyone has any right to expect it's amazing. I can't even say it just happened that all the league's power players happened to be in the half that played it his week, since two of them (FAE and MWS) put up much more normal scores of 28 million and 38 million respectively.
I know in principle what's going on here. Besides not losing the ball, the players, including the ones who didn't break a hundred million, had to have been making a lot of shots on the playfield multiplier, which if you can get it going will boost scores up to six times their normal value. And so I gave the game a try focusing on getting the playfield multiplier going. In five games I managed to get as high as 23 million, and mostly settle in the 10-to-20 million zone. I don't know what's going on with The Munsters there.
So I'm feeling confident on four of the five games. I just have to hope the half that plays next league night brings the median way down.
bunnyhugger won the tournament, as she usually does here, although it was a tougher contest than usual.
Continuing now on events of the week between Christmas 2023 and New Year's, as seen from Crossroads Village, at night:
From the opera house window --- second floor, as you enter and exit from the elevated back --- we get this frost-obscured view out to the village, including the Crystalline Entity in the middle of the town square.
Similar view but looking a little farther south, in the loose direction of the carousel and Ferris wheel.
Now we're downstairs and can see the very many puddles and great quantity of mud that make the photos look so vibrant.
Heading towards the south here. This path leads to a flour mill and also to the cafeteria where I think we one time ever stopped in for coffee and doughnuts and that I don't know has ever been open since.
Animated deer light fixtures, here showing them in both configurations.
More of the lights and muddy street and wet wooden sidewalk on the way to the carousel.
Trivia: In 1769 Jean Ogée published a travellers' guide to Brittany. Its subtitle promised the work was ``including all the remarkable Objects that occur Half a League to the Right and Left of the Road''. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography Graham Robb. Robb describes the distance as a little over a mile, which seems to be consistent with at least some of the old French units of measurement rather than the one-and-a-half miles you'd expect from the contemporary conventional league-is-three-miles thing.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 44: Truth Is Stranger, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. Wait, King Blozo? The heck?
