So to Silver Balls, filling up our Thursday night as expected. What did I win? Besides a night of short sleep going into Friday? Well, a T-shirt from the pinball operator. They'd donated some stuff to be door prizes, and my number came up once again for one of their T-shirts. This time I got the bright reflective yellowish-green, good for walking at night, and I think this might complete my set of the colors. Next time I'll have to snag a hoodie. Meanwhile other people won such door prizes as a hoodie, and a translite (the picture on the upright vertical part of the pinball machine). I forget who won the big charity raffle, the one with tickets to draw. Possibly I never knew because I was on a couple groups that ran way way way waaaaaay too long and I'm embarrassed to admit I was part of the problem.
So, people were drawn up in groups on randomly chosen games, and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger left all the games in the venue in play until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as is its wont, broke down, one game in. It's not our game's setup or anything; the table is just prone to breaking in this particular way. Maybe they'll fix it in code.
Well, a couple rounds in, I got called up on James Bond 007. It's a table I like and that, more, I just seem to be in synch with. Especially in the current code edition. And this day --- well, I was already playing very well, with killer (and first-place) finishes on The Munsters Somehow and Batman 66. But here, for James Bond? I ran away with it, putting up something like 300 million points on the first ball when a hundred million would ordinarily win the game. I didn't get any especially high-value modes going, which means I was playing a very long time. And then, on his second ball, RED put up nearly as good a ball, only for me to do another 300 million points. At this point we were not only the last group playing but everyone assumed we had to be on the last ball, maybe the last player, and hung around waiting with decreasing patience for this to end. This is probably why I missed some of the prize draws.
bunnyhugger was not in good spirits after two monster games of James Bond in the same group pushed the round to, I don't know, 96 hours long. I assured her there was not much chance that James Bond would come up again. With 38 tables in the venue and at most six needed at any one round, and the number of needed games dwindling soon as players got their final strike and exited the tournament, we might not see it again. And even if we did, that didn't mean there'd be someone blowing it up like me.
So the next round bunnyhugger was drawn up on James Bond, and MAG put up another killer game, one that was well on track to beat my performance. bunnyhugger called me in as assistant tournament director to make a choice: should we invoke the ``extraordinary gameplay'' rule, allowing someone who's run away with a game to be declared the winner and everyone else to go on as they were? (bunnyhugger had been seconds short of declaring this rule on me, the round before, when I drained my last ball.) I agreed, yes, MAG has officially won this round and everyone else can play for the remaining positions. (Extraordinary Gameplay rules hold that if some other player --- or players --- match the score where the game is called, they're all credited equally as first-place winners, whatever that might do to the internal logic of the game.)
We resolved that the extraordinary-gameplay rule would be in effect on James Bond the rest of the night, with a mere 600 million points where we drew the line that invoked it. (Unfortunately we couldn't just say anyone reaching 600 million won; the rule is for a player running away with it. If after ball one, someone has 650 million and someone else 625 million, they're both still in contention and have to play it out.) Many other people were advising bunnyhugger to take the game out of the tournament. She certainly wanted to, but as she had to keep explaining to well-meaning people, she couldn't. Not for technological reasons; as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles example shows, it's easy to pull a game. But the sanctioning body, the International Flipper Pinball Association, heavily penalizes the rating value any tournament where the game lineup changes after the start of the tournament for any reason except a table's catastrophic malfunction. (This is a reaction to a couple controversial tournaments where the game choice was winnowed down near the end. With players and tournament officials often being the same people this offers considerable chances for throwing a tournament to a favorite person.)
Mercifully, James Bond was not drawn the rest of the night. It stands there with --- I'm drawing this from Matchplay, not my sense of hyperbole --- my round lasting 57 minutes 17 seconds, and bunnyhugger's lasting 48 minutes 32 seconds. This means players were on James Bond for as long as it would take to watch Quantum of Solace. Which is, in my defense, the shortest of the James Bond movies.
As said, though, fortunately James Bond didn't come up again, and I would like to say the rest of the night ran without any group running tiresomely long compared to everyone else. Unfortunately, RED and I got called up on Monster Bash --- and our Monster Bash normally plays very fast, as it likes to send balls down the center drain --- and put up two monster games of our own. We spent only 39 minutes, 22 seconds, on this game, says Matchplay, but the next-longest-running group that round lasted only 23 minutes 14 seconds.
As you might have inferred, I was having a really good night. I won my first two rounds outright, and took second place in the third. I came off that killer James Bond game to a last-place on Kiss, one of the games I'd rate as my strength, but after that didn't finish in last place again the rest of the night. And came in first place on Monster Bash.
The upshot of all this is that I was in the final four playing for the night, on a game of Willy Wonka that, again, is one I'd ordinarily find easy for me to do well enough on, even against killer players like RED, MAG, and FAE. But I didn't have it --- nobody was playing well, maybe because it was well past midnight --- but I was struggling pretty hard. I was finally able, with effort, to beat MAG, but I needed to finish in first to keep going, and FAE finally had a ball that beat any score I could reasonably expect to put on even if my first two balls hadn't been disasters.
I would take home the third-place trophy. In one last, race-to-the-bottom game of Metallica, RED took second place, and FAE first, topping their recent win of the Lansing Pinball League with winning the biggest of the charity tournaments held in the same venue.
bunnyhugger had a pretty solid night too. Not as good as mine: she took second or third place --- one strike --- each of the first three rounds, and her only first-place finish was on Getaway. Sinking her mood and not quite knocking her out, but setting her up to be knocked out the next round, was the game she played in a group with MAG and me on Medieval Madness. Despite this being one of the venue's original games and one whose rules and moves we know in our sleep, we were racing for the bottom on this game, this time. After I fumbled my last ball I thought for sure I was in last place, as bunnyhugger didn't have much score to make up. She went for a risky but fairly valuable shot, correctly figuring all she had to do was beat me, and when the ball drained she was agonizingly short of my score. That's tough to recover from and between that, the stresses of running a tournament going on longer than she wanted (and fending off well-meaning people telling her that James Bond should be taken out of the game selection) and her not having slept adequately in a week or more, well, she was done soon enough. That at least gave her time to sit down some and get told by people how much they admire the work she puts into running these things.
Back when we thought the tournament might end at a sane hour we had the plan to go to Taco Bell for our new post-pinball-night ritual of getting take-out there. But now it was 1 am or so and we just rushed home, so I could eat anything and bunnyhugger could tend to her evening tasks.
I had work in the morning, and we had something else again to do Friday night.
Now back in pictures to Camden Park, and the third-most-important thing to get on after the Big Dipper and the Carousel of Certain But Imprecisely Known Antiquity ...
Here's the front of the line, and the sign, for the Hawnted House dark ride. The art's looking great.
Here's the exit, with a couple people staggering off the ride. The balcony there is a small U-turn where the car goes briefly outside the building.
And here's the lift hill and the drop, the element that makes this arguably a roller coaster! (I'm willing to credit it as a coaster but won't think ill of people who say it's not. We're not talking Pipe Scream here.)
Car going up the lift hill while another car, at the end of the ride, gets its terminal brake: a ride operator standing in your way. At the slow speeds it's going, and with the light weight of the car, this isn't a serious risk.
Nice witch art giving a warning as cars enter the ride. Note the ghostly figures emerging from the cauldron.
And the artist even got their credit in, both at the entrance and the exit!
Trivia: Until the 19th century American-made paper lacked filters to keep out debris. Paper would have lumps, twigs, hairs, and even bugs embedded in it. Source: Paper: Paging Through History, Mark Kurlansky.
Currently Reading: American Scientist, November - December 2004, Editor Fenella Saunders.
