Last Wednesday, I went back to the hipster bar, taking care of something we had meant to and forgotten to do during the Dungeons and Dragons launch party the night before. This was putting up a poster announcing the Women's Launch Party, which would be held a couple days later. Stern Pinball went through one or two launch parties sending only a PDF that people running tournaments were supposed to print out and hang themselves, which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger did not do. But for this game they returned to sending out posters, and while we forgot to put up one for the open tournament that's fine, seventeen people showed up. That's a good crowd.
And you know who was there? RED, naturally, hanging out with long-ago league regular PHD. RED was showing some of what he knew about the game to PHD and we got to talk a little bit about, you know, nothing much.
One thing we'd discovered the night before. Dungeons and Dragons, like every Stern pinball these days, has the option to log in using the Stern Insider Connect program, an account and an app and all. It lets you rack up Achievements and, in some games, also get progress that transfers from one game to another. This campaign mode lets the game rules mutate out underneath you, in some cases letting you get far better scores for some modes than someone who wasn't logged in gets. Also it means another company gets to track the things you do, and while Stern Insider connect is a free account now, I imagine at some point they'll take a tithe of your logged-in games.
But Dungeons and Dragons offers a pretty strong reason to log in like that: you can create a character and have it progress, game to game. This is a compelling enough idea that bunnyhugger finally got an account, that she could form some character.
Still, for games where logging in every time can give you advantages, maybe breaking competitions, there's compensation: you can log in on ball two and get credit for all the things you accomplish, but not have it mess up the scoring of your current game. And, we learned shortly before the tournament Tuesday, Stern put in a new method for Dungeons and Dragons. Hit the Action Button right after logging in and you'd log in as a ``one-time character'', not bringing your campaign progress into the game. This went well for the tournament until someone noticed that you still keep the gold built up, game to game, and you can use that in the merchant's to buy stuff. And, in principle then, more stuff than your competitors who weren't bringing campaign progress in.
You might ask how did Stern put out a pinball game with rules so half-formed that what should be a straightforward operation --- ``if you use the non-campaign-mode game don't include campaign-mode stuff''. Even these days, when it's easy to update the software on a game and so you're able to, for example, ship a game with the most basic, unrefined code and trust that you can make it good later?
Well, in playing RED and PHD a couple games --- I had to be polite, after all --- I had a really good game of Dungeons and Dragons. Good enough to get the Grand Champion score. I wanted to take a picture of that, to commemorate surely the only time I'll ever have that title and so that bunnyhugger could be mad at me. In the Attract Mode, waiting for people to put coins in or to start playing, the game would not bring up the high scores, the way every game since 1985 has. So, yes, can be.
We've reached the end of the first, short, day at Kings Island so you know what that means: lots of pictures of nobody in the park! But wait, there's a surprise coming.
I liked how the ... I think this is the International Midway ... looks with the white light outline here.
And here's a place that looks like it's still open and probably isn't, underneath the park's Tower.
The midway pool and those colored water jets are great and just get better by night.
Here it's seen from slightly off to the side, so that both the Eiffel Tower, Orion (the blue diagonal streak), and the Kings Island logo are in view. Note the person taking a picture of the Kings Island sign there.
Eiffel Tower, gift shop with Camp Snoopy stuff in the window, and moon that I don't think was full but it's literally impossible to check now.
And here we go, this is that picture that guy was taking, only this one is mine! ... Except ...
There we go. There's the dead-center view that makes this look as much as possible like a postcard they sold in the gift shops in the 80s.
And finally, my inspiration, since by then it seemed like we might be the only people left in the park and had it all to ourselves: bunnyhugger welcoming you to Jurassic Kings Island. bunnyhugger took the same picture of me, if you'd like to see me hamming it up.
Trivia: From 1925 to 1929 morning radio (before 1927 just in San Francisco, after that from NBC in New York City) had the pseudonymous broadcaster ``Cheerio'', his true identity known only to the head of NBC, and --- rumor had it --- performing six morning a week (live) without compensation. After Herbert Hoover's inauguration ``Cheerio'' was revealed to be Charles Kellogg Field, a classmate and friend of Hoover, who had defrayed the program's costs and contributed content suggestions. Source: The Mighty Music Box: The Golden Age of Musical Radio, Thomas A DeLong. Field had gone into business rather than the stage, at his parent's behest, and stayed on radio until shortly before World War II.
