Last Thursday was the start of Pinball At The Zoo 2023, Michigan's biggest pinball tournament for the year. Bigger even than state finals, as these are open to anybody, and since the event is part of the Stern Pro Circuit, it draws high-value pinball players from across North America. With them occupying so much of the A Division, the state-level A players fill up what had been the B Division, and the true B players like myself and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger are forced into competing for the fun of it.
Or in my case, not competing. I'm still new enough in my job, and weak enough in my finances, I didn't think I should take Thursday off to go trying to qualify. Plausibly I wouldn't have been able to even if I wanted: a recent security scan of the project came back negative, no signs of security detected, and it's been a bit of a high-priority rush to get something with a bit of security put in. They've been pulling people off other jobs to focus on this, and even authorized overtime, a thing nobody can remember ever happening. Given that, it's imaginable that if I had requested time off they'd have asked me to cancel it anyway.
bunnyhugger, having no particular work duties Thursday or Friday, went by herself to put in entries in the Main Tournament, yes, and in Classics. But mostly she wanted to play in the Women's Tournament, as part of her bid to secure a place and good seed in the Women's State Championship. (The Women's Rankings and championship are part of organized pinball's attempts to recover from how long pinball spent driving women out of the hobby.) All these tournament were run Herb-style. The name is mysterious but the pattern not: you play games on a set bank, and your ranking in the tournament is based on how your best game ranks against everyone else's. You can enter more games, as long as qualifying is open. Here, you also had to buy game entries, a dollar a game, which is why the format's sometimes called/derided as pump-and-dump. After all, play enough games and you'll eventually have a good one.
bunnyhugger, starting and focusing on the Women's Tournament games, launched herself into first place almost right away. Her third game of the day --- Walking Dead --- was the best score anyone put up on the game all weekend, including in finals. She spent the rest of the day mostly shoring up her standings, occasionally seeing the unfamiliar name of SS overtaking her in the Women's rankings. But then bunnyhugger would come back from her handful of Classics or Main tournament games, put in a little more time on the Women's games, and resume her first-place standing.
Friday, now, I figured to go up after my work ended, and bunnyhugger had work meetings that kept her busy until about when I was done with work anyway. So we drove together, getting to the Kalamazoo Expo Center too close to the end of qualifying for the Daily or the Classics tournament for me to consider entering either. (Classics finishes qualifying at 8 pm Friday night, to allow time for a first round of finals to be done Friday nights.) So with three hours of qualifying time that evening I figured to buy twenty entries and see what I could do in Main.
Meanwhile, bunnyhugger resumed her pattern of shoring up her scores to take the first place seed, only to see herself knocked down to second by SS again. She came to slightly if comically resent her rival, but also feel proud that after all the time SS would spend taking the first place back, bunnyhugger could reclaim it. I noticed how much this would be driving bunnyhugger crazy if the positions were reversed. Which, arguably, they were, since we didn't know how much time SS was spending focusing on the Women's standings, trying to reclaim the top seed from this HMK she didn't know. As it happens SS would win the night; when qualifying closed at 10 pm she had an eight-point lead that would take some strokes of luck to beat. (There were five games in the Women's Tournament, and your four best rankings count for your standing. There's a slight bonus for being the top or second-highest ranked player on any machine, which is how SS's slightly higher ranking came to build up an eight-point lead.) I promised bunnyhugger she could get that lead back on Saturday, and while she could have, she did not.
Myself, meanwhile? I didn't figure I had a chance in the tournament anyway, not unless I had several outstandingly good games. So I figured to try all of the sixteen different games in the Main Tournament's qualifying set (your top eight finishes count for your ranking) and then see where I might improve things. This was different from usual for me; I typically play what I think are going to be my best games and then try to shore up my scores on them. The advantage of replaying games is you have a chance to learn how they're reacting, what the gameplay is like, and so do better. The disadvantage is you can lock yourself into wasting all your time (and entries) on a game you do not have the feel for today, confident that next time will work.
There was not much evidence that anything I did would work, though. My first game --- Wheel of Fortune --- was appallingly bad; it's a tough game, but it's quirky and weird in ways that usually pay off for me. Seawitch --- an 80s game reskinned and modified to be The Beatles, one of my all-time favorites --- was similarly dismal. Abra Ca Dabra, an electromechanical, wanted me to drain early and often. Flash Gordon, an early-80s game, I finally had an okay game on; not good enough to get me into playoffs, but the sort of baseline good game I'd want to build from. I thought this might be the turning point and I'd start being on from here and no, I was not. There were a couple flashes of competence. I had a pretty good game of Pinball Magic, a rare 90s Capcom-made game. The actually good game was on the Jersey Jack-made Guns N' Roses, where I had the best score I've ever gotten on this game. I got the 'November Rain' song started, and played it through to meeting the big objective, and scored the jackpot, giving me nine million points in one shot. My typical score on this game is about one million points and my highest-ever, before this, six million, so that gives you some scale.
After that fantastic game it was back to okay and then dismal. I was in line and up next for my sixteenth game, the last one I hadn't played before --- Funhouse --- with a minute left to go before qualifying closed for the day. The scorekeeper insisted on looking up to make sure that the person ahead of me (our friend MAG, whom I kept following most of the nigh somehow) didn't want the score he had just put up (as it was lower than his already-recorded best), keeping me from starting before the official end of new games. Hrmph. Probably I wouldn't have had a great game, but it would have been nice to put a full quiver of games in with the one shot.
I had not expected to make playoffs, not with how little time I had to qualify. We would have three more hours to qualify Saturday, but those would also be packed, very busy, where we couldn't expect to get fifteen games in like I did Friday evening. Still, if I had a Funhouse game as good, relatively, as my Guns N' Roses was? And then two or three games similarly solid? I might make something yet, or at least get into range. bunnyhugger meanwhile despaired that she, sitting in the #2 seed for the Women's playoffs at the moment, was doomed to failure.
We stopped at Taco Bell for dinner and I impulsively decided to add nacho fries to my order. They didn't include the fries in our order, although they didn't charge me for them either. Added to the disappointment driving home, though.
Back to pictures! I hope you want to see more of Sunday at Motor City Furry Con, as that's what I have next on my roll.
As the conclusion to the How Arcade Games Work we moved into the games room. Vix opens the Quick and Crash target-shooting game so we can see more of how it works.
The light for the gun is produced inside the big cabinet there and taken by fiber optic into the gunsight, which is the system that makes more sense but you just expect the gun has some working parts.
And here we are! Turns out it works by electronics.
The Pepper's Ghost Illusion. The mug that's the final 'target' is actually hidden out of line of sight, reflection in a glass making it appear. If you hit it, the cover drops down and the mug disappears in favor of an explosion of PVC pieces.
How the mug looks in operation, with reflected light making it look really there.
And here's the pieces of PVC that the game tosses up in an enclosed space to make it look like the mug has exploded. The pieces are in bunnyhugger's hand; can you figure out what all the elements of this picture are? I should have been a very annoying cinematographer.
Trivia: The Dutch government reopened Schiphol airport in July 1945 with a repaved runway and a few temporary buildings; air traffic control operated from the back of a van. KLM had a fleet of surplus warplanes. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon.
Currently Reading: Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections: A Practical Guide for Museums, Angela Kipp.
