There's two things to do at Pinball At The Zoo, play in the tournaments or wander around the floor show. The tournament is Herb-style, a name of obscure origins, where you play a set of games and your rank is used to rate you against other players. As it's a charity tournament, you buy entries, a dollar per, and put in as many as you want, with the catch that you have to wait for a game to be free. As the qualifying hours close the lines get longer, or feel like they do, and you end up spending the whole day there instead of seeing and playing the games people and companies bring to the show.
This year the main, Open, tournament was 16 games, standing based on your ten best ranks of whatever you submit. In past years I've gone and put in a game on all these and gone back to see what I could shore up. But that's also a lot of games. Classics was a mere six games (best four counting), all games from at latest the mid-80s. The mid-80s are a Wallace line of pinball evolution; on this side, multiball really dominates game design and the table speeds up. On the pre-mid-80s side of things you can have two or three balls in play (1981's Centaur can get up to five balls going!) but all you really get for that is double or triple scoring as the computer tries to keep up.
I decided to buy $20 of tickets and play only Classics. This put me under the tightest deadline; to avoid a marathon of playoffs running forever on Saturday, Classics's starts Friday evening. These were all games that I knew well, either in simulation or from playing at past Pinballs Ats Thes Zoos or at the venues that donated the games, and I did ... not really well at any of them. Still, a mediocre start can always be improved on, and so I did. My secondary goal every year at Pinball At The Zoo is to never have to void an entry --- have the new score not count because it's worse than I already did --- and this year, well, I got until my third game of Barracora before failing. I would end up voiding six of my 21 total entries, which sounds respectable until you hear that last year I only had to void two entries of like thirty submitted. (But last year I put in games in both Open and Classics, and so replayed fewer games.)
Perseverance paid off, though. By around dinnertime I had a top-ten finish on Xenon, a space(?) robot woman game from about 1980; and top-twenty finishes on Mystic and Blackjack. I was out of contention for finals, though, since my next-best finish was a top-forty finish on Knockout. And after some incidents yet to be revealed, I looked at what it would take to get a top-twenty finish on Knockout (like ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger already had) and knew it was something I could realistically do. Knockout, a boxing-theme mid-70s game, is wonderfully meditative and can be played forever, at least when this one-way gate on the left orbit is in place, which is why they've taken it off for competitive play. This makes the game harder but not undoable and is why fewer than ten people had broken 100,000 points.
One chance. One last game before qualifying ends. And I have to put up the best game I've done on this all day. (It was only my third time playing it that day.) Could I do it? Yes. Did I? No. I so did not that I put up my worst finish on, again, just three entries on Knockout. But my quest to play in Classics finals ended there, 27th place where the top 16 went on to the first round of playoffs.
There was also another side tournament, the free daily where every participant got one (1) entry each on four tables, and here? Eh. I had a score in the top thirty-to-forty for each of the four games. That consistency --- no appallingly bad finishes --- meant I came in in 19th place, but only the top twelve went to playoffs. Well, the fun is in trying your best, especially against such tight limits.
I've said nothing of the fun bunnyhugger was having. That will come.
And now, I bring you today something I bet you thought you'd never see: the last of my pictures of Idlewild and with it the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour, bringing the photo side of my journaling up to ... July of last year! I'm totally going to catch up if we can just have another pandemic that keeps us from going anywhere or doing anything for a year.
As the show went on and different potential summer vacations were turned away they got to going into the audience and handing out rattlers and such, and some kids and some parents and some embarrassed kids joined in the music-making and the dancing and all. Also, yes, just like Dutch Wonderland they had a Daniel Tiger and Friends show but we missed it.
In what I'm sure is the most shocking twist ending ever, they ended up deciding the perfect summer vacation was going to Idlewild, as seen with a poster showing ... not quite things they have there. Did I mention the connecting music for their show was (of course) Lindsey Buckingham's Holiday Road, which we were still kind of shellshocked about?
And oh, a detail easy to miss in the other stuff but we were just a little late to see the world's largest rubber duck! That's a shame.
We'd overlooked the Skooter ride, the bumper cars, which we kind of regretted but not enough to wait through the line.
Little creek running through the park that's part of the built-into-the-woods charm of the place.
And a parting view of some of the Hootin' Holler area and the afternoon light. Our last destination of the trip (we wouldn't stop at Cedar Point on the drive home). Pretty happy vacation.
Trivia: The 1850 United States Census, the first to be done counting individuals rather than the number of people within households, was the first to record the ages and other information of enslaved Americans in equal detail to the free. However, enslaved people were identified by their slaver's name and a number, rather than their actual names. Source: The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Present Day, Andrew Whitby.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Sundays Supplement, Volume 21: 1959, Tom Sims, Bill Zaboly, Bud Sagendorf. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
