Pinball At The Zoo, after the tournaments were closed out from us. What's there to say? Well, league regular MAG took home first place in the open-tournament B Division, best player after the top 24 qualifiers (and a couple people who from their high worldwide ranking couldn't play in B). And FAE looked ready to march to an easy first-place finish in the Women's tournament, until in the last game of finals --- Elvira's House of Horrors --- DAZ, a Wisconsin player (runner-up for state women's champion), put up a ferocious 390.2 million points. For comparison I don't think I've ever broken 200 million and that not on a tournament-settings game. FAE was far behind at this point, with something like twenty million points or so. Don't remember; doesn't matter.
What does matter is FAE went on a heck of a run, collecting an extra ball --- for some reason turned on and playable --- before finishing ball three at about 370 million. This was something like twenty million points short, but FAE had an extra ball and, when you've run the game up that high, twenty million points isn't hardly anything. The only way FAE would fail to win the game, and first place in the tournament, is to have the ball drain the moment the ball save expired and what are the odds of --- oh. They did. FAE finished with 381.4 million, second place on the game and the tournament. An incredible run, though, and a dramatic, nail-biter finish.
For us, though? It would be going around and actually seeing things on the floor, which is actually some consolation. I was frightfully interested in this 1930s flipperless game called Chubbie, all about hitting the fifteen (!) coiled posts and then the real scoring begins. I managed to get to hitting fourteen with carefully plunged balls and a lot of nudging, but never more. There were other flipperless or proto-pinball games there too, like the World Series baseball one that's been at past shows, and, you know, really, I can't get enough of that.
Toward the end of show I got really interested in this 1986 Gottlieb game Hollywood Heat, which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger aptly dubbed ``we have Miami Vice at home''. At the time Gottlieb was doing a lot of ``we don't need a license if we make our own thing'' kind of game. It's got some fun gimmicks in it, though, including a little subsection of the playfield that all the ball-locking for multiball happens in, and a pop bumper that's enclosed in a case and can only be hit by hitting a captive ball outside the enclosure. For the last game of the show bunnyhugger and FAE and I ended up playing a game and, dear reader, I hit the Grand Championship. Also FAE and bunnyhugger punched me in the kidneys for starting, like, eighteen multiballs in a row. Thing is that captive-ball-to-pop-bumper thing is really valuable if you hit it in multiball, which, sure, I can do that, turns out.
After the show ended --- open finals would continue for a couple hours --- we all drove over to MJS's pole barn for the afterparty. bunnyhugger and FAE and MWS and PCL and I ended up playing a string of games (one person sitting out each) and I ended up doing better against some pretty stiff competition than I had any right to. Also before we left I made them play MJS's Cirqus Voltaire, which is a prototype of the game and has very different rules that don't work as well as the real finished game, but make a lot more sense of the playfield art. I'd love to know more about how that game developed.
We didn't figure to spend the whole night at the afterparty, and we didn't, although it got closer to midnight than we would have expected. And, you know, I kind of enjoyed spending so much time just playing pinball without any expectation past that I might do well on something weird. Should do more of that.
We were at 80s night in pictures last time. We still are.
Just a picture of light and shade on a ghost sign that I liked. This is on the second floor of the Pinball Pete's building; how old the sign is I couldn't say without trying.
Oh yeah, here's bunnyhugger rocking her 80s glasses and her real actual vintage 1980s puffy T-shirt. They don't make them like this anymore.
Evening setting in yet the band continues to bravely play a medley of 80s dance music.
I liked getting this shot of the drum kit from behind.
And then there's all the many pedals of the ... music thingy.
Cleaning up. We get to the end of the night and people whom I trusted were with the event putting away the chess board and the connect-four and all.
Trivia: The United States's Sims Act of 1912 prohibited the shipping of prize-fight films across state lines, although preliminary events and the introduction of contestants --- everything up to the moment the fight began --- could be legally distributed. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding. Why such a peculiar prohibition you ask? Well, you know, because the answer to anything in US politics is ``racism'', but how did that come into play? It's because boxer Jack Johnson was doing extremely well winning against white opponents and if you let people see that kind of thing they might start thinking Black people can be as good at stuff as Americans are. (With an assist from Progressives afraid that showing film of violence encourages bad morals.)
Currently Reading: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), Mark Cooper-Jones, Jay Foreman.
