It’s pinball time in the city (is it ever not?). We will be having our traditional after-Christmas, holiday-themed pinball tournament, Silver Balls in the City, at The Avenue Cafe in Lansing on December 28, 2019. This is the first-ever Saturday edition of Silver Balls in the City and we’re hoping for a record turnout and lots of money raised for the Capital Area Humane Society. This will be a 9-strikes (progressive strikes) tournament (exact number TBA based on opening time of the bar) with the usual sparkly, holiday knick-knack crowned trophies that are a trademark for this tournament. There will also be translite and other prize giveaways. The cost is $10 plus coin drop. $9 of each $10 entry fee goes to the Capital Area Humane Society (the other $1 covers the IFPA tax).
The start time has been changed to 3:30 pm. Please note that the bar does not open until 3 pm, so don’t arrive too early. For more updates, please join our Facebook event page, or email heather@lansingpinleague.com for more information.
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Derik (third), Danny (first), and Mike (second), in front of the tournament-ending game, Deadpool.
Thirteen must be Danny’s lucky number as he emerged from November 12’s final tournament as the victor of Lansing Pinball League’s Season 13. In fact, since things wrapped up after midnight, that added another 13 – November 13 – to the count. And another three, since Danny is the league’s third-ever champion, taking the crown from two-season winner Mike (who in turn wrested it from 10-season winner Chris). Mike joked that, like Chris (who took a season off after his first loss), this means he can now quit the league. I don’t think anyone really expects that to happen, at least not as long as The Avenue still has Ghostbusters.
Danny finishes putting in his GC initials after his tournament-winning Deadpool game.
Seventeen people qualified to play in finals, but Jon didn’t attend (we miss you, Jon!) so we had an even eight people in the A and B division brackets. I had squeaked into A division with a one-point lead over Biff, and my reward was having to play top seed Mike in the first round. Surprisingly I got him on one of his choices, which tipped the balance of power and should have made it possible for me to win. Unfortunately, I lost on his next choice and then again on my own ace in the hole, Medieval Madness (despite a strong start). In the loser second chance bracket I faced Josh, again won on one of his choices, lost a heartbreaking game of Batman in which I put up a personal best of something like 680M (he responded by nearly tripling that on a third ball rally from around 300) and then, demoralized, completely choked on Medieval Madness. I went out like I went in: 8th place.
Winner Jason and second-place Biff with their plaques. Jason also wants us to see his Jurassic Park flyer for some reason.
Meanwhile, we had a very heated B division battle. No one was looking forward to facing Jason, who is frankly too good to be slumming it down in B but was knocked there by missing too many league nights. Although Jason did end up winning the bracket, it was only after a very tough, two-round fight against Biff. The B bracket took so long that third place Lexi had to leave before the winners’ photos were taken.
Lexi with her third place award.
The A division took even longer, of course. In the early hours of the morning, Mike had to slog it out and see if he could win two rounds against Danny. Fortunately for everyone’s bedtime though not fortunately for Mike, it ended after one round, on a game of Deadpool. Danny walked away with over a billion and Mike, as player 2, had to try to beat that on what would have had to be an epic third ball rally. Mike didn’t give up and did start to creep his way up with a lot of work on Ball 3, but ended up draining somewhere in the 200 millions.
Biff playing in the final match against Jason. This is my favorite cheap camera trick…
I had predicted a win for Tim this season, but maybe next season will be Tim’s, since this one only got him a 5th place (“only” – I’d sure trade for it). Mike predicted “the season of Derik” but Derik went home with the third place plaque. My own nemesis Josh got fourth. If you’re going to knock me out of a tournament you could at least have the courtesy to go all the way!
A less arty picture of Biff in B finals.
Everyone who did not get a plaque took home a Lansing Pinball League “LOSER” ribbon. Matt had originally had those made for a past season and found his stash of the remaining ribbons when he was moving to Kalamazoo. He passed them on to me and then I proceeded to forget where I had stored them, causing Joseph to go home during the tournament, fail to find them, come back, then go home again because in the meantime I had remembered where they were and couldn’t raise him on the phone (I mean the landline, Joseph does not generally carry his cell) because he was already on his way back to the bar.
Danny and Tim, hard at work in the pinball mines.
The night wasn’t all disappointments for me either. At the start of the night, Tim announced that he wanted to present something to thank me and Joseph for the work we do for the league. He then pulled out a plastic cut-out of Rudy from FunHouse that he picked up at Chicago Pinball Expo. They used to cut these “keychains” out of the unused parts of the game’s plastics to give away as promotional items. I was really touched. Everyone knows I am a huge fan of FunHouse. A lesser known fact is that it is also Joseph’s favorite game. He’s the one who got me into it.
My Tuesday Night Smackdown medal (designed by Joseph) and my plastic of Rudy.
The other thing that happened is that I won Tuesday Night Smackdown for the first time. I was sulking from being knocked out of the tournament and had not done any qualifying on Scared Stiff. Joseph encouraged me to go put a game on so I grumpily stomped over and started a game with a few minutes to spare in qualifying. I ended up getting to Scared Stiff and nearly but not quite finishing the Stiff-O-Meter. I hadn’t looked at the qualifying scores and it turned out I had the #2 seed. It didn’t matter much because it turned out that (even though Joseph made medals for two divisions) we only had three people qualified who weren’t either gone or still playing in the main finals. Thus I won a three-person game of Scared Stiff against Joseph and Bryan to take the title of Tuesday Night Smackdown Champion. In addition to this being my first ever Smackdown win, it is technically my first ever open IFPA tournament win. I have won an open tournament before (the non-IFPA-sanctioned first Fear and Trembling, which only three people showed up to) and I have won several women’s tournaments. But this means my IFPA record no longer has “0” in my “wins” column. No, I now can proudly display a “1” there for having one a single three-player game of Scared Stiff. It’s both sad and funny in equal measures that my longtime earnest desire to win an open tournament has been fulfilled by that. This is why the philosophers say that life is absurd.
Tonight is the traditional split flipper tournament, Super-Ball XIII (AKA the Zen tournament). Teams have the chance to win a pair of spectacular trophies from our friends at Prime Time Awards. We will also have a Tuesday Night Smackdown and will give out the (so far secret) Most Improved award and the (not so secret) Worst Score ribbon. I hope to see you all tonight at 7 pm sharp to start the tournament!
Ages and ages ago, back in the mists of time, we had the final league night of the regular (qualifying) season. It was our closest league night to Halloween this year. In years past, we used to have a Halloween costume contest on the closest night to Halloween, but as the calendar has caused league night to drift further from Halloween we started having minimal participation (read: Joseph and I) so the costume contest was put on hiatus. There may be an explanation besides the calendar. At the first league night two different people (Jake – who should get his flippin’ fingers back to league – and Matt) both showed up dressed as former champion Chris. Matt won the contest by virtue of the fact that he was dedicated enough to shave his head, or at least the middle of it. Many people felt that the costume contest had peaked early and it could only be downhill from there.
Jason being Jason.
Anyway, since this was the closest night to Halloween, I found it fitting that the random number generator chose bank Melpomene, the comic-horror bank. We also had to randomly choose a game for Elvira’s House of Horror to replace, and the bumped game was Monster Bash. Given the misbehavior of the scoop lately, most were not disappointed, though I thought it was a shame to break up the monsters theme. (I would have rather seen Ghostbusters go, for more than one reason.) I made a joke to someone that I thought Jason should wear his Jason mask, as he did on his first night in the league years ago. Little did I know that Jason actually did have his Jason mask ready, and showed up wearing it once things got underway. Later, I got confused when Jason walked up and went to play a ball on a game I was playing because he was not in my group. I went to stop him, and people laughed. “She really has no clue, does she?” said Jason. Except it wasn’t Jason. It was Derik wearing another Jason mask. To my surprise, when Derik saw Jason wearing a mask, he declared that he was going to do it too, and got one out of his car. “You have a Jason mask just sitting in your car?” I asked, incredulous. The answer was yes, because he was given one in an Andy tournament he played in. Giving weird prizes is kind of an Andy trademark (ask Mike sometime about the penis keychain) so I had to accept this.
Both Jasons in profile (Jason in front, Derik behind).
I was in a desperate race to finish the season ahead of Biff in order to play in A division at finals. He was only 10 points behind me, and while he kept reassuring me that he had been playing like crap recently and certainly had no hope of catching me, I was not so sure. I had two really good games (notably a boffo Ghostbusters, of all things) and three bad, including a truly terrible Munsters. I think Biff had more good games, so I waited anxiously to see if he caught up. In the end he did not. I finished the season one lonely point ahead of Biff, guaranteed to play in A and face Mike first round. Hooray? And, uh, thanks Ghostbusters?
As has become common this season due to my work schedule, Joseph made the Smackdown medals. He always makes them relate to a current event or “this date in history.” This time he went with a Halloween theme, making one of them a jack o’lantern and one a piece of candy corn. I finally used up a black and orange ribbon I had randomly been gifted with at a furry con and had been saving specifically for a Halloween tournament. The Smackdown championship was on Indiana Jones and the undercard fight on Road Show. Derik won the Smackdown and Josh (not pictured) the undercard.
Derik with his (sadly reversed) Smackdown medal. I believe it has a jack o’lantern drawn by Joseph on the front.
Assuming everyone shows up for our double elimination finals, Mike will face me in the first round of A as the top and bottom seed, respectively. The other matches will be Danny vs. Joseph, Tim vs. Pat, and Derik vs. Josh. The B division will be very dependent on who shows up (as will the A, for that matter) but nine people are qualified so if everyone shows up there will be a play-in for the eighth seed position. Mike, the reigning champion famous for having ended Chris’s 10-season run, has declared that this is “the season of Derik.” I am going to put my money on Tim, though I consider Danny also a strong contender.
October 8 was our penultimate (that means 7th, in case you aren’t counting) league night of the season. Although Polyhymnia is traditionally our ad hoc bank, comprised of all the games we haven’t played yet plus the rest determined by vote, this season Polyhymnia ended up completely filled with as-yet-unplayed games due to the many lineup changes this season. This necessitated the creation of a new leftovers bank, which I titled Terspsichore (the Muse of dance), containing Batman ’66 and four games chosen by popular vote.
I was happy that Indiana Jones won in the poll, though less happy that I ended up having a soundly mediocre game on it. Here Biff is playing.
Although we tried to once again balance the bank to have two long games, a medium, a medium-short, and a short game, over the course of the season, how long a game is has ended up somewhat skewed. For instance, Guardians of the Galaxy started off as a medium game because people didn’t know it that well yet, but has blossomed into a longer game. We will use scores from the season to reconsider all the games next season, just as we did between last season and this one. Anyway, we ended up with several longer playing games in Terpsichore, because that was how the popular vote went. That made for another longer league night. At least this time my group ended up cleaning up credits instead of leaving them behind. Sometimes you get lucky that way.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown game had been randomly drawn as Ghostbusters, an announcement which was met with varying reactions. Josh outright stated that he refused to play it, even with the new code, and he kept to that. Mike, on the other hand, responded with the classic “everything’s coming up Milhouse” GIF. Maybe because it was Ghostbusters, maybe because the long night left people unenthusiastic about an extra tournament, we had a low turnout for the Smackdown this time. Mike won the championship medal, to no one’s surprise. Bryan played against his dad, Jim, in the B division and showed the old man who’s boss by winning the division. Mike pointed out that it was another dual redhead victory. Looking over the results, I see that as of this Smackdown, Jim is now a rated player! Congratulations and condolences! Jim now has to pay the dollar entry fee with everyone else.
The Undercard Winner and Smackdown Champion, Bryan and Mike.
I randomly drew a bank for week 8 (the upcoming Tuesday) and very appropriately hit Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, or in our case the comic horror bank. Since our Elvira’s House of Horrors LE has arrived at the bar, we will be randomly drawing a game from Melpomene to replace with it, except that we will not replaced Scared Stiff because I like the cool factor of keeping them together. Now if only we had an Elvira and the Party Monsters to complete the trilogy.
Our final qualifying night is Tuesday, your last chance to improve your seeding for the final tournament. Remember that you must attend at least four nights to qualify to play in the final tournament. See you at 7 pm on Tuesday at The Avenue!
The league night of 9/24 – our sixth of the season – marked the return of an old joke. In the Matt era, we – usually Matt, but sometimes Mike – would bring our own lightbulbs to replace the dead ones or empty sockets around the Avenue. It was so dark in the bar in those days that a strobe going off in a game would leave players standing there like jacklighted deer. Matt would bring the (then-expensive) LED lightbulbs home with him after league because if they got left behind by accident, they would tend to get appropriated into other use around the bar. On one occasion we were able to retrieve a few of them, but one disappeared never to be seen again. The rumor is that it got put in an office. Anyway, I started the joke that Lansing was a BYOB league: “bring your own bulbs.”
So we returned to being a BYOB league last time, as Josh brought a package of bulbs and put them up anywhere he could. He did have to give up on one light fixture that turned out to have the wrong type of socket (I’d guess it takes a mogul base), but not before sustaining an injury trying. This happened before I arrived, so I just saw the aftermath in the form of a Band-Aid on Josh’s head. Apparently he bled quite a bit after hitting his head on the fixture (the scalp is full of blood vessels so even minor scalp cuts bleed dramatically) but he was able to get it to stop by the time I saw him. Someone did remark on the fact that you could barely see the Band-Aid on his head because he turns out to be the person with the exact skin tone that Band-Aids are designed for. People started bugging me to take a picture of the light fixture and put it in the league update. Why? Because he left behind a piece of skin on it. I was disgusted by this and refused to look at, let alone photograph, it for most of the league. Finally, in the end, I caved in and took a quick shot. It’s grainy but it will do. Here, you jackals.
A good source of DNA for any murder investigations involving Josh. I may listen to too many true crime podcasts.
We played bank Polyhymnia, named for the Muse whose name means “many praises,” which was intended to be any miscellaneous games that had not been in a previous bank plus games we voted on as favorites. Instead it was all miscellaneous games because of the large number that have been added over the season, and it didn’t even account for all of them, which is why tonight’s bank, Terpsichore, is the “new Polyhymnia.” Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, is made up of Batman ’66 (do the Batusi!) and four games chosen by popular vote.
Pat with his Smackdown Champion medal.
This turned out to be a dangerous league night, since in addition to Josh’s accident, I nearly choked. I inhaled so much Diet Coke thanks to Mike that I had a genuinely scary moment of coughing for dear life, and continued coughing intermittently for at least ten minutes. We had been waiting for a group of people to finish a game of Puzzle & Dragons so we could get on Road Show, and when we did go up to play, Mike said we needed to “do a Chris Tabaka stance” in order to keep away any other Puzzle & Dragons players. He then did an imitation of Chris getting ready to play that caused pop to go into my windpipe. Chris has not been seen for a few sessions, I should note.
The “worst score” award has been determined for the season. After one season of no slam tilts (which made choosing the worst score ribbon a bit more involved), we’re back to having a zero score. The award (presuming no other slam tilts occur this season) goes to Derik, who rage tilted on Willy Wonka, causing a tilt through that cost Danny his extra ball. Danny got a compensation ball but he was not pleased at his loss of bonus.
My fall leaf medal, a commemoration of the equinox.
This was the longest night in a while with a lot of high scores both in league and in SmackDown qualifying on Medieval Madness. Nevertheless, the actual SmackDown ended with the highest score at a mere 19 million, a victory for Pat. The B division (including me) played on Ghostbusters, and my best moment of the night was probably pulling off a skill shot plunge of an extra ball that got me 10% of my score and won me the match. I got to take home one of the “fall leaves” medals that I was rather proud of, my first time experimenting with using colored pencils instead of markers.
I’ll be seeing you soon! 7:00 pm, The Avenue Cafe, tonight; be there!
The annual Fear and Trembling pingolf tournament is returning to the Avenue Cafe in Lansing on November 6. This nine-hole course will have a unique twist, as usual: each hole will offer two objectives and you have to choose in advance which one to swing for. Hit the other one in the process? Tough luck, only the chosen one counts! The holes will all be objective rather than score-based to encourage you to learn new ways to play the games. This is the only tournament in Michigan with this format (and maybe anywhere).
Fear and Trembling, as usual, will be a charity tournament supporting the Capital Area Humane Society. The cost will be $10 ($9 to the charity, $1 to the IFPA) and players will be responsible for their own coin drop. There will be custom trophies and probably translite giveaways. This will be an official Stern Army Circuit event, too.
The tournament will open at 4 pm with players allowed to start a scorecard anytime between then and 7 pm. If a player’s first scorecard isn’t going well, they can toss it out and start a new one at a cost of $5 (all going to charity), provided they start by 7.
I’ll just give everyone some time to get all the cracks about how OMG EARLY!!11!!!1 this league recap is out of the way.
…
Ah, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Always worth another listen. Anyway, I’m back with your semi-monthly league update. Our last meeting was the fifth of Season 13, meaning we’re over the hill, and I’m not just talking about those of us old enough to understand the superiority of analog clock faces. We finally have more of Season 13 behind us than ahead of us. It just feels like we have been playing Season 13 forever because of the July hiatus.
We spent all night in the alcove, so none of my photos were taken in the alcove. It’s too damned dark in there.
We played bank Melpomene, named for the Muse of Tragedy but actually made up of the “comic horror” themed games. When I arrived (a bit later than I would have liked, due to work-related delays), everyone was clustered around the new Stern Jurassic Park instead of waiting in line to put in Smackdown games as usual. I ended up having to enlist someone with a louder voice to get people to gather for the night’s festivities. Mike pointed out that we would be having a very nostalgic league experience, since all of Melpomene’s games are currently located in the alcove. In the early days of the league, we had few enough games that all of them were in the alcove. It may have been nostalgic, but it was also very crowded, and we were constantly bumping into each other or having to beg pardon for sliding past.
Brian playing Jurassic Park in the Undercard bout.
Our Tuesday Night Smackdown was on Guardians of the Galaxy, or as Joseph insists on calling it, “the Rocket Raccoon game.” Joseph really likes procyonids. I had been so busy with school that I had forgotten to make the Smackdown medals, so I called home from work to ask Joseph to make them again. He colored them with the design of a wrapped gift, explaining that it was in honor of his niece Sasha’s birthday that day. And what do you know, but Joseph ended up winning the Smackdown medal, taking the Sasha’s birthday medal back home with him. Over in B division, Mike said he would defer playing in the tournament unless the game randomly chosen was Jurassic Park. That’s exactly what happened. I was less thrilled, as I haven’t gotten a feel for Jurassic Park yet. “Pretend it’s the Beatles,” Mike said. I said that I still wanted The Beatles back and Mike said we should get a Beat Time instead. Derik asked what Beat Time is, so we got to be the first to fill him in on that delightful chapter of pinball history.
Joseph looks happy because he won the Smackdown tournament, or maybe just because he’s Joseph.
This was my first night in Joseph’s group this season. He was having a very bad night and got unusually frustrated. At one point he responded to a drain on The Munsters (a game he normally likes, believe it or not) by grabbing the game and rage-shaking it so hard it rocked on its legs. This was followed immediately by the voice of Derik: “I’m standing right here.” I told Joseph he had better cool it before Derik threw him out. Joseph said, “Well, you saw what it did to me.” Later on, Derik did the same thing to Munsters, causing a “See? See?” reaction from Joseph.
Jason shows off his first Smackdown medal. Also, happy birthday, Sasha!
Jason won the Undercard (B division), and was more excited about it than I expected. It turned out that this was his first-ever Smackdown medal of any kind, to my surprise. Not present was Jim, Bryan’s dad, who once again left too early, because he would have qualified to play in B. We’ll get him one of these times.
See you all tomorrow at 7 for another exciting chapter in the annals of Lansing pinball history, league night number 6!
League newcomer Jett watches Danny play Attack from Mars (and probably wishes he were in another group).
On 8/24, for our fourth night of the season, we played bank Urania, the “stars” bank (named for the Muse of Astronomy; this was an easy one). First, a sob story. I had expected by now that I would be settled in to my new computer, all my data migrated so it looked like home, back into the normal swing of things again after my traumatic computer theft incident. Instead, my new computer, while shiny and pretty and sleek, has turned into a new source of frustration and disappointment. For some reason my data refuses to migrate, even though I did the responsible thing and ran a backup almost every day and in two different places. I went to the Apple Store and spent three hours watching them frantically Google stuff I had already tried, culminating in their declaration that my backup just didn’t contain key user data such as my mail messages for unknown reasons. I didn’t believe this (correctly) and dug around at home and found where those things are stored in a Time Machine backup, but unfortunately I cannot figure out how to get them copied back into Apple Mail so I can read them. Anyway, that’s my latest excuse. I do have pictures this time, at least.
Danny hard at work on his craft, or in this case, spacecraft.
Well actually… pictures are pretty much all I have, since I didn’t take notes as I should, at least not where I can find them. Again, my computer situation has lots of ripple effects, since I normally keep my league notes in my Stickies.
I started out with a bang, having a 15 million or something Junk Yard score, which amazingly didn’t even win my group. I think everyone in the group was over 10 million. I remember when Junk Yard was the shortest playing game in the joint, but now that people aren’t scared of slam tilting it, I guess this is what happens. The rest of the night I did not play so well. At least, not until the end of the night. There was a credit on AC/DC (the Smackdown game) and I hadn’t played yet. I looked around and asked and no one wanted it, so I started up a game and ended up with something well over 100 million, which put me into A division and pushed Joseph out. I guess I’m good at AC/DC now? Huh. It wasn’t even a one off, because in the actual Smackdown fray, I did another 100+ million score that I thought was going to land me my first ever Smackdown A division medal. Danny dashed those hopes with a big third ball rally. Meanwhile in B division…
Who is that masked man?
Yep, that’s Jason in lucha libre attire, which to the surprise of spectators (mostly me), he donned prior to his Smackdown Undercard game. If I remember correctly he was victorious, though I’m sure someone will come along and correct me if that’s not so. I don’t have the records on me as I’m at school scrambling this together before driving home. A previous Jason stunt involved showing up to league after a long absence wearing a hockey mask, which spooked Derik but correctly clued me in that Jason had returned. I wonder what other masks Jason will show up in? It can’t be a chicken mask, because that one is my trademark.
Derik lets me know he sees my lens while Danny, Joseph, and Jon play.
Tonight we are playing bank Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, which in our interpretation means “the comic horror games.” That’s The Addams Family, Ghostbusters, Monster Bash, Scared Stiff, and the league “favorite,” The Munsters. This is going to be our fifth meeting, so keep in mind that it’s the last chance for new joiners to get in the four league nights needed to qualify for finals. See you soon!
There are no pictures this week (that is, the recap for Season 13, meeting #3), and for a change it’s not because I forgot to take any. No, I have pictures, they’re just inaccessible. This is because the exciting news I got Monday morning, which is that my computer had been stolen from Capitol Macintosh during a break-in. Apparently the burglars grabbed two display computers (one of which was a 2002 iMac for some reason) and two computers that were on the workbench being worked on. One of the latter was mine. Capitol Mac has written me a check for the rather pathetic value of a 2012 MacBook Pro, but nothing can compensate the life disruption that happens when someone who is glued to her laptop approximately 75% of the waking day is deprived of it. And the day before I went back to school, too. My new one won’t be in until September 11 so I really hope I don’t crack up before then. My 2007 MacBook – the only other option I have at home – is really not cutting it in this fast paced modern world. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying “I have nothing in the house right now that can read the SD card from my camera.”
I was able to recover my league night notes from my backup drive, so here goes. We played bank Clio, the “magic” themed bank. I started off the night by just about taking apart Tales of the Arabian Nights. I had something like 45 million, very easily my personal best (or “peanut butter” as the cool kids call it) and this without even getting close to rescuing the princess because I really don’t play for modes most of the time. On my last ball, having already played two really good multi balls earlier in the game, I had lamp value raised and a lot of bonus multipliers so I decided to forget lighting locks and just spin the ever-loving hell out of the lamp at every possible opportunity. I rarely get to win the night on a game but I managed it this time. I’d say I stopped Mike from having another perfect night, but I heard that Theatre of Magic nipped that in the bud anyway.
We spent a long time waiting behind a backup on Lord of the Rings. I’m sure more than one person was responsible for that, but I did hear that Joseph had an especially killer LotR game. Meanwhile, Medieval Madness was slaying people left and right with its sneeze-sensitive tilt bob. I saw someone in my group tilt for literally nothing, most likely because it was still swinging from a previous player’s tilt. Lots of people complained to me about the MM tilt but hey, it’s not my game, I just play it (reluctantly). I actually had one of my better MMs in a long time, though, I have to admit.
Danny finished up the night on a huge game of Black Knight: Sword of Rage. We were the last group still playing and he was player 4, so he would not have been able to get in a qualifying game for the Smackdown. As a result he instructed me to plunge his Ball 3 and ran upstairs after Ball 2 to play Star Wars. Despite this, he still had the highest score on BK:SoR. He also went on to win the Smackdown, so I guess it was a good trade. Mike won the B division “Undercard.”
I’d probably be remiss not to mention some other league news even though it is a little bit of a sore spot for me. The good news is that The Avenue now has a Jurassic Park (the new Stern game). The bad news is that The Beatles was moved out for it. As that is a rare game on location and one of my favorites, I am not happy about it. I did go out to the Royal Scot to visit it at its new home where it is in the bar area. I hadn’t been to the Royal Scot in a while so I hadn’t realized how many of The Avenue’s past games were residing there. It’s like The Avenue in Exile over there. Despite my nose being out of joint, we will still be having a Jurassic Park launch party on Wednesday, September 18.
Tonight we will be playing bank Urania, the “stars” bank, which is Attack from Mars, Junk Yard, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: The Even Nexter Generation. We will be starting at 7 as usual, though Joseph will have to get things started as I likely won’t arrive until right about 7. See you soon!
Remember our last league night before the July hiatus? Almost two months ago? Yeah, neither do I. Let me check the photos from the night to jog my memory… er, oops? I somehow didn’t take any photos. What the heck? I can’t explain that. But wait! This is what I keep notes for! Let’s see what my notes say.
Well, first of all, the one thing I did easily remember is that a historic event occurred: the first ever perfect score. Someone had the top score on every single game for the night, and that someone was Mike. This is certainly the first time it has ever happened under my era of the league. I don’t recall it ever happening during the Matt era either, although since I don’t have records of that, it might have happened early on (and if it did, the winner-spinner-chicken-dinner was probably Chris). Mike’s achievement was unlocked on bank Calliope, the “movies/TV” bank. This means that one of the games he had to blow up was South Park, and as Tim once pointed out, that’s a game you really feel more ashamed than proud to put a good score on. Luckily this is the last time we had to play it in league, since it (along with Elvis, which I’m a bit sadder about) left for Guardians of the Galaxy and Batman ’66.
Speaking of South Park, the one photo I did take was this one, showing the narrow margin in my group’s scores. I think I was the bottom one in this group, sadly for me.
Aha, my notes also remind me that we had a few new members joining this time, namely Biff, Jett, and Logan (I swear those are real people and not extras from Captain Scarlett). At one point Logan came up to me to ask who that guy in his group was, the guy who’s really good. I figured out that he meant longtime league member Chris “Dr. Turtle”. I said that we have a lot of good people in the league now but that Chris is rather legendary for having won the first 10 seasons of the league before his winning streak was finally broken by Mike.
After league we had Tuesday Night Smackdown, as usual. The Smackdown champion, on Black Knight: Sword of Rage, was Danny, but my notes say the real excitement was in B division, where Josh ran a huge score up on Deadpool. Speaking of Deadpool, the Deadpool BOOM! tournament from Stern ended during our hiatus with Danny, Mike, and Josh in the 4th, 6th, and 7th places, respectively. That’s right: our little old Lansing Pinball League owned 30% of the worldwide leaderboard.
After the Smackdown tournament, some folks hung around to play for fun as usual. This led to an instant-classic LPL moment. Derik, while playing Metallica, began complaining, “I feel like I’m playing with a tiny little pinball here.” I asked him what he was talking about (I assumed he thought the game was too low on its legs or something). He insisted that the ball itself was “tiny.” Everyone started laughing at him because none of us could tell just by looking at the ball that anything was wrong with it. Derik got indignant and said he was going to prove it right here and now, and he opened up Metallica and laid all the balls from the game on the upended lockdown bar. We all had to admit he was right: one ball was perhaps 1/16″ smaller in diameter. I could see it when they were all lined up together, but I’m amazed that Derik could see it when they were in motion. As a result of this incident, Derik has been given the nickname “Caliper” by Russell.
We’re just about to resume the season with meeting #3 tonight at 7. We will be playing Clio, the “magic” themed bank, consisting of Black Knight: Sword of Rage, Lord of the Rings, Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Theatre of Magic.
Posted inRecaps|Taggedrecap, season 13|Comments Off on League Night Recap for 6/25/19
