We had the last qualifying night of Season 18 two days before Thanksgiving, which probably accounts for it being a slightly smaller turnout than usual. Some of the bad luck we had with games in the last two banks continued. Joseph had his score suddenly jump by 160 million points just by flipping a few times on X-Men, so I was going to pull the game for having a stuck switch, but Derik went to look at it. He put it into maintenance mode, couldn’t see anything wrong, started it back up and flipped the flipper about 100 times and nothing happened again. Then he turned to Joseph and said, “So you want to be a pinball tech.” I declared the game “good to go unless anything else happens” and as far as I know, nothing else did. We weren’t so fortunate with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which went back to its old tricks and this time Derik wasn’t able to fix it before league, so we ended up with Black Knight: Sword of Rage instead. The way we handle this with the split banks is that everyone is just ranked against other people who played the same game. This results in a bit of weirdness as we then have two 100s, two 99, two 98s, etc. for the fifth game of the bank, but that’s better than trying to make an entire half of the league scratch and replay a game.
The other members of my group were Derik and Tim. I told everyone I would do my best to keep the average game time down but instead Tim and I both tore up Godzilla, causing Derik to complain that it was throwing his game off having to wait so long in between balls. Later, Tim finished up the night by playing an absolutely epic 14.3B game of Attack from Mars. Their last ball must have gone on for half an hour and I think they had three Total Annihilations on that ball alone. They had all the elements of Ruling the Universe except for not having destroyed Mars yet. I was really hoping to see it happen but unfortunately due to league rules, Tim ended up by having to plunge off at least two extra balls.
Nathan’s friend and league spectator Christy showed up again, and I clarified that I had indeed spelled her name wrong in the last league report. However, she was so pleased to have been mentioned in the league report that she could not stop reassuring me that she didn’t care I had spelled it wrong. Nevertheless, I have the correct spelling now. Christy has declared that she is the league’s official cheerleader (she revised this after deciding “groupie” wasn’t really the way to go) although I think it would be great if she just joins as a player next season.
Danny ended up winning the qualifying season, with Josh in second and a tie for third between Brian and Tim. Dan N. would be the top seed in B division, except that there’s been an unexpected development: Danny let me know he would not be able to make it to finals because he will be on a cruise. He said that he knew about the cruise and knew about finals but somehow had just not put together in his head that they conflicted – we’ve all done something like that. This means that Josh will get to be top seed in the final tournament and former B division champ Dan N. is going to have to play with the big dogs in A this season.
We had a Tuesday Night Smackdown game on The Mandalorian, and wouldn’t you know, the random number generator decreed that we would play the B division on Star Wars. The champion this time was Heather – yeah, that’s me! I think this might be only my second Smackdown win. Jason won the B division on Star Wars.
Tonight we’ll have our final tournament and then next week will be the Super-Ball, also known as the Zen tournament, our post-season split-flipper tournament. Tonight will also be a second chance for people to collect the launch party badge for X-Men, as I made an error getting the badge enabled for our launch party so people did not receive it as they should have. Just come anytime and log in at some point during the night and you should receive it.