Last week’s league night – the second meeting of Season 4 – was a night of shakeups. Sarah ruled the night, leaving Alex and Chris in her dust in second place. Two of last season’s Battlers for Third, Joseph and Mike S., landed near the bottom of the pile. And Austin Powers found an entirely new way to break.
Greg gets ready to play TotAN while Danny plays a side game of Getaway.
Joseph had a lot to live up to, because of his recent spectacular game of The Walking Dead. Chris said to me, “I asked your husband what he did to get that score. He was less than helpful.” “What did he say?” I asked. “He said ‘keep the ball in play.'”
We had been scheduled to play The Walking Dead, Theatre of Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights, and World Cup Soccer. As I predicted, WCS was still down. I was dismayed to learn that we would be playing Austin “Ugly and Talks Too Much” Powers instead. Before I could even ask Mike to break it for me, it turned out that Austin Powers was broken too. Greg had previously broken a piece off its plunger which had subsequently fallen into the ball return mechanism. Thanks, Greg!
Unfortunately, the substitute that we did eventually play was The Simpsons, renowned as the most brutal game at the Avenue. Mike’s bad showing this week was due in large part to an abysmal Simpsons game that saw him get his ball returned to him twice. If The Simpsons pities you enough to give you a second chance, you know it’s bad. Unfortunately his second chances didn’t score much better. He redeemed his pride by setting a high score with his league game on The Walking Dead.
Joseph glares at the camera with the look he usually reserves for a game that has offended him. OK, so I didn’t get any good pictures this week.
Joseph can blame his disappointing night, in part, on a catastrophic (289K) game of TotAN. Just as he predicted, he also utterly failed to live up to the legacy of his epic Walking Dead grand champion game. Instead, he seems to have passed his luck on to me: I earned about 53M, a personal best by a good margin, on my league game of TWD. I was feeling pretty darned good about this when, a little while later, I happened to look over and see Sarah taking the game apart. She was in the high 60 millions and counting. I didn’t see what score she finished with, but it was certainly a good one. I was not surprised to see her first place finish this week.
As on the previous league night, Jake suggested – no, insisted – that we go to Theio’s afterward. Joseph, Alex, Sarah, Aaron, Jake, Mike, Sam, and I headed over to Theio’s, where they pushed tables together for us. Greg ducked out on us at the last moment but promised to come next time. It was a bit earlier this time (Jake had promised Sam that they wouldn’t stay in Lansing until 1 a.m. again) so once things broke up Joseph and I actually headed back to the Avenue, where we played some games with Aaron before finally calling it a night sometime after midnight.
The standings after the second meeting have shifted considerably. Alex is now in second, just one point behind Chris, and Sarah has moved up to third. The season is still much too early to make predictions. It will be very interesting to see how things develop at our next meeting on February 10.
I do want to say, I’m not holding out on Chris or anyone with Walking Dead tips: I have absolutely no idea what happened on that Grand Champion game or how to repeat it, and I don’t understand anything about the rule set beyond that it seems to be a good thing to hit the well walker and hit the house a bunch. And anything flashing. The only thing I know that kind of works is, don’t lose the ball. And for this week, I kept losing the ball. Oh, so many lost balls, on so many machines. So, so much draining.
Hahahahahahah…..Got a good laugh from your response, Joseph.