Our second meeting of August was the penultimate qualifying night of Season 14. (Despite what Kyle Kaminski of the City Pulse thinks, penultimate means “second to last.”) It was the last official “Labor of Hercules” as the final bank would be determined by a combination of throwing in all the games that hadn’t yet been played and voting on the others. Traditionally, Hercules’s final and most difficult labor was to subdue Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld. (Fun fact: the Lernaean hydra, namesake of one of our earlier banks this season, was Cerberus’s sister!) The games in bank “Cerberus” were chosen because they either have vicious dogs or hellhound-like creatures in them, or because they related to Hades in some other way.
The biggest slowdown of the night was Junk Yard, with multiple groups playing very long games on it. A few people might still remember the first Silver Balls tournament in December 2015, which ran so long that we were in danger of not finishing before the bar closed. For the final game, I rigged the software to choose from only the two or three shortest-playing games we had in order to get things done as quickly as possible. The game that got drawn was Junk Yard, notorious at the time for its touchy slam tilt. Back then, it was considered a good game for someone to get 10 million on it. Times have certainly changed and now it is one of the reliably long-playing games. In my group, I felt sorry having to remind Biff to plunge off several extra balls as he was having a complete blowout of a game.
The disappointment of the night for at least some players was that Joseph’s group broke Stranger Things, and this after Joseph had put up around 100 million on Ball 1. We had to take it out of commission – I think the only time we had to do that with a game this season since Derik keeps everything playing so well – and play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead. Or at least some people played it. I did something while standing in front of it but I am reluctant to call it “playing.” At the end of my game I angrily declared, “I have just played the worst game in the entire history of pinball.” Mike tried to reassure me that my game was only terrible “so far” but he had missed the brutal fact that I’d just finished Ball 3. I think he just could not have imagined that someone could end a game of TMNT with 15K points. For perspective, the second worst game of the night on it was over 800K. I’m going to be very surprised if I don’t get the “Worst Score” ribbon this season. Someone else would surely have to slam tilt to make that possible.
We did not have a Tuesday Night Smackdown but we are going to be starting them again for our next league night tomorrow. The random drawing has decreed that our Smackdown game will be The Getaway. For the actual league play, we will be playing the miscellaneous bank which I have belatedly decided to call “Augean Stables.” If you want to know why I called it that, just go read up on the Labors of Hercules and you’ll probably figure it out.