Whoa.

Week 8 of the pinball league went better than expected. I am still in first place and got a pretty good score, considering I wasn't even there. Jack*Bot was one of my group's games, so my triumphant 4 B point score was counted, and I stole a point for that as well. My group also had Mousin' Around which was a good score, I just barely eked out a win on Skateball, and even my old nemesis Star Trek gave me a second place finish. That plus 4 bonus points (apparently, the match points are considered a virtual fifth machine and a scored accordingly... yoink!) gave me 16 total points out of a maximum (?) of 20. I'm now at #9 out of 19. I guess I'll find out next week if I'm going to move up to Division A or stay in B for the whole season.

The big question is whether my performance of the last few weeks is because of the practicing I've been doing. Honestly, I don't know. I feel like I'm playing better now that I've learned some of the advanced techniques and put a name to some that I already used. And I tried keeping track of my scores when I played at home, but I didn't stick with it so it would be hard to judge from that.

Now I'm getting super antsy to find out how I do in the last two weeks... will I continue doing well? Choke? Become so smug that collapse in on myself and start to burn? Probably it will be some combination of those, but I'm really interested to find out.

On a side note, we also went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was pleasantly surprised by it, because it certainly wasn't what I expected. I guess the filmmakers took advantage of the fact that this was basically an all-talking exposition book to make Harry Potter and the Extended Surreal Tone Poem. The entire movie was like a dream... kind of a nonsensical dream if you haven't read the book, because they had to leave so much out to fit it in 2.5 hours. A pretty bold choice and extremely cool for a big movie franchise... especially since it looks like they intended to do that, as opposed to the second Transformers movie, which apparently is an attempt by Michael Bay to remake Dali & Buñuel's Andalusian Dog with giant robots.

How'd THAT happen?

I'm not really sure how this came about, but I am #1 in points at the pinball league. I think it's just a matter of luck and a handful of good scores on key machines. The league scoring has this rule for "point stealing", where if your score is greater than the sum of the two players beneath you, then you steal a point from the lowest scorer. For example, normally you get 3 points for 1st place, 2 for 2nd, and 1 for third. But if player one's score is 5000, P2 is 3000, and P3 is 1500, since 5000 > 3000 + 1500, P1 will steal P3's point, so the points will be P1 = 4, P2 = 2, and P3 = 0. I think P2 & P3 can steal from P4, but I'm not totally sure how that works since I thought P4 gets 0.

Anyway, I'm not sure how long I'll be on top or what that will get me if I manage to stay. I'm definitely at the top of the B Division, so another good week or two will move me up into the bottom of A Division, where the players are WAY better than I am.

This week I'm not going because tomorrow is my wife's birthday and league night probably wouldn't go over so well. So a few weeks ago I pre-played all 9 games and those scores will be used for this week. I did pretty well on a few of the games, so I'm hoping my group will get Jack*Bot (4 billion points!) this week instead of, say, Star Trek TNG (FAIL).

Not much going on in the repair world lately. I'm kind of focusing on striking a subtle balance between getting the house clean and sitting on my fat lazy ass, so there hasn't been much time for anything other than furtive practice games here and there. I have sold a couple of spare parts by answering Mr. Pinball want ads to the tune of about $50. I also traded a work table in my workspace in exchange for milk crates full of my records that were in my wife's workspace, which definitely worked out better for her. But the lost work area did give me a little extra storage space so I could move three rogue playfields from in front of a file cabinet into my area. It also got the playfields out of our basement's flood plain, so that's good news for sure.

By the way, the Nintendo DS games that I found a few weeks ago? Instant Karma did get me after all... knocked me right on my head. Last week I carried the Super Mario 64 DS cartridge in a backpack pouch separately from my game case, and something happened to it so now it doesn't boot. I guess in a way Karma had already gotten me when I tried to play Sonic Chronicles, because that game was so bad that just playing it was like being punished.

Training? Luck? Or some third alternative...?

I forgot to mention that since I started training, I've become the Loop Champion on Doctor Who twice in as many days. I honestly can't attribute this to anything I've been doing, except possibly that I'm getting better at the shot. I even hit it enough times in a row to get the ramp door to close, which is the game's way of saying "Cut it out already."

Still no sign of a Davros Multiball, though.

We're gonna need a montage

League continues. I went up in the standings after the first week, down after the second, up after the third, and I lucked into going up slightly last time because I got extra points due to my score on WHO dunnit being greater than the 2nd and 3rd place players. I also decided to go way out on a limb and register for PAPA in August... I'm going to go for one day, mostly to play, but also to see how I do in a real tournament setting.

However, I'm starting to run up against my inconsistency as a player. I haven't really competed against similarly skilled players in at least 25 years... not since my days in the UCLA game room between classes and playing Blackout with me mates in the old King George V Pub between dart games. Since then, I've mostly played alone and I've been focusing on touring each game's features rather than scoring boffo points. Being an irregular player wasn't really a problem, because if I goofed up I'd just play another game until I was satisfied.

But with all this competitive playing I'm doing lately, I'm suddenly motivated to improve ma skillz. So like Little Mac before me I have to go into training.

I started by watching some videos by this guy Leo Something-or-other. Unfortunately, there was very little useful information... they're geared mostly towards the novice player, with just a few advanced tricks.

A more helpful resource has been ipdb's playing skills pages. Novice and intermediate were pretty obvious, so I started trying out the advanced skills. I did the Chill Manuever last week during a league game on Jack*Bot so I can at least do that, even if I can't necessarily do it reliably (and it's hard to practice because none of my home games have a post). I've done the Bounce Pass and Hold Pass, so those are a matter of learning to use them consistently in play. The one thing I did learn is something I don't think they list (but Leo shows): Passing the ball between flippers by holding the ball then quickly flipping so the ball goes up the inlane then back down with enough velocity to bounce to the next flipper. I practiced for a while with the glass off so I could try it multiple times, and I've gotten reasonably good at it.

The thing I really need to work on is shaking the machine to influence the ball, something I've never done much. I'm trying to work on the Up Push when the ball is in the slingshots and nudging when the ball is near the in/outlanes. Yesterday I nudged when the ball was past the switch in the outlane, but today I was doing it before it hit the switch... still too late to do anything, but I'm doing it earlier. I'm also not positive that I'm doing it in the right direction. It helps that I haven't hooked up the tilt on Doctor Who, though shaking the machine in any way causes the Dalek Dome to move around since it's not screwed down.

Finally, I've started keeping track of my scores so I can try to see trends, hopefully improvements. I used to keep a list of my high scores when I was a kid... I still have them, in fact... I think the high score on Quicksilver is from that list.

Now I'm going to fade out in my montage... If you fade out, it seems like more time has passed in a montage. Montage!