Pinball Elbow?

So, my right arm has been hurting for a few weeks... mostly one of the muscles in my forearm hurts when I pick up something heavy, or when I was doing my squeeze ball exercises in the car. I finally went around to going to the doctor and after a few probing questions she said it looks like Tennis Elbow. When I told her my major arm activities were mousing and pinball, she said she thought the twisting in pinball was causing the problem. At this point I told her she was thinking about foosball, not pinball, and described the flipper motion. She agreed that that probably didn't cause the problem, but suggested I lay off while under treatment (consisting of an anti-inflammatory drug, a cream, and wearing a brace).

So I was pretty good and didn't do any pinball until last night, when I went to the end of the season party for the pinball league. It was at a members house, a crazy big affair in the semi-rural suburbs of Virginia. They had tasty Mexican food and a basement filled with pins, almost all 90's and 00's games with a decided bias toward Pat Lawlor. One of the few exceptions was a 1934 World's Series, which was actually kind of a blast to play. There were two contests. The first was a Safe Cracker Assault the Vault challenge, where they inserted a magic token into Safe Cracker, which puts it into Assault the Vault mode, a 90 second ball free-for-all, and the highest score wins. I didn't win that. The other was way more fun than it sounds: Cashball, which was basically a half playfield that Williams put on top of a slot machine (probably to use up pin parts after they got out of the business). It basically autoplays a simple game of pinball, shooting the ball around a track with flippers and autoplungers. Various things get you extra balls, and each time the ball goes through the playfield everything is worth more points. The only interaction you have with it is shooting the ball, which you can get a skill shot. So I didn't win that either, but at the end of the evening I played a few more games... and on the last one I spanked it within an inch of its life. I got about 3-4 extra balls. The highest score had been about 2,700 and I scored over 11,000. The guy who owned it said he'd never even seen a score with 5 digits before. Sadly, there was a bug in the high score function so although it showed I had the high score, it didn't display it properly. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

So on the way home from the party, I noticed that my arm was hurting more than it had been since I started treatment. At that point, I was willing to give my doctor the benefit of the doubt. In the long run, I don't know what I'm going to do about that... league starts tomorrow, and I'm even thinking about doing the Wednesday night league in Baltimore too (subject to my wife's approval, and she wasn't too keen last time I mentioned it). Also, I'm wondering how messed up my arm will be after the pinball show in three weeks. Anyway, we'll see how that goes.

I did have an anemic start to my eBay season... sold 4 out of 9 things for some decent change, including a part I bought for $5 which sold for $17. To add insult to the buyers' injury, I sold a second one I had to the second highest bidder for $16. And I've still got one left. Sweet! But then I spudded last week and almost got there this week, but no go. I would like to sell enough so that I've paid off my debt to the family by the time the show rolls around (about $100 to go). eBay has not had much I want to buy at prices I can afford lately... I don't know if it's the new fees or the changes in seller agreements or what. It doesn't really bother me since I'm still making money, but the guys on rgp are always bitching about it. Well, I suppose waiting for next week to sell means I can get more stuff ready.

Andannuderdendum

This just occurred to me... swapping out the #44 bulbs with #47s in Paragon shouldn't have taken it from anemic to super-bright just on the merits of lower amperage. Now I think that one or more of the old bulbs had probably aged to the point where their resistance was higher than it should have been... one or two of them had the chromed surface of a bad bulb. In deference to the late Michael Jackson, one bad apple DID spoil the whole bunch, girl.

Andthendum

And then I remembered what I was going to type last night, but forgot.

My wife wanted me to play some Katamari on the Playstation over the weekend, but before she made it down to the basement I popped in the Williams Pinball Hall of Fame (follow the link... Amazon has it new for $5.50! Score!). I'd been thinking about PHoF since I read that the PS/3 version is supposed to have Medieval Madness, Tales of the Arabian Nights and either No Good Gofers or Monster Bash depending on who you listen to. I'm leaning toward NGG, though I don't consider that a big selling point... I'd think that MB would require a license from Universal Studios, which would be tough to swing in a low margin game like PHoF. Anyway, I ended up having a pretty good time playing... I finished a few goals and unlocked a wizard mode or two. I still haven't unlocked the two hidden tables yet, so I'll keep plugging along. Williams PHoF seems easier than the Gottlieb one, mainly because the goals in those damn EM tables spank me silly. Get a special in Ace High and Central Park? Please. Give me full-sized flippers and then we'll talk.

Either way, I'm eager to get more PHoFs, even if I have to sacrifice and buy a PS/3 in order to do it. I'd really like a Bally edition, but unfortunately Bally has some really good games that are unfortunately licensed properties (like Wizard! and Captain Fantastic). Fireball should be doable, though. I saw a thing online that said PHoF was actually a surprisingly good selling game, especially given the apparent lack of interest in pinball as a whole. I'd like to believe that's a simple classic games = awesome : new games = suck equation, but I just don't see that. Anyway, hopefully the prospects for new versions with more manufacturers or more games are good.

The other thing I forgot was I attempted to fix a physics problem with Eight Ball Deluxe over the weekend. The trouble is that the easiest shot to hit the Eight Ball target -- from the lower left flipper -- almost always causes a SDTM drain on my game. When I played an EBD at PAPA, I noticed that machine didn't have that problem. My puny brain reasoned that the problem was either that there is some physical object which causes this (either the clear plastic the ball rolls off of or the post at the bottom of the 8 ball target enclosure) or my machine was not in balance. The latter seemed likeliest, as I think I've only formally balanced one of my games (Quicksilver, when it was kicked upstairs to the living room). So Saturday night I decided to see what I could do. A level told me that the player-side legs were definitely off center by a bit. I tried turning the feet of the legs, but they appear to be a little rusty and wouldn't turn. I didn't want to turn this into a big production, so I cut up some cardboard squares and shoved them under the errant leg. The result? Maybe it's a little better, but not much. I think I'll need to watch it over the course of many games, and possibly take the glass off and study it in depth... probably I should keep records of how many times I lose the ball from that shot and why.

OK, this time I've said everything I wanted to say.

#2!

The pinball league finals were last week and I came in a solid second place. I did great in the first half when I was playing against the other top five finishers in my division, but I pretty much choked for most of the second half with the top three. But I'm more than happy... this is my first time, so second place is good enough. I will say that there was some pretty good pinball going on... one guy who'd been knocked out of the A-Division finals was playing Twilight Zone and got Lost in the Zone in two subsequent games. Then there was the guy who almost rolled over Strikes and Spares in one ball (~900K points).

Points were given out depending on your place, and there were prizes with point values, so the end of the night was basically the shopping segment from Wheel of Fortune (the game show, not the pin). I got a framed Whirlwind translite, a Williams window sticker, and the rest on a gift certificate for the Spiegel Catalog.

I got some repairs done over the weekend. Black Knight has blown the playfield light fuse, so I replaced that. I also finally replaced the upper ball lock plastic which I've had for years but never gotten around to. The sound on Eight Ball Deluxe has been goofy, and it got to the point where it was saying the wrong things... it would say "Get the 15 ball" instead of the 8 ball. I reseated the J2 plug that goes from the CPU to the sound board, and that fixed it... so that's basically two connectors on the CPU with problems I'll need to address at some point.

Then yesterday I started thinking about Paragon's weak feature lights, and rather than fixing the power board I decided to take the easy approach and replace all of the #44 bulbs with lower power #47 bulbs to see if that helped. I ended up swapping almost 50 bulbs, and that did the trick. It's still not great when doing the lamp test, but during normal play the bulbs are nice and bright, even when the Paragon letters are flashing. It was an easy fix that I should have tried sooner.

The next couple of weeks are going to be busy... eBay season is starting soon, the White Rose show, the next league season, the league party, plus my usual crapload of non-pinball related activities. sheesh!

Results!

Well, I came to PAPA last weekend and ended up having a lot of fun. I went up on Friday. It was a pretty long drive -- over 4 hours with limited stops -- but when I got there it was pretty impressive. It's basically a huge carpeted warehouse filled with lots of fairly well-maintained pinball machines. The center area was roped off for competitions, but all the other games were available for play, usually for 50 cents each. Then off to the side there was the big board showing scores and standings. There are a handful of video and novelty games for the kids, too.

The collection is pretty awesome. A lot of them are organized by theme, so you have a Space area (with Space Shuttle, Space Station, Star Trek, Attack+Revenge from Mars, Space Invaders, etc.), a Zaccaria section, an early EM section, etc. I got to catch up on my recent Stern games (24, CSI, and Batman) and play some super-rare games (Varkon, Blackwater 100, and Joust to name a few). And to contrast the lame-ass crap that you see at shows, all of these games were in perfectly reasonable working order -- maybe not all perfect, but highly playable. I can't think of one game I played that was mechanically not up to snuff.

The competition went OK for someone who didn't care whether he won. I entered two tournaments, "Classics" and the lowest division... if I had managed to make it to the playoffs in C division, I would have had to have come back on Sunday, but I didn't think I would and I solidly met that expectation. Classics was mostly EMs and a few early SS games, and I was in the top 8 for an hour or so. I ended the day in the top 25% out of 100 players, which I thought was fine. I even had a top 10 score on one of the games, but that was balanced by my bottom 10 score on another. In C Division I can in just out of the upper third, and playing a couple of sucky games didn't help... I only got points for two of my five games, Batman (which I did spanked in practice) and Doctor Who (with which I was able to use secret techniques gleaned from playing at home, namely racking up a huge playfield multiplier then starting multiball). Both games I finished in the top 40. Overall, I had a good time and I thought I did fine for my skill level.

I did meet up with a couple of people from the league, which allowed me to have the novel experience of actually hanging around with people at a pinball-related event. I even got to play a few games with a guy in my division, which was pretty fun. We played a few games of Joust, which is a blast with two players... you play 3 normal balls, then the game spews all the balls out onto the playfield for 30 seconds of nuttiness. I was invited to join the group for dinner, which was nice. It did keep me out later than I would have liked, because they were all staying in hotels and I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me. So as soon as we got back, I jumped in my car and drove.

The trip back was hard but not the helldrive it could have been. Towards the end I was stopping every 30 minutes or so just to keep myself in drivable condition -- not helped by all the budget-related rest area closures. I finally made it home at 2:30 AM.

Next week are the league finals, so we'll see how that goes.

And one final note, on Saturday I beat my current high score on Paragon with a score of 962,000. I basically got the 40K super bonus on the first ball and the 5x multiplier for most of the balls. Assuming uniform scoring and adjusting that to a 3 ball game, that would have put me in 4th place for that game in the B Division at PAPA. Sadly, I checked the Classic Joe scoresheet from my youthhood and found that my top score for the Big P was 1.02 million, so I have a little farther to go before I can do le Danse Superieur on my 18 year-old self.

Consolation Prize

Possibly as a way of making up for my lousy performance at the pinball league, I finally beat Davros on Doctor Who last night... just once, and there weren't any crazy multipliers at work, but I managed to do it.

ugh

Week 9 was a bad week, and I just got home from Week 10 and it sucked pretty bad, too. My warmup games were crap, and my league games were crap. Luckily the other guys in my group were mostly playing from crap as well, because it was like a toilet backed up or something. It was made worse by one of the guys in my group listening to his iPod the whole time, which I found kind of rude. I should still be able to get into the playoffs, though.

Next Friday I'm heading up to PAPA for some pin in the 'burgh. Hopefully I'll play better than I did tonight.

I did have a lucky Doctor Who repair incident. I started playing a few nights ago and I'm surprised I hadn't noticed it before, but there was only a screw where there should have been a post and bumper at the bottom of the Repair Targets and the Hang On corridor... looking at an old picture confirms it. Anyway, I must have whacked the screw askew with a well placed ball. Luckily, my basement was arranged such that the spare playfield was right behind me, so I took the post & rubber off and put it on in the working game. Problem solved!

Longtime readers will be tired of this refrain, but I'm starting to get a hankering to work on my playfield project again. I even rearranged things slightly so that Silverball Mania, my designated experimental playfield, is set up next to the desk. Something's bound to happen now!