Despite having no cards worth anything I actually had a pretty good day of games at March Hare Madness. I finished first place on three games, not all of them against little kids there because their parents wanted to be there. One of them was a game of Stranger things I barely squeaked out ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bunnyhugger on. She complained, correctly, that I beat her by less than the value of one skill shot. I had to answer, also correctly, that I showed her (after ball two) how to make the skill shot, a timed one that she was plunging too hard to meet.
I did not make playoffs. I was a couple of points short, caused by coming up third in a three-player group on Star Trek. This was the game where I'd have been able to with best effect use my steal-another-player's-score-after-ball-one card, except even that wasn't too much of a difference. Really I was sunk when MAG had an extremely good last ball. But even if I'd managed second, I'd have had to do one place better on either Kiss or Medieval Madness and neither game, ordinarily a friend, was giving me the flow I needed.
bunnyhugger also did not make playoffs. Mercifully, my squeaking her out on Stranger Things was not the thing that broke her. She had an extremely good night all around, never getting worse than a second. But there was only one game out of six that she got a first place in, and she'd have needed two more first-place finishes to make it in. She wasn't as consoled as I'd hoped by my pointing out she had a lot of good play; I mean, to come in second in groups that have both DMC and FAE in them, or both RED and BMK, is really playing great.
The finals would be between RED (top seed), FAE, DMC, and PCL. They would be run by the same sorts of rules as qualifying, with everyone able to play cards and win cards and use them to do anything except replace someone in the group with someone in another group. (We had to explain to RED why he didn't want to give up that card, though; there's other cards where someone can make you give up one of your cards, and useless cards are shielding against that.) I forget whether RED picked Star Wars: Fall of the Empire or whether the game got swapped into that, but it doesn't matter; he put up a game poor enough that I could aspire to it, while FAE played for roughly 26 hours without draining. Also PCL played his own swap-after-ball-one card, stealing FAE's lead, only to see FAE top their own impressive start.
Second round RED tried playing cards to go back to Fall of the Empire, and other people counter-played cards that put everyone on AC/DC, a game that's ordinarily very nice to me. After a shaky start RED started to shine again and also I discovered that something I'd accepted about the game --- that extra balls are a purely random mystery award --- was wrong. At least, incomplete. Get a preposterous number of combo shots and you can light extra ball too. AC/DC was already a game that rewarded combination shots but this makes focusing on them a tiny bit better yet. Not much; it is too many combos for how hard they are to gather. But the extra ball is there. There was also a brief confusion in multiball as RED wasn't sure why one of the sets of drop targets wasn't resetting. Turns out in multiball you have to complete both sets of drop targets before either resets. Good to learn.
The final game, getting on midnight, ended up being Scared Stiff, one of the Elvira games. At this point it was ... well, anyone but PCL's to win; he could hope at best to get second. One of DMC, RED, and FAE would be taking home the big trophy.
It was DMC, the not-quite-foreseeable result; he just got in on ball two and kept on playing, I believe including two rounds of the Terror From The Crate multiball and if I have that wrong, it's all right. It's close enough. Somewhere after 12:15 we were staggering upstairs to hand out the trophies and take winners' photos and to applaud, in a very small group.
After thanks and congratulations and cleanup we were diligent about going through the checklist of all the things we'd brought into the venue --- iPad mini, camera, phone, pinball box, Critical Hit deck, and so on --- and forgot bunnyhugger's travel mug used to smuggle in coffee. The security guy has sometimes warned her to toss out the coffee and fill it with water, so what might happen if the staff found the mug with the remains of eight-hour-old coffee in there? Turns out, nothing; it was in lost-and-found the next day and the bartender was happy to return it. Some problems are easy.
And now to one of the easiest things out there, hanging out at an amusement park. In these pictures we're out of ZooAmerica and back into the park and into ... another arcade! What do we find there?
Yes, it's Hercules! The giant-sized yet not actually interesting pinball machine that Atari made and aimed at ... well, amusement parks. With success, since we've seen ones now at three parks. Cedar Point used to have two; Canobie Lake [used to?] have one; and now HersheyPark.
And a puppet show! Much like we'd see at Marvin's, or that we did see at Story Book Land down in South Jersey. Unfortunately, as you see, we can't place a coin in the slot because it demands a card we weren't going to buy.
But here's a closeup of the puppets and we can make our guesses what it would look like. Pretty sure that professor-y guy on the right was in a Rankin/Bass Christmas special.
Some more pinball, or pinball-adjacent games like a baseball game and the Hi-Score Pool. Fireball is a perfectly normal pinball of the 70s.
And then here's Comet, which we've only ever seen on location once (a pizza parler in Traverse City), the 2013 Star Trek, and a game called Ice Fever we hadn't seen before.
Ice Fever's a 1985 Gottleib game and you can see on the side there that the scores for Star Trek are pretty darned respectable. Game must be in good shape and it's got to have serious players come through. This implies we might have had a chance on that Star Wars from earlier, if we'd been able to drop a couple dollars in and play.
Trivia: A crew procedural error caused Apollo 8 to lose the onboard state vector and platform alignment during the transearth coast, at 106:00:26 mission elapsed time. Realignment was done by 106:45. Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference, Richard W Orloff. NASA SP-4029.
Currently Reading: A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day, John Withington.