lilfluff

Silver Balls '025 would be the 150th pinball tournament bunnyhugger has run through Matchplay, a web site that does great at organizing matches and keeping results straight and all that. It would also be the first one she's run without using her computer to do the computing work. She had a used iPad Mini, formerly her mother's and replaced as a Christmas gift, for the work and did it in a trial by fire, for the biggest and highest-profile open tournament she runs in the year.

Or almost. There were fewer people this year than usual --- 21, I think, with a couple leaving early --- including the absense of a couple people like MWS and BMK. It might have been the weather; they promised snow starting about 9 pm and that'd be lousy to drive home through. It might be the way the state pinball rankings shaped up this year; there weren't many people who could push themselves into contention, or improve their standing worth anything, by taking a high rank in this tournament, partly because a huge tournament in Bay City the weekend before took that spot. No telling. Still, people came, people bought in raffle tickets --- the raffling off of a couple boxes of charity prizes also being done by an app on the iPad Mini --- and there were some random draws for door prizes, t-shirts and the like, so that all went well enough and left bunnyhugger with a fattened wallet to bring and deposit later than she really wanted to.

The tournament itself started a little past the scheduled time, with bunnyhugger's voice fading under the stress just as her megeaphone was fading under battery fatigue. I had to repeat some stuff for her. But we were under way, groups of three or four players. In the fair-strikes format, the person winning a game gets zero strikes. The person coming in last takes two strikes. Everyone else takes one. The big difference between this and progressive strikes --- where you take one strike for everyone who finishes ahead of you --- is that near the end of the night, when there might be three or two people playing, someone's always taking two strikes in a round, cutting the finale rounds in half.

My first round was in a match against DMC, a very much stronger player, on Kiss, a game I'm good on, and some other people. DMC had a lousy first and second ball while I had my decent-but-not-exceptional play. And then DMC went and had a ball that not just kept on going on, but kept getting to higher levels of achievement, climaxing in something called Kiss Army Multiball that I have never, not in a decade of playing this game, seen or even heard of before. He said it was a surprise to him too, though I don't know if he meant he didn't expect to attain it or didn't know it even existed.

So, I took a single strike. And I got a single strike on the next game, Metallica, ordinarily a strong one for me but today being mean. That's all right, though; I figured if I averaged one strike a round I'd be in a good place overall. Then on the next game, Attack From Mars, I finished last, taking two strikes. I made that up the next round, The Addams Family, just squeaking out bunnyhugger to her delight. So the next round, Mandalorian, yeah, I took last place again and now I was in the do-or-die position where I'd have to win every game to continue. That sound be on Stranger Things, where my path once again crossed bunnyhugger's.

Stranger Things is another of those games that's usually in my back pocket, but I just wasn't having it balls one or two. Meanwhile FB, a new guy, was calmly running away with it. My last ball I would have to make up a hundred million points to beat him and, you know? For a while it looked like I might do it. I fell far short in points, about forty million or so, but that's because I had the bad luck to drain at the start of an Upside-Down Mode that, completed, would have brought me pretty near the top.

So I indirectly mentioned how I gave one strike to bunnyhugger. She had a frustrating tournament, taking one strike in every single round until that Stranger Things game where, thanks in part to my strong finish after a mediocre start, she got two strikes and was knocked out. I did try to help her to at least a third place, which would have let her continue, offering advice on how to get the (timed) skill shot, but the game didn't let her play long enough and, critically, never gave her --- and only her --- a chance at an Upside-Down Mode that's normally good for tens of millions of points. Had she got that even once she'd likely have gone on at least one further round and then, who can say where she'd have ended up? We tied, instead, just above the median for the whole group.

In the rounds after we were eliminated more people gained their seventh strike, three in the next round and then one more each round after that. Finally we were down to three people, DMC (no surprise), FAE (also no surprise), and DG, who was having a killer tournament. He started everyone by beating both these A-rank players in The Munsters, and was doing pretty well on Deadpool until a catastrophic moment. After DMC put up a monstrously high third ball, DG went up for his turn, forgetting until after he plunged that it was FAE's turn. This meant that he took a last place for the round, automatically, and that knocked him out. FAE finished out the game even though DMC observed --- and we didn't quite understand it at the moment --- that the outcome didn't actually matter. DMC would win unless FAE beat him two rounds straight, whether or not FAE took first place this game. (FAE did, it happens).

The next game, drawn up at random, was Rush, which you'd expect to be an automatic win for DMC. I mean, you know DMC and Rush. And yet, somehow, FAE won, getting halfway to overtaking the guy who'd been on top of the tournament all day. Next game, randomly drawn: The Simpsons Pinball Party, which DMC started out by putting up about ten million, a plausibly winning score, right away. FAE would need until the end of ball two to match this. DMC plunged the third ball, which pinged right into the outlane --- bad luck --- and we discovered that the game had no ball save.

Every couple years someone at Stern pinball gets the idea that factory settings should include zero ball save time, and everyone hates it because modern game design supposes you should have some minimum play time, and they go back to being normal for a couple years. But Simpsons was one of those no-ball-save games (The Munsters is another), and the game was probably reset to factory setting a couple weeks ago after MWS's Saturday tournament and nobody complained to RED about the problem since then.

And now this change just screwed DMC out of --- well, he'd still have had to make up FAE's score, plus enough on top for whatever their third ball would have been. But screwed him out of a chance to play, and it sucks to lose that way and it kind of hurts to win that way too.

But it was a win, FAE's third(?) in a row at Silver Balls, which would earn them permanent possession of the trophy if we had a travelling trophy.

And while it was past midnight, it was not so outrageously past midnight. We got home and to bed at a reasonable hour for New Year's Eve Day, ready to see what 2026 might start like.

But for now, you're going to see what Plopsaland was like in its 25th year and final month under that name!

Peeking around the track of SuperSplash; you can see some animals that I don't think were Heidi-linked particularly. As you get back to the station you see them, though.

People getting into a train car.

And here they're ready to dispatch.

Here's a close-up of some control button with the thing.

And here's a view out the window of the station, which is pretty nicely decorated, you can see.

We're ready for the next ride, and here's the exit side.

Trivia: In 1920, at the start of Prohibition, the United States Coast Guard fleet consisted of 26 inshore vessels, some converted tugboats, and 29 cruising cutters, one of them based in Evansville, Indiana. Congress would not approve any significant additional appropriations for five years. Source: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent. Okrent mentions this was for just under five thousand miles of coastline, which I think means he's discounting Alaska entirely, which is fair because Alaska at the time had about twenty people so smuggle whatever you want in, it doesn't matter. But also you kinda can't actually measure coastline, thanks fractals, so I'm not sure what the five thousand miles represents.

Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.