[Continued from Part I]
Then the dreaded plateau hit. When you first start learning (or restart, in my case), your results usually rise swiftly, simply because you have so many avenues for improvement. But after you've learned the basics, further progress becomes harder and slower. You have less paths for improvement, although someone at my level still has plenty of path to follow, but it is harder to walk down them. Instead of worrying about basic aim and traps, you now worry about "I have to keep the ball out of the pops, because Lite Extra Ball is lit on the door and I need to collect it before it changes or I'll get screwed out of an extra ball". And then you worry so much about this that you forget your basics and drain, usually in a stupid way. But now you have enough skill to know it was a stupid drain, and so you beat yourself up for it, which makes your play even worse. Pinball suddenly becomes a mental game.
So there I sat for weeks, stuck at 500M and 13 panels. Once I got 14. The "?" is flashing! One more shot to start LITZ! Chooooooke.... "GOD @#$%! IT!" Followed by a 60M game because my head was no longer in the right place to play pinball.
One night I reached 14 panels three times. Choked three times. But I had had a field day with Powerball Mania and the regular multiball and jumped up to 902M and the first high score, and then it clicked. The table is going to give it to me soon. I'm good enough that I can get close to LITZ more than once in a blue moon. I've seen the high score lists. One day soon, it will surrender.
During all this time, I of course continued to play TPA, now on my iPad in addition to the 360. I had been pursuing a similar quest in RBION - to reach Atlantis - for four months with no result, despite hitting Frog Frenzy four times. But one week after the 902M TZ game, the pinball gods smiled on me and I reached Atlantis, as recorded in maximum size font on the RBION Tactics and Strategies thread. (Hey, I was really happy!)
So I went to CP Pinball that night thinking the gods would smack me down off my pedestal, that I had expended myself on Atlantis, surely it would be a sub-par night. A few hours later, I watched the slot machine reels align themselves for Lost in the Zone. "You have reached the end of your journey" indeed. And then the DMD ticking off the rules for Lost in the Zone, with a giant boom at the end of each one:
POWERFIELD IS LIT
DEFEAT POWER FOR 50,000,000
CLOCK MILLIONS IS LIT
HITCH-HIKERS ARE 2 MILLION
GREED TARGETS ARE LIT
SUPER SLOT IS LIT
DEAD END IS LIT
TOWN SQUARE IS LIT
SHOOT LEFT RAMP FOR 10,000,000
(And yes, all that really does run simultaneously, with all 6 balls in play. It's quite the competition for what to display on the DMD, although you really shouldn't be looking there during LITZ...
)
One hundred twenty hours of effort, for a 45-second wizard mode. Absolutely irrational behavior in any sense of the word. But those were probably the happiest 45 seconds of my pinball life so far. It was a terrible LITZ objectively, only 207M; I think random flipping might have done better. But it's hard to play objectively when you're nearly in tears with joy.
I think the collective reaction of the patrons was "Thank God! He's finally done it. Now we don't have to listen to that infernal jackpot sound effect anymore, nor fear for our lives when his game's not going well." (For the record, I tried to keep the swearing under my breath. I may have had a moment of weakness. OK, I may have had several moments of weakness. OK, sometimes I was continuously subvocalizing a stream of curses.)
I've started playing in a league now. I'm doing better than I thought I would, having never played competitively before, and it's a great deal of fun. I think I'm going to have a reality check this week, as I've risen in the standings enough to be punching considerably above where I think my weight should be. We will see. My 4.6B physical AFM score is under modified tournament conditions (3+1 balls, subsequent extra balls are plunged but not played) on a machine with full-open outlanes. The next week on the same table I only managed 872M. Such is life with the silverball.
I have not seen Lost in the Zone a second time. The TZ has turned on me, probably because it needed a good cleaning and new rubbers after all that play I put on it, and so now it's considerably faster and more squirrelly, not that it was ever even slightly slow or well-behaved before.
So if you're returning to real pinball as well, don't get discouraged if you crash and burn horribly the first few times out. Just keep at it, and eventually it will start falling into place.
Then the dreaded plateau hit. When you first start learning (or restart, in my case), your results usually rise swiftly, simply because you have so many avenues for improvement. But after you've learned the basics, further progress becomes harder and slower. You have less paths for improvement, although someone at my level still has plenty of path to follow, but it is harder to walk down them. Instead of worrying about basic aim and traps, you now worry about "I have to keep the ball out of the pops, because Lite Extra Ball is lit on the door and I need to collect it before it changes or I'll get screwed out of an extra ball". And then you worry so much about this that you forget your basics and drain, usually in a stupid way. But now you have enough skill to know it was a stupid drain, and so you beat yourself up for it, which makes your play even worse. Pinball suddenly becomes a mental game.
So there I sat for weeks, stuck at 500M and 13 panels. Once I got 14. The "?" is flashing! One more shot to start LITZ! Chooooooke.... "GOD @#$%! IT!" Followed by a 60M game because my head was no longer in the right place to play pinball.
One night I reached 14 panels three times. Choked three times. But I had had a field day with Powerball Mania and the regular multiball and jumped up to 902M and the first high score, and then it clicked. The table is going to give it to me soon. I'm good enough that I can get close to LITZ more than once in a blue moon. I've seen the high score lists. One day soon, it will surrender.
During all this time, I of course continued to play TPA, now on my iPad in addition to the 360. I had been pursuing a similar quest in RBION - to reach Atlantis - for four months with no result, despite hitting Frog Frenzy four times. But one week after the 902M TZ game, the pinball gods smiled on me and I reached Atlantis, as recorded in maximum size font on the RBION Tactics and Strategies thread. (Hey, I was really happy!)
So I went to CP Pinball that night thinking the gods would smack me down off my pedestal, that I had expended myself on Atlantis, surely it would be a sub-par night. A few hours later, I watched the slot machine reels align themselves for Lost in the Zone. "You have reached the end of your journey" indeed. And then the DMD ticking off the rules for Lost in the Zone, with a giant boom at the end of each one:
POWERFIELD IS LIT
DEFEAT POWER FOR 50,000,000
CLOCK MILLIONS IS LIT
HITCH-HIKERS ARE 2 MILLION
GREED TARGETS ARE LIT
SUPER SLOT IS LIT
DEAD END IS LIT
TOWN SQUARE IS LIT
SHOOT LEFT RAMP FOR 10,000,000
(And yes, all that really does run simultaneously, with all 6 balls in play. It's quite the competition for what to display on the DMD, although you really shouldn't be looking there during LITZ...
)One hundred twenty hours of effort, for a 45-second wizard mode. Absolutely irrational behavior in any sense of the word. But those were probably the happiest 45 seconds of my pinball life so far. It was a terrible LITZ objectively, only 207M; I think random flipping might have done better. But it's hard to play objectively when you're nearly in tears with joy.
I think the collective reaction of the patrons was "Thank God! He's finally done it. Now we don't have to listen to that infernal jackpot sound effect anymore, nor fear for our lives when his game's not going well." (For the record, I tried to keep the swearing under my breath. I may have had a moment of weakness. OK, I may have had several moments of weakness. OK, sometimes I was continuously subvocalizing a stream of curses.)
I've started playing in a league now. I'm doing better than I thought I would, having never played competitively before, and it's a great deal of fun. I think I'm going to have a reality check this week, as I've risen in the standings enough to be punching considerably above where I think my weight should be. We will see. My 4.6B physical AFM score is under modified tournament conditions (3+1 balls, subsequent extra balls are plunged but not played) on a machine with full-open outlanes. The next week on the same table I only managed 872M. Such is life with the silverball.
I have not seen Lost in the Zone a second time. The TZ has turned on me, probably because it needed a good cleaning and new rubbers after all that play I put on it, and so now it's considerably faster and more squirrelly, not that it was ever even slightly slow or well-behaved before.
So if you're returning to real pinball as well, don't get discouraged if you crash and burn horribly the first few times out. Just keep at it, and eventually it will start falling into place.
