Skee Ball and Other Dave and Buster Hijinx
This weekend Jen and I went to Dave and Buster’s with four friends for dinner and games. Dinner was good and whatever, but that isn’t the important part of the night. The important thing is that I forgot how much fun you can have playing skee ball. So there I was with about $40 bucks on a Dave and Buster’s funny money card that just screams, “Swipe me in any of the gaming hall’s 300,000 electronic money-stealer slots, but make sure you do it in as rapid a fashion as possible because it isn’t like these “credits” represent real money anyway!”
So, I did. First, we played some skee ball for big points and big amounts of tickets. I learned how to play skee ball from my dad a long time ago at Midway Park at Chautauqua lake. Always bank the ball off of the left side. You can really maximize your efficiency by nailing lots and lots of 40’s, with the occasional 30’s and 50’s. While going for the 100’s in the corners is tempting, it is usually not worth the effort as we have never mastered a 100 point roll. I did spend a couple of games trying out a spinning technique where I would give the ball a right to left spin and roll it down the center. I was able to nail the 100 a few times, but I couldn’t do it with any consistency. Everyone (except me) was tired of skee ball, so we decided to move around to the other areas of this adult version of Chuck E. Cheese.
We went over to the networked driving game to see who the best video game racer was. This is the cool video game racing where the four people sitting next to each other are in the same race. This is when I decided that a joke isn’t funny unless you execute it wire to wire. So, I decided to choose the automatic shifting option, which everyone scoffed at at first. Then I hit the start button, grabbed my beer and drove the entire race with a beer in my left hand, drinking on all the straight-aways to come in second out of four drivers. Nobody appreciated the maneuver as much as I thought they should have, but I guess I can’t complain because it is only perfect if you are able to come in first place.
Then, we decided to grab some replica movie rifles to take out some Aliens in the game named after the movie. Shooting games aren’t quite as fun as they used to be. I think the pinnacle of video game shooting was a game like Operation Wolf with the two machine guns and the grenade buttons. These newer games move around so much that they could give anyone motion sickness, and they are so hard that they just chew up money, no matter how good you are. As a side note, I am curious how our wars would go if we could arm our soldiers with guns that had built-in napalm and built-in grenade launchers. I think they would do well, but somehow, even with that firepower, in video game world we weren’t able to get that far.
More importantly, the allure of racking up high scores in exchange for meaningless tickets at skee ball was again calling our names. So, we went back over to skee ball where the machines were starting to malfunction. One machine malfunctioned to the point that it started me off with 1000 points. I started knocking down numbers and tickets just kept pouring out of the machine. Trust me when I say that all the little kids were extremely jealous.
It was almost time to go, so we took all our tickets, stuffed them into a bucket and gave them to some 5 year-old looking kid and his mom. It was kind of funny to see the kid’s face when his mouth turned into a giant letter O.
On the way out, Jen wanted to play one last game. They had the horse racing thing where usually you control a squirt gun and squirt into a target and the horses fly across the board until someone squirts their way to victory. Unfortunately for a disappointed Jen, they changed the game so that you have to roll a single pool cue ball up a board and into holes. Depending on which hole you put the ball; the horse will walk, trot or run. I won the first game. Some kid won the second game. On the third game my friend and I decided to corrupt the Dave and Buster’s universe. When the game started, I gave my friend my cue ball, so he was rolling two at a time. Believe it or not, he was somehow able to pull out victory. Before we could feel too badly about cheating all the kids sitting at the game, we were out the front door and on the way home.
And I think I found a use for that extra bedroom that Jen and I have in our house.
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I am better at skee ball than you. What no pop a shot?
Sounds like a challenge. I am willing to take it.
We did pop-a-shot too, but nobody seemed into it all that much, except me.
we should’ve made it out. Shannon is the queen of skee-ball.
eff this job.
I love skee ball!!!!