We went to Chuck E. Cheese's! Mom, Stephanie, Kevin, and I went at about 7:00. It was really fun. All games only require one token. Stephanie brought her own Chuck E. Cheese brand token dispenser, and about 15 tokens, plus all four of us got 25 more tokens with the pizza. Before the pizza was ready, Kevin and I played Skee Ball while Mom and Stephanie ate their salads. Generally, Kevin's better at Skee Ball than me, but I'm not bad. During our first game of Skee Ball, our movements mirrored each other (really, he's left handed), especially when we threw it too hard and it bounced back simultaneously. I did pretty well at Speed Skee Ball, a game I made up where you have to play Skee Ball really fast. Skee Ball always gives you four tickets (except for the broken one on the right). I think my high score for Skee Ball was 210,000 pts. Stephanie won with a high score of 320,000 pts.
This reminds me of a humorous anecdote that happened at Chuck E. Cheese about a year or so ago. Mom, Stephanie, and I went (same place) and played Skee Ball. Suddenly, the machine started spewing out 400 tickets! It's fun when they're all connected. We redeemed them for a Firefighter Chuck E.Then the pizza was ready. The real reason I went. We had half pepperoni and half combo. While we ate, Chuck E. Cheese appeared on stage! He sang
Help I Need Somebody Help Not Just Anybody for the first song, and for the second song, the duck/chicken/bird sang a love song to Chuck. It was a bit awkward as an audience (actually, we were the only ones eating there).
After pizza, we all went to play Skee Ball, except the machine on the right wasn't working. And since there were only four Skee Ball machines, we couldn't play four-player. Oh well. There were other fun games there that we played too. The Super Speedway game was fun. Ordinarily, the game gave out four tickets, but if you were good enough, and broke "the all-time record", you won
ten tickets instead. I did this twice! I was surprised to learn about that jackpot. Kevin couldn't beat the jackpot, so at least that compensated for my stinky Skee Ball playing (don't get me wrong here, I love Skee Ball).
However, not all games are fun. Hitter's Rally (I wrote the names of these games on a napkin so I wouldn't forget them) was the game from hell. You had to press a button to make the machine pitch the ball, then flip a lever to swing the bat. The annoying thing was that half the time, the machine would pitch the ball
too far for the lever to reach. It was really annoying, like I've said. And when I could actually hit the ball, it ended up going far to the left, and I could barely catch the ball with part of the lever. If I could keep doing that, I could hit the ball well, but then
the lever would stop working and I would lose! ARRGH! I only got two stinkin' tickets from that game.
There's also a ride of sorts that costs one token. You get to sit in (or stand behind, in my case) a car with Chuck E. as a passenger! And it takes a picture! Whee-hah! We took some funny pictures. Altogether, it wasn't the best thing there, and it gives you no tickets, but it gives you a memorable picture!
Behind the Chuck E. Ride was my favorite game there: Buzzy Buzzy Bee. It's a box-shaped machine with a fan in the bottom that blows bee-painted ping pong balls into the air, and you have to use a net-like stick to catch the bees in mid-flight and pour them into a "honey container" to score points. It takes some practice, but after a while, it's pretty easy, and it's not hard to score three bees at a time. Sometimes the ping pong balls fly right into the honey pot without any assistance. I guess I liked it even more because it has a
Double Dare-esque feeling to it. It even has a 30-second time limit (okay, it's 35, but it has the same feeling)! I love this game, and I love it even more because it gives you
five tickets, each time you play! My high score for this game was a remarkable 21 pts!
With 30 minutes left before the place closed, we had to redeem our tickets. They have these really cool machines (they had them last time too) that you feed your tickets into. It counts them as you insert them, and when you're done, you can press a button and it prints you a receipt. By the end, I had 182 tickets. Altogether, we all had 541 tickets! There really were no prizes I was particularly interested in except for two plastic lizards. That cost me only 30 ticket points. Everyone else added together their ticket points to get a kickball that has a picture of Chuck E. on it. And Mom got a pretty little foldable flower thing that she has in her car.
Well, that was my two hours of fun at Chuck E. Cheese. I hope you enjoyed reading about it.
