tjsynkral's ratings

I've played Stern Playboy a couple of times and it ACTUALLY is a nice player with great flow... but I don't care for the theme and art on it. If this machine was re-themed I'd jump for it. As-is it's kind of a waste of a nice player.

CFTBL was an instant hit for me. I first played it on TPA, and was addicted... then I saw one up for sale and knew I had to try the real thing. The real thing is even better, although it's just as hard! I keep mine on 5 balls, even though I can complete FILM in 1 ball now, new players struggle to get there in 3. This machine looks great in LED (it's rare to see one that isn't converted) but I pulled my cool white LEDs out of the dimming GI because they flicker at low intensities. I wish I could have the cool white lamps but with flicker free fading - this machine looks so much better with cool white than warm. I tried it with the dimming off and the light show is a little boring without it.

The flippers are very wide, and a lot of low posts and missed shots punish you with a middle drain. This is a machine that you have to nudge to succeed at. The tilt callouts are funny. I don't think the hologram adds that much or is very important to the game, but I'm fortunate to have a decent blue-green original hologram. I also added the pop bumper lamps that should have been there to begin with and it really improves lighting in the back. Visibility behind the ramps is no issue to me, but I'm tall.

All the ramps are fun, although the best one isn't available until multiball. I wish someone would create a new ROM for Creature that has another mode that uses the whirlpool ramp and a way to get a 3-ball multi. But as-is the machine is still great and not leaving anytime soon. Great use of theme!

The premium game is much, much better than the pro and should have been the lowest option available. The lower playfield does not play like a "real" pinball, like in Black Hole, it is more like Stewie Pinball - but it is still kinda fun. The LED lighting is excellent, and is an example of how an LED stock lighting set should be implemented (not like WOZ...).

A few comments that are common between Pro and Premium: Playfield has very little theming going on, it just seems like pictures of the AC/DC cast everywhere and lots of target lamps. The laser cut FIRE button is cool. The game plays fast and fierce. The music is repetitive, being that it is all AC/DC and that you sometimes are stuck on the same song for a while. Speech... well, there's not any, it is very quiet if you play this next to a Metallica pinball. If you're not an AC/DC fan, it might spoil this pin for you, and you'd miss out on a good playfield layout. The DMD doesn't do much... the only thing I really remember on the DMD is the Angus Young moon match game.

It's a good machine, but they should have only made the Premium and not bothered with Pro. It's so obvious that the Pro is a neutered Premium and not the other way around. The huge, ugly Angus Young face where the lower playfield would be, and the cardboard image of the band, just screams "You bought the lame Pro version, what's wrong with you?"

A few comments that are common between Pro and Premium: Playfield has very little theming going on, it just seems like pictures of the AC/DC cast everywhere and lots of target lamps. The laser cut FIRE button is cool. The game plays fast and fierce. The music is repetitive, being that it is all AC/DC and that you sometimes are stuck on the same song for a while. Speech... well, there's not any, it is very quiet if you play this next to a Metallica pinball. If you're not an AC/DC fan, it might spoil this pin for you, and you'd miss out on a good playfield layout. The DMD doesn't do much... the only thing I really remember on the DMD is the Angus Young moon match game.

In my opinion, DESW is the best Star Wars pin.

Main complaints: Multiball requires a lot of work, some shots are oddly placed.
Main praise: The music is great, the ramp is one of the best in pinball, and the music is Brian Schmidt's excellent "made-to-be-MIDI" style.

I've played JPop's other "greatest hits" - TOTAN and TOM - and they just do not compare to CV. CV is "the machine" - the one in my collection that makes other pinball collectors impressed and jealous every time.

Best bash toy? Definitely. Hitting the ringmaster is every bit as rewarding as hitting Rudy in FH, but much more important as part of gameplay in CV. Also, you can hit him with your main flippers, no need for an upper flipper. Dropping your ball under his head and into the subway is a great way to finish him off. The flow is good, although it can be a bit slow compared to other games. This is a game you get into for the modes and the theme, and not just its basic flow.

The rest of the machine isn't shabby either. The playfield mounted DMD is an idea that should be copied more often. The sideshow modes are awesome (except Copy Cat in the home rom, Copy Cat just sucks). The physical ball locks for high wire and juggler are nice. The light dimming effect is used very cleverly. The neon is awesome, especially in neon multiball.

The music is great, and jumps into different tunes often enough to keep you from getting tired. The speech has a lot of attitude and adds a lot (the speech in TOM just annoys me, to compare). There are so many "easter eggs" in the machine that I keep finding new things many months after buying it.

AFM is a fun and fast player. I'm fortunate to have one on route near me, because buying one of these now is way too expensive.

Pros: Gameplay fun, good bash toy. The dancing martians and exploding saucer are cool. No
Cons: No speaker panel art, fan layout is a little boring and I just tend to ignore most of the shots and focus on saucers and MARTIAN targets. But the biggest con... Its price.

I've read that Steve Ritchie rated this machine his favorite SRP designed machine, and I can agree with him on that. I've played the most amazing pins from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, and this one clobbers them all as the best actual playing experience.

The play is fast, but at the same time, you have amazing control. A common complaint about the machine is that you can play it with one hand - yet nobody says the game is "easy." The thing is, the flippers are close together, so if you lose a ball down the middle it's your own fault. Likewise, on the left you have a kickback, and on the right you have a magna save. I have mine set to give you both of those at the start, and you can re-light by hitting the KNIGHT targets. Draining on this machine can't be blamed on any kind of lack of control, it simply tests your skills and reflexes.

The dual playfield is excellently laid out. On appearances, I first ignored this machine because it looked the same as the original BK. I find the original BK to have poor flow (on the playfield, the ball is slow, and on the ramps it's too fast), but this machine has speed and flow comparable to ACDC plus a better layout. The pop bumpers are surrounded by rubber bands so you can get some great rebounds back into the bumpers for a good run.

The skill shot is, in my opinion, nonexistant. I don't know if it is just my machine, but even if I manually put the ball at the top of the launch wireform and let it roll down from a dead stop, it still goes past the WIN lanes and goes straight to the flipper. I've gotten close to hitting the N in WIN from the launch by nudging, but I've never made it happen. The only benefit you get from not pulling the plunger all the way is the ball rolls to the flipper a little slower for better control.

The music is not for everyone, but I find it enjoyable. The main theme will be stuck in your head forever. But, my favorite has to be the Double Knights Challenge music. Many pinballs try to use MIDI to represent real music, and it flops for that reason, but this pinball has music made for MIDI, and it sounds awesome. The sound effects are also very catchy. The speech is just awesome - the Black Knight (voiced by SR) laughs at you when you miss the Magna Save and says No Way when you hit Multiball when it's not lit! In attract mode he randomly says "Give me your money."

My main complaint about the machine is its stock speakers have the fidelity of soup cans. There's a lot of distortion and, having played this pinball in a PinMAME before getting the real thing, I knew right away that upgrading the sound would be my first mod.

The lighting is great in this machine. The light show is very well coordinated, with things like the "lightning bolt" effect when a multiball starts. This is one of many pinballs that sequence the lights faster than incandescent bulbs can responds, so I expect when I LED upgrade mine it will take to it very nicely.

The alphanumeric display has excellent animation. I find it to be very well thought out and it impresses me more than some of the weaker DMD animations.

The mirrored backglass is amazing. I'm lucky to have a flawless backglass, and it is a work of art. The cabinet art on BK2K is just OK.

For anyone who was disappointed in BK and passed this machine up, you need to reconsider.

I don't get it. I've played WOZ and I don't understand why people keep talking about this machine as if it's... GOOD.

Here's the thing: I think a lot of people were so excited to hear about JJP and a new line of pinballs, that they're in denial about how awful this game actually is.

The way I describe WOZ is, let's throw every gimmick and toy in the machine because those are what people want! People want toys and multicolored LEDs and full screen video, so let's just give them those things and not worry about anything else.

Toys are fine, but most of them don't add anything to the machine. If you look past the toys, the playfield layout is lazy, clumsy, and not intuitive. The RAINBOW shots - kind of a big deal - have no obvious path to reach them and your best chance of hitting them is a ricochet off the pop bumpers or something else in that area.

The sound feels like sound torture used in Guantanamo Bay to force prisoners to talk. The best sounds in the game are forgettable, but when I go through the OZ rollovers and get that nails-on-the-chalkboard chime, I feel a headache coming on. (It doesn't help that my arcade has this machine on maximum volume, meanwhile the Stern pins with GOOD sound are turned way down.) The only way the sound could have been worse is if there was a "brown note" in the sound effects. The music is just the ONE SONG all the time - the Yellow Brick Road song. Sure, you get different songs when you start modes, but the modes are short and then you're back to the YBR again. The MIDI soundtrack is very stock and boring, and I would actually have preferred if they had the munchkins singing. Really, would it have killed them to sample the real music from the movie?

The lighting - I love LEDs. I have converted all of my machines, and I love finding LEDs in the wild. The all-LED lighting in ACDC Premium is top notch. This machine is just a rainbow-colored pile of puke. I get it - the theme is rainbow - but you can't ONLY have rainbow lighting in a pinball. If it were balanced out with some basic cool white or warm white lighting, it would be much better. In a dark arcade, the lower center of the playfield (i.e. where the flippers are) is BLACK - there is no GI on this machine and you're playing blind.

The only thing that makes me keep putting tokens in is just how punishing the machine is. I hate center drains like this with a rubber post, and this is no exception. The center drain is where I lose the most balls on this machine. The outlanes are extra-wide, but both sides have a recovery feature that isn't too difficult to activate - however it's just a waste of time and makes me miss a traditional set of outlanes.

The scoring - it's LOW. I'm used to high scoring seen on most DMD machines - a lot of them give you a million points just for pulling the plunger at the beginning of the game. Good luck EVER getting a million points on WOZ. This is the first machine in a long, long time where the match game is on the ones digit instead of the tens digit.

And the display. This was supposed to be a big deal. There are moments when a full-motion video appears on the screen, and that's cool. However, most of the time, the screen just doesn't have anything to do because all the action is on the playfield! What do you end up with? A goofy scarecrow doing a lame dance next to the score display. This technology upgrade is not in and of itself a good thing unless you can come up with better video for it to show, ALL THE TIME. Of course this display was at the expense of backglass art, which is non-existent. Instead, have a little backlit strip with the WOZ logo.

One last criticism, the objectives of the game are not clear. Instruction card? Nope! The LCD tells you to hit RAINBOW to start TWISTER, but tells you nothing of any other objectives available to you. This game must have been made for home owners, the type of people who give you a personal tutorial whether you want one or not. But in the arcade, this machine seems WAY out of place.