Silver Spring, MD
Rating pinball machines is always going to be somewhat subjective- different people have different things they look for in a pin, and there's never going to be complete agreement on what machines are better than others. That aside, I think there are some sources of "bias" in the rankings- by bias I mean factors that have nothing to do with how good the game is that make some games get rated higher than others. Note, this is not meant to be a criticism of the rankings, just an interesting thing to think about. Two sources of bias that I think I've noticed are:
1. More recent games/remakes tend to get higher ratings than older games. A new game comes out, people get excited about it, and that makes them more motivated to come on here and rave about it than they would be with older machines. So, a newer game tends to automatically rate a bit higher than the same game would if it had come out 10 years earlier. I mean, I love Iron Maiden, but is it really the 3rd best game of all time?
2. Hard games get rated too low. Whether or not people prefer harder games is certainly a matter of opinion, and there's nothing wrong with someone who doesn't like games to be really hard ranking those ones lower. But, I think there might also be a tendency for some people to want to come on here and trash a game because they're pissed off that it just kicked their ass (of course that's not what they say in the rating comments). The five hardest games in the top 100 that I know well enough to have an opinion about are TNA (#21), Iron Man (#30), Houdini (#36), Flash Gordon (#66), and Dirty Harry (#92). All of those except Iron Man seem to low to me (especially Flash Gordon and Dirty Harry- those are both all-time greats!), even taking into account that not everyone likes those kinds of games.
Anybody notice anything else like this?
