I’d just like to be clear - anything I say about the game has absolutely nothing to do with Mike and his generally shit attitude. There are lots of questionable people in pinball past and present, lots of “gruff” ones too. I never let that influence my opinion of games.
That said, I am completely gobsmacked at the people who like Thunderbirds. I am completely incapable of understanding how that is possible because everything about how it feels and plays is anti-fun. There are no good shots, no flow at all, two separate SDTM drops (from the left “orbit” and center ramp), and the main effect of the island separating and essentially dribbling out a ball is so anti-climatic to border on offensive.
Then there’s the code - the wood-chopping tedium of spelling “INTERNATIONAL RESCUE”, the non-sensical ball lock, how basically nothing happens but you bat a ball around for a bit until you want to cut your own throat just to bring you sweet release. There’s also a bunch of weird graphic decisions, like the counter that runs down to zero then jumps back up to 10?
Then there’s the build quality - a plastic lock down bar that if you blow too hard will rip off, the belly button flipper buttons, the weird attention paid to engineering (the Rube Goldberg contraption to move the trees a few millimeters) versus the paper thin ramp to nowhere.
Absolutely every detail about playing this game is horrible. Maybe the stuff inside is good, but we know the the electronics are a rip-off of a design by an amateur hobbyist (sorry Ben, but it’s true) so I wonder about the rest of it as well.
So when I hear “it’s fun!” I just wonder what alternative universe I’m living in and if maybe I could play the game these guys are playing.
You’ll note none of what I said above has anything to do with Mike as a person. That said, I do feel a little more freee to be honest publicly given his attitude, so maybe there IS some credibility to the idea he’s his own worst enemy.