You were doing that BEFORE they reached this level of fuckery. They used to make solid decent games with finished code and not too many QC problems. When they did have problems, they used to quickly ship new parts or even playfields. Games were less than $4k. New collectors don't remember that collectors used to HATE Stern. In the rec.games.pinball days, it was non stop "Cheap toys. Cheap printing. Pixelated cabinets. Bad licenses". You were there lol. When I professed my enjoyment of Iron Man and Avatar, I got REAMED!!!! Today - collectors like Xfassa are happily buying $8k & $15k Sterns that are poorly designed, falling apart, and uncoded...but they look good, eh!?!?!?!?

Trent forgetting to secure the GBLE he promised me was a stroke of luck...and my choice to cancel my GB Prem is the best choice I ever made.

But hey, enjoy "restoring" your 2016 Limited Edition lol.

I disagree that they're on the level of Williams games now. TSPP, LOTR had the design & toys and stuff that was clever and WORKED...and code out the wazoo. Sure, LOTR and TSPP had re-purposed toys on the playfield...but everything else was gold. The magnet causing the ring to hover in mid-air in the magnet: awesome. Balrog was a cool light up bash-toy. The gold wavy-wireforms were very cool. The sword lock was awesome, and the way it let balls go for flow was clever. In TSPP, the garage is cool, the upper playfield was awesome, the TV on the upper playfield was innovative. The physical couch lock is neat and relevant to the license. POTC wasn't my favorite, but it was very popular and had a Williams-level toy with the ship! Plus a nice little half-pipe ramp and other clever features and unique design. FGY by Lawlor felt and played like a WMS game. Spider-Man was awesome. Even though no one gives a crap about them, I think WOF and CSI were very clever games with really cool toys. ACDC is incredible. Metallica is another WMS-esque game. Anyway - my point is, they were making really great games back before the "new wave" of collectors appeared on the scene. Not as solid as WMS games...sure, I'll give you that...but they weren't crap. Playfield clear wasn't chipping off. Things weren't as untested and incomplete as they are now. Designs weren't fundamentally flawed like GB. I'll take the old days of the 2003-2010 $4k games all day long over what's going on now.

It's very similar. Stern was down to a bare-bones staff for a while, and John Borg was designing all the games while Lonnie/Lyman came up with a "stock ruleset" to work with. Rolling Stones (not Borg), Iron Man, Avatar, Big Buck Hunter, and Tron are very very similar in rules and gameplay. The hardcore "B/W snob" collectors massivly pushed back on Stern for these games, claiming they were the epitome of cheap (stock toys instead of custom, more plastic/less molded items, no subways, no metal ramps) and shallow (relatively modeless rulesets). They weren't wrong....but at the time they never bothered to actually PLAY the games to discover if they were fun or not. All of these games are extremely fun (although I'm not a fan of BBH, but that's due to theme). While some saw these as dark times for Stern....I think it was one of their better periods. The games played great, the prices weren't insane, the code was finished, problems were minimal cuz there was nothing to break lol