GOT is one of my least favorite pinball machines of all time. I find the rules design to be completely atrocious, incredibly unbalanced, and extremely unfun. The scoring is ridiculous and makes discrepancies that are both intimidating and defeating to new and casual players. On top of that I'd say the game has some of the worst artwork on any Stern machine, as well as dots that feel crampt and unable to properly convey the information they're trying to convey.

ACDC is one of the greatest pinball machines ever made. It has a fantastic balance of risk and reward, with each mode providing a fairly unique and relatively equally viable approach to playing the game. With both of these being Steve Ritchie designs they can tend to be a little grindy, so that's something to be aware of going into either option, however with ACDC having the Song Jackpot constantly looming over your head can make that grind feel more exciting.

I've played many, many games on both of these machines on location and in tournaments. One I hope to never play again, and one I would gladly own.

My best example of this showed with Pingolf. We had Game of Thrones at a Pingolf competition a couple years ago (shortly after it released), and the Pingolf goal score had to be in the hundreds of millions as to make it something that the competitive players would actually have to be somewhat challenged to achieve.

The Pingolf competition used the current common scoring scheme where you can get as high as a 10 on a hole based on how far you were from the goal score after ball 5 (by percentage).

This lead to situations where casual players who weren't familiar with how GoT is played would step up, play 3 balls like they would on any normal pinball machine, and get 10 million. Instantly getting them the worst possible score they could get on the game, and making them feel like they played like absolute trash, even though they had a fairly average game as far as game-time and making shots was concerned. Typically I'd expect a game to have some base-line level of reward for average level play, but Game of Thrones has absolutely none of that. You either know what you're doing and get things going and get big points, or you just get nothing (or you get lucky and back door yourself into big scoring).