You have Tron and Iron Man. Both "template games" along with Avatar, BBH, and TRS.

Sometimes it works.

I don't think anyone's giving them a pass...I just understand why they do what they do. I'm not gonna blind-buy, that would be giving them a pass. I'll wait and play it and judge it on that experience.

I get where you're going with this. But to be fair, the vaunted Williams games that we all enjoy so much have lots of commonalities across the board. Heck, look at the progression of Lawyer games. If that were today, people would be freaking out from Whirlwind to Funhouse to Addams to TZ to Road Show.

There's only so many ways to skin a cat and Stern is a manufacturer. Yes, our little Pinside segment of players wants this Guardians machine to be wickedly unique... but 95% of people that will ever touch the game will be drawn to its art... will chuckle at the calls outs... and will get a kick out of dumping a few bucks into the game before moving on to doing something else. Know what? Probably 100% of them will never think twice about the originality of what they just experienced.

You gotta frame these machines for what they are (and what they were back in the heyday of the 80s/90s).

Sorry, if this has been mentioned before. I've haven't been following GOT religiously. Anyway, if Stern couldn't get full rights to the soundtracks it would have been cool to let users insert their own "Awesome Mix". Still could have been fully incorporated into the gameplay with sample songs, but give the home users the ability to swap in .mp3 files to fit their taste. Would have even fit with the theme of it being a mix tape.

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I wasn’t making any excuses just an observation. There is a lot more software work in a machine today than there was 20 years ago. If you can’t admit that then you are just being a hater.

It wasn’t harder back then just different. There were different problems to solve with different tools.

As technology gets better it doesn’t always get easier, because you start talking more difficult problems.

As far as video quality goes, it will evolve just like the dmds did. I know my TWD has great dots compared to my Checkpoint.

stern just keep putting out pins with ramps, decks, slings, plungers.

they are all so similar.

We are working on a shooter plate in the same fashion as our Mustang shooter plate - cast metal excellent finish and a quick easy install.
Also working on a shooter skill shot tape...to be determined.
About 4 more items on the punch list, waiting to play be fore we go further.

Guardians of the Galaxy pinball Early Gameplay

also...

and...

Man, I can't say I'm loving the LCD programming.....it looks so disjointed, like a bunch of random clips thrown on the screen.

(Thanks for posting those links)

Seems pretty rough. Lightshow and LCD programming are pretty basic and the LCD stuff feels really cut and paste/static. Like when you're choosing your character at the beginning, they're just still images when they could have at least some movement and there could be sensors and gauges moving and doing random things to make it seem more complete. Also, showing full body makes less impact than torsos where the characters could be much larger and more visible. Makes it look really blah from the start.

You can’t be serious? This game is kick ass and is going to be a HUGE seller for Stern. A lot of people are saying that this game is better than JJP’s new POTC game. That is saying something there considering all the hype that game got and how beautiful it is. Everyone was hammering the last nail in Sterns coffin and look what they just did, they crushed it! People counted them out a little too early looks like! I guess you can’t please everybody but most pinheads are pretty excited about GOTG.

I think he just said it's early and commented on the animation from a design perspective and is correct they are not following art 101 rules.

The games looks fun and will sell a shitload as will pirates, because the truth is all of us with our opinions here on pinside are not the center of the universe, we account for probably 5% of the market and operators just care about the new marvel and Disney game!

Can you explain the rules to me? It sounds like you know a lot more about the game than I do. Just a quick explanation of which type of rules, how modes are integrated. If they’ve crushed it I have to assume I missed that somewhere.

That may be premature.

I love the theme, but the vids looked kinda boring to me. Were they amateurish? Yeah, but at the same time, it seemed pretty uninspired.

Then again, the glare from the glass made it tough to see at times, so at least with an LE the invisiglass will help with th....oh, wait.

Does the orb open on the Pre/LE?

Groot shooters!

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IMG_20171115_222234 (resized).jpg

Those look way better than Stern's version

Hat's off to the original developer for shooter mods

I got to say that the clear coat is looking good and the playfield looks solid

Oh so shiny....

you take those crocs off right now

Haha and it's Crocs with socks

And so it should.

You're easily pleased.

Well, the MSRP bullet has been bitten. I'll report back with my guinea pig findings asap. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A MARKET POST IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS......

edit: get your trade offers in now and be first on the list to be considered.

I worked a full day, fed my kids and put them to bed all by myself before painting these shooters. I have no shame in the crocks with socks!

quit working on new stuff and let's get those damn BSD torches worked out!!!!

No, I am serious. Stern is in desperate need of an art director with experience in game animation to fix their anemic efforts making their LCDs come alive. This is what, four games in to the Stern LCD age and it still looks like a class project? The animation and general polish isn't even in the same league as the 20% finished PotC that was shown.

Is it just me, I find something special about DMD games... I dunno what it is but I like DMD's better than a full-blown screen. I was playing my indy last night that has a color DMD in it, and it's amazing.I would say the same for my Pirates, and Terminator 2, just love DMD displays.

It's enough visuals that I can actually peek at it here and there and still play the game. The newer games with these screens chocked full of full-color video and imagery is like a cognitive overload for me.

ANd another bonus is DMD games boot up in about 1/4 of the time

Not just you.. I'd have preferred a coloured LED DMD setup over an lcd screen

It's the same reason people love retro games...we still love how NES and SNES games look. There's a charm to that type of art designed within product-specific limitations. We see NES style art, we know it's NES. We see SNES style art, we know it's SNES. We see DMD style art, we know it's pinball.

And here I was gonna drive the IMVE to ya...oh well

You aren't wrong. Whoever is in charge of the LCD animations at JJP is very good IMO. They can be busy, but they look nice doing it. I know a lot of people liked the Aerosmith animations and such, but there is a lot that could be improved there.

They start on the next game right away, and maybe do some cleanup on previous games. They're not sitting around with their thumbs up their ass. Also they might be working on multiple new games concurrently.

3 teams, 3 games per yr

Math is simple. Avg of 1 title per yr per team

That’s “average”

Thanks for posting this footage,
I didn't want to seem like a spammer haha but it's the best footage that I could take this week at IAAPA...
The game is bright but not too bright, shinny but not too shinny and colorful but not too colorful.

So you know better than an *actual Stern employee*?

I understand that you're just reporting what you heard, but think through the math of what you're saying: Each programmer has 4.5 months to complete a game before it ship. Then shifts immediately to the next game, on which he will have 4.5 months. So each programmer should have 2.66 games per year shipping. We know that's not the case (in real life we see about one game per programmer per year), so that cannot accurately reflect Stern's process.

As a programmer and systems engineer in charge of various projects throughout my career, I would imagine the misunderstanding is they have 4.5 months to do the actual coding/programming for a particular game. However, before that time starts you have to do the design of the framework, the rules, the data types, and do all of the work on the lower level routines (think coining, hardware drivers, video drivers, support new hardware, new node firmware, upgrade routines etc). All of that support work must be done by the team(s) also; most likely while the game is being designed.

I highly doubt, the mechanical people design a game and then just hand it to the software team and say 'here, you have 4.5 months to get it working'. Most likely they have been involved from day 1, in meetings etc and when it is finalized, they are told to go on the actual coding which could reasonably be 4.5 months budgeted.

No, but that's what they tell me. Each game is different.

To put a game together its seems obvious and straightforward it takes one year on average.

"However, before that time starts you have to do the design of the framework, the rules, the data types, and do all of the work on the lower level routines (think coining, hardware drivers, video drivers, support new hardware, new node firmware, upgrade routines etc). All of that support work must be done by the team(s) also; most likely while the game is being designed."

I think that is exactly what they're doing! That's may contribute to the ineffective release cycle and they lack of completeness on launch. I see evidence of a lack of collaboration between system design and software. There are machines where inserts do little or nothing. Callouts seem to be recorded before the rules are complete. Etc.

Coders should be given a vision for the design of the rules and playfield. Rules and playfield need to be designed together!! I think it's clear that they are not. That would speed development and lead to innovations in game play.

Echo SilverballNut

The animations that I have seen on games look good to me. Batman looks good, Star Wars looks good, Aerosmith is amazing, not sure what you want?

Yeah, I agree but I'm not sure what the fix should be. I mean do we actually want movie clips or perhaps it would be better if they had screen stills? I just can't see how this can work in a pinball game. I'd rather have a character live action video clip for key shots and the rest of the time have animation on the screen. Just cutting and pasting the clips just does not look right. I can't explain it, the future of pinball LCD would look better if they use the movie clips and mixed them with animation. For example the WOZ ball lock was the ball rolling down the hallway in the castle...or the Hobbit ball lock was the the ball rolling down the rope bridge in the troll tunnel. It was still the movie but it was manipulated to belong in the pinball game. Not the haphazard way the video clips are playing in this game. If the future is going to look like this then I'd say bring back the Dots.

It makes a big difference. You can only see the Joker laughing in the same clip so many times...

They're essentially doing the clips the same way they did clips on the dots games like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Tron, etc. Shoot a shot, get a clip relevant to the mode. However since "black with score" doesn't look right on LCD, it seems like they're having mode clips looping as well, sorta like how they did a few of their last dot games like ST and GB...for example, on ST, they'd show the loop of Kirk & Bones running from the aliens instead of just score....so now with LCD, they're showing the real movie scenes.

like in hobbit extra ball clip!

Batman '66 is all over the place with little consistency in presentation, Star Wars has lots of weird static images just moved across the screen, Aerosmith looks like a free flash game. Guardians has more weird/bad art direction for the presentation, too, from what's been shown. It's an issue of art direction to control the presentation in a consistent way so everything meshes. Stern's art direction is poor for the LCD era games. No comparison with a JJP game, which are ALWAYS consistent in tone and design for the screen presentation.

R u for real? honestly this comment is just complete bullshit. No comparison

Ugh. Aren't there other threads for stroking JJP?

That was a pretty annoying clip in BM66, fortunately it was fixed in the May code update.

IMO

Aerosmith animation is cool/funny.

GOTG looks very sterile & needs work.