People are stoked the le/ce are packed but the standard is stripped down, are missing the fact that from a shot perspective there is very little difference. I think the real argument is more to do with stern the JJP. A lot of recent sterns have had little real differences between the pro and premiums when standing over the game. Think moving dinosaur on Jurassic park or projector on stranger things, so the pro and premium look comparable in screen shots maybe not in actual game play. For gnr it’s more like looking at a stern got premium vs a stern got pro, there is no denying the pro looks a lot more stripped down when you remove the upper play field. With gnr this is amplified even further due to the additional wire forms feeding from the upper play field to ball lock or back to the flippers.

Personally i think jjp could of made the standard a lot more cohesive with the higher models by simply removing the guitar sculpt on the left ramp and adding a diverter like on the le and ce models. The diverter could have fed the ball onto the upper stage and back through plastic ramp back to the left flipper. This would have been a way to better simulate the virtual locks on the standard vs physical locks on the other models. No actual upper playfield, no real additional costs as the diverter/ simple plastic ramp and the custom guitar sculpt probably equal out in BOM. I think this would of made the left side feel far less barren and pretty much brought the standard in line with the le/ce as far as play integration.

However taking the above out of the equation, I still commend jjp on a lot of things they have added to the standard that i don’t believe you would have got in a stern pro had they been doing the machine.

1. Custom sculpts specifically for the standard , the guitar in the left ramp is unique to the standard and the axel ridding skulls is significantly larger on the standard and a totally new mold.

2. The side playfield bar lights well not rgb would never have made into stern pro.

3. The inclusion of Bluetooth head phone support, no doubt stern would of kept this as a premium feature.

4. The hexagon lighting bar above the playfield mini screen again would of been dropped from stern pro.

5. No way would of stern incorporated the same number of rgb play field lights on their pro and premium models

There is no point arguing about the animations and theme integration as this is always the same on all model trims from all manufacturers. So you can’t praise jjp for delivering the same theme asserts on their standard and premium models, this is par for the course if you going to have a multi tiered model approach. In fact I would argue it would cost the company more money to strip assets/songs/animations from the code then to keep it consistent across all models.

Standard gets Bluetooth and wifi connect listed under headliner act in comparison document I.e features in all models.
The Le/ce get additional head phone input jack with volume control at the front of the machine. Small point but still not convinced stern or others would have blue tooth audio in their base model.

Just going through start of Buffalo stream and took this screen shot when Kevins just about to start his first Song.
58 Second ball save!!! This seems kinda of crazy time for a ball save. Kevin had started a previous multi ball for hitting the under the upper flipper shot.
So I guess he had added some time to the song ball save but come on a minutes worth of ball save at the start of the song...
Will have to make adjustments to these sort of settings to prevent crazy long games for home use.

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Watched the first ten minutes of the What the flip stream https://www.twitch.tv/videos/763534548 . 100% better. The game is so much easier to follow when there is one or two balls in song mode. Also despite only playing the song in mostly single ball (couple of add a balls) or max two balls the end score for the song was still really high. The game went from looking like a continuous fail non-stop with unlimited balls entering the playfield, to a more focused aim for the shots mode progression. You could actually follow along with the song and animations instead of everything seemed to be in epileptic mode like on some other streams. Going to watch more of this stream over the course of the day but I think it shows there is a quality game experience lying underneath all the multi-ball madness....