Quoted from heckheck:Those shirts look more or less fine one at a time with 'The Dwarf' text spaced out in random ways. Put all those 'direct from the style guide' renderings next to each other on a playfield and the text spacing becomes a disaster. That is clearly a place where the style guide should have been challenged. Present both renderings to the studio, with the text all messed up, but exact to the style guide and with the text spacing fixed (or even missing) and beg them to approve the latter. Only a moron on the studio side would say "stick to the guide even though it looks stupid".
It's all about the execution in what you put up for consideration. Do double work and put up a risky but better design and a safe one and lobby hard for the better one, but I guess that ship has sailed.
Bottom line. I'm a customer, I have a Hobbit on order, so I feel a bit entitled to a little armchair quarterbacking and critiquing. Sorry if it comes off harsh.
Not harsh and you are entitled to your opinion as are we all.. after all it is posted on a public forum. Its a problem any manufacturer will have when they are prepared to release parts of a design as the game ticks along. You can look at a lot of stripped playfields and see components that you either like or dislike. when the game is fully assembled though, hopefully everything ties in and you see the game in its entirety as a complete package. The move to photoshopped art is by and large not well received by pinball owners and yet the main manufacturers keep churning it out... its a tired concept as its all starting to look the same, after all, with all that technology that allows great shading and realistic art, it is by and large limited in its results. JJP digs its own hole here as we were promised the next step forward in pinball.. instead we see them adopting the Stern approach of cut and paste. Metallica is overwhelmingly well received due to its hand drawn art, but I strongly suspect that this is not a choice Stern made, more of a stipulation by Metallica to use their mate Dirty Donnie for the art if they were to get licence.
In all honesty, I don't know why companies release snapshots of the next upcoming title.. Its a recent development and I think it chips away from the anticipation and excitement of seeing the latest release. You will never please everyone... once you release the name of the next title we all start to have an image in our heads of what this game may look like and do... of course, its never the same image. I do feel though that the bottom line is that we would all like to see a bit more imagination when it comes to an art package on a pinball... it is at the end of the day the very first thing that will entice someone to take a closer look and play.. that has always been the sole purpose of pinball art
Brisbane
Watertown, CT
