I am partial to the cabinet hinge on the ramp. Could not look more homebrew if you tried…

I'm guessing the little drummer photo on the backwall will spin around and show an explosion or similar.

It looks like an explosion of a certain type already happened.

Did the cocoon do anything, like open up or trap balls for multiball?

Based off the manual, the POD uses coils to open and close, and push the ball, and there is an elevator from a subway into the mech. There's also some switches related to the elevator position and lock post, and detecting a ball in the subway and lift part of the mech.

Guessing the inner ramp goes up to load balls into a subway for that mech.

Maybe if someone could actually hit that inner ramp we'd have footage of it in action...

I think you are really reach with the "hot nation of interest" statement! No offense but it's coincidental.

What if the cocoon lock joke is so meta that it locks the balls during gameplay, and only releases them after the end of the game?

I'm not sure that explosion is to scale.....maybe its a godzilla explosion

duplicate

Lol. This is the sort of theme integration we’ve been screaming for.

The EM like floaty gameplay really picks up on the nostalgia of the time.

The drums are also situated so they are impossible to play. But yeah, that hot glue mess is really embarrassing assembly. Like a C+ art project in grade school.

I really think Mike could have sold a magnitude more if he had paid someone to do a better job with the art. Then you could at least trick a few people into thinking it's not a giant piece of crap (seemed to work for Thunderbirds to a degree). But when the art is so piss poor and uninspired, you can't help but notice all the other sloppy work

Maybe it's not too late to spin the avalanche of hot glue on the drum set is that is what remained of a drummer who melted

If we can also nitpick the drum set for a moment, I can't find one single instance of any of the Spinal Tap drummers using a Mapex kit. I keep seeing Ludwig and Yamaha kits, and they all have a large center hole in the bass drum head. The only time I can recall a solid bass head is in the Gimme Some Money video, and the brand of kit is borderline impossible to tell.

So I'd love to know where a solid head Mapex Kit came from.

also if you got an airball up there it looks like it would get stuck - maybe that is when the drum kit explodes - when the ball hits it...

I know it hurts

That's why I coined it "ball trap city" in an earlier post. How was that overlooked???

A toy manufacturer in China that could make a bunch of the toys for a few dollars a pop. The guitar toys also look decent. Maybe from the same factory as the drum.

sorry missed that - you are right and can't un-see the how glue as well

On a positive note, if you buy one and it gets delivered you’ll have one of the rarest production games of all time!
I really can’t see more than 30-40 of these getting out into the world.

Rare games are only cool if they’re actually good, like Big Bang Bar or Kingpin & got their runs cut short by business circumstances of the day. If they’re rare cuz they suck, who cares.

See also The Mafia and Cosmic Carnival

Going in on rare means nothing if no one wants it. The licensed theme will help to a degree, but not much

Pinheads care about the story. The story here is just shoddy work at a premium price

Oh I wasn’t insinuating it was cool. what a waste of good IP

You think the ball will go fast enough to jump up to the drum set? I dont think it can even make it up the ramp.

Game looks cool! Can't wait to try it out....

I would not get too excited, the let down will not be as bad.

I posted about that months ago. Not only is the kit deranged, rather than arranged, but Mapex has no known association with Spinal Tap. Turns out that's not entirely true. Greg Bissonette played on their "Back From The Dead" album in 2009, and on several tours, and is a long-time Mapex endorser. Still seems odd as he had nothing to do with the movie, and this pin is themed on the film, not on a record from decades later.

Buying this game is an endorsement of mediocrity.

Got to play this on the weekend
For me the problem with the ramps is not the welding, nor the curves, not the hinge or if you can make it up them with the flippers
It is that they are two big chunks of metal that hide most of the upper playfield
On other games, these would be plastic ramps, maybe with protectors for the entrance

why the shit is there a DMD and a LCD screen? Is the screen just to show random clips of movie and all the interaction goes the DMD? Seems like a waste of resources. DMD costs could have went into some exciting toys on the playfield.

There is a cricket bat on a spring mounted over the right slingshot

It was funny, at one point the slingshot was continuously firing, the cricket-bat just sat there and wobbled

So I got to play this at Pinfest this last weekend and here are my thoughts:
I have never played a thunderbirds (only heard the stories) and was interested to see what this machine was going to be like. My initial impressions were it looked much better than I thought it would. Seemed nice and colourful and I was a bit surprised in it to be honest. However that fell apart as I was playing the game. Extremely weak flippers and the geometry of the shots felt really strange. In particular the inner ramp (directly next to the left ramp) felt almost impossible to hit as it would brick into the ramp wall (right side) taking all momentum out of the ball.

I can't speak to the them integration as I haven't seen the Spinaltap move ( I know shame on me) however the machine seemed to have lots of clips from the movie. The sound was sooo grating. One of the call outs was 'shoot the spinner 50 times' (or something similar) that repeated ad nausem...

The reliabilty of the two machines there seemed poor to be honest. In the first 30 mins that I was in the room where these machines were (for the first session of pinfest) I saw both machines reset completely with someone (Mike I think?) having to interveen in getting them fixed. A buddy of mine played one ball and the machine (his very first game) made a 'pop' type sound and shutoff (great first impression).

I can imagine some of these issues can be fixed via software, however it just didn't play that well. Felt very clunky and underpowered. I have heard these machines are 14k here in Australia (which is more then a NIB Stern premium) which seemed way to pricey. I guess if you are a mad spinal tap fan then maybe you might like it as a conversation piece in a large collection? For reference I think I would have played 15 games or so to give it a fair chance, but it became a chore to play which was disapointing.

Because Mike said he doesn't like LCDs but knows people expect them now. So he added one for that but stuck with DMD for most of the normal pinball stuff.

In the very limited footage I've seen, the LCD at least occasionally communicates some pinball info (like displaying "skill shot").

Need to knock down the 3 drop targets twice to enable the lock, then shoot the lock which is directly below the POD. The ball is then raised up into the POD however not sure what was required to trigger MB (I didn't manage to do that to release the ball from the POD). The ball release mech opens the POD and pushes the ball off the cup onto the wireform.

This was pretty much my thoughts on it. Really didn't shoot well, and this machine compared to a Stern pro is night and day unfortunately.

I can't quite work out how on earth this can be anywhere in the region of 14k. As a curiosity it's barely passable. The one we tried was almost unplayable and I heard the phrase "shoot 50 spinner spins" in my sleep... and I only played it twice.

I was hopeful - it looked pretty good, a nice big lcd AND a dmd which is a bit different. But it didn't seem well put together, we couldn't even make the ball go up the ramps (we are all fairly decent players), and it was also out of order quite often.

I really like other companies coming out and producing pins and giving us something different to play, but sorry, this one as it stands is not up scratch. ☹️

Highway Games have uploaded another video clip of the attract mode.

It’s actually wet my appetite to watch the movie again

Look, we all knew what to expect here.

This is a game designed by amateurs and built by Chinese minors.

Nobody should be surprised that it's an absolute heap. We've all played Thunderbirds and we know it's terrible, and know this is terrible.

If it were a "have no choice" theme like BTTF, they'd manage to sell a few. But it's Spinal Tap. yes, it's one of the best movies of all time, but it's appeal - especially for a $10,000 pinball machine - is extremely selective.

It is - as they say - what it is.

Apparently being built in Taiwan by Taiwanese, who have no allegiance and are at enmity with China.

Thanks for clearing that up!

To be honest his mini-run of Porsche ripoff Firepowers looked more fun...mostly because I know Firepower is a good time. Bonus, no ramps means weak flippers aren't a problem

Firepower… any day, every day, all night and day long

The artwork doesn't particularly bother me, and the game play may very well suck but there isn't a lot of footage so I'll withhold judgement on that for the moment.
What I find bizarre is the DMD + LCD, wherein the LCD seems to just show the movie, no overlays, no apparent tie in to game play. Again, very limited amount of video at this point to go on, but what's the point here? I can play the movie on my TV in the background if there isn't any integration to speak of.... seems a very poor use of the assets...

Do say the topper looks fun. That might be a "win".

For those complaining about the price, maybe you can watch the entire movie on the LCD. If so, make sure to take that into account with your evaluation.

Screen Shot 2022-09-20 at 8.27.44 AM (resized).png

You’re definitely onto something there and would be a superb use of an LCD with DMD integration.

If a developer secures rights to an IP, then why not have an optional setting for a player to view the whole movie, show or a series for that matter, on the LCD while the lower section DMD tracks reactive game play and score. Perhaps translites and backglass are destined to become a thing of the past?

Two word review

Shit Sandwich

Homepin not doing any marketing is paying off in spades right now isn't it?

The less people know about this machine the better.