Are you kidding? I have no idea if he's racist or not, but from personal experience, I can say that generally speaking, Asians in Asia as a society are extremely racist. Ask Koreans about how they feel about Japanese, or Japanese about Koreans or Chinese about Japanese. There's a HUGE amount of inter-Asian racism. Also, they are casually racist about things like black people that they don't have day to day exposure to. I remember seeing an OVERTLY racist commercial in Japan for a pest service where they had a black guy dressed up as a cockroach in actual BLACKFACE. It was nationally broadcast A LOT. They didn't think anything of it.

So yeah, marrying an Asian doesn't relieve someone of the suspicion of being racist, especially if they've said or done racist things.

Japan's NHK making a cartoon to try to explain what Black Lives Matter was about to their Japanese audience and pretty much completely missing the point shows how oblivious they are to the issue they are observing from afar (click CC for English subtitles):

They had Balcer involved with this title, but he's apparently gone from Homepin already, so the question is, how much was he involved with this title? Did he do the design and bail? Or was he gone mid-job? Even if Homepin executed his completed design, who is doing the code? There's still a lot left to be known.

And yes, Homepin needs serious help with their marketing. Even the announcement graphic was...underwhelming. But I'm at least interested in seeing what Balcer delivered. I actually wanted to see their chinese ghost-themed pin that will never be released, too.

Thunderbirds is very rare in the US because no one bought it here once the truth was out about it, so I have a morbid desire to buy one, play it, and sell it just so I have had firsthand experience with one. There was one that was "touring" the US for about $3500, then $3300, then $3000, then $2700 as buyer after buyer flipped it. Still probably a little high, but I'd take one at $3000 delivered (which would be $2500 + shipping) max so I wouldn't lose too much on a flip.

There are a few pics of the Chinese Zombie pin around. Same with the porsche custom one.

I didn't save many of them when they were posted. But there are more around...
china-zombies (resized).jpg

china-zombies-lit (resized).jpg

playfield-back (resized).jpg

Kind of a waste of a Flash Gordon...

What's the "reasonable commercial life" definition?

Since it was a promotional tool for trade shows, I doubt it was many steps above a box of lights.

Ugh. The dial's not even right. 11 should have been after 10, and the center "knob" should have been reserved for "smell the glove wizard mode" or something else. As it's laid out right now it makes zero sense.

Would be nice to see what the playfield looked liked. On the only photos I saw it was blurred out.

The fact that Homepin won't even say who did the design and coding, and Balcer being brought on and then gone in a few months is not a good sign at all. How much more black could this be?

If you look at the promotional image that the characters were cut out from and re-arranged, Michael McKean has his hands on a sword. But on the playfield/promo pic Homepin released, by putting him in back AND LEAVING THE SWORD, it looks like he's stabbing Christopher Guest in the back.

EDIT: And the CRAZY PART I just noticed is that they moved the sword handle UP to make it more visible. Using the collar of his shirt as a reference, the handle of the sword is much higher than in the original art. Someone's guilty of Photoshop malpractice.

Original:
spinal-tap-promo (resized).jpg

Homepin photoshop hack job:
spinal-tap-homepin-close (resized).jpg

Really changes the tone of the playfield.

If he's not making it, why all the secrecy with the playfield? He wouldn't let you take a full PF shot?

Thanks for the one picture you DID get, but weird he's still clutching his pearls so tight on this dead-end.

Playfield insert and drop target arrangement are wildly different between the Chinese Ghost and Porsche pins, so not the same.

Well, we've seen the top of the whole Porsche playfield but only the bottom of the Chinese Ghosts one, so apparently he didn't care as much about letting the Porsche promo pin be seen.

I hate Data East pops. I can't put my finger on exactly WHY, but I do not like the way they feel in the game.

The Thunderbirds thread is a moderated mess now, but here's a post that survived with some clues:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/new-pinball-announced-by-homepin-thunderbirds/page/37#post-4033238

Not the way China sees it.

Pic is broken. Can you repost? Has anyone posted video of the machine yet?

All we know for sure at this point is mime is money.

Well, he hired Joe Balcer (Co-credited with Simpsons Pinball Party, did WoZ, Hobbit, Houdini, Oktoberfest, etc), but then Joe was gone before Spinal Tap was even announced, so his total time there was less than a year, so not sure what happened. He's being very cagey about who the designer and software are by for Spinal Tap, and that doesn't bode well...

Looks like purple metal flake armor, with black apron and chrome (?) legs.

The last picture is the leftover plastic after the plastics are cut out. Not many plastics in the set, only 8 if you exclude the slings and lane guides.

Here's a bunch of pictures for those (like me) that (smartly) avoid facebook:
01 (resized).jpg02 (resized).jpg03 (resized).jpg04 (resized).jpg05 (resized).jpg06 (resized).jpg07 (resized).jpg08 (resized).jpg09 (resized).jpg10 (resized).jpg11 (resized).jpg12 (resized).jpg13 (resized).jpg14 (resized).jpg15 (resized).jpg16 (resized).jpg17 (resized).jpg18 (resized).jpg

20 (resized).jpg21 (resized).jpg22 (resized).jpg

Might still be cool, but the odds are strongly against it so far based on past history, avoiding disclosing who did the design and who is doing the software, and how this rollout is going. It's a weird rollout that's not helping them build excitement. Homepin desperately needs a PR firm to handle dissemination of pictures and videos to build excitement while he just concentrates on getting the games made. He obviously can't do both, and when he does PR he ends up saying offensive stuff that turns a portion of his potential buyers off. Better to just leave the PR work to a pro.

I have seen exactly zero of anything that would qualify as PR or marketing for Spinal Tap from any source at all. Releasing random pictures to facebook of parts doesn't count, but if he coordinated with his distributors the could use them to scrape up some excitement.

Yeah, I think it was just an oversight or a bad cut and paste. The homepage here has it:

http://www.homepin.com/

Canada:
Nitro Pinball

Australia:
Highway Games

USA:
Pinball Star Amusements

Europe:
RS-Pinball

China (PRC):
CBC Pinball

...so looks like one distributor per region.

By definition, party is more than one.

I understand being stung by the criticism of a bad game, but Thunderbirds actually had pretty good response as the development pictures were being posted. Only when people got to play it did that go in the toilet. Doing Spinal Tap like this will not have any potentially positive feedback (or even helpful feedback to fix glaring problems) pre-release, just the potentially negative post-release word of mouth. Seems messed up, but whatever.

Maybe we're looking at it wrong. What if he's really a fabulously wealthy, centuries-old vampire that doesn't need money or profit because he only lusts after negative energy needed to sustain him? Perhaps this is all a ruse to create the negative energy that sustains him and we're playing right into it...

That Chinese zombies pin makes more sense in this framing, too.

Aside from the hideously butchered photoshop hit job art on the announcement flyer, I don't think he's shown anything on the game with art (playfield, translite, cabinet, plastics). The closest that's been shown is the plastic piece with the playfield plastics already cut out of it. No art.

OMG. How about just concentrating on making a passable pinball machine? Homepin explains why they stamped their bolts with the Homepin house - it's because they're metric, non-standard bolts and he wanted to make sure people could tell that on sight...rather than just using INDUSTRY STANDARD, CHEAP, WIDELY AVAILABLE PARTS.

Here's what he posted:
"I had an email this morning asking me "why we have leg bolts made with the Homepin logo - why not just get on and build machines, surely this is a waste of time & money"?
The answer is very simple. Our machines are built using the metric system. This means our leg bolts are also metric. We decided years back to have our logo stamped on the head to differentiate between our leg bolts and "standard" pinball leg bolts so people wouldn't try and force the wrong leg bolts into a machine."
homepin-bolt-top (resized).jpg

Okay.

The PINBALL world is by and large not metric, especially for the commodity parts. If you want to make your machine-specific assemblies metric, great.

To make COMMODITY parts (like leg plates and bolts) that are widely available and dirt cheap as a result custom and non-standard is hubris and hurts the machine long-term. That stuff is ALREADY made in China, so he wouldn't be shipping from the US, he'd be shipping from a next-door neighbor, at worst. I deal with Chinese manufacture all the time and am working with 8 factories right now on various projects, so I have an idea about costs there. Maybe his logo-imprinted bolts would cost more, but plain imperial measure leg bolts that are THE STANDARD FOR PINBALL do not.

If he just wants his logo on the bolts, just be honest and say that. Don't blame pricing on a part that is dirt cheap and likely made for the US pinball manufacturers in China, right next door to him, already.

But it's just like...why? There's a decades old, industry-wide, interchangeable standard, widely available. Why make leg bolts with threading specific to your machine only? It defies logic. I mean AP went with hex cap tops on their Houdini bolts for the steampunk aesthetic, but at least the threading was still standard.

Apples and oranges. The auto market is fragmented with many engine designs. We're down to basically standard and widebody pins for pinball (well, and Stern's The Pin). Things like leg plates and bolts are standardized across all manufacturers...except homepin.

Modern Stern has multiple types of leg plates (some are BARELY plates, but still), but they all have standard "pinball" spacing and threading AFAIK. Which is why you can "upgrade" a Stern spike with B/W leg plates and everything lines up just fine. JJP and CGC use B/W style leg plates from the factory with the same spacing and threading. The industry settled on it a long time ago.

Which is why THAT kind of change is OK (and the steampunk aesthetic fit is cool). It doesn't affect the standard, and if you lose the cap bolts, regular leg bolts will do in a pinch. Not so with the deviations Homepin is doing for no good reason.

It's this way because there's NO INFO on Spinal Tap. Another bad decision. I've posted literally everything I've found (you're welcome), and it's not much.

So we're discussing metric leg bolts.

That has been ignored for the most part by pinball for DECADES. The standards and overwhelming existing supply chain of pinball commodity parts is imperial, so this statement is irrelevant for this discussion about PINBALL established standards, and why going your own way to force a square peg into a long established round hole is a bad idea.

As I noted, most of this is being made in China and shipped to the US. Could just as easily be made in China and shipped to Taiwan, or Australia, or wherever.

But hey, we're officially circular in this conversation. Let's talk about something else. How about back to bad photoshop art on the playfield? The change to the art so it looks like he's stabbing Christopher Guest in the back?
spinal-tap-homepin-close (resized).jpg

Original art...

spinal-tap-promo (resized).jpg

Not that I'm aware of. I'm actually interested in the game (I know, setting myself up for disappointment), so I've been on the lookout.

Of course there are things specific to manufacturers and machines, but the GENERAL PINBALL MARKET is using one kind of imperial measure leg bolt thread spec for the bolts and the plates, and has for a LONG TIME, so they're widely available and cheap. Like, EVERY MAJOR MANUFACTURER OF PINBALL. So planting a flag on metric bolts with a logo for your low-run machine is pissing in the wind and just making things unnecessarily irritating for future owners of it. This is not a complicated concept, is it?

But let's go back to talking about the terrible photoshop job with the art on the playfield. They LITERALLY moved the dagger up so it would be visible and looking like Christopher Guest was being stabbed. WHY?
spinal-tap-homepin-close (resized).jpg

Walking Dead would have been a better example. They even reused the frickin' laser beam mech.

Yeah, that's a weird oversight. The other thing is in like 16 inches, you have the Homepin logo FOUR TIMES (Hopepin Ltd message, start button, and 2x on the leg bolts). We get it, Homepin made it.

The union jack is a nice choice, but not sure how the purple armor will look with that. It clashes in the small pic we got.

Like others, I'm just hoping the game design is good. Is this a Balcer parting gift, or someone else?

Some more pics posted of the pin.

Lighting board for the center amp dial graphic on the playfield between the slings with the giant "11" in the middle for some reason.
273362029_1114755909296551_5260562878417342388_n (resized).jpg

Coil assembly parts:
273467364_1115973805841428_6870825436728936533_n (resized).jpg
273505508_1117611852344290_1411416034004807208_n (resized).jpg
273559299_1117611842344291_7509288918824661537_n (resized).jpg

They're putting white pinstadium-like rails on from the factory
273649183_1117636112341864_8009718484936262437_n (resized).jpg
The mounting is super-ugly. With just a little refinement they could make it look much more polished.

Also:
Stage
Stonehenge
Kill (?? can't quite make this one out)
Hell Hole

I do like how well Homepin labels their coils. Here's a spinal tap assembly of some kind, a scoop assembly, and some pop bumpers they shared...
274343723_1125112281594247_6488095592184888130_n (resized).jpg273993455_1120918262013649_7646865357707947511_n (resized).jpgscoops assembled (resized).jpg273995727_1120918245346984_4978349887604235489_n (resized).jpgassembling a mystery mech (resized).jpg

Do they HAVE to put the homepin logo on EVERYTHING? Talk about making some ugly drop targets...

274749034_1127153441390131_7801689111505056604_n (resized).jpg

"This is one of our trickiest mechanisms to assemble. Inserting the pivot rod is complex as it has numerous nylon bearings along its length. However, our drop target mech makes changing a target VERY easy. Two screws at the bottom and unhook the spring! All parts, including the springs, are stainless steel."

At the very least it will be partially visible when reset and the target is temporarily higher. Completely unnecessary eyesore.

Talk about reinventing the wheel. Drop target reset tech is well established there was no need to add a hinge and 4 screws to each target to complicate things.

I don't see the effort savings - seems like a lateral change, and the hinge adds another point of failure.

Coinop express had a feature list. Don't recall if this was posted already:

27 Inch backglass LCD monitor
Traditional DMD display
Stainless steel ramps
Quick-release steel metal
Lockdown bar
Original Spinal Tap soundtracks
Cut video scenes from the original movie
Replica models of famous TAP guitars
Exploding drummer feature
Lifetime PCB support

Apparently Jeff Busch is doing the graphics for the game? That does not bode well AT ALL. His American Pinball on-screen graphics were TERRIBLE (especially Oktoberfest's), and his dots resume for the handful of DMD games he's done was nothing great.

Yeah, the whole thing read like it was never proofed. Highway games copy-pasted the same bullet list with the same mistake to their site.

You'd think they'd at least try to clean up the promo shot. Warehouse mess in the backglass reflection. DMD area empty with wiring harness running through it to a mostly empty cabinet where the harness is also visible.

Two words - Gaussian blur.

cabinet-mockup-lightened.jpg

Overhead has to be extremely low, so I doubt there's much risk of a loss unless it's a Thunderbirds-level disaster.

Photoshop glow all over the place to hide the crappy art cutout jobs.

Pretty sure he just wants credit as the source of the pic when it makes the rounds. Pfeh. Lame.

Weirdest rollout ever.

But if Mike is withholding anything of substance about the game (gameplay, art, video, etc) to build game anticipation until it has launched, he's still controlling PR badly, just once removed now. We're months past it being announced and it's literally supposed to be out in a matter of weeks and we still know next to nothing about the game. Even Thunderbirds had some pre-launch excitement for the theme and the toys shown. Spinal Tap has even less than THAT.

Hence, weirdest rollout ever.

I'm also like, was that made by someone with NO KNOWLEDGE of where the drummer sits and what needs to be accessible from that position?

But do we know if Balcer was there through the project? Because he was in and out at Homepin almost before you could blink. And Jeff Busch's art for AP was mostly a disaster. Like bad flash games. It kind of worked for Houdini, but Oktoberfest was a MESS from a UI design perspective.

Taking notes for the 6 mods I will sell by fixing this.

June is 2 days away and no one has even SEEN public promo pics, despite the release that was supposed to be May. I can't believe anyone would be dumb enough to put money down on another sketchy Homepin release with no pictures, at the very least.

I need some pepto.

EDIT: From what's visible, overall layout looks like it's heavily influenced by The Getaway.

The ring of inserts in the center of the playfield?
The 3 pops top center?
The targets guarding the pops?
The sweeping ramp on the left?

All very Getaway-esque.

The only thing that kills the vibe is the way-close scoop and standup on the left side.

It's pretty clear they're not gonna f'n do Stonehenge!

I believe the technical term is "fugly."

The bell is in the backbox. Do like that addition. At least the parts section of the manual is pretty good. Destroys the disaster of a manual that Toy Story 4 has, so there's that. Still not expecting anything from this pin, but maybe I'll be surprised...

backbox bell (resized).jpg

Is there pricing on this yet?

I just want to know what's up with the seizure-inducing LED inserts in attract mode. I can't believe it looks like that IRL. It has to be some kind of camera framerate thing...

That ping-pong ramp really needed a little more time in engineering. Crazy amount of ball rattle, and it can't make it up the ramp even with a pretty solid shot because of all the energy loss from banging right and left on the ramp walls...

Spinal Tap Ping Pong.gif

Why we need more footage of play. We have literally one ramp shot to look at and it's a reject, even though there was plenty of power going into it.

So, better than Thunderbirds ramp to nowhere, only now you can't complete the shot...

Broken within the first year.

Balcer was supposed to be at Homepin for a minute or two. Could have been his.

Here's the video for those smartly avoiding Facebook:

Looks really badly conceived and executed.

That 44 sec clip was already posted a couple pages back:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/homepins-spinal-tap/page/16#post-7140337

It's where the ramp rattle gif came from...

Spinal Tap Ping Pong.gif

I'm not surprised, but it certainly isn't doing them any favors. For a few hundred bucks, maybe $1k tops, they could have made a misleading, exciting video that gave the machine its moment in the sun. I can't imagine selling many at $9.5k with the word of mouth these on-site videos will create.

A complete waste of a stellar pinball license.

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.

He wouldn't post any of the playfield. Blurred stuff out. Shame because I would have liked to see that one.

Haha! Hilarious. I think you've hit it. Based on the underside of the Chinese Zombies (you need to rotate as the image is showing the PF from the wrong end), the lower scoop with the target next to it is there, the three standup targets on the right are there, the drop targets in the center with the pop triangle behind it are there. All that seems to be different at the PF level is the insert cutouts. Now we know why Balcer was told Homepin had another design already - it was Chinese Ghosts!

4916389cb1ec0e9a8468f46dc0dc7eec6dc7efef.jpg

If you're going to hell for stealing, might as well steal from the best.

Unfortunately, even if the theme is interesting, the effort put into the code is probably still lacking, so it likely sucked, too.

Yeah, I must have missed that. The only Chinese Ghosts playfield pic I have is when it's in the cab, and the PF is blurred out.

Well, at least Homepin is consistent.

Heh, that's what I get for perusing.

They had Balcer for a hot minute on Spinal Tap, but that failed for some reason and Homepin decided they could do it themselves.

They were wrong.

Easily roughed up? Easily magnetized? Rust easily? Pitted? How are they junk?

Worse. Mostly because it shows almost none of the machine in action. Tight, quick shots that are not compelling.

Crazy that Homepin hasn't had this engineering realization almost half a year since they first showed it. Nice work figuring it out!

Lyman's genius was he could generate code that was approachable for the unwashed masses, yet deep enough for tournament players.

They had Balcer and he lasted like 10 seconds.

The booger-eating crowd?

Yeah, Thunderbirds is a pinball that will pass the time for kids, but why not put them in front of a GOOD pin or a series of them to tune their tastelevel? After comparing it to a few actually fun pins, they'll understand the issues.

Pinball is hard.