Hi

Full disclosure, I've never beena kiss fan nor have I ordered one. These are just my quick thoughts after playing a few games yesterday at NWPAS

I've seen the pictures, but the machine in flesh looked even better. The playfield art especially looked good to me and the layout is well thought out. In many ways the game is similar to other recent sterns in terms of being fast and furious. There's definitely a nice mix of risk & rewards mixed with couple of shots requiring great accuracy.

They updates the SW on one of the machines, basically it took just a few secs. Turn off machine, remove backglass, put new memory card it, turn on the machine. Very easy.
The SW used was 0.91 if I remember right, and it was an improvement to what ever was there before that. Dots and color changing leds are well designed and look good

The music is integrated the same way as in MET or AC/DC, but I don't know if the objectives we the same. Based on just a few games I didn't see any change in that, but those were pretty short games (I suck, I confess). You can also choose a city but I didn't figure out its significance either

Gene's head spitting out the ball was a cool toy, but it often resulted in STDM. Maybe it can be adjusted because it seemed to be more pronounced on one of the two machines.

The ramps are cool and the fan layout is well implemented imho. A few MB's to chosoe from too, and trying to lock the balls in Gene's head definitely was risk/reward approach.

I have to say I was positively surprised, definitely made me want to play more of iteven if the band means nothing to me. All of you kiss army loyals, I think you'll love this pin

-K

I guess the dots are a pale comparison to some more developed games, let alone hobbit, but for clearly a raw code I thought it was ok based on the little I saw (my eyes were mostly fixated on the ball though)