Hey guys, thanks for all the nice comments about Full Tilt Ballard! I really appreciate it. As some of you know I operate the games there. I'm a long-time collector, player, and all-around game enthusiast so I do try hard to make sure all my games play well. In fact the whole reason I got into operating games was because I was so sick of playing shoddy machines out on location and wanted to try to approach it from the eye of someone who cares about the games playing correctly.

I'm a total stickler and I know the games aren't home-use-perfect -- try as I might, this is very difficult to achieve at a high-traffic location, especially in the brutal summer months at an ice cream shop -- but I do try my hardest to jump on problems as soon as I know about them. I also do a ton of preventative maintenance and preemptive strikes when I even suspect something might eventually go south. Some problems are solvable and others have to eventually just be chalked up to design flaws or "just how it is," though I'm always looking for new ways to fix problems in creative ways and go above and beyond what most ops would ever bother with. Most people would probably laugh if they knew how many hours I've put into trying to iron out even the most benign issues that 99% of players will never notice or care about.

Anyway, I'm surprised to hear that every game had problems, since I'm not aware of many right now. If you could give me the details on the issues you ran into, it would be very helpful. The more people report, the more I know, the more I can deal with. Nothing is more frustrating than having someone tell me "oh, your game is still doing that thing that it has done forever" and then proceeding to describe a strange intermittent issue I have never personally encountered and have never been told about. Then I dig into the game and sure enough, the problem exists -- if I had known a month or two before, I would've fixed it.

About the flipper alignment, I'm not sure what to say. I am really picky about flipper alignment, put a lot of time into it and think I have the best aligned flippers around, so maybe it's just a difference of opinion? Like Kevin says I always use a guide to align them in parallel with the guide rails to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. I also give attention to making sure they flip to the same point on both sides and look symmetrical. Which games did you notice wonky flipper alignment on? I'll go look at them and see if maybe they've come a little out of alignment if you let me know.

Thanks for coming out!