The menu buttons on my new GZ are crap. Wrote to Stern, and they said to go through my dist. I pulled the buttons out of my Deadpool, and they worked perfectly. So just a bad set of buttons that need to be replaced.

My flipper buttons are a minor bit sticky, but I'll just sand them down to fix it. No big deal.

My shooter rod was also WAY out of alignment. So that took a few minutes to fix.

Overall, it was exactly the little issues I sort of expect out of a NIB game.

But it isn’t the same part, it’s a cheaper one. If you pop open the door of a SAM game (depending on when built), you see 4 switches on a metal plate with soldered wires. Do the same thing in a current game and you find a circuit board with membrane buttons snapped into a plastic bracket. Reduced cost and vastly reduced assembly time.

I haven’t looked through all my games to this detail, but I assume they changed fabrication houses and ended up with a bad batch that have some contamination on the boards.

This is the normal continuum where you cheapen a part until it cannot function at the base standard, and then you go up a tiny bit and start building right above the failure point.

I've also had several games with them. Even my AC/DC Vault has them, and I've never had a single issue with them until GZ. And then I looked around and lots of people are complaining about them in the latest runs. They simply have a bad batch of them, and come to find out Stern doesn't even test if a game can go into the menus when they finish assembling it... Because there is no way that isn't noticed if someone had gone into the menu.

It's a standard QC issue. Bad set of parts that were not checked before installation, and the final product was not checked before shipping them to customers.