Quoted from rosh:Good morning all, exhausted and a little hung over from a crazy, crazy week with almost no sleep, the reveal, and some celebratory beer and tequila shots, but wanted to pop on and answer few questions, at least the ones I can remember.
First off, happy to see such a positive response to the game, but can't say I am surprised. We knew that much of the doomsayers on the theme just did not know much about it and what we could do with it. Obviously some won't like the theme and no matter what we did, some will say there is too much beer and babes and other would say not enough. Even on the team, we have differing opinions of where we should be and where we are. To let you know where I stand, any time I saw our artist, I said 'more cleavage'. But it is a tricky balance, plus I don't always get my way.
The mustache girl freaks me out a little but that plastic says, 'mustache contest', or so I have been told, but yeah.
The playfield is packed with lots of little things that will take time for folks to spot and see. There is a lot of fun little stuff tucked away. I am not surprised at the diverse opinions on the art package. It is often the part of a machine that has. the most differing opinions.
As far as the music, I have not watched the dead flip stream, so don't know which aspects of the game were shown, regardless, there is a very diverse selection of music in the game. While there is a some heavy metal/polka mashup stuff, which Balcer wanted, there is also plenty of tunes with a Polka and Oom-Pa style that Ferret and I wanted. What is important to me, is to have the variety. There will be four out of mode main tracks and then each mode will have its own. Currently only one main track is on the machine, which does have the heavy metal feel. 'Ride' modes will typically have the heavier music, the beer modes the oom-pa and the midway game modes the polka. In some cases a track was used in a different place for now. The main out of mode tracks will be also be a mix. As more footage comes out you will hear more of that variety. Right now it is probably 50/50 as far as heavy to oom-pa/polka, but I would expect the final mix to be more 25/75.
Some of the animations are what we want and some are works in progress and some are not much more than fancy storyboards (e.g. the mystery duck pull). Some will like what we do, some won't, but at the same time to me it is the least important part of the machine, since it has the least value to the actual player and at some point you have to decide where you spend your time and money, if you do everything to the ultimate degree, you get a much more expensive machine and that is not where I want to see us be.
I think most are going to find the game a blast to play. The rules fun and challenging, with lots in there for enthusiasts as well as competitive players.
I look forward to more people getting to play the machine.
I do want to thank the Straight Down the Middle, Head2Head, Dead Flip, and This Week in Pinball (despite their little screw up), for helping us get some quality info and video of the machine out there for you guys. I think links to all of those are already in this thread. However, Greg/Zach, next time I would like more than 3 minutes warning, so I don't look like I am hungover from a night of binge drinking (or the reality of days of no sleep while trying to get the machine ready for its debut).
I'll try to pop back on later to see what questions pop up.
In the meantime, PROST!