I enjoyed flipping Octoberfest for a couple hours tonight at American Pinball. Much thanks to Josh, Barry, and Nirmal for hosting these evening events. At one point I was in Josh's office playing a prototype while he sat at his desk working on the code. You can't get much more "behind the scenes" than that! First impressions: The game is fun and I love the ducks. It's only going to get better as more variety is added to the music and light shows. The German accents were cracking me up. My biggest criticism would be that the only way I was getting multiball was by selecting the Juggling mode. I'll cite Herman in the Munsters as an example of setting a low bar for casual players to earn an easy multiball. Overall, I liked what I saw and I'm looking forward to whatever comes next.

Now that I've slept on it, I realize rosh and Ferret addressed my biggest gripe about the Houdini code on Octoberfest and I hope they'll go back and do the same thing on Houdini. After a ball drains on Houdini, there's a long list of possible achievements showing how many of them were earned. If you had a short ball, you see a looooong list of zeros. That is so negative, I don't need to be reminded of how poorly I played. On Octoberfest, the list of achievements only shows what you accomplished. Positive reinforcement. No zeros shown. I earned a few steins and some ducks. Thank you Josh and Joe.