For all his flaws Jpop did one thing infinitely better than AP and that was art direction.

It's too bad he pissed them off with the "pig in a poke" joke that was his fake Houdini game, he could have worked as an art director there.

I may just have to drive down for a day and see this machine with my own eyes!

I know I rip on John a lot but he did have interesting ideas (just couldn't execute them outside of the B/W environment)

Much respect for those who used their own time and money to make this a reality.

I put 2 games on it. Thoughts:

1) You can definitely feel the core of a great game concept. It's more TOTAN than CV. It shoots fine but I wouldn't say great. (point 3 is an issue)

2) The ramps are totally doable and the squiggle returns lock 2 balls. Nobody I saw could figure out how to release them though (they dump at end of game) Did anyone here figure it out?

3) The game has at least twice as much plastics as it needs. The rear half is a swamp of plastic and it prevents you from seeing/understanding shots.

4) On note 3, the insert texts was a bunch of pointless "John words" like ZAP POWER and MAGIC so I had no clue what I was supposed to do.

5) The ball levitator is a transformer, we shot the ball through it a few times but nothing happened.

Aside from the whole manufacturing/finanical fiasco, the core concept is good but needed less JPOP. Somebody needed to say "there's too many plastics!" or "you need more progress inserts"

If this game ever gets remade (again) a version with the swamp of plastics greatly reduced would help a lot.

PXL_20221021_161459934 (resized).jpg

The rear half of the PF reminded me of "chicken of the woods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetiporus

Just endless stacks of plastics. It doesn't look too bad in my top down shot there but from player POV it's... Confusing.

Again, it's too bad John didn't have some old school industry person to keep him grounded 10 years ago.

Does the ball levitator work? Should through it a couple times, no effect. One time the ball landed on that circular thing in the middle and got hung up! (this 12 oclock thing I guess?)

That's because unlike Jpop the community isn't unfathomably lazy.