Mars, God of War Club 'n' Tech Emporium

This may be my first post on pinside. I'm not sure. I've been lurking for quite a while however. I guess I'll start with a quick history of my cabinet.
I've had MGoW since some time in May of this year, 2018. I spent a couple of months cleaning it and painting the inside of the cabinet because it wouldn't clean up well enough to suit me (and I have low standards). I've spent the last month or two getting it in playing condition which involved replacing a couple of crispy solenoids (ball trough kicker and right ball shooter) and cleaning a few switches. I'm not sure what happened to my particular machine but in the past it has had it's power supply replaced with a Rottendog and several hack repairs to the boards as well as whatever fried the solenoids I replaced. Of course there was also battery leakage which someone cleaned up relatively well before I got it even though they left the battery in. I got it playing. I played a few games and then disassembled the playfield to restore it. I am currently in the process of doing the playfield restoration as this post is written.

Something I was curious about. Has anyone restored the "smoke" look on the outer backglass? It's that ring of transparent black that goes around the outline of...well, I guess it's Mars, or whatever soldier that it's representing on the inner backglass. I at first thought this was just another layer of filth that this machine brought with it but I've noticed on other people's games that the edge of the smoke casts a more defined silhouette or outline of the man in the middle than mine does.

I have an orange cab. The paint behind the legs are much more rich (less faded) than the rest of the cab that has been exposed to the environment. When I removed the legs off of mine to clean them of rust I noticed a significant difference in the orange and it was striking. I could provide a picture if needed. If you have an orange cab and haven't removed the legs you might want to try that to see if it is anything like mine.

Great info, thanks for sharing! I actually didn't know the spaceship artwork was actually lifted from the sketchbook. As far as adding the concept vehicles, I love that, I might do the same for mine. One of my favorite things about this game is the blatant unapologetic ripoff of the snowspeeder.

I've been restoring my playfield for the past 3-4, 6 months, I don't know, but it's been in my garage in my makeshift paint booth while I've labored away with touch-ups. Following Vin's guide to playfield restoration, located here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/vids-guide-to-ultimate-playfield-restoration , which has been invaluable and inspired me to get a machine to restore, I've followed his advice and used Createx paints and 2-PAC auto clear and finally put my last coat of clear on today. Because of the infamous non-adhesive Mylar circles of death that surrounded each pop bumper the only real place in dire need of touching up was the planet in the middle of the playfield where perfect round circles were chewed into an otherwise serviceable board. Since I couldn't match the red or the orange I ended up repainting the entire planet... several times, but I won't go into that.

What saved me a lot of time was the black Molotow marker paint pen. I was able to go around the entire starfield and just paint directly over any blemishes with the pen which saved me from having to mask but more importantly it saved me from having to come up with a plan to paint what needed to be black while saving the intricately placed star fields all over the board, not to mention the headache to follow if the plan didn't work out. After spraying the 2-Pac these touch-up areas are hardly noticeable. Once again, not perfect, however a great improvement. I didn't spray an ounce of black, just used the pen everywhere including places around the eject holes, blotchy areas around the inserts, the bottom of the ramps and a huge chewed up area that was created by the apron. I also used the pen to mark over planking with reasonable success. I thought I'd share this since it is first hand experience using this particular pen on this exact machine. I don't know if the results would be as good on other machines although I imagine they would be.

I'll be letting my playfield sit for a month or so and then get it polished up. I'll post pictures when I'm done and I'd love to hear your honest opinions about the work. It's my first pin restore and I have thick skin and don't mind negative criticism. As long it's constructive, it can be invaluable pointing out things that were missed or wasn't noticed. Obviously positive remarks will be well received as well.

I also bought me one of them snow-speeders mentioned previously.