I've been aspiring to play this game for months on end. Ever since I saw the pictures and read about people talking about how solid the game feels, how fun the shots are, the callouts, LCD, light show, etc. I was hoping to get the opportunity to finally try this masterpiece myself. I soon found out about Pintucky's WOZLE he had on preorder (this was over a year ago) and that got me stoked. Then just a couple of months ago Dale got one for his Chattanooga Pinball museum.
Yesterday I went to Pintucky's (this was my third visit) to play his game. Keep in mind that up to this point I have refrained from watching any gameplay videos as not to "spoil the surprise" if you will. I walked into his living room and saw it on the back wall with the playfield flooded with color. It was on free play of course, and I also noticed several fingerprints on the glass from his family members checking it out the 2 weeks before I came.
I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what all the heck was going on while simultanously marveling at the look and feel of the machine. It is truly a work of art!! The machine feels like an absolute tank. The flippers, kickers, inserts, everything work flawlessly and feel great. Especially the slingshots. I have never seen such quick slingshots that feel like the soft sort of snappy "thud" that they do. Everything about the game gleams Williams quality. Even the playfield itself is quite heavy, heavier than even the renowned Sega ones.
Of course, being the techie that I am, I also had to look inside the PC box. There is simply so much going on in there that even I couldn't follow it all right away! I noticed the Micro ATX motherboard was mounted flush against the back of the box compared to early prototype games. This makes it very easy to get to various ports in the back verses taking the entire lid off if something were to come loose. The LEDs underneath the playfield wash out the underside in rich colors and the clean, easy to navigate service menu changes them to white so you can really see everything you would need to get to.
The ultimate idea here was to do a shoot similar to my Fish Tales video earlier in the summer (youtube(.)com/watch?v=7lQqo2HjBfI). Knowing that the system runs on a common off-the-shelf PC setup I decided to take the video a step further and capture direct signal feeds of both the display and the sound, and mix all of this together in editing. The result is below, done with nothing more than wires and cables strewn everywhere and my iPhone 4s zip-tied to a lamp. Pintucky and I eventually figured all this out, it took us a while.
Be sure to watch in 1080p and in full screen. I think it really turned out great. I hope to do this again in 2014 with a better capture box and more fleshed out rules. There is plenty of footage here to get a pretty solid idea of what we have right now (the game was running 1.17). Please give feedback, thanks, and enjoy!