Great review guys! Big fan of the show, love the passion and honesty!

Another great review, did you order it Zach ?

Great review as always guys!!

No. I have not found one in the Cleveland area to play so I have been living vicariously through you and Greg. I do have a deposit on an LE that I made after hearing all the buzz and your reports from Chicago. I expect that JJPOTC and TZ will be sitting next to each other in my game room for many years to come. With the new games (TNA, Houdini, JJPOTC) and new codes for Batman 66 and TWD, this has been an exciting year for the pinball hobby. The timing of starting SDTM could not have been better.

Any idea when these will start shipping? Have to be getting close.

Remarkable video editing and coverage! I wonder how many POTC machines have been sold because of these videos? . I have been getting many orders for the POTC Pin Stadiums and I bet they are ones that saw these and decided to buy the machine as they are using the “sdtm” 10% discount code.

Keep up the over the top work guys!!!

It sold me. Working on placing my order.

Pinball n00b here. Consider me a sign of growth in the hobby. . Just hit 1000 games on my new Dialed in and broke 2.5 million. Pretty much never played pinball until 8 weeks ago..

I just love your videoes.
Im going for a pirates LE because of this review.

Zach, I didn’t care for the Hobbit, because of all the bad review and hate it gets here, i love the theme though.

I watched your review of the Hobbit, the love and passion it gets from you, made me wanna try it out.

So my friend bought a hobbit and dailed in LE. I started playing the hobbit and totally fell in love with it. Its such a fun pin. Awesome gameplay. Sounds. Callout. Music. Omg. Im gonna buy a hobbit LE now.

DI LE has great layout. Extreme feel good shots, omg such cool ramps, light show, rules and layout. BUT music was so borring, so lame, theme didten do anything for me. It didn’t drag me in. After some time, i jumped back to the hobbit and had a blast again.

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Great video review! I thought I was set in Houdini but then I watch the Pirates video and now I can't decide between the two.

Any chance we could get a "This or that" Pirates or Houdini video?

Great review fellas. Your detailed oriented approach really helps people to decide whether games you review are right for them or not. Much appreciated hard work on your part!!! Btw, love the editing. Especially when you slowly zoom in on Greg’s “creepy clown smile”. Lol. Good stuff. Part comedy, part hard core pinball. Can’t wait for next review.

I've never owned or really played a machine with stacked rules. This will be my first. I do really like the simple rules, modes, progression of dialed in. Hopefully I find this game as much fun when I power it up at home the first time.

I've watched the POTC videos a couple of times, and my head is exploding with the rule set

It's hard to see the target as each rule is described. Hopefully when this thing ships to me, it has a decently documented rule set. But if not, it'll be a lot of weeks with the glass off hitting switches.

This pin has so much going on you forgot to mention it has a video mode. I can't believe you had so many pins on your list above it something isn't right. As everyone else has said you do a great show

Great review guys, I really enjoy the longer, detailed reviews with the designers and programmers. It’s a interesting and informative way to show all the details and rules for these complex pins. Entertaining as always, keep up the great work!

I hope they have the dog with the keys in the game would have been good to be able to play as him. Would also like to see the videos played in the compas TV and it would be great to see a shot where it is lit up the machine goes dark and all you hear is Davey Jones heart beating thump thump and you have about 30 sec to get it. I think that would really build the tension.

I wish I could, need a bigger house and a second job for both, haha. Both of these games look awesome and I really enjoyed playing Houdini. Pirates for an LE is going to cost $2500 more then Houdini but I think its justified as Pirates is packed with so many interactive toys and the amount of work going into the software, audio and animations appears to be beyond anything seen before in pinball.

For $7k though you get so much game with Houdini. Having 125 modes in POTC is amazing with 25 randomly selected per game but if all of the main modes are about hitting the character shots from that movies scenes and you can't hear those characters voices during the modes (as well as see video) I'm not sure how that's going to play out in terms of them feeling unique.

I wonder if the Gibbs callouts recorded by Kevin McNally have lines that are specific to the events in a scene that a mode is based on?

Great video as usual, I appreciate the long in depth reviews. It's also nice to see the actual designers and programmers showing off what they have created.

Amazing video. It does seem like we need further elaboration on Tortuga Tom and the Nice tight crop ending......lol I'm sure that was an uncomfortable ride home.

Yah - my hope though is that the fun of the game/layout transcends the code style. I suck at pinball, but having great fun with dialed in. I hope the code on POTC won't spoil the simple fun and challenge that they managed on Dialed In.

The toys and layout looks fun. Lots of multi balls. Lots of non mode challenges. Risk reward. Seems like a ton of fun. And then the modes challenging you to work through lots of varied shot combos.

Best quote of Episode 52: "It takes your balls and puts them in subways where you don't know". I love Greg's reaction LOL

"J P Dewin is the best animator around. J P Dewin is the 2nd best animator. J P Dewin is the third best animator, period".

"Do I care that it doesn't have a bunch of stuff? No, it is the best cake I've ever tried". cakeguments are not allowed.

Ha ha we were so serious in that first video! Oh how that went out the window!!!!

You guys need a google doc or excel file so we can sort on all the individual categories.

It’s a bummer when your top rated pin can’t be bought. Almost need to split our pins you can buy new. And pins you have to hunt for used.

Looking forward to ratings in the new display / animation category!

I enjoyed the review updates - thanks!

Strange though - I found myself agreeing 100% with Greg's perspective for a change as I'm really digging Batman 66 lately too!

What the hell's wrong with you Zach - whad'ya mean you HATE BM66's music?! Granted, it's not "Cherry Bomb", but then again what is?

Yet another great video. Just watching it they seem like the kind of guys you just want to have a beer with. (and not punch in the face) You guys Really need to do an unplugged kind of video (off the cuff edited of coarse) maybe a driving go-pro cam (like the American Pickers only the American Pinballers) on your next adventure. lol I am betting the conversations and rhetoric would rival Bill and Teds great adventure.

Thank you sir!

You know we have discussed something similar to this! Our distance between each other is the major hang up but who knows.....we may be able to do a few a year! And I can’t thank you both enough for all your support!!!

Can you share it?

Greg...fonts matter. They speak to either the effort taken into integrating the theme with the animation or being completely lazy. I dare you to put the arial font in JJP's Pirates of the Caribbean animations and get back to me to see if fonts are important. To me Pins are not only fun to play but works of art. I wouldn't say it would prevent me completely from buying a pin but it would definitely bug me.

Definitely agree - fonts are part of the display package, done wrong and they wreck the look of the display a good deal. Also, bad 'fonts' on the play field also hurt it a lot as well.

By the way - you really quickly moved through Hobbs. While I know Keith and the crew have been hard at it on Pirates - I think missing the final wizard mode would have impacted your score a bit.

Still a amazingly beautiful machine and the LCD display and sound still may be the best out there.

Anyway, just wondered why there wasn't any more comments on the coding delays - and Hobbit is still one of my favs

Great episode... until Greg called John Williams' score on Star Wars just "Ok"

Can't wait till you guys review the review of your reviews down the road. It's an endless cycle. SDTM content for decades to come.

For those with malfunctioning detectors......

Great show guys!

Great video. It shows what we all kind of do over time...change our opinions. Whether it is more time on a machine, learning the rules, or maybe that we got a bad first impression, it is amazing how our pinball opinions can change. Especially in our current environment of Pinside and Podcasts where early reviews can "sour" someone's opinion on a game before even playing it. I walked up to a Hobbit before I even knew about Pinside. I had a blast and bought one. Then I found out I was supposed to hate it. lol. When I first walked up to a Batman 66 or SW, I had very low expectations because I read and heard so many bad early reviews and then realized that they were a blast to play. To be fair, I didn't get around to playing BM or SW until code was pretty far along. I hope you guys continue to update your reviews as code or experience changes your view of a game.

How many times do you see someone has updated their review of game XYZ on the Pinside Top 100? Opinions change with time.