Quoted from stantman:
Wow - I feel like I'm in the twilight zone here. This pin is a great (best ever, IMO) theme and certainly a popular new designer who's managed to get Stern to increase their budget a bit more, but dang, I have no idea why you are all gushing so much about this game. If this is all you need Stern to do, you're totally letting them off the hook. I get the feeling there's some group think/hype going on here that's influencing more people than will admit it. I was hoping for some special, and what we got doesn't interest me much at all.
The overall package looks great. I don't love the artwork, but it's ok and theme relevant, and the playfield certainly screams Jurassic Park, but that's pretty much the most positive thing I can say.
The layout has a ton packed into it. Yes, it has some cool features (t-rex toy), fun ramps, neat fake-jeep feature, cool raptor area, but it all comes with a downside. It's a clunk-fest. I watched the stream and even watched the best player in the world have trouble making shots. Rattle, rattle, post, clunk. Keith occasionally got into a good rhythm and showed how cool the game could be IF you can manage to hit a string of overly tight shots, but I best most people will have trouble. I hesitate to suggest which shots should have been removed, as all of them are pretty cool in their own right, but there's just too many of them. Everything's too tight. Damn... opportunity lost. This game could be so much fun, but the clunkiness kills it. Before posting this, I went back and clicked on 10 random points in the stream. I think 1 of the 10 showed a guy making a shot. The rest were posts and ramp rattles. Wonka destroys this game in playability.
You guys really think the animations are a step up? The LCD usage in this game is TERRIBLE. Stern, you can do so much better! Please don't listen to these people who think this is good enough. Please redo these! BK3 wasn't great either, but it is infinitely better than this. Why? The fake Jurassic Park content doesn't look great. The overly dark images done purposely to keep designers from adding detail look terrible. The quick changes to like 10 differerent scenes in short amounts of time is jarring. The bonus summaries changing the background for every award is difficult to process. The text sitting directly on top of animation graphics makes it super hard to read. The normal gameplay screen has too much information squeezed in with too small fonts. There's so much opportunity to make a beautiful graphical presentation, and this game completely misses the mark. ACNC destroys this game in LCD implementation. JJP destroys this game in terms of animation quality.
Lightshows... everything seems the same. Normal gameplay doesn't do much, hit a good shot in a mode and get a random, fast, blinky pattern. Whoopee. Soo many lights on the playfield, such poor integration. Spooky and JJP lightshows both crush this.
Sound... ok. I think this is the best part of the game right now. I don't love the voices, but everything else is integrated fairly well.
And dang, Stern. Why is the high score entry switching back and forth between DMD-style and high res? Looks awful. And who did the font selections on this game? Wasn't there a font-gate on Wonka? This game has the strangest choices for fonts and colors.
Yikes - I think this opinion won't be popular, but damn I had such high hopes for this game, and it totally misses the mark. Stern hopefully fixes the display and lights, but I don't think there's much they can do about the layout. I was so ready to buy this, but the stream killed my excitement. Maybe playing it will help, but I'm not a great player, and even some great players on the stream couldn't shoot this game well. Wonka's theme integration is really bad, but it looks a ton more fun to shoot.
Pittsburgh, PA
Beecroft
Saint-Étienne
