Pinball is very personal.
Some machines just speak to particular people.
A lot of machines for me need a tip of the hat because of their place in history. Is the Addams Family the best pinball every made? Yes. And having said that to give the machine it's due... I've played enough Addams Family that the machine doesn't have anything to show me anymore.
The game was designed around a perfectly balanced progression that was suitable for coin op, playing maybe twenty games at 50 cents a pop. In a home environment, playing 1000 games? Nope.
Way before you've put a thousand plays on the machine you're going to be done.
That doesn't stop it from being the best game ever made... It just means that in the modern environment, the machine plays like a piece of pinball history. Give it it's due... and move on.
I FIRMLY believe that some of the ambivalence, or mild dislike, or even active loathing might have been because the player was put in front of a machine that either wasn't working, wasn't working right, or wasn't tweaked to be a good example.
Or maybe not. One of the nice things about Funhouse is that it can be fairly off-level, fairly poor mechanically, and it still delivers a 'Funhouse' experience. (Shrugs). I like it, but I get why people don't. It's another game like Addams that it's fairly easy to master all the shots if you are a skilled player, and then there isn't that much there. It was an astonishing play experience when it was released.
So pinball is very personal.
You end up liking the machines you like, you end up disliking the machines you dislike. That's OK.
The pinside top 100 list is a popularity contest, and almost any player will enjoy machines in the top 20 or 30... particularly if they've been there a while. But that's ALMOST everybody. Maybe not you.
On my retail showroom I really like to have a dozen or more pinballs in great repair, tweaked to bring out the best this particular machine can be. I keep them on free play, and I want a potential buyer to play the machine they are thinking of buying... because what one person loves, another person isn't impressed by. And how are you going to know unless you not only play the machine, but play a good example of the machine?
I like pretty much all pinball.
Except Popeye. That machine sucks.
