Classic Bally/Stern is not my era of games. I like a lot of EM's, they have a charm to them, a certain smell. I'm amazed at how they were able to make complex rules work. I especially love the difficulty and frustration of drop targets. I'm much more into modern games. Ramps, multiballs, great sound. I always thought the early SS stuff was sort of an awkward in between stage.

I came across a Stern Hot Hand on craigslist a couple years ago. It came with a spare MPU and basically cost me the price of the MPU. I figured I could learn some stuff fixing the old MPU, sell off the replacement, bat the ball around a few times and sell it a show.

Repairing it was not as easy as I had hoped. Fixing one problem uncovered another. After finally getting it to work, I can't get enough of it! It's playing great, playfield is nice. Backglass is maybe a 6 and a couple of the displays are a little wonky. I went from thinking I'd play 20 games on it and sell it, to - where can I store this temporarily so I don't need to sell it. I turn it on thinking I'll play a quick game or 2. Ten games later I'm late for whatever I needed to do.

As of now my favorite is my Stern Hot Hand, but moving forward I won't just write these games off as an awkward in between stage.