When you use the Star Gazer custom ROM the rulesets are very similar. I give Quicksilver the nod for better flow, the insane pop bumper nest and best sound package for 1980. And another +1 for the history of the artwork.

Oh man, you have to try the custom ROMs. Forcing you to shoot the entire field to spot all of the constellations makes it far more challenging. In fact, many games I don't even complete them once to get the 12K super bonus. I also like the way it handles the extra ball target differently and being able to reset the bonus multiplier.

However, I'd still like the ability to spot zodiacs. Maybe after you max out bonus multiplier, target banks spot zodiacs.

A nice, fast Seawitch is four-flipper frenzied fun.

The rip tide shot has a great light and sound effect, but unless you have a maxed spinner there isn't much incentive to shoot it, unfortunately.

Somebody needs to make a custom rule for the rip tide shot. Just like the drop targets that increase in value as each target on the playfield is hit, I think the rip tide should be multiplied by bonus x. Could you imagine having spinner at 1K, rip tide lit for 2x with 7x bonus multiplier? Instead of 22,000 plus the spinner, you would score 11,000 x 2 x 7, or 154K plus the spinner. With a well tuned spinner that could be a quarter million shot!

Get a better cabinet speaker and hook up a subwoofer. When the saucer shot vibrates the glass you won't feel sad anymore.

I hope you get to play a QS that's set up properly. When you do, you will appreciate its speed and flow and understand the genius of its design.

I, too, am not a big fan of Iron Maiden and Split Second. Iron Maiden is very cool and I'd love to have one in my collection, but I've played a few of them and all left me unimpressed playwise.

Played Split Second a few times in the arcades, never again. Maybe I need to give a nice example another chance. I don't know....seems everyone that picks one up moves it pretty quickly.

I have my concerns with Freefall. No one ever talks about it. I'm going to try to set mine up right and tweak it. We'll see what happens.

Meteor is awesome!

I'll admit, when I played it in the arcade I didn't care for it that much. Then I bought one on the cheap and thought I'd kick it around a bit for something different to play. I had just sold a Trident, which I liked, and was falling in love with QS so I wanted more classic Sterns.

Well I got it running, rebuilt the mechs and started playing it. It played well, but it was still just OK. I could roll it at will. I put the divide by 10 ROMs in and that ended the rolling, but I was still scoring into the millions all the time. It just wasn't challenging enough and wasn't giving me that "just one more play" feeling I wanted from it.

So I decided to make it harder. I raised the back legs all the way and put it on blocks. I jacked it up so high it felt like you were playing pachinko. Ok too much. I dropped it down just enough to the point where the physics started to feel normal again. Still really steep, but at least the ball would actually bounce off the rubber instead of dead hits and dropping. I also gapped the lower flippers EOS switches as close as I could to give them more power to fight the added slope.

It was there that I found its sweet spot. Now it's hard to max out the rockets. The ball moves so fast up top that it's harder to hit all of the Meteor targets. I tweaked the spinner to make it very lucrative. Even so, rolling it is a thing of the past. So challenging. You know if you can just have one good ball -- get Meteor targets up to 6x and get the extra ball -- you might have a chance of breaking a million.

Now it gives me that "just one more play" feeling, and I love it.

Genesis used to be one too. People couldn't get past the translite and nobody wanted it. Now they're starting to see there's a good game lurking under that ugly translite and the value is going up.

15 years ago nobody wanted these old Sterns. At auctions they were dead or had problems and you could pick them up for pennies on the dollar. Then the hype from the collectors started to raise awareness on these gems and the value soared. Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag by the time I was looking for a Star Gazer.