Quoted from NickBuffaloPinball:

I sincerely hope that everyone that's waiting for a game, gets one in working order and enjoys it.
Looks like Scooby Doo will be at PinBrew. If anyone wants to show me what I'm missing on the game (or any other Spooky games there), I'm open to that. I'm willing to change my mind and happy to report a positive experience.

Quoted from Aurich:

It's weird that pinball has gotten to the point where it's so about ownership that location play is supposed to be gate-kept into some kind of ghetto.
I'm not going to argue about this, you don't like that I took the time to write up my thoughts after playing the game for people asking questions about the game so be it. I think your outrage is misplaced.

Quoted from Pinstym:

You're reading it wrong if you're reading outrage.
I didn't make this the owners thread. I jumped over here from the hype. The hype is still there to post whatever you want. It's like the easiest thing to give some respect to. I'm totally serious that I don't understand why someone who's not an owner, and thinks they never will be, would want to come here and post anything.
If you wanna help the 3 iffy guys who aren't sure about their purchase, why not pm them? You can still help them while you help me.
There's still an active hype thread. Why's it so difficult?

Quoted from chuckwurt:

I think it’s silly to post in a club thread if you have no interest in the game whatsoever. But you 100% do not need to be an owner to hang in these threads.

Quoted from Aurich:

Played Scooby last night with a friend, so played and got to watch so I could pay attention to things. Just my quick thoughts:
My honest take is it's clunky but charming. Things I enjoyed:
The art is great. Really captures the Scooby vibe. The LCD stuff is mostly pretty good, I don't love the typography choices, but I'm admittedly pickier than most. Instruction text was clear though. Cartoons make for good clip content (mostly, see below).
Sculpts and powder coated wireforms all look great.
The bookcase flipper is really unique. That's no small thing, not often you get an actual original flipper in pinball, hats off to the team for the whole idea. It's super on-theme, the way you use it to capture a ball shot to the upper playfield is clever, and learning how to use it without flinging the ball, or, learning to fling the ball on purpose was fun.
Modes and objectives seemed pretty clear, wasn't hard to figure out what to do. Though I got the Captain Cutler multiball but I wasn't entirely sure why. Like, clearly I was bashing him to get it, but the various lights on him and the targets and lanes around him were confusing, I couldn't tell if I was supposed to move my shots around, if I got it because I just hit him enough times, or what.
I thought it was fun enough, even with my complaints below. If you're a Scooby fan it felt very on theme.
Things I didn't love:
The drop banks on the left are awkward and don't feel particularly useful or enjoyable. I love drop targets, but they don't seem interesting to shoot, and mostly just seemed to get in the way of the ball in sort of dribbly ways.
I'm just not a big upper playfield fan, in general, and this one is kinda dominant. The bookcase flipper is awesome, and makes it more interesting, but it still has the fundamental problem with that kind of upper playfield, which is that the physics of the ball in a small area (it's big, but not that big) just aren't super fun, and they are by their very nature safe, since your only penalty is to go back down to the lower.
With the big upper playfield and the Mystery Mobile and lock behind it you basically cannot see the entire back of the game. So you spend a lot of time shooting up into lanes, the ball vanishes, and then you wait to see what happens. Sometimes it come back out right away, sometimes it doesn't, and it was never really clear if it was being held on purpose or stuck or slow or what. There's just no visual feedback of the ball path, and I didn't enjoy that.
The game felt very stop and go. As I said it wasn't clear sometimes if it was even meant to stop. I'm still not sure why the ball took longer to come back some shots. The clips to start a mode look nice, but are very long, I wish they were edited to be more punchy. There's just a lot of time spent waiting, and the rhythm of it felt slow.
Overall the game felt very easy. The middle flipper drop target save seemed up a lot. It's clear once you learn it a bit more that ball times will be long. That's good or bad depending on your taste. I think for the theme it's cool that it's more kid friendly.
Overall I thought it was fun and pretty, but also clunky, and not overly interesting to shoot. A lot of basic fan shots that disappear under things until they come back, so you never see the ball curve, just shoot straight up, wait, it comes straight down. Not being able to see the ball a lot, or seeing it a lot on the upper playfield which is slower by nature, meant the game didn't feel very kinetic.
I'd play it again on location, but for me not seeing the ball movement is a design flaw that would make it not my first choice to play.
[quoted image]

Quoted from frankmac:

Quick question? If the reviews were 100% positive and raving about the game would you still not want them to post in here?

Quoted from anathematize:

It may not have been in their official review but Nick and Kevin absolutely destroyed Stern over the scoop nonsense on Rush.
They also scorched them when Nicks Godzilla power supply arrived with incorrect wiring out of the factory.
Frankly - Kevin’s P3 bias aside - they are pretty equal opportunity when it comes to ripping manufacturers.

Quoted from Aurich:

Played Scooby last night with a friend, so played and got to watch so I could pay attention to things. Just my quick thoughts:
My honest take is it's clunky but charming. Things I enjoyed:
The art is great. Really captures the Scooby vibe. The LCD stuff is mostly pretty good, I don't love the typography choices, but I'm admittedly pickier than most. Instruction text was clear though. Cartoons make for good clip content (mostly, see below).
Sculpts and powder coated wireforms all look great.
The bookcase flipper is really unique. That's no small thing, not often you get an actual original flipper in pinball, hats off to the team for the whole idea. It's super on-theme, the way you use it to capture a ball shot to the upper playfield is clever, and learning how to use it without flinging the ball, or, learning to fling the ball on purpose was fun.
Modes and objectives seemed pretty clear, wasn't hard to figure out what to do. Though I got the Captain Cutler multiball but I wasn't entirely sure why. Like, clearly I was bashing him to get it, but the various lights on him and the targets and lanes around him were confusing, I couldn't tell if I was supposed to move my shots around, if I got it because I just hit him enough times, or what.
I thought it was fun enough, even with my complaints below. If you're a Scooby fan it felt very on theme.
Things I didn't love:
The drop banks on the left are awkward and don't feel particularly useful or enjoyable. I love drop targets, but they don't seem interesting to shoot, and mostly just seemed to get in the way of the ball in sort of dribbly ways.
I'm just not a big upper playfield fan, in general, and this one is kinda dominant. The bookcase flipper is awesome, and makes it more interesting, but it still has the fundamental problem with that kind of upper playfield, which is that the physics of the ball in a small area (it's big, but not that big) just aren't super fun, and they are by their very nature safe, since your only penalty is to go back down to the lower.
With the big upper playfield and the Mystery Mobile and lock behind it you basically cannot see the entire back of the game. So you spend a lot of time shooting up into lanes, the ball vanishes, and then you wait to see what happens. Sometimes it come back out right away, sometimes it doesn't, and it was never really clear if it was being held on purpose or stuck or slow or what. There's just no visual feedback of the ball path, and I didn't enjoy that.
The game felt very stop and go. As I said it wasn't clear sometimes if it was even meant to stop. I'm still not sure why the ball took longer to come back some shots. The clips to start a mode look nice, but are very long, I wish they were edited to be more punchy. There's just a lot of time spent waiting, and the rhythm of it felt slow.
Overall the game felt very easy. The middle flipper drop target save seemed up a lot. It's clear once you learn it a bit more that ball times will be long. That's good or bad depending on your taste. I think for the theme it's cool that it's more kid friendly.
Overall I thought it was fun and pretty, but also clunky, and not overly interesting to shoot. A lot of basic fan shots that disappear under things until they come back, so you never see the ball curve, just shoot straight up, wait, it comes straight down. Not being able to see the ball a lot, or seeing it a lot on the upper playfield which is slower by nature, meant the game didn't feel very kinetic.
I'd play it again on location, but for me not seeing the ball movement is a design flaw that would make it not my first choice to play.
[quoted image]

Quoted from trueno92:

so its a somewhat clunky, somewhat pretty, nostalgic night-light? question - did anything break since its been out on the floor?

Quoted from Aurich:

Scooby never left me wondering, except for not being clear on the Cutler multiball start.
Do I just bash him? There are the footprints with the targets and the horseshoe behind him, but it just started before I had made them all go out or anything

Quoted from chuckwurt:

That shouldn’t happen. Each footprint shot you need to hit twice. Then the bash toy lights for MB start

Quoted from Aurich:

Played Scooby last night with a friend, so played and got to watch so I could pay attention to things. Just my quick thoughts:
My honest take is it's clunky but charming. Things I enjoyed:
The art is great. Really captures the Scooby vibe. The LCD stuff is mostly pretty good, I don't love the typography choices, but I'm admittedly pickier than most. Instruction text was clear though. Cartoons make for good clip content (mostly, see below).
Sculpts and powder coated wireforms all look great.
The bookcase flipper is really unique. That's no small thing, not often you get an actual original flipper in pinball, hats off to the team for the whole idea. It's super on-theme, the way you use it to capture a ball shot to the upper playfield is clever, and learning how to use it without flinging the ball, or, learning to fling the ball on purpose was fun.
Modes and objectives seemed pretty clear, wasn't hard to figure out what to do. Though I got the Captain Cutler multiball but I wasn't entirely sure why. Like, clearly I was bashing him to get it, but the various lights on him and the targets and lanes around him were confusing, I couldn't tell if I was supposed to move my shots around, if I got it because I just hit him enough times, or what.
I thought it was fun enough, even with my complaints below. If you're a Scooby fan it felt very on theme.
Things I didn't love:
The drop banks on the left are awkward and don't feel particularly useful or enjoyable. I love drop targets, but they don't seem interesting to shoot, and mostly just seemed to get in the way of the ball in sort of dribbly ways.
I'm just not a big upper playfield fan, in general, and this one is kinda dominant. The bookcase flipper is awesome, and makes it more interesting, but it still has the fundamental problem with that kind of upper playfield, which is that the physics of the ball in a small area (it's big, but not that big) just aren't super fun, and they are by their very nature safe, since your only penalty is to go back down to the lower.
With the big upper playfield and the Mystery Mobile and lock behind it you basically cannot see the entire back of the game. So you spend a lot of time shooting up into lanes, the ball vanishes, and then you wait to see what happens. Sometimes it come back out right away, sometimes it doesn't, and it was never really clear if it was being held on purpose or stuck or slow or what. There's just no visual feedback of the ball path, and I didn't enjoy that.
The game felt very stop and go. As I said it wasn't clear sometimes if it was even meant to stop. I'm still not sure why the ball took longer to come back some shots. The clips to start a mode look nice, but are very long, I wish they were edited to be more punchy. There's just a lot of time spent waiting, and the rhythm of it felt slow.
Overall the game felt very easy. The middle flipper drop target save seemed up a lot. It's clear once you learn it a bit more that ball times will be long. That's good or bad depending on your taste. I think for the theme it's cool that it's more kid friendly.
Overall I thought it was fun and pretty, but also clunky, and not overly interesting to shoot. A lot of basic fan shots that disappear under things until they come back, so you never see the ball curve, just shoot straight up, wait, it comes straight down. Not being able to see the ball a lot, or seeing it a lot on the upper playfield which is slower by nature, meant the game didn't feel very kinetic.
I'd play it again on location, but for me not seeing the ball movement is a design flaw that would make it not my first choice to play.
[quoted image]

Quoted from kevster:

Alright folks, I might need some talking down.
I'm currently in line with SD #401. I've never bought a NIB pinball before. Obviously, reading through this thread has been a wild ride. Lots of issues, which doesn't seem too surprising as it's early. But some of the build quality issues are alarming. And that was just heightened by a podcast episode I listened to.
I recently started listening to "Bro, do you even talk pinball." I find it entertaining with generally good info. On their recent episode, they both just laid into Spooky as a pinball manufacturer. And I mean, they let em have it. Talking about issues their past pins have had, things not working out of the box, shoddy soldering jobs, all sorts of things. I'll be honest; it really got me worried. I know Spooky is active on here and everyone says how good their customer service is, and that's awesome. But how concerned should I be that these build quality issues keep coming up on all of their releases?
Believe me, I WANT to be convinced to stick with my pre-order because I think the game looks very fun. But 10 grand is A LOT of money to throw at a company that doesn't appear to be learning much from their past mistakes.
I don't mean to be so negative. I've been hyped about this from the time I first learned about it. I'm hoping to hear some positive things that will convince me to get hyped again. Hearing what I did in that podcast was a bit shocking though. Am I putting too much stock in the opinions of just a couple dudes?

Quoted from Pinstym:

It's not the content of the post. Wrong place is all.

Quoted from Aurich:

Will the footprints go out? Because things were still lit when it started off bashing him which is why I was confused. Maybe I hit enough.

Quoted from Pinbolls:

The only long stop for me was at mode start and waiting on the ball to come out from the mystery machine. Also the scoop to the left takes a while to pop out. I did get one ball hangup in the left horseshoe.
Thanks for the review. I felt the game did just enough for me to keep my order in .

Quoted from Aurich:

On ball 3 of my friend's game he got fake multiball, the game started just kicking out balls randomly while he wasn't in a mode or anything. But early code, bugs happen, I don't judge things like that too harshly.
But it's definitely not a night-light, it's a real pinball, and as I said I did have fun. Early code or not it felt purposeful. We played Bond LE after it and compared to Scooby it was much harder to figure out what we were supposed to be doing. A lot of times when there were inserts lit on Bond but it wasn't clear why or what to do next. Scooby never left me wondering, except for not being clear on the Cutler multiball start.
Do I just bash him? There are the footprints with the targets and the horseshoe behind him, but it just started before I had made them all go out or anything, was just shooting up there, trying to get the feel for the bookcase and I hit him one more time and it started.

Quoted from RebelGuitars:

Sounds like the game might need an increase in pitch.

Quoted from bobukcat:

It's actually called "Phatom Multiball" and it's a new Mystery you and the gang have to solve.

Quoted from jk2171:

They might as well call that podcast "Bro Do You Want to Bash Spooky". It's a recurring theme throughout every episode.

Quoted from BlackBelt:

They can't talk that much trash without it catching up to them at some point...and it will. They've also done an excellent job at documenting everything they've said via video/audio streams so it's easy to go back recall exactly their words.
I just reach out directly to known SD owners (because their opinion matters to me) and ask for general feedback on the pin after they've owned it for a bit...works great to get sustained feedback and I'm super pumped after hearing all the positives!

Quoted from Mrawesome44:

Played one on location. Game was fun when it worked otherwise a lot of the same issues people have already reported in the thread.

Quoted from Pinstym:

Dude, one tiny paragraph?
The less you played and understood, the more we want to hear.

Quoted from Vecna:

Hopefully the Spooks test and re-test the Doos that go to Texas Pinball Festival. Lots of people and big wigs in the industry going to get a first impression at TPF. Not the time for games to crap out. The paparazzi will be watching.

Quoted from jk2171:

+1; it's just annoying as f*** to listen to every episode

Quoted from RebelGuitars:

Spooks? Really?

Quoted from metallik:

Then why do you listen to ANY episodes?
Reading all the podcast complaints here, you'd think folks were tied to a chair with a headset duct-taped to their skull. If you don't like what the people are saying, you can just turn it off.

Quoted from chuckwurt:

I think some pinheads literally take in every bit of content whether they like it or not too.
I used to, then it got to be way too much. Was easier when there was one stream, 1 podcast, and one YouTube channel.

Quoted from anathematize:

Agreed.
Maybe it’s just me but i actually enjoy podcasts that disagree with my opinions or challenge me to think about something differently. Echo chamber content sucks and caters to the lowest common denominator.
Frankly its all entertainment in the end. People just need to lighten up and not let someone else’s opinions ruin their day.
Everyone in pinball wants the best games at the best value. But it’s impossible for every game to be a home run. And every now and then you get a stinker. Such is life.

Quoted from SpookyLuke:

We are not seeing or hearing a high rate of surprise multiballs at all. I think maybe the game you are playing has a switch out of adjustment somewhere. I'm sure if you sent a video to us we could help diagnose. We certainly have some code bugs but I do not believe what you see describing is one.

Quoted from SpookyLuke:

We are not seeing or hearing a high rate of surprise multiballs at all. I think maybe the game you are playing has a switch out of adjustment somewhere. I'm sure if you sent a video to us we could help diagnose. We certainly have some code bugs but I do not believe what you see describing is one.

Quoted from SpookyLuke:

We are not seeing or hearing a high rate of surprise multiballs at all. I think maybe the game you are playing has a switch out of adjustment somewhere. I'm sure if you sent a video to us we could help diagnose. We certainly have some code bugs but I do not believe what you see describing is one.

Quoted from Green-Machine:

Ok!! Where is this guy when you need him?!
[quoted image]

Quoted from CoolCatPinball:

Not trying to be contradictive, but I'm pretty certain I've read of at least 3 people in this thread describing the mystery multiballs. Not that 3 is widespread, but it's definitely indicative of a potential repeated error either in assembly, code, or perhaps as simple as sensitive switches. I'm pretty handy around pins and if it's the latter situation, that's to be expected. Some of the reports were from location players, so maybe they're not opening tickets with Spooky?

Quoted from anathematize:

Agreed.
Maybe it’s just me but i actually enjoy podcasts that disagree with my opinions or challenge me to think about something differently. Echo chamber content sucks and caters to the lowest common denominator.
Frankly its all entertainment in the end. People just need to lighten up and not let someone else’s opinions ruin their day.
Everyone in pinball wants the best games at the best value. But it’s impossible for every game to be a home run. And every now and then you get a stinker. Such is life.

Quoted from insight75:

Its easy for switches to get out of adjustment after making a long trip by truck on our pothole filled roads across this country.

Quoted from Vecna:

Are we blaming potholes now.

Quoted from RebelGuitars:

Why are you here in the owners thread again? You shit all over Spooky in the hype thread. Not getting enough attention there?

Quoted from Vecna:

I have a pre-order. Thank you very much.