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.
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so its a somewhat clunky, somewhat pretty, nostalgic night-light? question - did anything break since its been out on the floor? i trust your opinion is summarized as in, this is a pretty curiosity but lacks thrills and moments of a modern game.
It sounds like you came away from the game as 2 EM playfields were stacked with 1 half covering the other..