What do you think isn't lined up? I don't see anything wrong

Eh. That's forgivable. The text for the insert is at least inside the insert.

Probably not as noticeable in person either. The camera really picks up where the LEDs are.

Yeah I can see how that can be a minor annoyance.

Maybe Spooky can add another LED there. They could possibly replace the single lamp LED board there with a board containing two LEDs sharing the same lamp data. Or they could add another single insert LED board into the serial chain, but they'd have to redo the addressing of all the boards downstream in the chain (and would make fixing the games already out in the wild a serious PITA for a very minor problem)

Maybe a modder could make a replacement lamp board for those inserts for those that care.

Much easier to deal with than the artwork

It'd be ok for doing the credits during attract mode, but starting every game like that? People would skip it every time after watching it once and operators would be annoyed at how it wastes a minute when they're primarily concerned about player turnover to maximize coin drop.

I'm not trying to sound overly harsh. It's a nice attention to detail. But there's plenty of other areas that need work first.

Maybe I need to rewatch Halloween as it’s been a few years, but most of the scenes I can remember are very long and drawn out. It’s a masterclass of filmmaking in slowly building up tension. There’s not a lot of action that fits the needs of a pinball machine, so I get why they took the approach of original animations with a sprinkling of movie clips where stuff actually happens. There being a total of two good minutes worth of short clips sounds about right.

The LCD screen is simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to pinball machines.

I watched the stream with the animator and didn’t find it cringe like others. Maybe a bit dismissive of some criticism in a way that reflects poorly, but it was interesting to hear him talk about needing a game in possession to really understand what scenes worked and didn’t, how some are too long or repetitive, etc.

Someone brought up an excellent point about the disparity in art styles between some of them, which is constructive criticism in my opinion. I also think it’s constructive when people show what short movie clips they want to see running during modes or at the beginning/end. It’s definitely a challenge for the programmer and video editor to figure out ways to properly loop them and advance them during modes, especially since modes don’t seem to time out.

Maybe some of the original animations can have more variations as you progress through modes to keep them a little fresher. The LCD is mostly for onlookers and they’re not visually interesting for long. For example, where Michael is in the back of the car waiving a knife: maybe he doesn’t show up in the backseat until you hit a mode shot, then another he starts to waive the knife around, then the girl notices and reacts, and speed up the slashing motions as shot progress is made.

What if there was an op setting to return any ball that immediately drains after being lifted to the in-lane? Especially if the flipper button wasn’t pressed. Maybe limited to one save per ball with an audio call out to help teach the player to do better.

Watching some streams and seeing some of Travis's criticism, I think he has a very valid point that at times the game becomes too tunnel vision with "this is what you're supposed to be doing right now and nothing else matters/progresses” which is especially apparent when on the upper-upper playfield mode.

I like this idea and would suggest that the drops reset after the jackpot collect phase and then collecting the super jackpot would be a single shot worth, for example, 1x for hitting the outside drops, 1.5x for hitting the edge and center, and 2x for hitting just the center. Just to add a little extra reward for accuracy. They already have an excellent subtle rule that if you knock down only the center drop you can shoot through to go straight to the upper upper playfield. Those little rules add good depth for players to discover and for tournament players to enjoy.

Some buttholes are nice and tight and others are goatse

I thought some of Travis’s points were totally valid, and some were more his personal preference.

I haven’t had a chance to play either. Look forward to seeing one. I’m hopeful I’ll get a chance within another month when more make it out

And just to say, I get this is all very early code with lots of stuff needing fleshing out before polish on animations/sounds/scoring-balance. I still mildly regret not immediately pulling out the CC for Ultraman and figuring out the details later. But I’m sure I’ll get to see them in the wild and in friends collections soon enough anyways.

I remember being kinda down on ACNC when I first saw one, though I did notice the big improvement in build quality and saw the skeleton of a good game.

It’s kinda interesting. The shots are generally safe and beginner friendly in that you get lots of safe returns, so I guess in turn they make the code a lot tougher. I wonder how novice players feel about it.

Not standards though. I wouldn’t pay thousands more for stuff that makes no bearing on gameplay.

Munsters was basically done when it came out. People just didn't like how shallow the game was and were expecting a lot more than what was shown off. Which is a great reason to watch a reveal streams where Dwight flicks all the switches to show off everything in the game and talk about his design goals for the game being very simplistic.

I think spending blood for movie clips is kinda neat, but agree it's not enough to make the majority of players ever choose it. Maybe combine it with the awards that give you 1-3m points. Then people who don't care about points get something they'd be interested in, and tournament players may still opt to buy it if they just need a few points to cement their win.

A thousand times this. The LCD is the best and worst thing to happen to pinball. All this additional money and resources just to watch someone skip the clip with some flipper button presses

CGC has the best solution with their modern looking DMD. Cheap to make content for the screen, has the nostalgic charm of dots but with the higher resolution that your brain thinks of (sorta like when you play a HD remake of an old game and you forget that's not what it originally looked like)

Also is Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper suddenly chopped liver?

Nah. They type too differently. They're just both loud mouths.

Horror movies can be one of the best ROI in the movie industry if they hit. Newline Cinema was built on the back of Nightmare on Elm Street Movies. Blumhouse Production has quickly become of the most profitable companies in the industry with their spray and pray approach of giving unknowns small budgets and some of them occasionally blowing up, like Paranormal Activity or The Purge. The Halloween movies are relatively large budget for what they normally do.

I thought I remember Ben saying the Pinotaur was based on the Open Pinball Project and was Mission Pinball Framework compatible. Is Spooky coding the game in MPF? Just curious

I like MPF. It makes certain things very easy and is pretty flexible with adding custom python code.

And as an aside, I'm guessing the licensing is why you need to directly contact Spooky if you bork your drive. Can't let people just swap the code/drives around willy nilly. Licensors don't like that. (Though Stern didn't seem to care to prevent people from doing this on their Whoa Nellie and Spiderman Home iterations)

There’s not much stopping most people from directly controlling a machine via USB and MPF these days, including brand new Sterns out of the box.

Hell people already do plenty of dangerous things with silly mods, fat fingers, and general stupidity.

Some of the controllers are pretty good about knowing not to do certain things.

It’s a Pinotaur board. All new designed based on OPP. No schematics are out for it yet. There was some mention of selling them to homebrewers later but it sounds like Spooky can barely get enough to put in their own games.