Is this a bad thing, or just Ritchie returning to form after a long abscence? Star Trek and AC/DC both felt VERY out of character with him, with both having 'dead end' type shots and the Premium/LEs of both of those games play MUCH MUCH slower than their pro counterparts...

If this ends up being more like No Fear with good code...then I want a premium.

Bless the Maker and His water.
Bless the coming and going of Him.
May His passage cleanse the world.
May He keep the world for His people.

I've played FullT several times, and played Aliens at TPF..... If the FullT's I played were better set up with stronger flippers it would've been more than fine in the flow department but that wasn't my actual experience.

Aliens is clunky as hell man IMO, but that's what happens when you have a design change hands halfway through.

Because they're not production ramps. They're likely mold testers that aren't polished.

Man....you guys make me kind of glad nobody looks at my Voltron thread...I'm not sure I want the art critiques.

The problem is that BM66 is actually a pretty good game. It plays great, the rules are easy to understand. It's main problem is that it still has unfinished code and modes that do um...nothing? TV villian modes don't do jack. The game is fast though...way faster than BM66, which is a vast improvement. If they just FINISH THE CODE, and if the game had been released at normal price points, it wouldn't be nearly as maligned. I'm thankful I have one to play on location.

So clearly then, her professional judgement of good pinball games is terrible.

Man you gotta stay outta Vegas. It's not having a good effect.

Don't you just love the way they hypocritically trash the guy that owns 7 pins as an "overgrown child"...clearly, these people never look in the mirror..

Holy f'in s--t does everyone here make 200k +? lol. Biweekly paychecks would put you at around that amount for 8k/check..

And only if there had been some conversation with ANYONE AT STERN and it been referenced in this piece...the title might actually carry some weight...but since the entire thing is speculation and conjecture...um....

+1000000000000000

That comment goes to plaid.

Well you know the saying is "If you want something done right, do it yourself?" That's the entire reason I'm doing the Votron project...Steve killed the design on WPT, but the art direction and theme are very MEEEEHHHHH to me LOL. So I'm going to do it as something I want to look and listen to every day.

Steve has been a cranky old man for a long time, and this would hardly be the first time he's crapped on potential customers. Frankly, if I treated him the same way that I feel about..say...Jack.... I wouldn't buy any game he ever designs again. The guy is a crass prick a lot of the times when his games are announced. He's lucky he's talented at what he does and that somehow these layouts that are so similar have become SUCH a liked trope instead of a hated one...otherwise nobody would put up with that shiat. The very fact that he goes to RGP (the Garden of Eden of crass pricks everywhere..) to post instead of here just illustrates that the guy is TERRIBLE at understanding how these things work and that initial criticism is *very* often backtracked on and people eat their words.

*edit* I had to figure out who I had on ignore to see the initial comment, so I guess apparently Steve has other outlets than just RGP now. Guess Stern has made enough money off him to loosen their grip a bit.

I'm waiting to find a WWE LE for 2500. I've actually grown to kind of like the game having to play it in league. The upper playfield is difficult when both slings are working properly and it's bouncy, and the rules for qualifying Tag Team are interesting. It's actually a very good competition game because it requires live catching and bounce passes to control effectively, and consistency in making the left and right ramps is required to build bonus X.

This game would have to be shittier than any game Stern has released since Striker Extreme to be as bad as DESW.

Guess my dreams of ever getting a premium are dead... 7400 is way too much. I'll just find a nice STTNG I can restore instead.

Burn in a fire, man....like, REALLY? It's the dinks like you saying this exact thing repeatedly over the years that has led us to this point of absurd pricing. Every game is SOMEONE'S dream theme, so you're advocating for a price increase for EVERY GAME. Maybe that doesn't matter so much to all the lawyers and other people with boat payments on here, but I can tell you it matters to me and to a lot of the people I associate with. The 1k increase over what I paid for my Met or Tron matters. The extra 1k over what I paid for AC/DC Premium *DEFINITELY* matters! This game isn't anywhere NEAR as packed as AC/DC premium was!

STLE was PACKED as well. Not so much with gameplay extras, but aesthetically? It's not even remotely a fair comparison. STLE is a visual feast.. SWLE is...an expensively modded premium.

I think we'd all have liked for the detail and extras that went into STLE to be something of a standard moving forward, but it seems that almost all of the cool things they did for that LE have gone by the wayside..

How many times are you going to say that? Is Stern paying you a per diem on this?

Why wouldn't it be? It's clearly called a "jump ramp" and why would they go to the trouble to have a different part there other than the already-designed-and-previously-produced "fork lock" if it wasn't going to do anything different? Come on...

You repeated it twice in the span of three posts on this thread... seriously. I'm glad you're excited, man... so am I! I really want to play the premium. If I could afford to buy one, I'd be in, because that AT-AT side of the artwork is freakin' amazeballs, and if the hyperspace ramp is really a loop with a linear magnetic inductor like Getaway? I *really* miss Getaway, and the whole reason I got rid of it was super shallow code...so something else with that feature is something I'm VERY interested in.

PHRASING!

This is one of the most moronic things I've ever seen you say, man. Really? Someone doesn't understand the rules because YOU haven't had a 45 minute game? How do you think *WE* -----====ARE====----- having 45 minute games? We're locking mode balls left and right, stacking multiballs, getting add-a-balls off the spot target and Into the Fire and Barrel Escape... MY GOD THE GAME HANDS YOU MORE BALLS THAN YOU GET IN HYPERBALL FFFS...ON A SILVER PLATTER....

The real question is how are you NOT having 45 minute games?!?

I was at a private owner's house the other day helping him fix another game, and his like 5 or 6 year old daughter played ball 1, I played ball 2 and got all the way effectively from the start of the game -1 mode to making 3 unsuccessful kill shots on Smaug (monsters were up...ugh..) and then Into the Fire and COMPLETING it and shooting victory laps for a minute. I didn't even play ball 3 because I was just tired and needed to get home.

Please send these guys to our league to boost our points for a few weeks. I'll be happy to personally eliminate them and show them how to play the game correctly.

It sounds to me like if the Hyperspace loop has 4 magnets it's meant to run continuously for a bit. The Getaway supercharger is only 3 magnets, but the Hyperspace loop is SUBSTANTIALLY longer it looks like.. so....needs 4 magnets, and I bet it still won't get close to Supercharger speeds. Boo. :\

DO IT!!! I love playing against Bob! I've had a handful of chances to do so and the guy is just so affable I don't ever feel bad when I lose to him. I think we're at about a 50/50 ratio when it's come down to 1v1 games. We had a great tiebreaker throwdown on Spiderman with lightning flippers last year at Bat City Open for the very last finals slot in the main tournament, but his superior control won out against my on-the-fly playstyle. I just could NOT reliably shoot doc ock.

*edit* Deleted last part because I'm an idiot and have been doing the same thing as all the other good players apparently.

There's no difference at all in who you pick for WWE aside from some callouts.

Sweet, then it's even better and I already liked it. Will take the update with me to league on wednesday!

LOL....the entire country of Germany is about the size of the actual civilized part of Texas. Literally, east edge to west edge, is almost identical to what I drove from Dallas to Austin and back over the weekend for a tournament. I've also done that drive in an evening to buy a game. That's like barely even a factor when you consider all the other stuff!

Apologist much?

And also, I hate to tell you, but running a business doesn't make you NOT a civilian. At least use something fitting....like 'peon'.

Really...exactly which other -=pinball machines=- are sold as DIY kits in the last 20-ish years? I don't care about your non-pinball examples, because that's a different market and different precedents. Even the "kits" that have been sold to convert games came with an assembled and wired playfield LOL.

I'd need your help about as much as...nothing, actually. 6 years in the hobby I've never paid a tech ONCE. Three full playfield swaps by myself, one diode went on one lamp socket incorrectly and that was the first swap, 4 years ago, and no issues at all with the other two. Competence isn't the issue. A company delivering an assembled product which is NOT marketed as D-I-Y *is*. I had no issue with my Sparky being ziptied. If they sent it weeks after my game was delivered and said "Here put this on yourself!" I'd tell them to go f themselves and send a tech to do it. It's not my job to build their games. Nobody, including ops, buys games expecting to see a huge gaping hole with some exposed posts in the place of the biggest visual feature on the playfield. Hopefully, it's just an incorrect rumor, otherwise this is an all-time low for Stern. Shipping incomplete code was one thing that I could fathom...shipping games with missing parts? Errrrrrrrr....is that why they had yet another price increase?

Personally, I think it would be a hoot if they'd release some un-cleared playfields and collectors could color their own. It would be hilarious to see all the absurd things that people do to try and be "better than Stern" LOL

OMG BRO U ALREADY FORGOT ABOUT YOUR SUPER PHONE JUST DIAL 1-800-KICKERS TO FIX ALL YOUR WOES.

/facepalm

couldn't help myself.

How did a new game play like that? How did Pinbot and Shuttle play like that nearly 30 years ago... as far as I can tell, GB is the ONLY game you consistently trash for physical design, but it's far from the first, or the last game that kills you for missing shots. The shots themselves aren't THAT hard, but they ARE very unforgiving when you do miss...

I feel like you were in a good position as a skilled player to correct the poor opinion that new games shouldn't be hard. If he owns a Gorgar, and *doesn't* get a lot of drains? That's a Gorgar that plays like crap, in MY opinion! That game is super tough when it's waxed and you can't move it 5 feet to either side. Sounds like the guy is just complaining because it's beyond his skill level, he's used to playing a flat, boring Gorgar, and refusing to learn new skills...like many many 'casual' players that I have seen post here and show up for league/tournaments only to never come back after the first week because they want to compete with 'pros' and feel like they have a shot at prizes and money....but not put in the time and effort to develop their skills and knowledge. Who the crap wants to walk up to a brand new game, and just pwn the thing the first two or three games into it, leaving nothing to aim for, nothing to improve on? Boring!

Not every pin needs to, or should be, built to suit causal players. Trudeau is as notorious as Oursler (and I do understand it's NOT the domain of the casual player to know who the heck designed a game and what their M.O. is!) when it comes to building layouts that will hand your butt to you if you just carelessly flail around. If you shoot the GHOST target from the left flipper...you deserve to drain, IMO. If you develop the skills to livecatch and can start with a skillshot, you really shouldn't ever need to touch that thing anyways. I'd say maybe 1-in-5 games I deliberately shoot it, mostly because I beefed my soft plunge. There's more to modern pinball than "FULL POWAH PUNCH-PLUNGE WITH THE PALM OF MY HAND AND MONKEY FLIP TILL I DIE" and people hopping in need to understand these games are NOT being aimed at EM/80's casual fans....they're for the kids with the ridiculous reflexes and coordination. I'm sure many old EM guys felt that the newfangled solid state games were/are utter garbage when they started showing up for the same reasons. If the opinion on GB is so split right down the middle (aside from Slimer which has never had the fix applied to it AFAIK), then it's not a case of the game just *sucking*, it's just your preference. That's perfectly okay, but to claim the game sucks? Give me a break. I won't even say that Aerosmith *sucks* or that TWD *sucks*, and I hate both of those games. They both have one or two little things that irritate the crap out of me. Aerosmith, GB, TWD.....none of these games are Avengers.

Your complaint about linear modes? You are certainly free to make the choice to not play them in a linear fashion if you wish to kneecap your own ability to score points. The option is there. Following the right loop ladder isn't the only path to success on GB for anything but the extreme top end of play. It's hard to pull off. Left ramp modes are much safer IMO, but again...scoring is lower to compensate for that, and the fact it's only 3 modes instead of four. No causal player is going to give two farts that the extreme end of play is linear, because all they're doing is flipping around, not intentionally shooting the same sequence of shots over and over. To make an analogy out of it...competitive play (I include things like going for high scores in an arcade as "competitive") of pinball is like speedruns for console and PC games. There are highly optimized paths to take to achieve specific goals, and just like speedrunners, pinball players are going to seek those out and go for them if they give *any* kind of competitive edge. You can't have a risk/reward structrue that is 100% balanced in a game like pinball. There's too many variables.

If you don't like the theme...fine...whatever, nothing can be done about that, but there's nothing wrong with the shots on GB *pro*. The premium right side ramp? I 100% will agree that thing is a POS, and the magnaslings were always going to be love/hate. I'll even give you the Scoleri Bros. and Slimer on all models **if** they haven't been fixed....our pro on location is STILL bricking balls and causing airballs over the lane guides, which we can all agree is crap. It definitely hasn't gotten better with age as many suggested it would. I'm super glad to not see mid-playfield drop targets on Star Wars LOL. Both of the issues that give players the most grief with this game are *fixable*... slimer and scoleri. Should Stern be chastised for not having a more reliable design out of the gate? Absolutely. Does two easy, but needed, fixes turn a game into a crap game? Not in my opinion...clearly yours is different.

Just complaining that the game drains too much? Pfft. Please. THEY ARE DESIGNED TO DRAIN YOUR BALL. THAT'S HOW THEY MAKE MONEY. Don't like it? Then don't play the game, plain and simple, and operator profit margins will speak for themselves in most cases. Or take it home and adjust it to your liking if it's a theme you JUST HAVE TO HAVE. But don't say that it's a crap game just because you couldn't make the shots and were punished for it. I've seen plenty of 'casual' players rock a GB, and I've seen plenty of 'pros' eat dirt on it. The game is pretty well balanced in that regard.

I've watched about 45 minutes of the Star Wars video...certainly isn't looking like a "casual friendly" game. Lots of punished flails to the outlanes and STDM, plus super complicated rules that DEMAND your attention on the fly to reach those big scores = this game is going to piss off a lot of newbs. Even the shot coming around that inner loop had some STDMs that I saw, and that's on an INTENDED SHOT. =|

/soapbox

Furthermore (sorry I do have one last thing to say), that "Trudeau flipper gap"...why does everyone bitch about this, yet people LOVE Doctor Who and BSD, and lightning flippers on tournament games. It's the same bloody thing accomplished two slightly different ways, but one get shat on and the other is "just how it was intended".

??? dafuq? So by your logic, a game can't be 'linear' if it doesn't have modes? Even when the clear path to good scores is one route, and one route only? LOL. Where is the line between "simple" and "linear"? BSD and DW force you into 2 specific tracks to blow up the score, which GB doesn't. But they're not linear and GB *is*? That makes no sense at all. GB gives you the choice of three mode ladders, and even allows you to switch paths inbetween. You also have the option of just popping a ton of ghosts and going for PKE Frenzy, Loopin' Supers, and Total Insanity.

BSD is *the* definition of a linear game. There is only *one* path to blowing that game up, and that's the multiball stack. Bats may save you in a tourney setting, assuming that EVERYONE ELSE FAILS at the real goal, which is 2+ stacks. If anyone even whiffs at 2 or 3 20 million jackpots your bats just became useless. Nobody plays BSD to get bats, or the video mode.

Doctor Who? It's always machine-dependent on if the side ramp is 'safe' or not on the return. If it is... Sonic Booms until your eyes bleed. Everyone that did well on DW at TPF this year used that strategy. If it's not, then you go for your extended multiplier timer, make a few shots to build it up and PRAY you don't get STTNG-style screwed with a half ramp shot to left outlane, and go for multiball. That's it. I love the feel of the game but it's a wading pool, codewise.

Where were you bitching about Metallica's outlanes, and TWD's pops draining down the middle? It's the same bloody thing, only the issues on those two games are almost entirely due to not being level. Personally I've never seen GB go from pops STDM where it wasn't saveable? Are you talking about the left side or the right side...I don't see how it could possibly be the right side. Maybe ours tilts to the right so it's less of an issue, but just like I took your word for it on the sound of Hobbit, I'm willing to listen to a reasonable explanation on this one and compare to the one I have access to! The airball crap is fixable. Our location hasn't fixed it, but I've played enough different machines to know that how those stupid drops are adjusted makes a HUGE difference. The outlane rails I feel like are your one valid complaint, but that alone doesn't kill the entire game, sorry.

Oh, so it's perfectly fine for your Gorgar owning friend to do that, but not me? Okay.

You're bitching an awful lot about things that are the fault of the machine's owner to not have fixed. I guess Monster Bash is a shit game because I've played PLENTY where the scoop shot STDM and I was forced to avoid it unless I was starting a multiball. Stupid ass Gomez!

*edit* I'm going to hear you out on the pops thing, then I think I'm done looking at your posts for a while at least.. I used to have a lot more respect for you as a poster, and I keep finding lately that it's just going down the toilet, and we're both hardheaded as f.... it's probably just better if we don't have these exchanges to start with.

Not any more than my hundreds of hours of playing Pinbot on the NES affected how I felt about owning the actual game, I'm sure.

Like I said..I'll check the level on our GB here locally but haven't ever had much STDM out the left OR right sides, so that doesn't really mesh with what you're saying, but I could see how if it's tilting much to the right, it would alleviate a lot of that.

I'm just over it man. You've decided to have your little crusade against a game that you have impossible expectations for. You admit it's a story based game, but you want it to NOT be *somewhat* linear..makes zero sense. It's like telling me that LOTR sucks because you have to play the major multiballs BEFORE you Destroy the Ring...I've just never seen you rail so hard against one game, and every time there's a point addressed, you shift the complaint to some other part.....so I give up, and putting you on ignore for a while, because frankly even I'm sick and tired of it at this point. It's really easy to call something shit when you set the conditions to be an impossible standard to meet. You refuse to admit that owners/ops need to do any work to correct the fixable issues (yet replacing the metal cube with a captive ball on Met Premium was acceptable to you if I'm not mistaken), you want a *story* based game to be COMPLETELY non-linear.

*throws up hands*

Whatever. Agree to disagree and all that. I'm just not going to listen to any more of it.

Because everyone knows nobody under 5'2 owns pins, and everyone over 5'2 has the same length of arms, which just PRECISELY happens to be just right to reach the new switch location. (I do agree that remotes are a good and cheap solution on this....just think it's funny you're maligning a group of players based on their height. The switch location is dumb, period. Without remotes it's a pain in the ass in tight quarters but we've all be over this a million times..)

*edit* OH NOES DOWNVOTE ARMY INCOMING LOL.

Actually, this is pretty dead on. It does remind me a LOT of modern pachinko/pachislo games in the way the assets are handled....just never made that connection before. It doesn't personally bother me, but there's definitely a similar vibe!

Avatar.

While this is true, it seems the complaint is that big scores can happen by chance, and it doesn't necessarily require skill, just a few "missed" shots at the right time...so some luck can play a bigger factor than it would in other games. I think the way Star Wars appears to be working, is a step in the right direction to alleviate some of that. The fact that you have to select a set of shots before you cash it out, and that as the multipliers get higher it reduces itself down to ONE shot, means that aside from being in multiball...players are going to have to be a lot more aware of what they're doing with those multipliers. It won't fix the claim that you can blow up scores with a few good shots, but it's very unlikely that the claim that 'it was just luck' is going to hold any water on Star Wars..

GB bonus..... it's not ridiculous. It's easy to get back up top and collect lanes or let the pop bumper slot machine do it's thing and award rando 5x or whatever. The prize winner for ridiculousness on GB is by far the %score awards for soft plunge and shoot the skill shot. Sometimes hundreds of millions of points for the easiest award since Jackbot soft-plunge valid playfield exploit to start Casino Run! GB is actually far worse in this regard, because you can even hit MULTIPLE switches and the thing will stay lit.

No, it's awarded when you make the skillshot. If it was awarded on bonus, I'd have many many 5 billion+ scores on record LOL.

If someone is shooting GOT for a half hour and have a crap score...that's entirely their fault, and they're NOT shooting lit shots. Even assuming they don't know how to INTENTIONALLY manipulate the multipliers (why is this so damn hard...all you do is keep making combo shots, which the game DOES LIGHT UP FOR YOU, and whacking the battering ram. SERIOUSLY....THAT'S THE WHOLE THING.) if you're playing for 30 minutes and not getting at least to Hand....that's just terrible play, not the fault of the game to provide ample scoring opportunities.

How is it not applicable to Keith and Lyman's games.. you can VERY MUCH kill someone that's played substantially longer than you have on WOZ if you stack Crystal Ball 2x with EC multiball. AC/DC? You're kidding....right? That game is the *king* of risk/reward... I can sit there and watch someone put their balls all over the mini playfield for an hour, and literally, I will pass their score in 15 minutes playing Thunderstruck, easily.

That might be the only question I'm actually interested in Ritchie opening his mouth to answer....how much of the rules on things like AC/DC, GOT, SW are his 'vision' that a programmer has simply fulfilled for him, versus it coming from them?

You're right, and GB is *far* worse about this than GOT! I personally think AC/DC is too, but the fact that almost everyone thinks I'm nuts for always playing Thunderstruck seems to indicate that nobody agrees with my opinion there. (I'm still right though. )

Yeah...there's very very little "middle ground" with GOT. It's like the saying.. "When you play the Game of Thrones....you win or you die."

Star Wars should be better in that regard, since people can just cradle up and pound the lockdown bar for what's looked like some very decent points in videos. I'm not sure if I like that or not, and probably won't know until I get to play one in a few leagues or tournaments. It's definitely going to be a strategy to go for hurryups and video modes on that game in super hard tournament setups where you just need a 'decent' qualifying score, or to avoid taking a zero

That video that dead flip did where the game thoguht the guy was still in muliball.....he was getting 8 million a pop at one point, pretty sure. I'll go back and look, it may have been 800k in which no biggie but I swear I saw one that was 7950K....which is 7.9 million. For pressing a button. lol. Seems the value builds over the course of a ball and doesn't reset unless you drain. Could lead to some very odd strategy where you're just trying to get tie fighter hurryups.

I think it was just a faulty switch. AFAIK the ball was sitting in the death star inner loop thingy behind the lifted up gate/pole/whatever.

SW showed up before our league night on wednesday. Really fun game, though there are a few small issues:

1. Bonus values are *ludicrous* until people get a grip on this game and start getting higher per-ball scores... we saw many balls where bonus was worth more than the ball score. If you're complaining the ball doesn't go over the top lanes enough, you should either be thankful, or get ready to play Avengers 2.0 until they get rebalanced.

2. The scoop on ours kicks STDM *very* frequently, and will need to be adjusted.

3. Game is chock full of 'sucker shots'...it's not a noob friendly game at all, so any reports that this game might be dumbed down or "easy" to support a non-pinball fanbase are greatly exaggerated and honestly not even remotely true. This is a *PLAYERS* game. It's fast, it's furious, it's REALLY DIFFICULT to juggle everything you need to be doing at once. I actually injured my shoulder tendon because I was trying to chin-smash the button to kill tie fighters while keeping the ball in play as I couldn't get control of it.

4. The ball save is on the wrong bloody side. The ball, from what we have seen, only very rarely goes out the right outlane. The left side is a black hole.

Overall, I like it a *LOT*. The cabinet looks amazing, IMO. It's got a fllat comic-bookish style to it that I like, instead of looking like a movie still or other digital painting. I did manage to get ONE 40x playfield shot, it was worth around 400 million, which was REALLY nice, considering average scores that night were around the 600 million mark, haha.

Still waiting for someone that's really pissed off to sell me their 2k Transformers so they can have the time of their life.

You mean as long as they don't have autoplungers...

That's a LE, right?

Well...that's nice, I suppose, but modern games are coded with the assumption it's there. I don't want people to be able to sit in multiball all day long with a ball or two in the shooter lane, personally.

Pity about that shipping. That's actually kind of tempting. I like Transformers a lot and need to raise some cash. Getting rid of Met wouldn't sting so bad if it got replaced with something we wanted and didn't leave a hole in the lineup..

Maybe SW VE will be "Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing"

The scoop is my one major complaint. Our one on location locally never locked up but I'm not particularly surprised to hear about that either with the state the code is in there's probably a lot of stuff that's 'commented out' in the code and God knows how that's affecting stability.

But it is a trench hole.

No...but the actual SCOOP one I've seen shoot STDM way more than I'd like. Same with AFM and RFM.

That's exactly how I felt about Star Trek Generations.

*POSSIBLE GAME SPOILERS BELOW*





A few days ago, playing with Xerico at league night, I managed to play through all the main modes and the mode multiballs. I had the entire game go dark, and four shots were lit. There was a callout or screen display along the lines of "prepare to fight the emperor!". When I say the entire game went dark...no GI, no insert lights aside from those four shots having all inserts for the shot flashing. I still don't quite get what happened. I shot the left ramp, as it was the easiest of the four, and basically nothing happened except there was an animation of Palpatine falling into the guts of the Death Star, from when Vader tossed him down....flippers went DEAD, ball drained, and game then allowed me to pick another character. No big multiball, no indicators, no big points.. just...one shot and done. Is this an uncoded-as-yet wizard mode or what? LOL. Not sure if there was supposed to be more there, or if I just hit a glitch and it ended early....or if I was suppposed to make those shots in a very specific order or something...an explanation would be awesome from someone that's had a chance to muck around with it.

I had one shot that was around 500 million and ended up with like 5.6 billion. Very satisfying. I HIGHLY recommend that anyone having issues with the right side scoop kickout, either due to power or alignment on location...pick Leia and take your first choice as "Light Tattoine Missions"....this basically negates ever shooting the scoop intentionally for 90% of things that are NOT collecting mystery award. Lighting the Endor missions off the left ramp is simple, then you just stack in the one Tattooine mission with an Endor mission and you're good to go, without ever touching that bloody scoop!

Pretty funny that even at the pinnacle of current pinball tech, we are still 10+ years behind...pachinko. That stuff has had full 3d rendered scenes for a long time, in addition to FMV and compositing of the "slot reels" on the screen. Sound systems are frankly better on modern pachinko too!

I will say that in this regard, Dialed In does have a big edge. The fact that it doesn't look like photochop+Flash animation is *really* nice. I think it's an acceptable level to what I'd expect, once they get the code finished and everything animated for the phone screen as well.

LOL....as a Metallica owner that bought before code was good, and bought it knowing that it might not ever be more than that....Star Wars needs VERY little (mostly bugfixes) to be at that level. Depending on how wizard modes end up unfolding, it's not going to be very hard for it to be BETTER than Metallica. The shots are much more fun, IMO. I've had 3.5 years of bashing Sparky. It's old hat now. SW forces you to do some very interesting things in order to optimize your scoring, whereas MET is pretty much entirely dependent on the doubled crank-it-up cash-out to score big. The lack of actual modes in Metallica I do not like either, and it's just gotten more and more irritating to me as time goes on, and I realize that all there is to do is farm coffin hits and sparky multiball, and bypass my most lucrative scoring potentials entirely if I want to play End of the Line. Choosing between scoring points or going for the wizard mode *sucks*.

6 years in, it's still close to a zero sum game for me. Beyond the first 3 or 4 games, I've made enough to cover everything else. Not EASILY, and there's a lot of "valueless time" factored in, but patience and knowing what things are worth and likely to sell for helps a LOT.

Yeah serious WTH?!

It's the same on the top of the head, but then on the front it's white instead of blue LOL!?!

To be honest, I've had 2 NIB games from Stern, and I don't remember either of them having protective tape there, LOL.

As for faith....in Stern....their quality control? Are you serious? Why would anyone?

I'm calling it now..

Remember everyone bagging on Metallica before Crank it Up and End of the Line got added and it was just four multiballs and that was IT?

Yeah. Lots of people going to be eating crow on this.

This has always been my advice, but the corollary to that is also "Stop being a f'ing dickhead just because you don't like the game as is.".....which many people seem to have an issue with pulling off. It's you guys' own bloody fault for preordering 7k toys with massive unknowns. I didn't buy Metallica until there were TWO pros at two different locations near me. I bought it before the big code updates, but I was perfectly fine if it had stayed that way forever. /shrug

I have no money in this fight, but given that I really don't like most Steve Ritchie games with a few notable exceptions (AC/DC and STTNG), and I do like THIS ONE, it's worth saying so. I don't think you really understand this game until you've put up a score (on .87 anyways) of 5+ billion without a scoring glitch. People bitched that lockdown bar buttons didn't get used enough (And somehow think the one on here is under-utilized)...well....stop being lazy and MOVE THOSE ARROWS instead of leaving them in one place the whole game?

I wish I could get video of me blowing up the one we have locally, including what I'm doing with the lockdown bar, because I really don't get how anyone thinks they need MORE to do with it. It's crazy how much I use that thing in comparison to AC/DC or GOT, and I've just started getting in the habit of the 'long press' when it's orange in multiball for the add a ball, so that's three core things that are done with the button as it currently sits.

Just so much SMH here. People's expectations have become ludicrous. If the game isn't TSPP or LOTR, it's not complicated enough. If it's TSPP or LOTR, it doesn't have enough flow.

I had it happen last week at our league night. That bug is so bonkers that it will even plow through your extra balls. I hit the bug at the end of my ball 2, then had 2 extra balls (plunge only..didn't play them...one was 2.2 billion bonus! .85 code I think LOL) and the last ball, and it just went right on through them all.

No ball save when that happens either!

My wife can't reach them. She's tried.

That's also very true about RFM...even I have trouble reaching that thing and I've got long cro-mag monkey arms.

These are the same people that thought that Star Trek was going to project an image onto the playfield glass.... LOL.