I know this is the hype thread, but I'm super disappointed with the art. Especially the playfield. The cabinet art on the pro is decent and the premium seems borderline fake. The side art is decent though. Very curious to see more of the LCD screen in action later today.

The Icarus toy really makes me think of Ritchie's Elvis

I'm fine with iconic images, but the images just seem barfed onto the playfield with little consideration for how the art elements are placed with playfield elements/inserts. And then lots a giant sunburst and some color gradients to fill in the rest.

Steve Ritchie does not seem to really care that much about what his games look like. I'd say most of his work at Stern has poor to mediocre art, except Black Knight

I feel like if it had Stairway to Heaven then they would advertise having it.

I agree with you that the song doesn't fit pinball, at least without a ton of work.

But I would guess the reason it was left out is that the song costs as much as half of the other songs combined.

Part of the problem is you gotta get the designer on board with the theme. Steve Ritchie ain't getting hyped to make [removed] the pinball machine.

The other issue is rock is kinda dead? Unless they feel like mining 90s rock. Do people really want a Pearl Jam pin? Maybe a Foo Fighters...

I'd be into that one as well

RATM has been on my mind. I'm doing a homebrew project and while thinking of themes I keep circling back to possibly picking Run the Jewels. Zack de la Rocha does a lot of collaborating with them.

Of course there is an extreme irony considering what RATM stands for and being put on a nearly $9,200 luxury toy

But back to Led Zeppelin...it's fine. I'm happy for those that like it. I'm planning to buy a game next year, but this one ain't it.

Steve Ritchie and Tim Sexton. They did BK SOR together.

5. Steve Ritchie loves cross playfield plunges. They are on many of his games

6. I bet the ball can fall back in for another skill shot, like on Elvis.

Yeah, I don't want to sound ageist...but Keith Elwin is the youngest head designer and he's almost 50. He at least has a lot of fresh ideas because he hasn't been doing pinball design his whole professional career.

Rob Zombie, Primus, and GnR all formed roughly the same time but got popular at very different times.

I wonder how long ago Stern started planning the side rail lights. Just interesting GNR and LZ have a similar feature in such a short time span. I would think Stern was working on it before the GNR reveal, but it'd be funny if they spent the last two months cramming it in there.

There is one less multiball on the pro. This is confirmed in the Stern feature matrix. The center toy isn't present or compensated for in the pro, so its multiball is entirely missing.

Yeah I'm actually surprised with their implementation. It seems more complicated from a quick glance and I'd like to know more.

Looking at this screenshot really close, you can see a long line seam along the side below the lights. I'm guessing the lights are in a plastic assembly that slides into the side. And I guess they cut a channel in the sidewall of the cabinet to make space for it?

Screen-Shot-2020-12-15-at-9.36.57-AM (resized).png

Just Steve Ritchie.

I liked on Elvira HOH LE/SLE they had 4 people sign it (designer, artist, coder, lead engineer).

He's been doing voice callouts for Stern for years. Sometimes additional music like BK SOR

I hope the best for Tim Sexton and his code ideas. The TWIP article mentions some new ideas with how they want to integrate modes, songs, lightshows and how to coordinate all the elements.

My biggest issue with music pins is best demonstrated by ACDC. I don't necessarily want the song and the mode to be tied together, particularly on a game like this where I don't want to own one and will mostly only play it in a competitive format. I like that the song doesn't matter on Iron Maiden. And oh brother if the songs are in a set order.... At the same time, I do really wish that there was a better orchestration between the different elements.

It's a tough position to be in.

I didn't think BK SOR was incredible, but I did think it was a solid game rules wise with some nice lighting effects. So I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll be a solid competitive game.

This is the point you start playing the coil counting game and figure out which coil you remove elsewhere to put in a kickback. (Maybe tie two of the pops together like on Star Wars The Pin? That frees up a transistor for a kickback)

Monday morning quarterbacking on a Tuesday afternoon!

If there was a mode that was completed by doing a sequence of shots, there should be a secret satanic jackpot for knowing the shot order and performing it backwards during that particular mode.

It's basically the same shot to relight the kickback on No Fear on the left side this time...but now it does two things!

Could be rounding up. Or it’s just some filler music to play when a Zeppelin song isn’t actively playing.

It doesn’t make sense to hide music. It’s a selling point to have the songs.

I can say...I was not expecting what I saw for the art packages on all three models. It was a lot to take in at once. And I know I defaulted to how I don’t like certain complementary color combinations like orange and blue.

But now it’s starting to grow on me. I still don’t love it, but I wasn’t going to buy one either way.

I’m guessing you got a note after Star Trek?

Did anyone care about The Shadow? Heck who even owns that IP

I might be mistaken, but he doesn’t own The Shadow IP so idk what he would claim is infringing on his rights.

But something like a TOTAN alternate translite, he has the IP to that

Tim could be reusing code Dwight wrote and/or helped him designing his own implementation.

He didn’t say Dwight invented it did he?

Scott did create it, but don’t deny Dwight greatly expanded on the idea on TMNT

And also other options like teams and 3 v 1

But yeah. There is a whole strategic element that opens up with turtle powers, the order of turns/turtles, and player skill level being paired with a particular turtle.

TNA co-op was an amazing new feature. TMNT greatly fleshed out the concept of team play

But ultimately it just sorta rubbed me the wrong way of Whysnow trying to add drama or some slight to an innocuous comment. Like come on. He’s just being nice to his coworker.

Not really co-op. No progress is shared between players. Just makes it more convenient than doing some simple math

Name a game where you share progress among players before TNA

Progressive jackpots maybe a distant relative to co-op. Lock stealing is taking advantage of other players.

What bothers me about the art is how the assets are just dropped in place without much regard to the inserts. Or that inserts couldn’t be moved to make the art more cohesive

It’s stuff like how pictures of the band are partly intruded by inserts with no real blending. Or how the zeppelin is the focal point of the play field and the inserts around it are just laid out in the most unimaginative way.

The slingshots are barely decorated for f sake

I grabbed a quick photo of a JPop game as an example

DD4B62B8-C305-4395-9EF0-15C317BE2595 (resized).jpeg

Look at how the princess lights up in the bottle insert. It’s telling a story with art. There is subtle to elaborate details in all of the inserts. The genie letters are fanned out.

And there are Stern games that do excellent work with inserts. Yeti and Franchi have done excellent work with them

On this it looks like it’s that hermit guy on most on the arrow inserts. No variation. It’s boring

I thought I heard Jack Danger said he could rip the spinner into the center ramp.

I’m mostly looking forward to seeing the center ramp shot made from the upper flipper. There’s a rubber wall right next to the center ramp above the side ramp/standup target. I guess it’s supposed to be like the snikt bank shot into a ramp.

That and the business model doesn’t work. They sold millions of plastic instruments in the hey day. They sell around five thousand of a single title if it’s really popular.

A $3 song with millions of possible buyers. For a unit with a few thousand possible buyers, it would need to be like $500 a song. And that’s assuming it’s cheap to make new tracks on a semi regular basis.

And we really need to get to a stream because the art is anti hype

The Beatles is a tough license by all accounts. The inserts on it are well blended into the other elements. Some are even decorated like records and the kick drum is a giant insert that flashes to the beat.

I’m only an outsider looking in. I’m sure Led Zeppelin were not the best business partners Stern has worked with. But the art is bad no matter how much I try to rationalize and sympathize with the people stuck with making an art package for a band that lacked a lot of visual identity

Heck months ago in some other thread I was wishing whatever artist the best of luck with this theme. https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/what-will-be-the-next-stern-pinball-machine/page/211#post-5904637

I’m really curious what the LCD is going to look like. The few pieces so far haven’t been too encouraging.

It is what it is

I’m mostly complaining about stuff like the playfield art, the cabinet art is uninspired and repetitive, the pop bumpers caps are the same thing, the sling shots are practically blank, etc

Stuff like the blue armor color clash is the least of my criticism.

That one bothers me more than any other. Just move the damn circle and photo. There’s plenty of room in that area.

Yeah but lots of other recent Sterns have looked way better than this.

When I look at the Star Wars art package, I see areas of art that blend with inserts and using inserts to mark out areas of art/story.

Look at the center and how the major mode hot dog and square inserts frame a center area with the main characters portraits above their associated inserts. Outside each mode insert is an area of art related to that specific mode.

Inserts up to the Death Star Ramp use the green laser blast to help guide the player to the shot, and then two iconic characters of opposite alignments are split along it. Their own lightsabers going towards shots.

Granted Star Wars is a story. They have lots of visual cues to work with.

But Led Zeppelin is just whatever. We get blimps, Icarus, and a few hermit logos. Other music pins have done better

And just to say, I’m not mad. I’m not saying the game is trash. I love pinball. It looks like a fun layout. I just want them to be the best. I enjoy trying to discuss and explain specific areas. I’m not just shitting on it to be mean. I’m genuinely a bit disappointed as a pinball nerd. (That’s right, I went full disappointed parent)

I’ll forward to seeing how it shoots. The upper flipper shots look fun.

I wonder if it’ll be a standard option on all game cabinets going forward

Still hundreds of thousands of existing games for them to go into.

Twitch is only starting to enforce DMCA so it’s very draconian. Youtube has done it longer and is better about fair use appeals and either demonetizing videos or sending the monetization to the rights holder. But it seems like they’re cracking down more too as of late.

The law hasn’t keep up with technology and the way modern people consume media.

I watched the stream the other day

They did a much better job with the LCD screen than I anticipated. The live footage quality is about what I expected, but the rainbow acid drip art adds a lot of style. That said, the animations seemed sparse overall (maybe a minutes worth total). And of course it’s mostly just a bunch more Zeppelins.

I couldn’t really follow along too much with the rules, but I’m sure the colored arrow inserts are simple enough to follow.

The expression lighting effects were neat, but the choreography wasn’t always obvious (music sounded like crap on most of the stream which may be why. They should really just make a whole new video)

The center toy is ok. Not very Led Zeppelin but it’s different. I liked Tim’s rules for starting a it’s MB. Hope to see it utilized in more interesting ways as code matures.

I don’t like games with complicated multiplier rules. These seem complicated on a surface level, but they didn’t seem overly powerful. So it strikes a balance of its there if you want to engage with it.

Tim pointed out the symbols of the band flash when you hit their respective areas to build them up, so you know who is what. I’ve said a lot about the blandness of the art, but it’s another way the art could have been better. Put pictures of the band member near their targets instead of just randomly on the playfield. But whatever. Dead horse

The shots look fast and fun. It’s a Steve Ritchie game. He knows how to make a fast and open playfield

Didn’t see anyone make the center ramp from the upper flipper or sweep the drops.

Overall it seems fine. It’ll definitely play better than it looks. I’m still a bit disappointed though.

The problem is lazy and overly broad enforcement. It doesn't matter if they're using it legally. The platform holder tools do not allow the level of nuance that the creators are legally entitled to. (And they're all at different experience levels. Amazon/Twitch is by far the worst because they're only recently getting serious about enforcement, so they've been the most draconian)

There are millions of hours of content to police. It's just some simple bots constantly scanning everything. The platformer holders err on the side of it's better to take down content creators stuff and inconvenience them than to risk being sued by media companies.

It's very much a "kill them all and let god sort them out" type solution.

Correct, it's because they're not hosting it themselves. They're using Amazon/Google/Facebook services and tools. They're subject to how those companies comply with the law, and they all have differing standards and methods. The only commonality is they all have poor solutions considering the size of the problem.

And I agree to some degree. It's foolish to try to build yourself up through those companies or to become overly reliant on them, because they don't care about you and have so much control over your work with little recourse. But it's also incredibly expensive to host videos, especially live videos with a chat system and a robust monetization system with a built-in large audience. That's why it's so tempting to use the platformers in exchange for giving up a lot of control. (And since Jack Danger is Stern's main social media person, and he's fully bought into Twitch, it's not surprising that Twitch has been the preferred platform for Stern until now)

All that said Stern needs to just be better about making and hosting videos on their own website.

This problem has been on the horizon for a long time and isn't about to get fixed soon. Streaming has been a legal gray area for a while. I know for years video game podcasts I listen to have been questioning when the the legality of streaming would really hit the fan. The industry already had a weird relationship with streamers, but now their licensing and business partners want their taste of the streaming pie and to argue about what actually is and isn't being licensed (and what it will cost).

To be clear, I like the streams and having a chance to ask questions out of the creative team.

But I'm also not running the company...I'd have them do pre-produced videos explaining the rules with proper audio/video outs. Something like Tim Sexton explaining rules and showing cuts of gameplay relevant to what's being discussed. Keith and Randy Elwin did great tutorial videos back in the day: example

I think Stern needs a video like that for every one of their games. The community fills in the gap, so I get why Stern doesn't feel like they need to spend the resources. But it would be nice. They had started the "Sharpshooter Pro" or whatever series on Stern Insider, and it never went anywhere after a single stream a year ago.

Yeah I was bummed out. I lost my internet connection for a second and lost the whole FB feed

Regardless, Stern needs to figure it out for their next game in a couple months. The issue isn’t going away for a while

If I’m not mistaken all advertising materials have to be individually approved. That’s how they have pre produced videos ready to go with the rest of the advertisements, all dropped at a negotiated time and date. Streaming a reveal isn’t explicitly covered by that and it’s its own negotiation and cost. And then there is the issue of does the licensor even know how to negotiate those rights, if they even fully understand what is being negotiated.

This is all new frontier for the recording industry which has routinely rejected particular advancements in technology because they cut into the bottom line

And you’d still run into the problem that Facebook/Amazon/Google all have varying levels of success of allowing a company like Stern to legally stream what they’re allowed to. Hell movie studios sometimes accidentally DMCA themselves, and those are billion dollar corporations that are driving most of these decisions.

Basically Twitch didn’t give a fudge about the law, and the RIAA (who represents most music artists and drive anti-piracy measures) hadn’t really put the heat to them. That was until this year.

Twitch was basically like, oh shit. Delete everything! We’re just Amazon, a plucky upstart company with few legal resources! We’ll figure this out later, best of luck till then streamers!

They simply lack a mechanism for a user to argue for their fair use rights to be respected. They rather throw the user under the bus than deal with their legitimate issues.

Works for most people streaming for fun, but not JJP and Stern who want to show off everything in the games they’re selling.

It’s really bad timing too. GnR and LZ are not only music pins, but they’re both trying synchronize that music with the machine in new ways that won’t come across with muted music.

I doubt they had time to make those changes and build the game between reveal and steam. Buts it good someone at some point noticed the unicorn thing

It’s probably just a sample game. A lot of his games are preproduction units, sometimes with little very differences than final retail games.

No way Stern is letting him borrow one of 500 LEs to death save on.

I bet it’ll be about twice that. Pinstadium set the market price. These are even more elaborate and capable than that.

The LCD screen seems very underutilized. Rarely is it telling the player what to do or offering any guidance. Compare it to some other games where the screen has useful information (granted some players never look up, but it doesn’t change the fact it is sparse compared to other Stern games)

The game is just shoot the flashing arrows and make a few combos to build up a playfield multiplier. Sometimes a tour will offer some side objectives to work on

Also...can a player just trap up for 50 minutes or whatever and get to the wizard mode? You won’t build up values or anything. But it would be amusing if this is a game a player can get to the wizard mode with only a single flipper button press. This isn’t me being negative. More of an observation.

They’re the ones who release games too early and leave bad impressions with people like me. Shrug

There are a few Stern games that I thought were rubbish the first few months they were out. Some of them I like now years later, and some still stink IMHO. Just hoping for the best and being grateful for whatever they do is how standards get lower.

It just felt like Stern was getting so much better about shipping games that were close to feature complete, especially after COVID slowed down the line for a bit.

That’s the vibe I get when I try to watch the choreography between the lights and music

Or maybe the did a pass through a program to get a basic light show started and they’ll slowly hand tweak it when they get to the polishing stage. They still got a lot more to program in.

It’s a Stern. Unless you wanted a LE they’re not hard to get if you have any semblance of patience.

Ah yeah. That’s cool. Hope you enjoy it

I hope Brian Eddy is still at Stern working on a spiritual successor to Shadow. Despite the theme, The Shadow is Eddy’s best game.

They cost about what I thought they would

People just see a strip of LEDs and a sticker. They're really discounting the software development and the unique integration with the game.

Also Pinstadium has basically established the market value of these sorta things. At least these do a lot more with a lot less work on the end users part.