I don't like Munsters either but 5/10 for art and you think the art of STh is better? I'm confused and am actually curious.

So happy to hear that I'm in love with a turd. STh is the game that gets played most in my house...by everybody. It's an absolute blast and has that one-more-game feel like no other game I own. And I don't have an agenda because I'm not selling it for at least a few years (have quite a few ahead of it on the chopping block).

That being said, I respect your right to be wrong.

The market will tell you in very specific terms that Munsters sucks. Everyone has an opinion, but when enough opinions align to drive the price into the cellar, you can start to state opinions as facts

yeah... pretty sure that opinion has become fact.

MUN was what??? 5500 originally.
Selling for 4300-4500 on secondary.

That has to be the quickest drop in market on a recent Stern in the past 10 years.

XM and AV are the next closest. It took a while for XM to drop.

MUN dropped quicker than WWE.

answers I would expect knowing who it is coming from. Rookie score

What’s with people trying to apply objectivity to subjective dilemma.

You don’t like stranger things or Munsters. Cool. That’s just like, your opinion man.

It’s fun to talk about but conflating subjective topics with morals and ethics while simultaneously personally attacking others, it gets out of hand.

Ain’t nothing wrong with thinking whatever about Zach. If he’s a shill to you, fine. But can ya just let others think what they want without you jumping down their throat? Personally I hate the stern topper and disagree with zachs stance. Doesn’t make me hate him though.

Yes that’s Zach alright he’s living like a rock star! LOL

I actually enjoy both games. I wouldn't give either of them an A. I wouldn't give either of them an F. I can say that I have a lot of guests over to play pinball and they play Stranger Things 3-to-1 over JP. They aren't pinball people but it's definitely not a terrible game. And they are repeat customers.

And if you had South Park they might play that 10-1 Don;t know if that makes it not a shitty game.

you over rate
I under rate

Sounds like we should probably do a show together and even all the BS out.

Maybe the first time. As I mentioned, they keep playing on subsequent visits. That did not happen with other games, such as Ghostbusters. It's not an F.

Does Punny Factory count?

I'd pay to listen to that podcast!

Just kidding ... no pay, but I'd listen.

It would be hilarious!

South Park, Mario Bros, and Street Fighter all crush location play. Iron Maiden does poorly on location. What average people will enjoy for 5 minutes is not the barometer of quality.

Ouch. When you grade on the Zach curve this is like saying it's a dumpster fire and the creator should be jailed.

I don't disagree on quality. But in my opinion earnings should be factored into the equation when giving a game an F. If it makes money then it must be attractive for some reason. I simply said those games were not an F. Theme matters.

But a couple games you have given an F to are; BTTF & X-men.
Do those themes not matter? Did you factor you "earnings" calculation in there?

If pinside lately is any indication, BTTF could never be worse than a B+ on theme alone.

No, because those games suck. Just kidding of course. If I were giving them a grade I would not give them an F. My ratings are weighted based on what I like in a game. If we were going down through a list of games I would certainly not give X-Men an F.

TheLaw is saying by Zach's scale a 5/10 is 50% or an "F".

Probably better to see which stern games aren’t a F for him. Probably only a couple. And if your ratings reek of agenda, his certainly do as well.

Now we’re back where we started. Haha

I understand. I was just pointing out that my ratings are weighted towards what I like in a game. If I were trying to grade all categories evenly I would not give them an F. Actually, a game would have to be really bad for me to give an F.

The fact that Strangers Things Le value continues to plummet should speak volumes to how much people don't seem too enjoy this game. Put a stranger next to turtles and its mind-blowing how much more passion went into turtles and it shows cause TMNT Le is sold out and people are having trouble moving Stranger

https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds/ad/95287

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I like quite a few actually and own pretty much all of them.

TWD PRo is great. JP2, IM,BMDK, GOT, IMDN are all good.

That is just off the top of my head.

Or maybe turtles just had a better artist?

AFM would look pretty bad next to that Turtles playfield but it's still an incredibly playing game.

Huh? Whom wouldn't rate a game in how fun it is to you?

Ah right.

So what are the rules here. If a machine is going to score an F rating, then a secondary set of rules kick in that factor in theme and earnings?
So confused.

LOL. I didn't see earnings as an option when I rated the games or X-men would be higher. So, the Looprunner secondary set of rules did kick in! Anyway, I don't necessarily equate the ratings to grades like we are on this thread. A 4 out of 6 is decent. And I believe I gave X-Men some good ratings in specific categories such as theme.

I never said the artwork was bad. The point i made was Stranger things as a whole lacks the passion that Ninja Turtles got. People spoke with their wallets plain and simple.

Yes, that would be awesome.

As far as the reviews go, there's no way Zach can be honest, the same we couldn't be honest if we reviewed one of our own employer's products on a podcast, it's a conflict of interest. Nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn't get after him about it because his hands are basically tied. He's just doing what so many other successful business do, create podcast content that people want to consume and then when people are interested in a product he has a great chance of getting the sale since people have a familiarity with him. It's a brilliant channel to use. If you go into the real estate space, it's super prevalent there, with guys getting on each other's podcast driving people to their investment options or mastermind classes. Just good business.

As a fan, I'm guessing, TMNT may look inspired to you. For a non fan, like myself, it looks phoned in and bedsheetville.

Taking a look at the chart of game ratings from SDTM. One needn’t understand understand the differences between polynomial analytics, trending or regression analysis to see an upward bias on display in both Greg’s and Zach’s ratings. You don’t need a background in probability, statistics or tassology either.

To better use the spectrum of grades, existing ratings should be “normalized”. That means an average, solid game would receive a C rating. If a game was less than average, by definition it should receive a grade of D or lower. The resulting chart of ratings should be compared against ideal distribution percentages. A - 15%, B - 25%, C - 40%, D - 15% & F - 5%. There should be at least 1 game with an F. If reviewer doesn’t have an F rated game listed yet, they need to review a game that deserves it. Seeing that would give me confidence in the process.

Basically to Zach and Greg, a C is garbage. C should be average. Thus the ranking.

Everything you said here...I believe the opposite. Nothing innovative in TMNT...and sales don't mean it's a great game. It means there are a bunch of grown men who just had their I-wish-I-was-young-again button pushed.

But I do respect the obvious fact that your opinion was completely unbiased.

Most games aren’t innovative. They still feel different. Stranger Things could be the least innovative game in years but it doesn’t feel like anything it copied the rules or layout from.

I see your reasoning, but I think their letter grades reflect a grading scale consisting of ALL pinball machines, not just the ones they've reviewed. They mostly review newer games, and generally Zach and Greg only review pins that at least one of them owns, or owned in the recent past. And since they're unlikely to buy a bad game for their personal collections, they're unlikely to review a bad game. So naturally that would skew the grade distribution to the upper end.

Like if Zach and Greg reviewed the BTTF pin, or the DE Simpsons game, or something like Hardbody, then you'd probably see some F's and D's on their score chart. So the lack of D and F grades doesn't represent any flaws in their system or grading scale. It just reflects Zach and Greg's buying preferences. Like maybe Black Rose is a C or D game if you're only comparing it to modern Sterns or JJPs, but it's definitely at least a B or B- when you add games like Thunderbirds or Shaq Attack to the mix. You get me?

Besides, why look at just the letter grade to their pin reviews. They go into a lot of detail describing how they got to the grade. Surely the reasoning behind the grade is more important than the actual letter anyway.

How recent?
Dominoes & Thunderbirds for sure, but those aren't super super recent.
I played a RZ and that might be close BUT it might have been early

Stop...we've all bought shitty games.

This image is all the stats anyone needs when constructively critiquing the caliber of a their friendly local salesman/distributor/podcaster...

When you have those games in previously owned, but Popeye in your current collection... case closed. lol
You like some turds and that is cool, just own your opinion. You like and rate some pretty horrible games very highly.

Reality to me is that if you were not a salesman, your real preference is likely a mix of your currently owned and wishlist games.
In other words, only 4 Sterns out of 20 games. That is all any collection really ever needs anyway.

Toss on these 'stats' that 40% of your currently owned is Stern and 50% of your previously owned is Stern.

When it all comes down to it, most of these 'highly rated' games just dont make the cut in your 10 game collection.

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Finally! Objective proof that Zach... likes pinball.

I had to look this up; I've never seen that word before.

To be fair, I still suspect Popeye is only there because I said it was a bad game and for whatever reason it became the game to spite me. I don't know this for a fact, but the theory is sound.

Every time you ask me specifically someone else gives a good answer. Stop asking me such an inane question as you will never change your mind and just be your condescending self. It would kill you to give even a D to a pin. Munsters and stranger things. They're shit. Those are Ds. F? Jetsons.

Will you run off and change your scores? Of course not. So stop asking because your scoring system is garbage.

Likes selling it is more like it. All those games I give an A! I predict he and Greg will have an episode where he rates popeye an A- just a week before he unloads it onto somebody. I'm of course being slightly sarcastic.

An odd thing about pinball ownership is that one rarely owns all the pins they rate the best. Ask a pinball owner to list their top 10 pins and then list the pins in their collection. Compare the two lists and ask yourself, why do they own x, y and z when they say a, b and c are their faves. The stronger the correlation between the two lists, the more that person follows their own advice.

There are many reasons why these lists don’t map to each other. If one has 5, 10 or 20 pins, should they mostly follow that person’s top 10? One of the chief reasons for the disparity is that the goal of owning one’s favorite pins never occurred to them. There is a lack of ethos for Owning Your Top 10.

There are other reasons like available funds, access to local markets, the price was right, nostalgia, impatience, attraction to shiny objects, thrill of spending money, the cool factor, sheep mentality or even self loathing.

Then there is churn, or how often pins are being bought/sold. A young collector has little experience and a curiosity to play and learn. They might find a pin to be their grail, yet sell it six months later, only to purchase a Popeye. They tend to have a higher rate of churn than the naturally occurring rate. In the long term (after five years in the hobby), the pillars of one’s collection should start to resemble that person’s top 10 list. Why you ask? Well, that is the question I want to hear Zach and Dennis discuss.

Y'all are fucking weird.