Not my Stern Stars, and that was pretty early, though it did still have chimes.

I thought it was interesting that Flash could actually be put into a "bell/chimes" setting. I don't know what games he would had have been referring to, though.

Future Spa had a chimes setting, which was waayy better than the electronic beeps setting.

Looks like Williams Hot Tip was one of them

Hot Tip sound drum.jpg

probably a lot of the 1977 games where they were going from the SS to Em transition. They did the best to make people comfortable with the new technology.

I was there. It didn't work. Took me a long time to get over that.

yea, pinheads are fairly resistant to change. Look how well p2k took off. I think everyone would have came around if it continued.

It wasn't so much the resistance to change, but when solid states arrived on the scene they felt hollow, and for the most part sounded terrible compared to what they were replacing.

P2K seemed like a novelty when it first came out. I said "cool, but let's see the new full size machine" which never came...
RFM was also too darn easy to play.

p2k is full size. Playfield is actually bigger than a lot of other machines.

For some reason it didn't seem that way. I played the heck out of it, but was still thinking regular games would keep coming. It was at an arcade with about a hundred machines. I had no idea it was almost all coming to an end.

the playfields are longer than many of the early SS and EM games. Just seems shorter because the playfield is recessed into the back of the cabinet. Almost touches the back of the machine.

Apples and oranges because the area that you actually play on and can *see* is much smaller. Who cares how big the piece of wood is? If P2K is so great, why can I buy one of them HUO for less than $2000 all day long even though the didn't exactly make a lot of them? Why did they get their ass kicked by Southpark (LOL) on location? The market has spoken. It was a cool niche item that ran its course.

that's the point, the area you see and play on is longer. you play all the way to the back of the playfield. The black wood back there is the back edge of the playfield.

the reasons the price stays down, is because some are close minded to new concepts, and the fear of the prism card/CPU going out and difficult to replace or fix. Plus they only made 2 games. 1 of which is not very good.

Dang... I was hoping the thread was about this classic film.

image.jpg

I don't disagree with this point, but I think another reason prices are low is due to concerns about long term reliability and the difficulty of obtaining replacement parts.

I have a bootleg dvd of that. Seeing the old pins is cool but the movie is average at best. It's a little seedy too, very 70's. I don't think it ever got a proper dvd release.

You got over it?

Well the other reason is that SWEP1 isn't that great and RfM on default settings is just way to easy. Changing a few settings on RfM, and opening the outlanes and upping the pitch make it a much more enjoyable game and much more difficult. I think if more people played it this way they would like it more.

You mean less than $3000? I've never seen an RFM go for less than 2400 here (even if not HUO). The "market" may have spoken, but it's still the most popular game in my arcade when my friends and come over. It's also my son's favorite (he's 16). I think RFM is a great pin at $2500 (what I paid for mine).

I was referring to SWE1. On the other hand I picked up an HUO RFM with an NIB SWE1 kit for a friend of mine for $2800 total a couple of years ago.

That is great! You left out the part of my post where I said that it is a "cool niche item". No doubt it is popular with kids and non-pinball people. Point is that with only 2 games available and 15 years to think about it, pinball players and collectors have rejected this format. If for some reason there was going to be a revelation, it would have happened by now, the prices would be huge for these games and we would be seeing RFMr.

Maybe. But I'd argue that Lexie Lightspeed is the spiritual successor to RFM. Lots of interaction with video on the playfield. Video/pinball integration certainly is not dead. And I know at least a few collectors who haven't rejected the P2K format (after all, it's not operators buying all these RFMs).

When I was finally able to acquire my own EM games, yes I got over it. I thought at the time I would never see them again.

Are there any better movies/documentaries available? (just found this one : https://vimeo.com/74438437)

I sort-of agree there, but having played both SWEP1 and RFM plenty of times locally, I have to say that Lexy is a completely different animal. I very much agree that the partial reflection is a neat concept and was executed reasonably well, but it really is too darn hard to see anything in the back half of the pin2k machines and they really suffer from the "hidden ball" effect and feel a lot smaller than they actually are. It kind of kills the "nailed it" long flow shot arc feeling and return. It's also pretty difficult to figure out where the shots actually are without squinting and puzzling over it.

The play style of Lexy in modes where you're trying to hit virtual targets is much, much closer to that of earlier machines with playfield rollover switches down in the lower playfield area. Actually, the "warehouse" mode *really* brought that that to mind the first time I played it because it pretty much emulates the play style of many EMs with a very closed-off back half where you're trying to keep the ball in play in the lower playfield while making dangerous short shots. It's mean and pretty rewarding, it also actually feels like you've gone into a crowded warehouse and don't have a lot of room to maneuver. During multiballs and most other modes it's the same modern snappy flow return to flipper action of a fully modern machine.

Yeah... I saw it when it first came out and again recently on YouTube. Very strange flick.

Sometimes it's easier to easy people into newer technology. I always thought it would be a good idea for Stern to introduce a title with an LCD display but allow a setting to show DMD style dots instead of the video display. That way everyone wins. Sometimes you just gotta give the public what it wants.

Yes star gazer. Tilt the battle to save pinball, chasing ghosts, king of kong, tommy
Tilt throw the seedy side of pinball in the lime light. Which I think happened a lot more than people think. Hell in arcades by me if you were " king of the machine" it was yours. someone had to pay for you and play against you. I still have seen it in bars with pool.
My friends and I would sometimes make small bets or winner buys the fries but I am guessing the gambling aspect was not really far off. Ever heard of playing madden for big money.

I hadn't seen that one before. Much more positive.

LOL - I've never even heard of that.. sounds like someone tried very hard to force pinball into a plot.. a pinball hustler! lol, how many hours would it take to hustle someone decent at pinball.

I think a pinball movie should be more along the lines of "The pick of destiny" - With his final breath, Steve Kordek revealed he had created his life's masterpiece - a pinball table with a 10 digit display that granted a wish if you could reach 1,000,000,000 points. He created only one and nobody knows where it resides to this day...............

I missed the L in the thread title entirely and got REALLY excited.

Ha! Like I said, it's on Youtube...Check it out.

Super creepy beginning scene when a very young Brooke Shields proposes a threesome with an old fat truck driver and his wife... (yech!) .....The machine they use in the film is custom and has been at PAGG a few times.

He was speaking about Williams games making the transition. I don't believe he was implying this across the whole industry.

I think it was just the first 2 or 3 Williams games during the transition that did this.