Houdini was a tough one for me. Visually it is stunning. Full-stop. Inside and out, playfield and everything is amazing to look at. It feels rich and authentic and well integrated. I added the straight-jacket and water torture mods and they blended right in. But the tight shots and some of the very breakable mechanics (the pops, the catapults, the trunk, etc) scared me. Also, I agree, the use of the video screens were a tremendous FIRST attempt, but I always felt the technology available to the gamecode author was way under-utilized even after 7 or 8 gamecode updates.

If I had a collection of machines that I would only LOOK at, I would have kept Houdini, but as a machine that I'd want to play once in awhile, it was a mechanical struggle so I parted with it...

I owned it for a few months and in that period I had some trouble with the catapults and the pop bumpers. The catapults needed a bit of grinding to widen the mounting screw holes to allow alignments (pretty often) and the bumpers used two API specific metal posts which also had broken. Not big deals, but I didn’t want to have to keep lifting the playfield for some minor fix.