I hate piling on, but this pin (The Hobbit) really bummed me out. I am a Tolkien nerd to the nth degree. I almost bought it just to look at it. LOTR is my grail pin, not just because I love the theme to death, but the game is incredibly well designed and really captures the world of Middle Earth. Some argue the game plays too long (which I can agree) but I still enjoy the hell out of it. Then there's the Hobbit. I was so excited when I heard it was going to be made by JJP and would integrate this awesome new display and be a widebody game, I started saving my pennies. Then I saw the 2D CAD layout and wondered, why is this widebody design so open across everything? Why does it have two flippers mid playfield that don't really appear to have any shots that can only be hit by those flippers? For a widebody it only had a few shots where the ball physically travels to a new location. I remained optimistic though, the artwork looked amazing ( I LOVED that they listened to feedback and changed Smaug on the playfield), the display was well done, and the sound and callouts were all on par. Then I played it. I couldn't get into it at all. It looks like it should be fun, but it felt like a grind. Hitting those beasts over and over and over again is monotonous and unavoidable. They pop up all the time, felt like I was in beast Frenzy every five minutes. The modes were fairly non-descript for the most part with at least one of them being a single shot. The multiballs also did not feel very different from one another and I found the game just felt the same throughout my entire gameplay. The playfield is what bums me out the most. A widebody was meant to have a TON of stuff to do and shoot, yet this pin has very few shots. The dancing drop targets are cool, but I really could careless. Why is there even a 3rd flipper on the game? There isn't a shot that flipper has that you can't hit with the other two. Why did they remove the mid left flipper and not both? It just feels like they had a concept in mind and thought it would be cool, but then figured out through play testing that they really didn't need 4 flippers, but going down to just 2 on a widebody seems silly, so we'll leave 3 in there for good measure even though it's not really needed.

In any case, I've played the game maybe 50 times or so, but after playing a single game on a machine on location for over an hour I have not played it again. It would have been awesome to have TH sitting next to my LOTR and see all that Tolkien greatness, but for me, the game didn't stack up.

For the win.

I get your analogy, but even if TH was only a few thousand bucks I don't think I'd want it taking up the space in my line-up.