Wednesday, September 30, 2015

How stripped down is Game of Thrones Pro?

Update 6/27/16: Just to throw it out there, GOT Premium has turned into one of my all time favorite Sterns (less the horrible art) and GOT Pro is good too.

Game of Thrones Pro was revealed to a collective "Ouch, that's it?" from everyone except the most die-hard wallet haters (or people who only care about the premium, or should I say... complete version). All of the buzz surrounding the game initially was primarily on the bad art, the enormous gap between the Premium/LE and Pro models, and generally bungled theme integration. And it's not just that the Pro is wildly different from the LE, the Pro is one of the most basic looking machines in a while. This would be potentially understandable while Stern was carrying us through the budget dark ages in the 2000s, but it was unexpected for an epic theme during a pinball renaissance. I think many of us expected this game to somehow compete with The Hobbit on features, which was probably unrealistic despite Stern pumping up MSRPs ever closer to Jesery Jack levels.




To be clear, the simplest pinball machines can be fun. Game features do not equal fun. Game features can slow the game down and can dampen a game with a lot of flow. I was just curious of the last time we saw such a simple game considering the whopping $6000 price tag on this sucker. It's a Steve Ritchie game, of course it's going to be fun. The reveal solely make me want to look at how much solenoid you're getting for your money, not how much fun the game is.

Monday, September 21, 2015

1966 United Aztec Big Ball Bowler notes

This one took a lot of measuring and convincing myself. I have a house with enough room for a bunch of pins, however ~20 feet of straight space is something I simply don't have. My garage is about 19 feet long and this bowler is 16'3" from end to end. Taking into account ~3 feet of space you need behind it to open it and ~3 feet of space you need in front of it at a minimum to play it, it wasn't seeming likely. I did find that if I put the back of the bowler right up against my garage door, blocked off a small section of my garage with the lane, and used the small entraceway to my garage as playing space I'd have enough room to play and I could open the garage door to work on it. It's really dumb and it takes up too much room, but that is the price of owning the king of EM games.