So these are basically like the magnets on The Addams Family, only where the slingshots would be and activate every time those switches get triggered? I can see a lot of frustration…I personally wouldn’t mind that much, but I can bet most other people would.
[quote=“Snailman, post:16, topic:1465, full:true”]But then Stern needs to ask the question: if the video of beta code magna-slings is going to generate more doubt/negativity than excitement, then why release a video of beta code?
[/quote]
Two possible reasons I can think of: 1) They didn’t think people would react so negatively to this (it’s pretty clear these guys were having fun with seeing where the ball would go), or 2) They figured everyone would know this is beta footage and give them the benefit of the doubt.
The thing is though…it honestly doesn’t matter at all that it’s beta code. No matter what you do software-wise, you can’t get magnets to do remotely consistent things with the ball (other than catch it completely under certain circumstances); whatever they end up doing is going to be a mess one way or the other. Would have been totally fine if they left in normal kickers and an operator menu option. Sucks as multiple places in town are now going to get this gimped version of the game.
As long as they have an upward speed most of the time on the ball after it ‘kicks’ (which shouldn’t be that hard to arrange through magnet placement), you should have “plenty” of reaction time. (I won’t, because I’m not good at pinball.)
It’s not like slingshots aren’t designed to mostly throw the ball in the outlanes. . . .
I’d guess that they also fire in a more consistent way (the same pulse every time) than the Power does. The power’s software and hardware is designed to be random, this could be fairly predictable: you should get something approximating a kick with the vector toward the magnet and strength given by the distance from it (squared). Will it be the same as a kicker behind a rubber? No. But that doesn’t automatically make it bad design.
(Note that this behaviour is the opposite of a normal sling, which kicks more ‘up’ near the top and more ‘down’ near the bottom, while this should do the opposite.)
Are we completely sure the LE won’t have normal kickers?
I’m a little uncomfortable with the amount of speculation and assumption going on in this thread. Can’t we wait until we actually get to see and play this before declaring it to be The Worst Thing Ever?
I don’t think that the video did Stern any favors, to be honest. If you want a feature on a pinball machine to look the most pedestrian possible, show it off in test mode. That’s essentially what they did here, so the magnets were just doing continuous short pulses. We didn’t get to see what happens with a quick hard pulse, a long pulse (stop the ball, drop to the flipper), or what it will look like to see the ball moving at full game speed, which is probably 10 times faster than what they could do rolling the ball around.
I think it’s going to be a really fun feature. Yeah, it will be less predictable than standard slings, but we don’t know in how many different ways quite yet. For all we know it could act a lot like a typical sling with a single hard pulse.
I think different is interesting. If it ends up being a bit of a failure of an idea in the end at least they tried something. Stern is so boring and conservative with what they’ll allow usually, we shouldn’t complain when they actually innovate. (Complaining if it sucks after trying it is different, but maybe we ought to actually try it first?)
If they’re just stopping the ball though … I dunno, I have a Shadow, I know what Sanctum wear looks like. Not sure that’s really an attractive idea.
Now that a real video is out, what does everyone think?
To me, the magnaslings looked to behave more like dead bumpers most of the time and the game seemed to play a fair bit easier with less sling > outlane drains. I wonder if a tighter switch adjustment and a larger rubber ring will help up the responsiveness.
I agree. What I saw on Deadflip yesterday was promising though. It looked like the magnaslings flung the ball in somewhat similar fashion to a traditional sling (albeit not as consistently). I was also encouraged to hear that the slings have at least three different mode/states to them, depending on the game situation.
Even if the magnaslings aren’t as deadly as traditional slings (on tight & strong settings), it looks like having the dual Avatar-ing outlanes already led to lots of outlane drains. Not to mention the extra drains from jumping the flippers and lane guides.
I think both actually. With the one switch in the middle, a ball that didn’t hit the sling right in the middle didn’t seem to activate the magnets, so a lot of dead bumper behavior resulted from off center hits. it also seemed to throw the ball less violently often times but then occasionally action seemed almost exactly like a mechanical sling.
I was too quick to dismiss the Magnaslings after the lame Stern video.
On Dead Flip, I agree that they behaved like very gentle traditional slings. Not to mention that it has the ability to do some weird things with the ball. I now think that these could end up being very fun. If they help avoid sling-sling-outlane drains, I think that’s a good thing. How is that a test of skill, anyway? I’m actually leaning toward the Premium, even though I like the Pro translite and cabinet art best.
I watched about 10min and saw very little action from the slings. I wonder if they turned the sensitivity down because of our frothing response to the previous video.
Funny shape for stern slings as well; seems the action surface is more vertical. Could account for lack of activity.
It WAS weird just having a video where they flick the ball over anyway. It doesn’t look as interesting as regular gameplay. Were they intending to avoid having to show the rest of the playfield?
Good to know that in practice, however, the slingshots work pretty closely to regular slingshots. But is the magnet’s range that small? I thought the magnet was supposed to go off and affect the ball’s trajectory each time it triggers a slingshot switch.
