If you’ve got a Pro MET at home, in a tourney, or at a location with someone available to free stuck balls, then simply set your Pro to have to have the snake lock turned on. Highly recommended, IMHO.
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They did, but the # of hits compensated is nowhere equal to a @PAPA_Doug standard juiced spinner. You can easily get 1.5-2 advances on a hard hit. 
Just looked closer at the pics to see what you mean. Ugh – that seems to obscure the L outlane area even more than what ACDC’s cannon did to the R outlane/inlane area. Brutal!
Perhaps someone can make a translucent plastic replacement mod?
I predict modded clear plastics will be made for both the Left and right side flash bulb holding pieces. Bet was done to decrease ball times.
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The magnets are arranged in a triangle ala TAF under the middle of the playfield. Pro has one, Prem/LE has 3. Unless they are referring to all 3 of those being “one” magnet, but I doubt it.
Groot arms are further apart than where the magnets would be from what I can tell.
No spinners on the Pro. Boo!
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The lack of spinners is a bummer, but the way spinners get used these days, it’s probably not a huge deal. The layout looks very safe and basic, but you get the same feel looking at Metallica or Iron Man. I’m excited to give it a try. The code will mean everything on a layout like this.
The art is a real home run. Great work from top to bottom there. I can’t wait to hear how it sounds.
I’m feeling the up the middle bash toy/target fatigue a bit though. We’ve had A LOT of that over the past few years. I’m hoping there are some twists to this one to make it feel a little different.
A Borg game where repeatedly bashing the main toy… doesn’t start multiball? (I know that’s pretty obviously not the case this time)
Let’s hope the cabinets are made better
I really like the vaguely Metallica layout and I don’t think this game will suffer from slightly rehashing a design proven to be enjoyable. However, from the inserts this game looks mode based, whereas Metallica didn’t have traditional modes at all. This opens up some possibilities for making the game feel totally different with code even if the layout isn’t entirely unique. Just hope the modes are TZ / TAF unique and not Austin Powers / Kiss / Aerosmith ‘unique’.
Not familiar with the AP modes, but what do you mean about Kiss’s and AS’s modes? I’d always thought TZ/TAF’s modes were pretty lame overall, usually just make some random part of the playfield valuable for 20 seconds.
I think it’s all about perspective. There’s “rules” taken at the most basic level, where something like Clock Chaos/Clock Millions is one of the dumbest modes ever created in pinball (shoot this one spot target as many times as you can).
IMO a “mode” is more than just the rules challenges that it presents to the player. It’s “EVERYTHING” . . . the speech, the sounds, the lighting, the choreography.
The modes in Kiss and Aerosmith to me are nothing but “Colored Arrow Target Practice”. The songs they relate to mean nothing, and you could easily flop the Deuce mode and the Detroit Rock City mode, and nobody would care.
Now replacing Seance and Fester’s Tunnel Hunt on Addams would make no sense. The ramp shot on Seance gives the perfect amount of time for Larry to pull off that choreography in time for the player to make the next shot. In FTH the game uses those shots under the playfields as “tunnels”, which makes total sense with respect to what the mode is representing. That’s the “MAGIC” of pinball to me.
Give me ANY mode on TZ or Addams over ANY mode on Kiss/AS . . . even 9 MILLION! 
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Some historical perspective: These were really in the bleeding edge of “mode design” and as such are much different than what we have today (for the most part).
Note also that different is not necessarily better or worse, in either direction (today vs. then).
Your other excellent points aside about “modes as a whole” aside, I’d point out just these 2 mode’s interaction with the clock makes them worlds apart from what we normally see. Especially when you throw things like the damage bonuses in, and even the subtle change in Chaos of no longer pausing for the robot before moving the other direction after 6 hits.
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Further, I’d argue that while Metallica’s “modes” might be non-traiditional, the few that it does have do a GREAT job of the “everything” aspect that Josh brings up:
- Lady Justice: the choreography of the scales tipping back/forth as you alternate shots to different sides of the playfield. It’s not game-changing scoring, but it’s a cool underappreciated mode.
- Fuel: while not very useful from a scoring perspective, the music change and revving sounds from shooting the piston lane are very nice.
- For whom the Bell Tolls: the choreography, sounds from dropping bombs on this mode are one of my favorites. Love it.
- Fade to Black: dimming the lights as you go… phenomenal.
I could go on, but I’ll stop there.
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Non-traditional? You qualify the modes (CIU), then play them. There’s a lot of extra window dressing, but really no different IMO. Props to Lyman for creating something folks are calling non-traditional when it really is traditional rules.
I’ve been wondering lately if Dwight went too far with SW. It’s not a good game for noobs at all, but it’s an awesome game for us regular players. Not quite as deep, but GOT and GB are also player’s games. Maybe it’s a good time for a game with simpler rules?
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Six minute long modes qualified by making up to 60 shots vs 30 second modes qualified by making one shot? Plus the complex systems for lighting the different items.
GoT is maybe the first game I’ve seen where some of the modes actually had interesting rules to them beyond ‘shoot this shot a lot’ or ‘shoot the flashing arrows’. Hit standups to light shots, hit one shot to build up another. Not many games have modes with much strategy or risk reward to them. SW has taken that a step further (especially with making them untimed, which I really enjoy), and I’d love to see what the next step beyond SW looks like.
I feel like we’re getting to the point where there are 2-3 different things we’re calling modes, from things like ‘the hotdog is worth points’ and ‘hit everything for points’ all the way up to some of SW’s modes. Metallica also makes an interesting attempt at having both kinds (fuel, lady justice, etc making different parts of the playfield worth points), although CiU is still so far off it might as well be a wizard mode. I’d like to see a game where ‘this shot/action is worth points’ is a separate, stackable concept from multiball/modes (which maybe shouldn’t be being stacked when they’re so complex)
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We’re not regular players. I’ll bet that 20% or less of the people who have played Star Wars could tell you anything beyond one or two basic concepts, if even that.
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Dennis and Leon Moncla posted video of GOTG gameplay from IAAPA:
(need to join Gulf Coast Pinball FB group)
Or redirect on YouTube:
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Screen video and graphics look excellent!
But did Stern seriously do another pin LCD screen with small WHITE scores on a CYAN background? 
And let me guess… when you have a 4-player game going, the font size goes microscopic to fit all 4 players scores in that band across the bottom of the screen. Ugh.
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I’d say it’s less than 20%, I’ve played it a bunch and all I know is:
Lite Deathstar modes, lite Endor modes, play both, then play both MB’s at the same time, profit.
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They went way too far with Star Wars. More stuff is often lit on a shot than the game can properly indicate, so it makes understanding why shots are scoring what they do pretty hard to parse out. There’s just too much stuff that stacks and runs concurrently on that game. Game of Thrones was so much more elegant. Star Wars is bloated.
Watching the scraps of video that we’ve got for Guardians looks like the next evolution of the KISS/Aerosmith style of modes. While it’s still really early to make that call, it’s definitely more in that vein than in the GoT/SW style. I hope there are a good amount of surprises in there to be found, however.
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