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Message: <blockquote data-quote="vikingerik" data-source="post: 115604" data-attributes="member: 3745">This nails my feelings on Stern, at least after TSPP and LOTR.  The Williams tables have a certain... joyous revelry is the best way I can describe it.  I think it's largely in the speech quotes.  When Attack From Mars yells out "Total Annihilation... WOOHOO!" or "Super Jackpot, OH BABY!", you can really feel the fun and passion exuding from the design team.  The Williams tables truly draw the player into the experience and heighten your mood.  It's like the machine is cheering you along.  The king of the trope is probably Monster Bash, where everything you do spawns some excitement from one of the monsters.The Stern tables of recent years don't recapture this.  I haven't played them all, but many like Dark Knight, Elvis, Tron Legacy, Avatar, AC/DC mostly feel like they're ticking a checklist of requirements from the source material.  They offer little sense of joy on accomplishing something big.  It's more like you got a task done at work and now it's on to the next assignment.  The machine isn't excited for you, it sounds more like a dispassionate anchorman reciting your news.  The absolute low point here was of course Wheel of Fortune, just a lousy mailed-in mood with no fun at all.  They're there to consume your quarters, not to entertain you.Williams games go "I'm howling at the moon tonight!"  Stern games go "2 More For Multiball."The big exceptions for Stern are TSPP and LOTR of course.  Smashing the Balrog or stacking up a ton of multiballs are every bit as awesome as in the peak Williams games.  A few other earlier Sterns also felt good and cheerful - Austin Powers, Monopoly, Sopranos.  So I think the Stern deficiency is mostly in the multimedia experience, not the core pinballing.  The playfields and rules for the modern Stern games are still fine, aside from the arguments over missing wizard modes.  But there's just not as much production value in the sound and video.  The "always display the score" policy is a miss IMO, it really cuts down on the feeling and expression of BIGNESS when called for.Mechanically, Stern is just as good as Williams.  I don't perceive any meaningful difference in the quality or feel.  I probably couldn't identify the flippers of each company if a blind test were possible.  Every pinball machine will suffer weak flippers and broken switches if unmaintained.  If Williams games seem more reliable, that's probably selection bias due to age.  20 years later you only see the outliers of WMS games that have been well cared for, but still see newer Sterns installed on locations everywhere and left to rot.That all said, Stern delivering B+ tables is still better than no Stern at all, so I hope they stay around.</blockquote>

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