Thread for irrational dislikes

[invitro]

Speaking of dads, something that drives me nuts/kinda actually really irks me about pinball and the pinball community is this weird obsession with porny, boob-filled pinball machines. It feels totally out of the 70s. Like, what are you going to do, have sex with the machine? It seems especially bad in the actual pinball-owning community, because buying/upkeeping a pinball machine takes a lot of money, so it's like 99% middle-aged men with "man caves".

I don't think pinball has featured many boob-filled machines since the late 1970's... please correct me if wrong... and the 1970's were definitely a porny decade .

And what's wrong with middle-aged men, or man caves?

 

[trunchbull]

I don't think pinball has featured many boob-filled machines since the late 1970's... please correct me if wrong... and the 1970's were definitely a porny decade .

And what's wrong with middle-aged men, or man caves?

The 70s machines are definitely the worst for it but there's a lean towards it in the art in general (Bride of Pinbot, the busty damsels in AFM, half-naked biker chick at the end of Harley Davidson, the entirety of Woah Nellie, etc). WRT the average pinball owner it's just that it kind of engenders a boys-club atmosphere, tho maybe I just had a bad experience on the Pinside forum, which seemed cripplingly sexist and homophobic. Really, the major issue is just the degree to which the pinball industry is limited these days - sexy (or dad-rock nostalgia) sells, which leave much room for any tables that won't attract buzzed dudes at a bar.

 

[kinggo]

I still haven't seen any "sexy" pinball. As long as my stiff-o-meter stays on zero........
And sex, nudity, whatever is much more a selling point today than it was 30 years ago.

 

[HotHamBoy]

Breakshot has some boob stuff happening in the DMD. Guns n Roses is REALLY bad, the table is covered in scantily clad babe'z and the match is literally a girl taking her shirt off and the numbers cover her nips. When I first really started getting into pinball last year I began a quest to seek out as many new table experiences as possible, regardless of era. OVertime, I started to notice an odd trend... almost every pinball table featuring art work of women depicted said women with, ahem, their "headlights" on. If you look at a lot of tables (especially from the 70's, but certainly the 80s and 90s, too) you'll see a lot of hard nipples pokin through. Even on the tables that aren't showing the girls in a sexual way. I laughed when I saw the girls on Captain Fantastic, I shook my head at Strikes n' Spares... I guess it makes sense on Dolly, but Old Chicago? Bally Star Trek? Really, pay attention to the girls... it's weird.

Oh, and what's really odd is that the large majority of women on pinball tables are kind of ugly... I think they're supposed to be attractive but the artists usually make'em pretty fug or old-looking.

 

[Biff]

Imo, the more porny, the better.

The layout is pretty good but everything else about it is total fremdschamen; the humor, the call-outs, the art (ugh).

Interesting, do you Americans also use the German word "Fremdschämen"?
Like "Schadenfreude" or "Kindergarten" ...

 

[trunchbull]

I guess it makes sense on Dolly, but Old Chicago? Bally Star Trek? Really, pay attention to the girls... it's weird.

Which is part of the trend I'm talking about - pinball by guys, for guys. They seem to be made with the assumption that the players will be tipsy, horny, and ready to objectify.

Interesting, do you Americans also use the German word "Fremdschämen"?
Like "Schadenfreude" or "Kindergarten" ...

It's not as widespread as "schadenfreude" but I know enough who do that I don't feel weird saying it!

 

[HotHamBoy]

Oh, hey, getting back on the rails - I, too, really dislike video modes. If I wanted to play video games I wouldn't be playing pinball. The DMD games are simple yet difficult, mainly due to awful collision detection and limited computing and display technology. They pretty much all suck and really kill the flow of the game.

I also dislike being spoiled by ball savers. They make older games feel so mockingly cruel when you get that house ball.

Revenge From Mars' super-dated CGI is kind of peevy, but understandable. What's far more irritating and not at all acceptable is that bland, generic, ugly office font! It looks so bad!

 

[Slam23]

If a video mode is well done (i.e. fun to play and more or less unpredictable) and the frequency with which you get to play it is not too high, I actually like the diversion from regular gameplay. Very bad examples are the inane (so called) video modes in CBW, the frequency, the scoring importance and bad taste of HD3e's video mode and the frequency of the HSII Getaway mode. But I like for example the diversity of the Indy '93 video modes, and STTNG's Cave video mode is quite fun (but a little predictable).

 

[soundwave106]

Speaking of dads, something that drives me nuts/kinda actually really irks me about pinball and the pinball community is this weird obsession with porny, boob-filled pinball machines. It feels totally out of the 70s.

Generally speaking, I would say that the majority of the artwork that is more boobalicious is 1970s-early 1980s. So that sort of fits. Like I said in another thread, many things made in the 1970s could not be made today.

A huge portion of pinball artwork is fantasy and science fiction related. So you get all the rest of the tropes of fantasy / sci-fi in your pinball art (including the shirtless, steroid-pumped musclemen, the fantastical machines and creatures, and the like). It's not like other similar fantasy / sci-fi artwork of the time didn't have similar tropes. (See: Heavy Metal...)

In the 1990s, when I started playing, the Heavy Metal style wasn't in, and pinball machines were probably more general audience anyway. I certainly can't recall playing a machine of that sort. If there was any boobalicious stuff, it was in a campy way (like "Scared Stiff").

Of course, Stern makes machines for middle age male collectors, and certainly a hair metal pin like Guns N Roses is going to pump up the hair-sleaze-o-meter (of course, seen a 1980s hair metal video lately?). None of that is present on a machine where that theme is not appropriate, like say "Ripley's Believe It Or Not".

My opinion: for some reason, a recent trend has been for portions of people online to get *way* bent out of shape in an overly simplistic way out of various stylings and tropes that they see as overtly sexual. This is unfortunately a mistake, akin to the "radical feminists" of the 1970s which also overall probably did more harm than good to the cause. There are certainly fantasy tropes that sell to the other sex too (the 50 Shades of Gray / Twilight type trope as one obvious example) and terms like "objectifying girls" oversimplifies both the artwork concept itself as well as what all women feel about such fantasy art (As in, I know women who like that type of style, don't see it as objectionable, and actually get pissed at the people that overly banter the "objectification" angle). Obviously there are a lot of silly things about these tropes, but let's be careful and not make too big a deal out of it.

 

[Dedpop]

^ Nice post sir.

 

[Crooker]

It's only pinball

 

[trunchbull]

Revenge From Mars' super-dated CGI is kind of peevy, but understandable. What's far more irritating and not at all acceptable is that bland, generic, ugly office font! It looks so bad!

I kind of love the ugly font, it makes me laugh. It'd be cool to see a machine with redone graphics, though, I'm sure someone with programming and design skills could knock that out.

My opinion: for some reason, a recent trend has been for portions of people online to get *way* bent out of shape in an overly simplistic way out of various stylings and tropes that they see as overtly sexual. This is unfortunately a mistake, akin to the "radical feminists" of the 1970s which also overall probably did more harm than good to the cause. There are certainly fantasy tropes that sell to the other sex too (the 50 Shades of Gray / Twilight type trope as one obvious example) and terms like "objectifying girls" oversimplifies both the artwork concept itself as well as what all women feel about such fantasy art (As in, I know women who like that type of style, don't see it as objectionable, and actually get pissed at the people that overly banter the "objectification" angle). Obviously there are a lot of silly things about these tropes, but let's be careful and not make too big a deal out of it.

The only real damage done by radical feminists was that people latched onto the idea and used it to demonize the cause, which happens in every civil rights movement (and it's still happening today with all that craziness from the Men's Rights nutjobs). I guess what I'm more getting at is that I wish the pinball industry was as prosperous as it used to be, because right now it's kind of a collector's market that seems to be dominated a certain kind of person. But I suppose anyone who comes late into something like this pines for the glory days, right?

EDIT: thought of another irrational dislike: I hate Thing in Addams Family. I like the concept but it takes ages for it to come out, and then sometimes you have to wait for it to put the ball back. I swear it's faster in real life.

 

[HotHamBoy]

Kick-outs that aim SDTM. You have to hit them and then they betray you. Shouldn't have to shove the machine to save a ball that's returning from a shot you're supposed to make.

 

[invitro]

The only real damage done by radical feminists was that people latched onto the idea and used it to demonize the cause, which happens in every civil rights movement (and it's still happening today with all that craziness from the Men's Rights nutjobs).

Maybe we need a politics subforum (or maybe we don't).

 

[invitro]

EDIT: thought of another irrational dislike: I hate Thing in Addams Family. I like the concept but it takes ages for it to come out, and then sometimes you have to wait for it to put the ball back. I swear it's faster in real life.

Tournament play is enhancing my hate of long table actions and DMD animations that can't be aborted by pressing both flippers. Dwight Sullivan is a prime offender: Who Dunnit and Junk Yard's DMD sequences, Champion Pub's boxer that should start turning when its accompanying DMD animation starts, instead of waiting until it's over... grrr! Such hate is irrational because fixing things would've been extremely difficult, and I am going to live forever so I shouldn't care about losing a few minutes waiting for pinball...

 

[trunchbull]

Kick-outs that aim SDTM. You have to hit them and then they betray you. Shouldn't have to shove the machine to save a ball that's returning from a shot you're supposed to make.

There are some tables where I just straight up don't do things that it wants me to do because it inevitably leads to a ball drain. Eight times out of ten, the Twilight Zone skill shot is just a kamikaze death plunge.

Maybe we need a politics subforum (or maybe we don't).

Probably not! Tho this forum seems a way less wacko than Pinside. My first week over there a thread turned up full of people getting violently angry about Caitlyn Jenner, which was pretty unwelcoming.

 

[DA5ID]

Tournament play is enhancing my hate of long table actions and DMD animations that can't be aborted by pressing both flippers. Dwight Sullivan is a prime offender: Who Dunnit and Junk Yard's DMD sequences, Champion Pub's boxer that should start turning when its accompanying DMD animation starts, instead of waiting until it's over... grrr! Such hate is irrational because fixing things would've been extremely difficult, and I am going to live forever so I shouldn't care about losing a few minutes waiting for pinball...

yeah with the 20 minute tournament time limit - I can't afford to wait through mandatory dmd waits - specially the end of ball bonus screens you can't skip through. I have noticed that on a few games the tournament timer pauses - but not all.

 

[HotHamBoy]

Oh yeah, I just avoid Pinside. My very first post was replied to with a jerk comment about how the guy hates people who use silly handles. Everyone says it's drama, most popular gaming forums are toxic. TPA's forum is small but nice

Some ramps are so steep that if the flippers aren't full-strength on the table you're just going to burn money and go home angry. I was having a heart-breaking time on a Pinball Magic on my recent trip to Nashville. Hit that left ramp so many times, ball only made it up once.

I also hate when a flipper button feels like its grinding, yuck.

Ever played Corvette? That game is a demon. Main ramp torpedos the ball down the center drain and if your ball hits the outlane post it's gonna sink 9 times out of 10.

 

[invitro]

yeah with the 20 minute tournament time limit - I can't afford to wait through mandatory dmd waits - specially the end of ball bonus screens you can't skip through. I have noticed that on a few games the tournament timer pauses - but not all.

The timer seems to stop with end of ball if and only if you have no balls on the playfield (usually by ball lock). Probably for some people it was good strategy to purposely drain on F-14 when they just finished a multiball, and had full bonus, as draining with full bonus took about 15 seconds off the timer.

 

[invitro]

Some ramps are so steep that if the flippers aren't full-strength on the table you're just going to burn money and go home angry. I was having a heart-breaking time on a Pinball Magic on my recent trip to Nashville. Hit that left ramp so many times, ball only made it up once.

+1... this happened to me tons on Frankenstein. It made me so angry but it the ball came close enough to make it, and did make it occasionally, that I couldn't stop playing it. At least replays were easy. I didn't play Pinball Magic except on trips but I think I remember its steep ramp. Not having to worry about machine condition is a positive for digital pinball.