At the Pinball Expo 2014 event in Chicago last night, Jersey Jack Pinball unveiled the production version of their new The Hobbit Pinball game, which was first announced to be in development way back in November 2012. As a part of this unveiling, Jersey Jack Pinball has revealed that they have 3 versions that will be available: Standard, Limited and Smaug Gold Special Edition.
Here are the flyers which lay out the differences:
As the flyer mentions, Smaug can “steal” i.e. grab the pinballs; there is a player controlled diverter to provide a “first-ever inclined loop shot” as well as a “patent-pending Total Control drop targets over 3 banks”. They also have redesigned the LED lighting system in some way using 65 bulbs.
Here are some jpeg compressed pics posted to JJP’s Facebook page:
Some celebrity power, Ed Robertson from the Canadian music band Barenaked Ladies got some time on the game:
The Smaug The Dragon toy
I will have a chance to check this game out at IAAPA next month to report some hands-on time with it. What are your thoughts about it based on this info?
This looks like a quality pin, but it seems to be a little simpler than OZ was. It looks like it will flow a lot better than OZ, but at the same time it looks possibly too easy because the playfield is pushed up further.
I played this at the show… it’s way more simplistic in terms of interaction than Oz is. Very open layout with a lot of open play space that made it feel a bit on the boring side (along with Walking Dead, which also felt rather boring, but not as much as this… the surprises of the show for me were Big Lebowski and Full Throttle). Hobbit wasn’t easy by any stretch, but it’s layout didn’t lend itself to excitement (outside of the sound system, which is definitely its high point). Even the Smaug toy is non-interactive (think Champion Pub’s boxer without being able to hit it). If the main toy of the game just spins around and talks to you, something’s not right. The only interactive toys for the most part were the pop-ups (like trolls in Medieval Madness) and they are annoyingly close to the flippers. The show table only allowed for one ball games to be played so that there wasn’t a log jam of people waiting to play. Even with that, there were a lot of the same shots being made over and over that just felt dull to me. I got a little video of it that I posted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BaIolGEDAA (but you have to make it full screen to see anything, or you can watch Gizmonic’s video here… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynPVwstcw5s )
Thanks for sharing Ice. I had thought that the Smaug toy was going to be more animated/animatronic. Good to know what to be looking at when I get a chance to play this in a few weeks.
Honestly I think that I had the most fun with Mustang, which I hadn’t played either until the show. The jackpot calls are a little annoying, but other than that, it’s a surprisingly a spy title with a lot of action.
The Walking Dead is a bit of an odd title that suffers heavily from “straight down the middle-itis” and it doesn’t have a ball saver in between the flippers. This leads to a lot of frustration, not to mention that the rightmost ramp is a very tough shot, so scoring opportunities are heavily favored to left and center shots. I think the title would do well based on theme to start, but would be difficult to keep up with once the frustration of the gameplay sets in.
Lebowski on the other hand played surprisingly well for being in beta testing. The shots flowed well, and it was pretty entertaining. The DMD was large and bright, the sound was great, and the game had attitude. They need an option to turn off the offensive language, fix the rug shot to have more “give” and solve their bowling alley building VUK issues yet, but since it’s still in beta there’s time to solve those.
Overall it was an entertaining show.