How come Stern seems to have forgotten about holding the ball while animations play on the screen? It seems to me that with old DE and BW games you always had time to watch what was going on on the DMD because if there was a sequence of any length, or if there was info you needed to see, the ball was held somewhere so you could take your eyes of the playfield and take it all in.
Fast forward to the last 10 years or so and that seems to have gone out of the window. With DMD games like Met and AC/DC there is plenty to see but very little time to see it, and with the lcd screen machines it's got even worse: take a game like Stranger Things or Batman 66 and there's probably lots of stuff to look at, including useful info about game progress or hints about what to shoot for, but almost no chance to take it in because of the action going on on the playfield.
It seems obvious to me that vital info like "Lock is lit" or "shoot for the gadgets" should be done through a call out which you can take in while playing the game, not via something which is displayed briefly on the screen. Or at the very least display that info while the ball is held somewhere.
There's a parallel here with the way that cars are going - an obsession with screens. Rather than have buttons or thumbwheels that you can operate to change radio stations or Spotify tracks while watching the road, you now need to look at a central touch screen and then prod at the right part of the screen while taking you eyes of the road.
Hummphhhh.
Fast forward to the last 10 years or so and that seems to have gone out of the window. With DMD games like Met and AC/DC there is plenty to see but very little time to see it, and with the lcd screen machines it's got even worse: take a game like Stranger Things or Batman 66 and there's probably lots of stuff to look at, including useful info about game progress or hints about what to shoot for, but almost no chance to take it in because of the action going on on the playfield.
It seems obvious to me that vital info like "Lock is lit" or "shoot for the gadgets" should be done through a call out which you can take in while playing the game, not via something which is displayed briefly on the screen. Or at the very least display that info while the ball is held somewhere.
There's a parallel here with the way that cars are going - an obsession with screens. Rather than have buttons or thumbwheels that you can operate to change radio stations or Spotify tracks while watching the road, you now need to look at a central touch screen and then prod at the right part of the screen while taking you eyes of the road.
Hummphhhh.
