Yesterday Stern Pinball sent out a memo to its distributors that addresses the issues that owners of its newest cornerstone pinball machine, The Uncanny X-Men, have been experiencing with plunged balls not always being able to make it fully around the game after launch.
The fixes include a number of changes to the game’s software and three hardware changes. The first hardware fix is the one that I would have tried had I owned an X-Men, a new spring for the shooter rod.
The other two hardware changes sound a little trickier than just changing the spring. They involve replacing a metal ball guide and a new plastic guide assembly for the metal ramp.
I’m very glad to see Stern taking care of its customers and addressing this issue with the game, but it’s still surprising to me how the ball launch issue wasn’t caught during the design or testing phases of the game before it came out. It’s really obvious to anyone who has played the machine. Having said that, in my opinion the game is a masterpiece and I LOVE that they took chances with its design so this is a small price to pay for the game’s uniqueness.
Kits containing the new parts will begin shipping to customers by mid-December.
I spoke with Stern Pinball’s George Gomez this morning about the fixes and he told me the following:
“Just to clarify, not all games have the auto launcher or the plunger issue. The reason that it’s taken us this long to address it is because we’ve seen a lot of diverse combinations of causes to the problem across different games. The architecture of the lane in question is very complex as it does many things; it drains the ball, it launches the ball into a lane that is shared by several playfield features, such as the shot to the right of the Sentinel, several ramps encroach into the ball path, etc. While I agree that the launcher should be more consistent, the reality is that the launcher is typically only about putting the ball in play, since the player has no control of it beyond pushing the button. The launcher does do that consistently. The mistake we made was in having it share the shot that serves the ball to the flipper. As a designer that came up at a time when pinball had to earn money on the street, this was typically frowned upon because the more controlled flipper feeds ( ramp feeds to the inlane) the longer the ball times. Some perspectives from the studio.”
