Last night Stern Pinball streamed the first official gameplay of its new James Bond pinball machine. George Gomez, Mike Vinikour and others from Stern showed off a Bond Premium.
The game's code is still very early and incomplete. The team said a lot of "when this is programmed, it will do XYZ" during the broadcast. Keeping that in mind, I thought that the Gomez layout looked really cool. The bones for another awesome Stern pin are there. Here's a few notes that I took while watching:
- The game uses a generic British announcer to guide players.
- Bond on a Wand does almost nothing at this point, but it has the potential to be very interesting.
- The game supposedly contains 10 licensed songs from Bond movies, but it seems to me as though most of them are part of the instrumental scores from the movies, many by John Barry, rather than songs by popular artists. Supposedly, the licensing cost to get many of the popular Bond songs were "absolutely out of the question unaffordable."
- The game has at least a whopping eight Skill Shots, which is really neat. Those will make some cool achievements to shoot for. Alas, when I watched I only saw one skill shot completed. The others may have not been fully coded yet.
- None of the players in last night's stream logged into Stern Insider Connected while playing, leading me to assume that achievements have not been programmed into the game yet either.
- The sound for the spinner in the game is temporary. George is a self-proclaimed "nutcase" about spinner sounds and he hasn't finalized that yet.
George Gomez's enthusiasm for the Connery-era Bond films is contagious. I went and watched "From Russia With Love" on Amazon Prime right after watching this stream. I plan to watch at least all six Connery films that are in the pin again prior to it hitting the streets. For those of you who missed the live stream, the pin will be on location at Enterrium, Logan Arcade and Pinball Expo this week. A replay has also been uploaded to YouTube. I have embedded it below:
