I have a pretty original pinball idea, it involves using the coin door to throw a pinball into someone's nuts.

I don't think anyone claims it's the #1 of all time. It's ranked abnormally high because it's the new hotness and it just got on the leaderboard. Almost EVERY new game debuts abnormally high and then sinks down towards its long-term ranking. You'll also see the ratings change as the software gets more complete and some old reviews on the early versions may eventually be revisited. Anyway, it's going to take time to see how it shakes out but it seems promising that it will be somewhere in the top 10 I think by the time the software hits 1.0.

Three ramps and a bumper is ignoring some other cool stuff, at a minimum there's an extremely versatile 3rd flipper with locking capability and a moving drop fin target. On the Premium/LE you've also got the upper playfield and the shark that goes up/down. Note that the Pro is not ranked nearly as high as the Premium or LE too, so to some extent I think people agree that the Pro is a bit on the sparse side.

The audio and video are both very well integrated, if you're playing it in a noisy bar you're for sure not getting the full experience.

Approachable is a great term for this game. Very easy to find and do the thing, which I think is going to make the game very popular. I love Zilla, but sometimes it’s not always super clear what I need to shoot and when. Jaws seems to be easier to navigate which shots I need to make. The fin shot is superb. It’s just as fun as the gunfight shot in CCR.

Couldn't agree more with your assessment, I'm not a tournament player...I have no desire to ever be. I like to drink a couple beers with friends and shoot few games against each other. If anyone here had non pinball enthusiast guests at their house, I couldn't imagine them trying to use Jaws as an example of how FUN pinball can be.

I'm not sure why people even bother to rate the Pro. It's like voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in Texas with the Electoral College in place.

Pinside should REALLY adjust how final rankings are determined when you have multiple trim levels.

Great, just great....now when my family gets home from spring break vacation and asks what I did by myself during the week, I will have to tell them I dropped acid and went to Galloping Ghost to play pinball because, coincidentally, I played TFTC for the first time yesterday and enjoyed it more than Jaws.

Thank you hahaha, 3 votes for tftc!!!

The degrees of separation between a lot of great games is minimal.

I wouldn’t put much stock in the ranking order.

Every new Stern is number 1.

And all your highest rates games include "easy to understand " in the description; that might have something to do with it.

Check back Sunday, we'll see if it's still in the Top 30
Only one game debuted at the top spot and stayed there for the long haul, GZ!

I dunno, I kind of disagree. jaws is really accessible, the layout is open and there’s not a lot of danger in the shots.

what it offers to casuals is really good sound and lighting and a game that doesn’t feel like it’s full of unfair drains.

IM and JP have much less for causal players even if they have bigger toys.

Has he gotten down to the bottom of what he’s missing yet?

I’ve narrowed it down to either there’s something wrong with him, or perhaps the rating system is corrupted!!!!

lol

The world would be better off if everyone realized two things can be true at the same time…..

Yeah I have to agree, and yet another reason this game isn't a top 5 game of all time. The sound is bleh. There's only so much you can do using the jaws score, and while it's fine for building some suspense, i much prefer games with more energetic music. When i get little tidbits of like a sea shanty or something it's like a shot in the arm and even that isn't too great. The callouts by million year old Richard Dreyfus are sub par at best. I get it, it's jaws, and this is what you're gonna get.... but it doesn't do much of anything for me

I played the game quite a bit here at a local arcade both the pro and the premium. The game overall in my opinion is not that exciting. The playfield layout is really boring and the shots are not that great. It’s really a bummer because I grew up with jaws and it scared the daylights out of me. Super bummed on this release, my go to game at the arcade is venom and pulp fiction. Both are super fun.

You are biased towards games made in the 20th century Haymaker.

I don’t get a lot of casual at the house, but the few who have played jaws at this point seem throughly entertained. Most non pinball people seem to focus on bashing the shark and have a good time.

That's false, I'm biased to new games. I'm over all the 90s stuff for the most part. Games today are so much more fun

Just going off your collection

All my highest rated games? I've rated like 5 games total lol, and that's because I owned them. But yes, easy to understand is more fun imo. All the 90s classic games were fairly easy to understand. I guess it's the same reason why I don't like modern video games, who wants to spend 2 hours doing a tutorial to learn how to walk and shoot the bad guy lol...

NAILED IT

You see, I’m baffled by this…

I found Jaws pretty dull on my plays, but - watching in tournament - the number of people who can knock out consistent shots AT ALL is tiny. In order to make split-second strategic decisions over which of 17 things to shoot for, you need to be in the top 5-10% of players (at least). I’m baffled by the size of the audience for this experience, given the standard of people I watch playing EVEN IN TOURNAMENT.

I went through my annual stats for Stern Insider Connected, believing I was a very bad player. Because, for UK tournament players, I *am* a WAAYYY below-average player. It turns out that, compared to the population of people who log plays on Stern Insider Connected, I’m in the top half (25-35% best players). Most people who play competitively in tournament will be in the top 1-10% of all players with Stern Insider accounts, which probably means the top 0.5-5% of regular players.

If people who can consistently choose between shots are the audience, I think it’s, well, a bit niche. There’s nothing wrong with being niche (I love TNA and Fish Tales), but it still limits the audience. GZ, AFM (and JP2 to a lesser extent) offer a fun experience for people at a variety of skill levels. The theme, to be honest, is also niche. Everyone LOVES monsters, but the actual theme of Jaws pinball is standing about on a boat smoking with a bunch of oldish dudes, waiting for an oversized toothy haddock to pop up.

Good idea or maybe one of these would work.

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#1 or not the top 100 page never looked cooler with jaws swimming at the top.

Shark eat Top 100, even tho shark no eat ball. Shark gives zero f’s.

Stern IC rank is meaningless. I’m in the 100th % on every game and am an average player. It includes people who find starting a game challenging.

I have owned JP2, GZ, and Jaws. Jaws is my favorite and is easier than JP2 and very similar to GZ in difficulty.

You do know how popular Sharks are right? Like shark week and fishing are gigantic. I could describe GZ as men dancing in foam rubber suits but then we would both be wrong.

I just can't on Jaws...

...can't reward Stern for taking so much of the mechanical joy out of pinball for just another collection of shots...even if they are 'fun' (which I find debatable on this one).

And this pains me because a) I own and enjoy games from what I feel are their greatest hits (DP, GZ, JP) and b) I met a lot of their crew at TPF and they ALL seem like great people who enjoy making pinball and are very gracious to their fans. I'd love to be more excited about their current product.

But I just can't with the lack of toys. Maybe it's because I'm not a world class player but it still puts a smile on my face when the T Rex eats the ball. Or the building moves. Or the hamster wheel spins (that's probably a more obscure reference for most). And it's the same for my guests. If all good players want non- stop flow with no interruption from toys why do we need new games at all? We have tons of games like that. Or why isn't Venom more popular?

Ultimately I'll support companies like Multimorphic and Spooky that still have a sense of mechanical whimsy. I value that as much as 'kinetic satisfaction'...

The IC rankings for scores aren’t a good representation of skill at all. I consider my skill level average and am in the 100th%. I am no where near top 1% of players. Just look at your year in review, it tells you that the average games played for all IC users is 113 games for the whole year. Average days played for the year is 18. These are the players you are being compared to.

I don’t think only the top 10% of players know what to shoot for. Sure maybe you don’t know the path to maximise points in the safest way but to know what to shoot for, that’s what the blinky lights are for.

Machines aren’t set up the same for tournaments and at home so watching someone in a tournament in a one off game and saying they can’t make shots isn’t a good representation of their skill either. You only need to watch the top players in the world in a home setting and also in a tournament to see the difference in game set up and also being able to play the same machine several times over versus a one off. It’s completely different.

When I played it at TPF, it had so many lights blinking on the playfield that I thought I was playing a JJP game. Just shoot everything. As for the assets, if I wanted to watch/listen to Jaws, I would have stayed home and watched Jaws. I felt like it was too much.

This game hasn’t clicked for me yet and I understand what some are saying. It simply felt like another long-playing Stern. I didn’t want to play it any longer and, in a rare moment for me, other manufacturers’ games were calling to be played. A friend just traded his Bond 60th for a premium and I’ll put more time on it and rate it when I feel I’ve put sufficient time on the game.

I like DP but what is the mechanical joy in the game? It sounds like you find it fun and that's great. Jaws has more "mechanical joy" than DP so maybe it's just not for you. Let it go and play the next one.

Fair, but I'll tell you what I tell everyone else lol. I generally can't afford to buy the games I want. I have to rely on getting huge deals that fall into my lap. There's some other stuff that prevents me from downsizing my collection into a handful of modern games, but I kinda would like to!

This is the Pinside Top 100 visual representation. I will let you guess what games he owns.

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Most Stern pro's have zero toys.

Personally I find the shots/ramps/ball paths way more satisfying on Jaws than GZ for example.

Way too early to see where Jaws sits in the all-time list.

I think it helps to like fishing/and/or the movie, but that is the same for most games I guess.

Yo, for all ya'll talkin about serious players, noobs, what kind of percentile you fall in, ect having to do with how you feel about this game, I want ya'll to post your high scores here. Hell I wanna see your venom scores too lmfao

Also, yeah, it's really easy (too easy imo) to be ranked in the 100th percentile. I think average score paints a much better picture, but outside of comparing yourself with the people you follow on IC its hard to see how you fall

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My current jaws high score is 1.7b and that’s with making it through all the code so far (though not beating every mode). I’m a big fan of the game, but also don’t find it the best game of all time and that’s fine. We are all lucky to have so many choices for great games, so just find what you like and enjoy.

IMHO, Jaws is the most addicting of all the new ones at A.G., the whole idea of you vs. sharks with a whole beach of people in the balance was just a damn good time, the most tension-filled world-under-glass since Elwin's JP. Laby was lots of fun, same with LT. (Elton...very meh layout and not into the songs or staring at his face) But Jaws puts you in the role of fighting vicious creatures while saving people (and the doggie!), so it isn't just a famous movie, it's an excellent theme for pinball. Luckily Elwin nailed it with another unique layout and the code team is providing TONS of sharky things to do.

Meh

Phew...just stopped in to make sure jaws is still #1. Thought it might already be slipping, and I lost a lot of sleep over it last night.

The next Top 100 update will be in 2 days and 9 hours

fuck...looks like another sleepless night for me

Medieval Madness in the real world would still be #1 due to decades on top. Things change. New collectors come in, older collectors drop out. Ball of life.

Worse things in the world than a noob buying a top 10 pin based off pinside list. They’re all fun.

Played Godzilla, was ok, not like , WOW! For my tastes, that’s just me. I’m also a Jaws fan, assets were much more than I expected, worried it would be ‘JP’ like with just shark tones and no popular characters. I was SO wrong.

Elwin did a wonderous job designing the shots, upper pf, returns to flippers. Game really is fun.

All this proves is how useless polls are. The majority vote to prop up their purchase decision as many people are subject to the feelings of post purchase dissonance. There's no way that Jaws is the best pinball machine in existence. It's not really even close to Elwin's best work.

Fair enough. I respect your pov. I never paid this much for a Stern pin, understatement to say I was anxious out of my mind after paying for it ( no one had a Jaws yet to play first except one Pro and it was ok). I was Jonesing for this theme and Stern made it happen. Got lucky Elwin was the designer.

I may never pay this much for a pin again, and I’m good with that. I don’t regret my decision unless shit starts falling apart. Talk to me a few years from now and we’ll see.

That’s your opinion, which you’re entitled to. We own all of Elwin’s latest pins and so far Jaws LE is up there, it complements the others very well. Played GZ right before Jaws last night and our experience is Jaws is a faster, more intense game. Doesn’t mean GZ is worse, just different, which is great!

Looking forward to additional code updates, which should make it even better. As others have said, it’s ok to form an initial impression, but rating a game should be done once the code is at or near completion, and, you’ve truly put some time on it.