Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. As always, I am Alan, your host of the show. Joined in the basement studio, my co-host, Alex the Waterboy. How you doing? I'm doing great, Alan. How about you? Doing pretty good. Very happy because we're doing another Die on the Hill series of our show, which is where we invite a guest to the show to defend a commonly crapped on game that they unironically love. And it's a chance to highlight some underappreciated games and cut through all the groupthink and the blind hate and realize that pinball is always subjective and people actually do like these games. Some of these games that you have simply written off may have more to enjoy than you previously gave them credit for. This week's episode, we will be featuring Gottlieb Premier's masterpiece, Raven. great odin's raven released in 1986 designed by john trudeau with software by john burris play field art by larry day and featuring some incredible sound and music from ken hale it was actually a very big seller for gotley premiere at this point in time with 3500 units made but it's currently ranked number 301 on the all-time pin side list making it the lowest rated game that we have ever featured on the show yeah it's abysmal maybe it's the lack of a multi-ball maybe it's because of the photo backlash which was the first time any company had done this but Raven, for whatever reason, has no shortage of haters, and we're going to read all their reviews. But thankfully, one brave man is joining us on the show to defend Raven's honor, and that man is Scott Denisey. He's a pinball designer, programmer, engineer, musician, a name but a few things to Scott's time. You already know him. He's been on the show before. Welcome back, Scott. Why do you love Raven? Excellent. Glad to be back. Awesome. Why do I love Raven? Okay, so Raven was a game that I owned a long, long time ago, And I got a real beat up one and I fixed it all up real nice. And there's many, many reasons why I love Raven. And I think we're going to probably touch on those. We should probably just, let's just get right into it and start. Let me get in the hate and let me do this because I'm going to justify every reason probably why I did this. We probably got like 13 or 14 reviews that I picked out. Oh, perfect. And then, yeah, and if there's any that are... I culled a bunch of them because there's a mountain of hate for this game. You want me to start it off here? Start it off. The first review is from King Daddy. He says, it's hard to argue against Raven being the worst solid state game of all time. It has laughably horrendous artwork and concept combined with very poor gameplay. Gee, Brittany, I'm overcome with emotion. See, so this is the problem here. So there's two big things here. So I'm going to start with gameplay, first of all, because the average pinball player now, they don't understand simple rule sets. This one has a very simple rule set. it has a lot of cool little things going on in the playfield. Yes, it doesn't have an orbit that goes all the way around and that's fine, but it doesn't need it. Not every game needs an orbit. It doesn't, but there's a lot of little cool things going on. And the fact that you can hit those standup targets and get those little sniper guys to pop up and stuff. It's really cool. That was ahead of its time. That's before Cactus Canyon. I just want to remind you guys. Clever use of drop targets for this time. Dude, very clever use of drop targets, which I'm a big fan of. And now like the artwork right so let's talk about that again so like actually there's probably three things this guy was hitting on artwork the artwork is actually really good if you look at it the photo back glass is probably fantastic it's it's badass it was supposed to be rambo right yeah so that's like a it's back when gottlieb was doing stuff like bone busters was supposed to be ghostbusters right the gottlieb knockoffs which are just endearing yeah yeah they're great they're they're unlicensed themes that are tech they're like sort of kind of like the license you know they're trying to get around the licensing this is like rambo and then they put instead of putting rambo on there they put this lady with a ak-47 shooting from the hip which you can't do um you know it's like and also that yeah i don't want to go into the technical details of why you can't shoot a firearm like that but but it looks cool scott it looks cool hey you know what though in those those photorealistic back glasses i bet you like it doesn't even matter man when you're in a bar and you are looking at this thing you're just like this is hilarious i'm gonna go play this game oh my god it's like rambo look at this it's it's actually pretty awesome no the playfield artwork is sick and then it's got like a cheetah print cabinet which is cabinets right dude the cheetah print cabinet did you know that it came with black armor on it too whoa oh that's factory yeah go look at pictures yeah that's factory crap man yeah damn and they had the model pose with it. Well, they had to create, they created these photos, so like, they got a model, and they dressed, and they photographed the game, and they got the model to come back, which is impressive. Yeah, it's so cool, man. I think I got, I think I got everything right. Did I get it all? I got the art, I got the gameplay. There's gonna be more commenting about the same things. In fact, Frank Black says, Raven gets slammed for its artwork, and rightfully so. The backlash is silly and dated. The cabinet isn't much better, though it fits the theme such as it is. This was made post-Rambo 2 and at the same time of Aliens. So we have a Rambo female like the character Ripley in Aliens. Anyways, there are some nice conversion kits out there, but it's like putting makeup on a pig. A really big makeup experiment. With a nice translate replacement and new side art, this could be made to look like a nice machine. But the play field in play isn't that bad. However, the audio is rather drab. I guess it's passable. Oh, that hurts, man. That audio in there is so awesome. It's like 8-bit audio. So it sounds like it was made on a Nintendo with a few oscillators. It sounds amazing. This person obviously didn't listen to it at all. Yeah. So they must be trying to compare it to the new 44, 100 hertz CD quality audio that we're getting out of these things now. It seems like they want this game to be something it isn't. They're like, oh, you can change the back glass and paint the cabinet. Although it would probably be considered a felony in most states. And you're like, that's just ludicrous. They're just ruining it. Yeah. That's what makes it cool. Yeah. What makes it cool is that back glass. The back glass is the best part. It is that cabinet. I mean, seriously, look at that cabinet. That's hilarious. It's awesome. It's great. I'll get into the next review because we'll just keep going on the art for a minute here. Yeah, perfect. Like, let's go, yeah, let's just keep, yeah, we'll keep hammering on it. Dr. L says, the back glass in the cabinet artwork screams ugly and lazy. There was not much effort put into it. In fact, I consider it the ugliest back glass ever. Don't fashion people squander their lives loudly worshiping all that is superficial and meaningless. The art on the play field is actually pretty good. For the record, I agree with you. It would have been better if they left the gun-toting woman off of the lower middle. play is pretty good for a late 80s game but i would never own it because the ugliness of the back glass art really man this like i don't know man this guy just doesn't like fun i guess like i look at that i go like this is great this is fun that's people don't people need to like embrace the cheese and maybe it's because we're younger than these guys we didn't live through it and so they're looking at this as like a dated relic and we're looking at it as like a like a time capsule and you're like this is hilarious you're absolutely right you're absolutely right and i'll tell you what too i think there's something wrong here i think there's a lot of issues with people saying the back glass like looks like crap i wonder if what they're actually saying is the back glass looks faded and crappy they do get yellowed because these got leaves have the fluorescent right behind them correct people just fucking hate it though man yeah valley who says this is a fail the designer should have stayed in bed that day but on the positive side it has set a standard in what not to do when making a pinball machine. Change your attitude, hon. Change your life. Really? The whole thing? Like, you're going to discount the whole thing? This is what not to do. He says that everything of this game is what not to make a pinball machine. He uses this as an example. All of it's bad. I don't even know how to respond to that because, like, this person is so off base that it's, like, bewildering to me. The next one is even more vague. Stantone. he says wow i can't believe i owned this game once i sold it quickly after playing it just a few times it's very bad i don't like fun yeah in all capital letters it's very bad very bad well obviously they must have not uh had some friends over and played this thing because they couldn't hit the spinner and see the helicopter twirling dude the helicopter run every time you touch the spinner the helicopter turns on dude yeah it's cool as hell man and the snipers pop up and shit like how is that not amazing and there's a shot between the pop bumpers right you have to slam that up there the whole store full of shorts for sports and get those four targets that are behind the pop bumpers come on it tell me that not awesome it cool it is cool man that like that what weird i like i shocked by some of these actually i thought people were just going to be making fun of the art and stuff But people are saying like this the game sucks I like wait a second No way. This is why we do this segment on the show, Scott. It's offensive. We do this because we get people on that love a game and they're like flabbergasted that everyone else thinks it sucks. And they're like, what? Are you kidding me? This game rips. Dude, how much do these go for? You know what? I'm checking Pinset right now. Hold on. They're like $1,200 still. They're like one of the actual games that's still cheap. No, man. There's one in West Chicago right now for sale. $2,500. Oh, that's way too much. I mean, it's probably worth it. No, it's not too much. It's probably worth it. Let me see the play field. Let me see this thing. Let me see this. I'm just checking it out. Holy crap, dude. This thing is in nice shape. Oh, wow. It does look... Oh, wow. That's real nice. You see that? Look at that play field, man. Dude, look at that armor. It's so beautiful. It's got the original... Look, the Mylar's still on there. Yeah, okay. The armor's nice. Dude. This is a nice raven. Look at the lack of wear around the start button. That's what I was like. The cabinet's like that. People would say that's because the game's not good and they didn't play it.