Jersey Jack's Guns n Roses Looks Amazing: Part 1

Cary Hardy·video·23m 59s·analyzed·Oct 6, 2020

Analysis

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TL;DR

Jersey Jack's Guns N' Roses revealed as industry-leading machine with unprecedented theme integration and production value.

Summary

Cary Hardy praises Jersey Jack Pinball's newly revealed Guns N' Roses machine as an exceptional achievement in pinball design, production values, and theme integration. He highlights Jersey Jack's collaborative approach with Slash, extensive music licensing, immersive light shows, and creative mechanical implementations (oscillating lights, guitar-themed shots, cymbal targets) as setting a new industry standard. Hardy argues the game's depth of content and design overcomes theme-specific appeal limitations and positions it as likely 2024 game of the year, challenging Stern's market dominance.

Key Claims

Slash personally facilitated licensing of 'Live and Let Die' by calling Paul McCartney after Jersey Jack's initial licensing request was denied
medium confidence · Cary cites information from 'Super Awesome Pinball Show' podcast interview with Eric Menier; second-hand account of licensing negotiation
All 21 Guns N' Roses tracks are full-length, unedited, remastered versions with location-specific concert footage
high confidence · Cary states this directly from podcast/video sources; verified across multiple official reveals
The drumstick supplier sold drumsticks to Jersey Jack at cost out of excitement about inclusion in the machine
medium confidence · Cary reports this from official Jersey Jack messaging; anecdotal but consistent with marketing narrative
Each machine ships with a randomly selected album art decal variant (4-6 options) and jersey Jack plans to sell additional decals separately
medium confidence · Cary cites 'Super Awesome Pinball Show' podcast; specific number uncertain ('I want to say four, maybe six')
Machines are already boxed and shipping to customers at time of reveal, unlike previous Jersey Jack delays
high confidence · Cary directly observes this as significant operational improvement and market advantage
Standard edition priced close to Stern Pro edition pricing to drive location placement
medium confidence · Cary's market analysis of pricing tiers; not explicitly confirmed in official materials cited
Trapping the ball during concert mode degrades the performance meter, forcing constant flipper action
medium confidence · Cary reports from Eric Menier's video explanation; specific rule mechanic detail
The Guns N' Roses machine is now Cary's pick for 2024 game of the year, replacing Avengers
high confidence · Cary explicitly states this opinion-based prediction near end of video

Notable Quotes

“All you other manufacturers out there, please take note from Jersey Jack on this one because that is how you launch a new pinball machine to the public. They just totally mic dropped you guys.”
Cary Hardy@ 0:30 — Opens with direct competitive challenge to other manufacturers; sets tone for entire analysis
“Slash calls up paul and then he calls back within 10 minutes and they're like hey we got the rights it's all good”
Cary Hardy@ 2:46 — Illustrates Slash's leverage and commitment to licensing unprecedented content; shows IP holder collaboration model
“This game, theme integration. This is the definition of theme integration that you do not see with other manufacturers to this degree.”
Cary Hardy@ 7:01 — Core thesis: Jersey Jack has achieved superior mechanical theme integration vs. competitors
“Look at this damn light show. Are you kidding me? It's like you're at a damn concert.”
Cary Hardy@ 14:21 — Visceral reaction to oscillating light effects; demonstrates emotional impact of animation/production values
“This is such a good thing for pinball in general guys because this is what stern has been needing this is what you call a flame under your ass”
Cary Hardy@ 19:23 — Explicitly frames Jersey Jack's achievement as competitive pressure on Stern; industry-wide implications
“As of right now i'm calling it this is the new game of the year for the next twippy session”
Cary Hardy@ 22:08 — Formal prediction of award recognition; Cary's highest praise metric

Entities

Jersey Jack Pinballcompany Guns N' Rosesgame Cary HardypersonEric MenierpersonSlashperson Paul McCartneypersonSuper Awesome Pinball Showorganization

Signals

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business_signal: Jersey Jack's Guns N' Roses machine with production-ready inventory at reveal positions company for significant market share gains vs. prior delays; supply chain management materially improves competitive standing
high · Cary emphasizes: 'this is how you get market share is by having product readily available for people...this is going to definitely drive jersey into more locations'
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sentiment_shift: Shift in casual player acceptance: Cary's wife (non-Guns N' Roses fan) expressed desire to own machine based on design/content depth despite theme indifference; indicates design/production appeal overrides IP licensing concerns
high · Cary reports: 'my wife was telling me that she's not a fan but the game looks beautiful...even she's not a guns and roses fan but you can look past the theme a little bit'
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competitive_signal: Jersey Jack Guns N' Roses positioned as game-of-year frontrunner, displacing Stern's Avengers; explicit competitive challenge to other manufacturers on design and production quality
high · Cary explicitly states 'this is what stern has been needing' and 'now that jersey jack has just announced this...as of right now this one's going to be game of the year'
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design_innovation: Diverter mechanic described as 'taking it back to the days of Road Kings and Bride of Pinbot' creates visual/physical ball routing effects; Cary views as elegant budget-conscious solution to multi-path ball routing
medium · Cary analyzes left ramp diverter mechanics: 'this is like taking it back to the days of like road kings...this is a very good way to divert to ball, left to right'
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Transcript

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0:00

Check out to 21 full length Guns N' Roses favorites on a play field paradise locked and loaded. Slow down. With features.

0:10

Claim a front row seat to mind blowing custom light shows and live the tour. On. All you other manufacturers out there, please take note from Jersey Jack on this one because that is how you launch a new pinball machine to the public. They just totally mic dropped you guys. What's up guys and welcome back to my channel where I talk and do everything pinball. So if that sounds interesting to you, then hit that subscribe button down below. So, Jersey Jack has officially revealed to the masses their next title that has been rumored for a year? Been rumored for a long time now as Guns N' Roses. And boy, what a reveal this was. This was not just your regular old, like, hey, here's some pictures and here's a little video showing you what's going on. No, the video that they put together was very, very well produced. and then on top of that you have a even better video put together by Zach Mania straight down the middle of pinball show that's like 25 minutes long that if you have not watched it I highly recommend it because it gives you a much better view of what the game plays like and what it looks like and a lot of additional facts and features for this title and for even further additional information then by all means listen to the super awesome pinball show with Christopher Franchi, Christian Lyon, and Mrs. Penn as they interview Eric Menier and he's the designer for this machine along with Slash from Guns N' Roses. One of the big facts to take away from what I've learned from listening to the podcast and watching the videos is that Slash took a major part in making this machine happen because without him there would have been a lot of licenses that just would not have been obtainable at a good price at least and even mentioned in the super awesome pinball show you had a point where they wanted to get the song live and let die but there was a licensing issue with paul mccartney evidently the studios or record company labels managers or whatever were turning them down they were turning down jersey jack for the rights to that song and eric made it known to slash that they were having this issue and slash was like hold on let me call up paul real quick and see what's going on so slash calls up paul and then he calls back within 10 minutes and they're like hey we got the rights it's all good so when when you hear something like that it's like what that that is awesome i mean like whatever they wanted to get slash gave them and they've got terabytes of concert footage from all the locations on this game so if you go to la or Chicago, Germany, whatever, you're going to get concert footage from that particular site, from that city. They've got all of that concert footage that's going to be in this game. All 21 tracks are remastered. They're full tracks of them. They're not going to be little snid bits, not little two-minute section or anything like that like you've seen in other music pins, for example, like Beatles. You're getting all of those tracks full length unedited. But by all means, they do specify that there is a mature version or adult version as well as the family friendly version. It comes immediately already activated on the family friendly version. You can go to your options, change it to adult mode, and then you have all the profanity and stuff like that going on. I really wish that whenever other companies, like let's just say Stern, for instance, came to a certain license holder and was like, hey, we want to make a game involving this license. What can you give us? And instead of the license holder being so restrictive and being like, we'll give you this, this for this much money, I really wish that they'd be more involved and happy to do whatever they can to help make a machine that really promotes the hell out of the license. I mean, that's what I wish. And I believe, I think this is the first game that's ever been made that's going to have all of these different licenses. We're talking like Fender, Gibson, Vader, all these different types of stereo equipment, all that kind of stuff like that. And you even have the story that they talk about the drumsticks that are inside this game. Those are legitimate drumsticks that the drummer for Guns N' Roses uses legitimately. And the person that makes those drumsticks was so ecstatic that they were going into a Guns N' Roses pinball machine that he sold it to Jersey Jack at cost. that's right the person that makes those drumsticks didn't make a dime he was making him to help Jersey Jack make this machine now I'm just going to go ahead and tell you that I'm not a Guns and Roses fan I don't know any of the individuals in the bands I don't know their names the only one I know is Slash because that's one's the most famous that you know I've seen on Guitar Hero and stuff like that but other than that I know a few other songs and I think that is going to be really There's two things that are going to hold back this machine from being such a major selling machine. And the first one is going to be the theme.

6:57

And I want to say, obviously, the drumsticks that are on the other side. Little stuff like that. This game, theme integration. This is the definition of theme integration that you do not see with other manufacturers to this degree. Now, I was going to go through Jersey Jack's, you know, reveal trailer, their announcement trailer. that it's like a minute and 37 seconds long or something like that but the thing is chances are you've already seen it if you haven't i'll put a link in the description down below but there's no sense of me showing the entire thing to you again because if you're like me then you've already watched this video a couple times at least multiple why because it goes so damn fast guys they don't really give you a good view of what the layout really looks like and how it shoots because the camera is going around the way it does so it's kind of hard to get a really good like bam let me study what's going on there's no time for it in this video it's done well because in the end you're amped up and you're excited about the game this isn't like a legitimate like trailer this is the same effect that you get when you watch a really good movie trailer You watch it, you see a lot of cool stuff, you're excited, you want more. This is exactly what the trailer gives you for this game. You're like, oh, this is cool, but I want more. And that's why I lean towards everybody also watching the straight down the middle video, because you get more. You get an idea of the gameplay footage and all that kind of stuff in this video. So I'm going to have little snippets of the video throughout this video that I have here, but I do want to pinpoint certain little details that some people may or may not notice. Now let's start right here. A little detail that I caught was that you actually see slash in the reflection of this pinball whenever it's going towards the screen. It's so quick that it's hard to really tell, but let me see here. Ball comes real quick. Bam. I mean, it's so quick that you wouldn't even catch it, but that's what it is. So this segment of the video, like right here at the beginning, gives you a really good effect with the hot rails that they have that are patented for this particular machine. Chances are we're going to see these also in future Jersey Jack machines. This is what a lot of people are going to compare to Penn Stadiums, but they are actually down. They're lower. They're like on the play field. They're not above flashing down. So this gives a much different lighting effect. effect and from what I'm seeing on video it looks really good so this portion of the video right here look at the sides of it everything that looks awesome I mean we can go back here just to kind of get a good idea and I keep wanting to fast forward or rewind but I keep fast forwarding whatever but uh let's kind of skim through here all right so let's go through a little bit on layout for those of you that do not see where the ball goes and where it's supposed to go your right ramp is going to go up to hit a stand-up target and feed down now it looks like there is a diverter right up here that will sometimes feed to your upper right flipper or it will feed to your lower right flipper so i think on this first shot it feeds to the upper right flipper. No, that time it feeds to the lower right flipper, but I know there's another segment or a shot where it actually loops around and feeds the middle, you know, the upper right flipper. Anyways, so that's what that does. It goes up this right ramp, hits a standard target, goes down the drumsticks, and feeds back to your right flipper. Moving on. Now, when it comes to hitting the left ramp right here there's going to be a couple of different things that can happen because you've got a diverter this diverter can sometimes feed right back around to your left flipper or it cannot and it can go up here to the upper plate field for you to go hitting it around and stuff like that or it'll loop all the way around and feed to your ball lock so this is also something that's really cool that i like this is a very good way to give us a physical diverter on a budget but a really nice effect so this is really good this is like taking it back to the days of like road kings and uh bride of pinbot this is a very good way to divert to ball, left to right. Now, of course, you can't choose whether it goes, but it just gives you a nice little visual effect of just kind of zigzagging back and forth and which way it's going to go down what looks to be a guitar fret and strings right here So it a really cool visual and implementation along with a nice little show The physicality of it is what really draws me in and I really enjoy that, it's awesome.

15:05

I never would have thought of that. Very good. So in case I haven't already stated in previous, but you have your cymbals right here. your hi-hat and your cymbal that go along with your pop bumpers now the objective on this game is to collect all of the members of the band and then begin your concert and in order to collect your members you have to go to different areas of the play field so to collect your drummer i think his name's duff or something like that anyways you go to your pop bumper section and you hit these things so many times and you collect your drummer i want to say in order to get slashed you have to, I think you hit the guitar or it's the spinner down here or something. I think the spinner is actually the lead singer, Axl. Oh, that's what his name is. Yeah, it's like, oh man, I can't believe I just remembered that name. But anyway, like I said, I'm not a big Guns N' Roses fan, guys. So you have different areas of the play field that you need to get all the members of your band and then you need to start your concert. And we'll go into a little further details on that in bit. So your ball lock right here can hold up to six balls for your multi ball. This is what the upper play field can do. So your upper play field can either one of three things. One, you can hit it up here to a Vuck that feeds your frets for your fender. Two, can spin around and lock a ball on the frets of this guitar right here. Or three, you can lose it down here and it drops down to lower play field. That's what can happen on this play field up here. So this is an important thing right here. If any of you guys out there have played Guitar Hero, then you're going to understand more of how this bar right here on the far right works. So once you collect your band members and you begin your concert at the destination that you're at, you have to play well. And when I say play well you have to make the corresponding shots the better that you play the higher this bar goes to where you're rocking out if you are not hitting the correct shots or not doing too well then your bar will eventually go down to where you'll actually be booed off the stage and i want to say that you even have to like your ball has to drain i think that's what they were saying i could be wrong but i know for sure that you can get booed off stage so it's important that when you play that you do well otherwise this meter goes down and you you basically it's not good so even something interesting that i also heard on there was that trapping a ball while you're in your concert mode is not good either because while your flipper is being held up this actually detox from your rocking meter so it's important to constantly be hitting those flippers and not trapping a ball so those of you out there that are used to trapping and holding a ball during a multi to save it and be able to do different kinds of strategies you not going to be able to do that with this game at least this transition right here is damn close to epic because it is more than likely obviously after you lose your balls and you're done but whenever he throws the mic up lovely transition then you have the lovely eric and he goes through a lot of explanation on information that i'm giving you right now this is why i'm telling you that a lot of information is going to be in this video so that's why i highly recommend you spend the 25 and a half minutes watching it because it's packed full of good useful data guys i mean instead of listening to me you could have the actual designer of the game give it all to you i can't wait to play this game this is uh it's pretty awesome i mean there's a there's a there's a chance especially with the wife the way she was talking about it then i don't know maybe i might be getting me a jersey jack machine i don't know we'll see we'll see no promises yet but she likes the way it looks and she agrees that it looks like that game is packed full of all kinds of good stuff and even she's not a guns and roses fan but you can look past the theme a little bit whenever you've got a whole bunch of cool stuff going on inside the machine this is such a good thing for pinball in general guys because this is what stern has been needing this is what you call a flame under your ass jack jersey jack pinball has just lit a fire underneath all the other manufacturers asses to let them know that look uh if you want to be able to be as awesome when it comes to what we put in our games you're going to have to step it up and i'm liking the way that they're going with this right here so hopefully this gives other manufacturers more incentive to pack more in their machines eric kim the whole Jersey Jack team over there congratulations on finally being able to show your game to the world and I'm pretty sure that the majority of everybody out here agrees that this game looks like it's well worth the wait I think one of the big big hits for you is that you have games already in boxes being shipped out to customers as I speak that has been an issue in the past for them is that they reveal a game and people have to wait a long time for them but due to the fact that this way this time around they have machines inboxes ready to go and they're still pumping them out right now this is how you get market share is by having product readily available for people i look forward to seeing it played pretty soon i believe we got a stream coming up on buffalo here the next on wednesday then probably a number of other people are going to have this game here pretty soon and we'll start getting a lot more better idea on how the game plays and sounds so as of right now when it comes to like art play field and cabinet no major issues i'm actually the play field art is good the cabinet artwork at least on the premium premium at least on the le and the collector's edition those look really good standard edition is probably obviously my least favorite of the three because it's they made it basic is basic and they did that for a reason they were trying to get these machines on locations and make it affordable for the masses so props to them for doing that but me personally i wouldn't settle for anything less than an le i mean i'm thinking more about it guys and chances are i think before this game was revealed avengers was more than likely going to be game of the year more than likely but now that jersey jack has just announced this and we've seen what it has and what's all in it as of right now this one's going to be game of the year i don't see why it wouldn't so as of right now i'm calling it this is the new game of the year for the next twippy session but we'll see anything can happen guys like i've stated There was no way I was going to be able to hit every little note, a little bit of a pun there, when it comes to this title and everything that's going in it, that's involved in it, because there's so much more to talk about. So this is going to be a first of more than likely of another video or two as we see more gameplay, then I get a better idea of what I think about this game. But as of right now, that's what I've got. So tell me, what are your thoughts on Jersey Jack Pinball's newest title, Guns N' Roses? If you had the money, which one would you get? Standard, LE, or the CE? Well, that's easy. I'm thinking anybody that had the money just to spend, they would go with the CE. But let's say, for instance, you are on a budget, or you were going to sell some games to get one of these titles. Which one would you go for, and why? Or if you have negative thoughts about the game or whatever, then by all means, let me know in the comment section down below as well. If you like what you've seen here, give me the thumbs up. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the subscribe button down there. That way, you can be notified of whenever I upload content for your viewing pleasure. Until next time, guys.