While we’re on the topic of pinball, the other day I had a chance to play an Avengers for the first time in a while, and got reminded why.

With the benefit of experience let me update my original assessment: this is the worst Stern game since Austin Powers.

(Like, that means worse than Transformers, Avatar, Stern Indiana Jones, NASCAR, and the ’02 Playboy. Worse than the Stern Rolling Stones, for chrissake.)

And the reason is that this thing must’ve been designed with no appreciation of like, geometry.

Geometry isn’t everything! A lot of people love both Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness despite the fact that they have basically the same shot layout and progression, the big difference is in the multiball rulesets. (Also off the top of my head, the catapult, moat/drawbridge, ramp design [but not routing], trolls vs. martian standups, and the Merlin saucer kicking out to the right orbit instead of the scoop ejecting down.)

Hell, Jack*Bot is the exact same table as Pin*Bot (sole exception being the left ramp lifting up to expose the Cashier standup, I think) only with a much much much better ruleset.

But Avengers. Oh man. Let me tick off the issues:

• The right few lights on the multiplier lanes are obscured by the Hawkeye ramp at the top right, and worse than that the lanes have absolutely no synergy with the pop bumpers beneath them, I have no idea how they expected people to be getting 6(!) rollovers in a ball.
• The inlane lights are obscured by the ramp returns from any reasonable stance, which is completely unnecessary and inexcusable.
• Almost all the major long shots are way too deep and narrow-mouthed to be reliably collected - the Iron Man orbit, the Black Widow ramp, the Captain America loop - and none of them are any more practical from a backhand shot.
• The one easily gettable shot is right flipper to left orbit and the Hawkeye ramp. But that’s terrible, because that’s the most absurdly important shot in the game - it locks balls for Loki multiball and it’s a safe return right back to the right flipper (and thus the only real safe shot to feed an inlane and thus light the locks). Having a game where good strategy is to shoot the same ramp to return to ramp over and over is terrible design, like Bad Cats or Data East Star Wars-level terrible.
• It’s not at all intuitive how the Hulk drop targets light multiball and it’s way too hard to get the collect saucer on purpose, which is terrible for a bash toy serving the “something even flailing newbies can get and enjoy” role, plus the ball gets stuck under the toy’s arms way more than is justifiable.

It’s like they just skipped straight from concept to final without working it in whitewood or something (which now that I think of it might’ve been possible if they were rushing to match up to the theatrical release, kinda like what happened with Phantom Menace).

Like, the two possible, possible excuses would be

1. it’s designed for a much shallower slope than Portland operators tend to use, kind of the opposite of how Stern Indy works better when it’s steep
2. it’s designed to challenge the highest tournament-level trap-and-aim sharpshooters, a counterpoint to how AC/DC, X-Men, Metallica, and Stern Trek got updates to favor Zen archery-style speed. Would certainly explain how they expect people to get to the Vs. 2-balls, which would require 4 shots to start a mode, however many to collect, then 4 to start again.