Stern's Metallica Pro (Oct 2013)

Hey folks, Nick back once again from getting over my cold. Like I said it's clockwork. Always right around the holidays I get sick for a good week, sometimes even two. Top that off with the bad weather and other personal stuff I haven't had time for putting together videos. Thankfully I did a bunch and I have a reserve stock, so today we're starting a first of two videos on Stern's new Metallica!

This was taken back in October of 2013 when I took the first videos at Modern Pinball NYC. So the game's code is out of date. For the most part everything's still there, if you're not a serious player I doubt you'll notice but players will. Like the "Mystery" that only gives two awards, one being 500,000 points. Not a real mystery.

Metallica was designed by John Borg and I think this and Iron Man rank up with my favorite games that he's designed. The game doesn't really go out with a ton of modes like in AC/DC but what they do is there's a lot of different ways to score points. The main features are the four multiball modes. There's the Grave Marker, Coffin, Snake and finally the game's main toy, Sparky in the Electric Chair Multiball. Some can be stacked and if you add in the FUEL targets you can enable the double playfield scoring for huge points. The very first time I played the game I was able to stack two multiballs with Fuel Scorning and made it to fourth place on the high score wall!

The biggest thing to note is the game's amazing artwork from Dirty Donny. It's really an album cover come to life. The "Ratfink" Hotrod art style looks amazing on a pinball machine. It's so much better then looking at the cheap, cookie cutter art that was on Avengers where they used the pictures provided by the studio, rather then making something original. It really stands out and looks great.

Hope you liked this because coming up soon we've got another look at the Premium Dirty Donny edition from The Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas! So stay tuned!