Stern Pinball's Mustang (Version 1.1)

Early this week Modern Pinball in New York City got in Stern Pinball's latest game, Ford Mustang. This is their Pro edition of the game with the limited and premium editions coming out later. The game was designed by John Trudeau who also designed Creature From The Black Lagoon, Judge Dredd, T-X Sector and even Q*Bert's Quest. This marks the very first game he has designed for Stern. You can see the game even borrows the 360 spinning bowl from CftBL which everybody's been calling it The Creature Feature.

The game is only running on Version 1.1 and they have another version in the works, but right now the game is VERY buggy. In the game you can earn letters to spell out MUSTANG. After spelling out Mustang you're treated to a special Mustang Multiball mode, the biggest problem is the letters carry over between games. So you can spend all the time in the world collection all the letters and only to have the next person go up to play the game get right into the Mustang Multiball to score millions. It's also unclear on how the game's main multiball mode, Gear Shift Multiball works. If you knock down all of the GEARS targets you'll shift your car up by one gear. Once you get the car to 3rd (sometimes 4th) gear the Mustang Shop scoop shot (Say that three times fast) is lit for Multiball. They do give you the option to abort the mode so you can go up in gears but as of now we don't know if you go all the way up to 6th gear do you get higher jackpots. I did notice when I cashed it in on 4th gear I had four balls instead of 3, so maybe it's there, but it's not clearly listed. We'll see as the game progresses.

I really don't like to judge new games after only playing it for a day. Thankfully the shop wasn't that crowded so I was able to get about 15 games in on it. I'll have to experiment more with the Gear Shift to see how that works and for the MUSTANG letters to be fixed. (We even turned the game off and the letters still carried over!) If you're going by the other recent release games from Stern I would rank it lower then Star Trek and Metallica...but that's for right now. As I like to mention Spider-Man I didn't like with the early code, once Lyman Sheets gave the rules an overhaul it became one of my favorites, so we'll have to wait and see how it turns out.

Until then, if you'd like to watch a longer version of the video, feel free to check the video out over on Blip.tv. Unfortunately due to YouTube's ridiculous copyrights they will not let us upload videos on our channel over 15 minutes long, with the intro I did the video came out to almost 20 minutes, so be sure to check it out over on Blip for a more full fledged video.

http://blip.tv/arcadehunters/stern-pinball-s-mustang-pro-ver-1-1-6811476