New pinball: Godzilla (Premium)
A 2021 Stern Godzilla (Premium), a top-rated Keith Elwin game that bridges my pinball and Japanese hobbies, acquired February 2025 in a trade.
Godzilla was my next Spike 2 machine, and it came in as a trade: my Game of Thrones went back to the shop, and this one came home in its place.
By the time I got it, I had been studying Japanese for a couple of years, and a lot of what I love about Godzilla lined up nicely with that. I like the music and the theme, I like monsters, and I will happily admit I enjoy knocking down buildings. It is almost a wholesome kind of destruction, too. For all the mayhem in Godzilla, it is never gory, none of the blood and guts I am not a fan of. Better still, the game has a Japanese mode, and I can actually understand some of the Japanese in it, which is a genuinely cool crossover between my two hobbies.
It is another Keith Elwin design, like my Jurassic Park, and by the time I picked it up it had been sitting at number one on the Top 100 list for a long while. I do not always go along with the community’s rankings, but on this one I think they are completely right. It shoots beautifully, the music and sound effects are fantastic, and it just plays great. Everybody who comes over wants to play it.