The pinball market is still rough in 1984. We're getting away from 1983's theme of "weird but cheap", and companies are largely refocusing on what they do best but making it look polished and new. That's how we get "poker but with aliens" remade as "pool but with lasers", for example, or "mystical tic-tac-toe" remade as "literal tic-tac-toe", "space bowling" remade as "space something", or El Dorado remade with electronics and with art that cares what El Dorado is supposed to be.
I've been skipping remakes that keep exactly the same playfield, but all of these (Laser Cue, X's and O's, Star Light, and El Dorado City of Gold) change something from the pre-existing table (Alien Poker, Mystic, Laser Ball, or El Dorado), so it's okay.
Zaccaria is still doing their own thing. Magic Castle, featuring off-brand Dracula even though Dracula is public domain, is one of their best tables. Devil Riders is objectively not great because you do only one thing on it ("ride the big wheel"), but somehow it's worth it because that thing is hard to do.
But then we have the wild ones. Spy Hunter with a lower playfield shape that was never tried before, or again. Still Crazy, the vertical game that doesn't feel like pinball but it's hard to elucidate a criterion that makes it not pinball. And Granny and the Gators, the last of the hybrid arcade/pinball machines, and the only one I can get to run in VPX + PinMAME.
And there's hope at the end of this pinball slump: At the end of the year, Space Shuttle is cool enough that it is said to "save pinball".
The first half of these appear tonight on Silver Ball Century, at 8pm Eastern on https://twitch.tv/arborelia.
Going live: