Welcome to the start of our coverage of Stern's next game: X-Men.

Stern have today officially confirmed that their next game will be X-Men. The announcement came in the form of one of their teaser videos produced by MediaHouse and featuring game designer John Borg and software programmer Lonnie Ropp.

Although little is given away about what we can expect in the game, there are enough snippets for us to collate them into a near-complete playfield map.

At the start of the video we see John at his desk as he scrolls across parts of the playfield CAD drawing.

John Borg in his office

Later we see a clearer view of the screen, although it is shot at a rather acute angle.

Another view of the CAD layout

Meanwhile, Lonnie is in his office.

Lonnie Ropp in his office

In this section we get to see another section of the playfield in the form of the lamp map diagram.

The top part of the playfield layout

The 'gag' here is that both John and Lonnie have X-Men-like powers. John's magnetism attracts all the metallic playfield parts to him...

The metal parts fly off Lonnie's desk...

...and stick to John

...while Lonnie has a hidden super-power ability too.

Lonnie has Wolverine-like hidden powers

By combining all these glimpses of the playfield design we can get a composite look at the layout.

The X-Men design

The game appears to feature two ramps - one on the right and a side ramp which is presumably shot from a third flipper on the upper right - and bears more than a little resemblance to a horizontally-flipped Tron design. The ramps' paths are not shown but probably lead the the left and right inlanes.

The upper flipper can also shoot a 'Gem-like' inner loop lane which feeds the left orbit and the pop bumpers, while there is a Quorra-esque inner loop on the right.

There is a spinning disc in the centre which is lit from below by four flash lamps. This sits at the entrance of the centre lane which can also be fed from the top in lieu of top rollover lanes. It's not clear whether there will be a bash toy at the top of the centre lane, but there appear to be two pins which can rise at the entrance to create a captive ball, like the link lane on Avatar.

To the left of the spinning disc is a captive ball mechanism with a magnet in front to throw the ball back at the player.

Just to the left of the magnet is a Flynn's Arcade-like scoop with four triangular inserts indicating the features which can be started there. There are two standup targets on the left of the scoop, with a matching pair on the opposite side of the game.

Down at the bottom of the playfield, there is a single inlane on the left and double inlanes on the right. A large X-Men logo is positioned above the flippers with seven inserts below and a shoot again insert right between the flippers.

The CAD drawing also shows the under-playfield slides which are usually only fitted to the Limited Edition versions but have to be allowed for in the design.

You can see the whole X-Men promotional video featuring John and Lonnie by clicking below.

We'll have much more on Stern's upcoming X-Men game very soon right here at Pinball News.

© Pinball News 2012