# Episode 16 - Jack Jaws Juegos **Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2016-08-28 **Duration:** 94m 44s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-16 --- ## Analysis Jack Danger joins the Eclectic Gamers Podcast as guest host to discuss competitive pinball tournament formats. The hosts share personal updates and dive into tournament structure preferences, with Jack advocating strongly against unlimited herb-style and single-elimination formats while praising strikeout tournaments (particularly Pinberg's match-play system) and pin golf for their competitive integrity and social engagement. The conversation also touches on casual gaming, personal projects, and pinball arcade setups. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Unlimited herb-style tournaments should only be used for charity/fundraising, not regular competition, because players without sufficient funds cannot compete equally — _Jack Danger's direct statement on tournament formats and skill vs. cash dynamics_ - [HIGH] Pinberg's match-play strikeout tournament format is 'maybe the best tournament that's ever been created for pinball ever in existence' — _Jack Danger's explicit claim about tournament quality and design_ - [HIGH] Pinberg's format allows players of all skill levels (including Keith Elwin and four-year-olds) to start equally on day one, with divisions determined by performance — _Jack Danger's detailed explanation of Pinberg tournament structure and pairing system_ - [MEDIUM] Pin golf tournaments create better social camaraderie and positive atmosphere compared to head-to-head score competition — _Jack Danger's observation comparing pin golf high-fives to the competitive tension of score-based play_ - [HIGH] Jack Danger qualified for A-division finals at Pinberg and survived a round in A finals — _Dennis's question and Jack's confirmation during casual conversation_ - [HIGH] Jack Danger has been streaming pinball Monday-Friday from his studio for approaching two years (ending September will mark second full year) — _Jack's direct statement about streaming frequency and duration_ - [HIGH] Ghostbusters LE gameplay reveal stream on Jack Danger's platform received 30,000 viewers in approximately one hour — _Jack's statement about stream viewership during Ghostbusters reveal_ ### Notable Quotes > "Unlimited herb style and single elimination are two things that need to just go away." > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _Core argument against two widely-used tournament formats; establishes Jack's stance on competitive structure_ > "The match play event of Pinberg is maybe the best tournament that's ever been created for pinball ever in existence." > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _High praise for a specific tournament format; establishes Pinberg as industry benchmark_ > "It gives you an actual analytic number here is where you belong always and forever" > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _Explains why Pinberg's format provides accurate competitive skill assessment_ > "In pin golf, it's not like an immediate competition with the people you're grouped up with necessarily... when the only goal is to start that multi-ball and that's the objective, when you do it, everyone's cheering because it doesn't freaking matter. You did it." > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _Contrasts social dynamics between competitive formats; emphasizes communal aspect of pin golf_ > "It's a very amazing, glorified pinball babysitter job, but it's a good place to be for sure." > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _Self-deprecating humor about his streaming content creation role and machine acquisition_ > "For an hour's worth of work, I had 30,000 people watch me drink beer and show off a Domino's pizza pinball machine." > — **Jack Danger**, N/A > _Demonstrates audience size and platform reach; shows commercial potential of pinball content_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jack Danger | person | Pinball designer, streamer (DeadFlip), co-host of Tilt Through competitive pinball podcast, guest on Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Streams Monday-Friday from studio, has received donated/loaned machines from viewers and Stern Pinball. Qualified for A-division at Pinberg tournament. | | Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Recently participated in memorial tournament for local pinballer Daniel who passed in July; qualified for B division and placed 15th. | | Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Attended Texas Pinball Festival, participated in memorial tournament with Tony, reads History of Rome podcast in penance for mispronouncing 'Deus Ex Machina.' | | DeadFlip | product | Twitch streaming platform hosted by Jack Danger. Streams pinball gameplay, restoration, and competitive content Monday-Friday. | | Tilt Through | product | Competitive pinball podcast co-hosted by Jack Danger. Described as 'favorite competitive pinball podcast' by Dennis. Hosts meet sporadically due to coordination difficulty with three hosts. | | Stern Stars | game | Early solid-state pinball machine from approximately 1978 with chimes mechanism. Gifted to Jack Danger's studio; features spinner-connected chimes. Recently restored and restored to working condition by Jack live on stream. | | Stern Stargazer | game | Spinner-heavy vintage pinball machine owned by Jack Danger. Played by Tony at Texas Pinball Festival. Features three drop target banks and zodiac symbol collection mechanic. | | Pinberg | event | Major pinball tournament with innovative match-play strikeout format. Creates level playing field on day one; players advance through divisions based on performance. Praised by Jack Danger as potentially the best pinball tournament ever created. | | Texas Pinball Festival | event | Tournament event attended by Tony and Dennis; Jack Danger competed and handled streaming coverage during qualification and finals. | | Ghostbusters LE | game | Stern Pinball game with LE variant. Jack Danger hosted exclusive gameplay reveal stream that drew 30,000 viewers in approximately one hour. | | Domino's Pizza | game | Pinball machine theme. Jack Danger streamed Domino's themed pinball gameplay that drew significant viewership. | | Daniel | person | Local pinballer who passed away in July 2024. Co-worker of Tony who played pinball in the 1980s and was introduced to modern tournament play by Tony. Memorial tournament held in his honor with good turnout. | | Stern Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer. Has provided games for Jack Danger to stream and has close relationship with his studio; drops off machines for content creation. | | Keith Elwin | person | Elite pinball player referenced as benchmark/legendary competitor in context of Pinberg tournament's skill-blind initial pairings. | | Attack from Mars | game | Pinball machine played by Tony at memorial tournament. Tony scored 150,000 (a 'joke score') on one ball, which ranked as #2 score for half the night before being knocked down to #6 as other players improved. | | World Cup Soccer | game | Pinball machine used as example in pin golf tournament discussion, with goal-based format (e.g., 'get three goals'). | | Pinnapalooza | event | Tournament event where a 36-player survival tournament format was used, requiring 80 machines and eliminating lowest scorer per machine each round. | | Star Trek | game | Pinball machine played by Tony during Texas Pinball Festival qualification where Jack Danger was working nearby as streaming operator. | | Wheel of Time | product | Book series by Robert Jordan. Tony reading book 6, using integrated Kindle/Audible sync feature to read and listen across devices. | | Breaking Bad | product | Television series. Dennis recently started watching after years of not watching it despite friends watching weekly; describes it as well-written but not superior to West Wing or Game of Thrones. | ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Stern Pinball providing machines to Jack Danger's studio for streaming and content creation, demonstrating manufacturer investment in streaming platform growth. (confidence: high) — Jack: 'We also have Stern very close, and they are more than happy to drop games off for me to show off on the Internet.' - **[event_signal]** Memorial tournament held for local pinballer Daniel who passed in July, with good community turnout. Tony qualified for B division and placed 15th. (confidence: high) — Tony: 'last weekend, me and Dennis took part in a memorial tournament for one of our local pinballers who passed back in July. And it was a really good turnout.' - **[sentiment_shift]** Strong consensus among competitive players (Jack Danger, Tony, Dennis) that Pinberg's match-play strikeout tournament format represents best-in-class tournament design. (confidence: high) — Jack: 'The match play event of Pinberg is maybe the best tournament that's ever been created for pinball ever in existence.' - **[design_philosophy]** Pin golf tournament format creates superior social dynamic and camaraderie compared to head-to-head score competition by shifting focus from beating opponents to beating machine objectives. (confidence: medium) — Jack: 'when the only goal is to start that multi-ball and that's the objective, when you do it, everyone's cheering because it doesn't freaking matter. You did it.' - **[market_signal]** DeadFlip streaming platform demonstrating significant audience reach (30,000 viewers for one-hour Ghostbusters reveal), validating pinball content market. (confidence: high) — Jack: 'For an hour's worth of work, I had 30,000 people watch me drink beer and show off a Domino's pizza pinball machine.' - **[personnel_signal]** Jack Danger's dual role as pinball designer/streamer and community ambassador; streams Monday-Friday, hosts competitive pinball podcast, and maintains close relationships with Stern Pinball. (confidence: high) — Jack: 'I stream pinball Monday through Friday... it's generally whenever I'm in the office' and 'The podcast is a little more sporadic.' - **[technology_signal]** Eclectic Gamers Podcast transitioned audio hosting from Continuing Services to SoundCloud with minimal listener disruption. (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'Podcast audio hosting is now with SoundCloud. Our previous host was Continuing Services. Transition went pretty seamless.' --- ## Transcript Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is Sunday, August 28th. It's episode 16. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're joined by a guest host this week, Mr. Jack Danger. How you doing? I'm awesome. How the hell are you guys? Oh, we're doing pretty good. Yeah, no, that's okay. That's okay. Don't worry. Anything too severe, I'll clean up in post. But for those that don't know. Oh, sorry. No, go for it, Matt. Go for it. Oh, sure. I was just going to say, for those that don't know you, Jack, I was just going to mention that you are the host of Deadflip on Twitch, the number one pinball streaming service. And also you are a co-host of Tilt Through, a podcast dedicated to competitive pinball. Absolutely. and all sorts of like other fun little tidbits of information but we try to keep it on pinball for sure yeah so what we're going to do is actually for those that are going through the show notes at the top of the links section we have links for both your twitch feed at dead flip and the link to podcast garden at tilt through so people will be able to go and check you guys out and hear what you have to say because it's probably far more interesting than what tony and i are going to do Yeah, dude, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. You'll all be disappointed, I promise. Actually, you're my favorite competitive pinball podcast. Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, it's really cool. And I do try and catch your Twitch stream a lot. You're usually streaming every weekday. It's Monday through Friday sometime. Today's Sunday. We're going to be streaming today. It's generally whenever I'm in the office. but I try to do it Monday through Friday for sure. The podcast is a little more sporadic. It's really hard to get three hosts together at one time to do something. It's a real big pain in the ass. But, yeah, it's just a pain. But, yeah, you know, it's... Yeah, well, I mean, just arranging this and the last episode where we had a guest host. Yeah, I see every time you add a person, that coordination is exponentially more and more difficult. Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, we normally start with sort of an intro where people can talk about just sort of what's been going on. So you're free to do that. Or if you want to talk about your shows or anything, this is the time to do so before we actually dive into the main meat of our topical discussions. Oh, geez. Well, yeah, I stream pinball Monday through Friday. Sometimes we play digital pinball on my show. Lately, what we've been doing is someone gifted us a Stern Stars, which is an amazing gift. Like, crazy, crazy good. It's an early Stern pinball machine from about 1978, I think. And I don't have any real experience shopping games out. So what I did is I was like, you know what, we're going to clean this thing up. We're going to do it live. And we fired up the cameras, tore the thing apart, cleaned it up, put it back together. I did some soldering for the first time ever live on camera, which was terrifying. I had a lot of people telling me I was doing a lot of things wrong. I had a lot of people telling me I was doing a lot of things right. And, you know, just come to find out everyone has their own way of doing things. And usually if you don't do it the way the Internet says, you are going to get screamed at. But it worked out pretty well. The game fired up first try, and it plays amazing. And I couldn't be happier with this new addition to our little arcade we have here in the studio. Awesome. Now, Stars, that's a... Now, that is a... It's a solid-state game, though, if I recall. Early, early, but... It's a solid-state game, but here's the kicker. It's a solid-state game with chimes, which is mind-blowing. And the chimes are hooked to the spinners, which is the most amazing idea anyone has ever had. It's phenomenal. Yeah, it's a beautiful game, too. And I also have Stern Stargazer right next to it, which is another game that's just spinner-heavy, super amazing, pretty hard to find, actually. But, yeah, we have a really nice collection of games here. Oh, yeah, I tried Stargazer at the Texas Pinball Festival. It was a lot of fun. Oh, man, that game just, when you juice up that spinner and you hit it, it's an out-of-body experience. Yeah, that one's got a lot of those, it's got like those three drop target banks, if I recall, as well. Oh, yeah. Really unique layout. a lot of reliance on the pop bumpers up at the top to be able to score those in, if I'm thinking of the right one. Yeah, absolutely. And just all around the perimeter of the whole game are just touch targets everywhere, and those are the Zodiac symbols you've got to collect to raise your bonus up. We did have a – there was someone in the area a couple months ago who was trying to sell us stars. I remember he contacted me because he wanted to see about doing a trade. I was trying to get rid of a Xenon at the time. but unfortunately he wanted the I guess the power transformer from the game in something else he was selling so it wasn't going to actually come working because he was going to pull out a key component and I was like well dissect it and Frankenstein it and sell you the rest of them yeah he had another game of the same era and it was worth more working than stars was so it was like so he's like well I want to you know I was like well to me it's not a one for one trade at that point yeah because it's not a working machine Yeah, no, I've only ever taken one non-working machine, and I'm not doing that anymore, I don't think. Rock and roll. Was that your scoreboard? It was. I did. I just, actually, I finally sold it. Yeah, the cool thing about the Twitch show that I do is it started off with me just using one of my buddy's pinball machines, but it has now grown into people that watch my show send me their games, and they live here. I take care of them. I stream them, and when they want them back or I'm done with them, we just send them on their way. Or more recently, people have just been buying machines that are local to my area, sending them here, and they're like, yo, if you could fix this up, it's yours. Just play the thing. It's a very amazing, glorified pinball babysitter job, but it's a good place to be for sure. Oh, yeah. Great way to get a variety there without having to buy them all, which adds up quickly. We also have Stern very close, and they are more than happy to drop games off for me to show off on the Internet. Yeah, I watched when you got to do the reveal of the Ghostbusters LE gameplay. I saw that. Oh, yeah. I was able to catch that. I tried to catch your dominoes, but I got home too late, I guess, because when I got on, you guys were already done broadcasting. I was ever so sad. Yeah, it was a short stream. It was about an hour and a half, but that show, that day, got 30,000 eyeballs on it. Oh, wow. Yeah, for an hour's worth of work, I had 30,000 people watch me drink beer and show off a Domino's pizza pinball machine. That sounds like a terrible gig right there. I don't know how you can handle that. It's awful, man. Actually, I have to admit, I've always been pretty impressed. You do a good job of interacting with the stream while still playing. because I've seen a lot of people even just playing games who will get so far into it that their stream interaction just completely drops off. Right. And I've never really noticed that with you. Well, it's coming up on two years of practice is what it is, yeah. And the end of September will be my second full year of streaming Monday through Friday, so I've had a lot of time to work on that. Get to the point where you can see out of the corner of your eye and keep things going and still actually pay attention. Yeah, my peripheral vision has increased over the years. Well, we'll try and get you at least another 30 eyeballs with your participation here. Let's do it. All right. Tony, so what's going on with you? I have been really busy at work and working around the house. My youngest birthday was yesterday, so we had to get everything cleaned up for all the family and everybody coming over for her special day. and other than that I've mainly been I've been reading I'm still reading in the wheel of time I'm up to book 6 and I'm now cheating because I'm purchasing all the books from Audible and I already have the books from Amazon and they've got this service now where they link up so I can be reading the book on my Kindle close my Kindle, set it down, fire up the Audible app on my phone and it picks up at the exact spot I was reading so I can be sitting at home reading my book, put it down, get in the car to go to work, hit play on Audible. Why is that insane? I know. It's insane. And I'll sit there when I'm at work and I'm doing this and that or I'm doing stuff. I'll listen to what I'm reading and then at lunch or when I'm at home or whatever, I'll read it. And it just picks up instantly. You open it up and it says, last heard section was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah on your Kindle at this time. Do you want to jump there? Yes. Play. There you go. It's awesome. That is amazing. It sounds like cheating, and I don't approve of this. It is. It is awesome, but it's so much fun because I'll just sit here. I'll be reading in the morning or just before going to work, and then I'll just, oh, well, play. And I'll listen to it. It picks right up where I was reading when I head into work. Oh, audio books aren't cheating. Only the sync-up thing. I'm a big fan of audio books. I've listened to a lot for my commute, but I don't cheat. I don't cheat and then go to the real book and be like, hey, why don't you just sync things up for me because I need to be cheating. I'm just saying. It's okay. I'm not judging. I'm just – I said I was cheating. He's calling you a cheater. I said I was cheating. It's just – it is wonderful. It's amazing. I read about it. I tried it out, and it's like, oh, man, I don't know if I could ever buy just a book without the audio book again because it's so nice. Because, you know, you get to the, you're in a really good scene and it's like, well, crap, I have to drive somewhere or I have to go do something. Right. And I don't want to stop, oh, wait, that's fine. I'll go grocery shopping. Kind of hop in the shower or, you know, whatever you're doing. It's been pretty amazing. I like it. Huh. The only other big thing I've done lately is last weekend, me and Dennis took part in a memorial tournament for one of our local pinballers who passed back in July. And it was a really good turnout. That's awesome. That's really awesome. That's awesome that you had a memorial tournament, too. That's a really cool way to show your pride. Oh, yeah. He was a great guy. He was actually one of my coworkers. and we I played pinball and he played pinball like in the 80's his name was Daniel and he played pinball like in the 80's and stuff and I was talking about going to these tournaments and he started coming to tournaments and it was great and this and that it was a great turnout and it was a wonderful tournament and he's definitely somebody we're all going to miss a lot he was a great guy that's great man i i like hearing that kind of stuff that's pretty awesome i mean that's that's about all i've been doing the last two weeks is nothing big and important well at least you learned how to cheat at reading so i i learned to cheat at reading you'll never live it down i'm sure that i'm sure the the listeners will will probably they'll probably cheat too and maybe i will eventually but i won't admit it um well for me let's see i guess first i need to announce a correction from the last episode. Always a fun thing. So thanks to Eric for contacting me about this. But during last episode's discussion on the Xbox One S, I said a word, souk, which is not a word. What I meant to say was sku for stock keeping unit. And so I just obviously I flipped two of the letters while I was going. I knew I made this mistake by the time I was editing in post, but I thought no one would dare notice it. So I left it alone. And I was wrong. So now I get to admit that I was wrong publicly and acknowledge the mistake. So it should have been SKU when we were talking about the different models that are available. They're different SKU units or different SKUs. So now you've got Suk and Deuce X Machina. You call it Deuce X Machina? No, I said Deu, like Hot Shots Part Deu. Yes, I said it like, well, a completely differently spelled French word instead of a Latin phrase. So yes, Deus. Just the number two. Yes, that was – Don caught me on that one, on Deus Ex. So I'm still working through my History of Rome podcast in penance of that. I'm all the way up to the third century where the Roman Empire was starting to initially fall apart. But no one listening probably cares about that, so we will not. We will not go there. Fantastic. I don't know that I know much about that at all. So let's see. What else? Another announcement for everyone. Podcast audio hosting is now with SoundCloud. Our previous host was just Continuing Services. Transition went pretty seamless, and it looks like everything's working to me. So no one probably noticed beyond maybe a couple of hours that day while I was moving all the audio files over. Been fairly busy at work. Went out to Hays, Kansas this week. There are no pins in Hays, Kansas. I asked. Apparently they don't exist. Why'd you go? There's nothing in Hays, Kansas. They made me. I normally get out of – we always – every year there's a governing board meeting that happens somewhere away from a capital and it's usually in a rural area and I usually do not have to go. However, I couldn't get out of being on the agenda and so I had to go out there. The whole itinerary was really lackluster. They were talking about being a regional hub and all that. The whole time I'm sitting there thinking, how can you be a regional power if you don't have pinball? It doesn't make any sense to me. So I just felt that they were lying, that they were just lying to me. So anyway, that was pretty uneventful. It gave me an opportunity to start a new book called The Gemini Effect by Chuck Crossart. It's sort of a near future sci-fi horror. I'm sure I could cheat and listen slash read it but I'm not. I've been watching a show that I never saw but it's been off the air for a few years now called Breaking Bad. I didn't really watch a lot of that. I know my friends would come together and watch it every single week and I would just show up to get drunk with them, but wasn't really too interested in the show. I've seen a few episodes. It looks interesting. I've got to go back. I'm just not a fan of catching up on TV shows. Yeah, it's been. I'm just going straight through on it. It has some approaches to it that I don't care for. I started watching it because someone asked me about it, and I was like, I don't know anything about it. Let me go ahead and watch it. It's good. I wouldn't put it like West Wing good or Game of Thrones good. I think the weekend baking bad's weakest episode is stronger than a lot of episodes or a lot of shows average episodes so I mean it's it's got a really solid writing core it's it's definitely a good show that after after lost I sort of gave up on TV show love because I just my I got my heart broke man like lost can do that to you I I surrendered like season three of lost I was decided you know what this isn't worth my time. I hung on, man. I tried to make that relationship work. It did not pan out. Yeah, the Lost ending was pretty bad. I would say the Battlestar Galactica was even worse, though. I just felt that much like Lost, they kind of lost their way. No, well, pun somewhat intended, but it just didn't work out for me, and it was they were... Oh, fair enough. Yeah, I think I only watched the first half of Battlestar Galactica, and it was good when it started off, man. That was the good half. That was definitely the good half of that show. I mean, there was that one season where they blew their entire special effects budget in the second episode, and then the rest of the season was courtroom drama, and I didn't realize I was watching Battlestar Galactica SVU. It's still on the air. They're up to season 19. It might not be that high, but it's like 18 or 17. Oh, yeah. That Law and Order, the first one was on for freaking ever. then finally at the benefit tournament i qualified for b division ended up taking 15th place was uh interesting i don't first time i ever actually qualified in any of these sort of tournaments it was a unlimited herb style but the reason we did it it was done that way was because all the money was going to the family now see that's awesome so that's what it does it does make a lot of money it does make a lot of yeah it's just uh if it's just like a tournament for players doing some thing, man, that style can go flush itself. Yeah, I've never bought... Every time I've played in a Herb-style tournament, I'll just do a playthrough and maybe touch up one or two machines and let it go because I'm not willing to dump it. Where for like this, since it was a Memorial tournament, I had a set amount that I took that was fairly large. That's awesome. Like you would have donated all that money anyway, so you might have had some fun with it too. Yeah. Well, with our introductions out of the way, let's go ahead and move to the first of our three main topics of the podcast, and that would be pinball. And since we have Jack on, I figured we should actually start with some competitive pinball talk, which is something that Tony and I don't really do much of other than when we give our intros, actually, because we're not any good. We're not a master champion player. No one's a master champion player, except for the robots in, like, Top 8 Division. Yeah, yeah. They're not human, so it doesn't matter. Hey, didn't you qualify for A at Pinberg? I did. I qualified for A finals, and I even survived a round in A finals. Nice. So you are a robot, then, is what you're saying. I'm a part robot now. If this was Battlestar Galactica, you might be concerned that I was a Cylon. I am. I do think that you may be a toaster. So anyway, what I thought would be a fun topic in the realm of competitiveness would be to talk about, When it comes to competitive pinball, what tournament formats, be it the qualifying format or the finals or any aspect you want, that you enjoy the most? And what formats do you think are the worst? Well, I'll tell you right up front. Unlimited herb style and single elimination are two things that need to just go away. Yeah, I don't know. Unless you're raising money, because the unlimited herb style for raising cash for good causes is an amazing idea. because people do want to dump money into those things. It's just some people I know, when I go to Unlimited Herb Styles, I just see a lot of people are like, I can't compete anymore. I just don't have the cash. But you could say, you know, play better, and you won't have to dump that cash. But when it comes down to that, you can play really good on your one ticket, and then someone else can come back, play nine tickets, and eventually pass you. it just, I don't know I'm just not a big fan and also single elimination is just a huge waste of time people driving out to a place, playing one game getting kicked out, going home yeah and I feel the same way on both of those I haven't played in any single elimination tournaments I don't think I would go to a tournament if I knew it was single elimination unless it was like down the street and Herb sounds fine so, I mean Herb happens and I go to it but like I said earlier except for special things like the memorial tournament I just go with I literally take enough money to do one full run and then fuck up a couple tables and that's it that's all I'm willing to do I just I don't like when like when at the memorial tournament I put in a joke score on attack from mars I mean like 150,000 on attack from mars yeah it was like impossibly stupid straight drains of everything and hit nothing. It was terrible. And I mean, that's like I hit one thing, and then I bucked it up, and I knocked it up to 4.3 bill. And that score stood as the number two score for like half the night, and then I got knocked down to like number six as people just kept going back and hitting it and hitting it and hitting it again. There's also, like with the Unlimited Herb style, there's what, I don't know what the official term for this is, but sniping, if you will. and let's say you're there with your friends. You and your buddy are playing, so I'm playing pinball. I do really well. I know I'm going to qualify. My buddy's really close to qualifying, but there's a few scores that are, like, screwing him up on games that people have. So what you do is you go and knock these other people down with some extra money to let your buddy, like, move forward. It's some sneaky, shady stuff, but it happens, And, yeah, it just, the ability to keep buying into, like, play games that wouldn't affect your game but will help some other people is a little goofy. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know. I've not talked to anybody who's really a fan of Herb Style at all. Yeah, right, right. Except for, like, the people who are the real, the solid, amazing try-hards who are always on top of everything and they're always at the top and get all the money. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get there one day. Yeah, I was going to say I'm definitely not a fan of Unlimited Herb for qualification. In terms of what I like, strikeout system, I like that with the four-player teams and bottom two take a strike. I like that because it emphasizes, I think more so than head-to-head, the tactical play where, okay, maybe I'm in first and I think I can hold it, or maybe I know I can't do first place, but I think I could get second if I go for some risky shots. Yeah, man, I completely agree. Yeah, the Strikeout Tournament's incredible. The match play event of Pinberg is maybe the best tournament that's ever been created for pinball ever in existence. I don't know if you gentlemen have been to Pinberg. No, not yet. You are just, you have not played competitive pinball yet. Nope. We're scrubbies. because when you first start that very first day the Keith Ellens of the world and the freaking four year olds that their parents bought them a ticket are on the same level that very first day and what you're doing is you're just getting paired up in groups of four randomly that whole first day you're battling to put yourself in a division the next day you battle through that division to try to get to the finals and that tournament more than anything tells you how good of a pinball player you are like it gives you an actual analytic number here is where you belong always and forever like you played you wound up in the middle of b you know you're supposed to be in the middle of the beat because you started off equal with everyone and that's where you you sort of whittled your way into oh yeah i can see that sounds like that could be a lot of fun and the fact that you can get paired up with people and it doesn matter that oh i got i got paired up with you know keith l1 and yeah he won but i still you know I got third and I got enough points I can get see where I going and that type of stuff Yeah it really amazing man Like because you will yeah battle like the monsters of the midway while you climbing that hill But if you lose to them, it doesn't matter. Like, every point does matter, but that one fight really doesn't, like, change your outcome as long as you can play well in your other bouts. Because if you get really demolished in that one matchup, you move on to people that also got destroyed. so you now have a chance to battle those people that you might be a little better than, and then you move back up, and you just sort of bounce around that area that you should be in. I like the sound of that. Yeah, man. It's a lot of fun. I know Pinberg's on my short list of places. We went to Texas this year. We saw you there. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was running around like a madman streaming everything, and then I did the finals and also qualified for the finals at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was on a machine next to you a couple times during qualification. But, of course, I didn't want to distract you while you were on Star Trek. I just kept swearing and screaming. You were pretty mellow, if I recall. Yeah, I'm a pretty mellow player, for sure. I've been working hard between this podcast and one of our big tournament venues. This is in a pizza place. I'm a blue-collar worker, and I've got blue-collar worker language. So I work very hard to hold back from it, but still every once in a while you get there where you just turn around and you're just, you know, it comes out. Especially when you get a really cruddy like outland drain that shouldn't have happened type stuff. You got to do what the sharps do if they're not really feeling the urge to like swear in front of a bunch of kids or an audience. They'll just go to the machine that's next to them that's hopefully vacant and just shake the crap out of that pinball machine. it's amazing because you see them play and they'll just jump over to the machine next to them and just tilt the crap out of the machine next to it just to get that anger out so you can walk away feeling sort of redeemed that you got to hit a game even though it wasn't the machine that screwed you that's not a terrible idea that sounds violent I don't know it seems awfully violent for me occasionally you need to embrace the inner rage I know there's times where I turn away from a machine and it's just like, super Saiyan walking away. I typically try and do just really dumb sayings. Sometimes I'll have an outlaying train and I'll just go, oh dear, oh my. Now, what I did for a while, I started swearing in French. And I don't really know French, so maybe those aren't really swears. I don't know. But I'm thinking no one knows what I'm saying. Why do I keep yelling soup in French? I don't understand. Ah, bagel. Another format that I thought I'd throw out that I've only played in once competitively, but I really enjoyed it, was pin golf. Ooh, yeah, pin golf's a lot of fun. Because it's like, depending on what they've picked for goals on the machine, you know, you're not really playing to beat other people. You're more playing to beat the objective. Right, right. It's like you're playing the machine, but in mind also trying to be aware of just how well other people are beating the machine or not beating the machine, depending. Right, because it's not like, say, for instance, you're on World Cup soccer and the hole is to get three goals, right? It's just how many balls does it take to get those three goals? And hopefully you could do it on one ball. I would imagine you could do it on one ball for everybody. But, yeah, like no one's going to get a better three goals than you on that game. You know, so it's you're playing the machine, not the people standing next to you. Now, if it's a score based thing, you want to hope that you can get it in like the amount of balls that well, the least amount of balls, because it is like each ball is a stroke. And you're trying to get your birdies and eagles and all that fun, goofy stuff. I don't understand golf at all. I'm just saying words I've heard before. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I went and I've played golf once, and I lost the feeling in my thumb for half a year, so I never went back. Yeah, fair. Yeah. But, yeah, the time I did it, we did a whole, I guess, round under score-based, and we did a round under objective-based play. Nice. I like the objectives, I think, more when it comes to pin golf. It changes the way you play pinball. Yeah, that one was interesting because everyone knows how to score points. But when it got to the objectives, we'd have to get in a group, and people would be explaining to you the ways you could achieve the objective. And even in our little sets, people would high-five each other if they actually did a hole-in-one. That's amazing. And there was a lot of camaraderie to it versus what I normally see, like in the strikeout format, where you're just like, oh, come on, you need to get third. You need third. I need second. Because in pin golf, it's not like an immediate competition with the people you're grouped up with necessarily. Like when you're playing someone for score and you're standing back and you have $30 million and you're watching some dude climb from like 22, 26, 28, 31, the entire time you're sitting there and everyone can say they don't, but you know you're sitting there going, oh, just drain. Just drain your freaking ball. Drain. Just drain. And that's not like super positivity. but when the only goal is to start that multiball and that's the objective, when you do it, everyone's cheering because it doesn't freaking matter. You did it. High five. Let's all hug and smack each other. I've never played in a Penn Golf, but it sounds awesome. It sounds like it's a great little very social tournament format. It's so unique. It's out of control. They really found out how to keep something competitive really, really friendly. Okay, so it sounds like we're all in agreement. Herb sucks, Papa's awesome, pin golf is fun, and so are strikeouts. I've got one more tournament. It was a special tournament that we played at at Pinnapalooza, and it was a survival tournament. Oh, yes. And it was 36 players. I had to call it up to make sure there were 36 of us playing in it. And what it literally was is they just chose machines, and the lowest scoring person on that machine was dropped. And then everybody – and it took forever. I mean, it was very time-consuming, and it required a huge number of machines. Likely we had like 80 machines to work with. Right. And as you worked through, everybody just played on the machine. Like the first machine was 1 million BC, and then all you had to do was get a higher score than the lowest person. So once you crossed the lowest person, you could just drain and go to the next machine, which was, I don't remember now. Now, was it the lowest? So this sounds very similar to another tournament I was going to bring up. Is it like two people battle, the person that loses has to stay in that machine, the person that wins gets to move on? No, it was literally you just play a one-player game, You just play a one-player game, and you rack up the biggest score you can, and there's a list sitting right there that shows all the scores. And there's normally the lowest scores highlighted, and the second you cross the lowest score, you're done. Your score gets put down, and you just drain off. You're done. And the next person comes up, and whoever has the lowest score after that run gets eliminated, and then everybody just keeps moving from machine to machine to machine. if you've got the lowest score you'll just wait and hope somebody gets a lower score than you. That happened to me on Roadshow I had a really low score on Roadshow early on, it was like game 3 and I thought I was done and like an hour and a half later somebody came up and said hey you need to play your game on Roadshow so you can move on because somebody scored lower than me and I hadn't noticed it we were running two tournaments at the same time is how that was running that typically doesn't work out well Yeah, no, it wasn't bad. Well, it's a very, the specific tournament we were at, it was a very social, lighthearted kind of thing. But the survival tournament ran until like 2 in the morning. I got eliminated around midnight. There's one other tournament that I'd like to bring up that I want to encourage everyone to try, because it's the most fun you'll ever have playing pinball. It's sort of like pin golf. What you do is you go to each machine that you have lined up. Let's say you have 10 games. Pick an objective or a score-based goal that is moderate to low, and make sure all that information is displayed on each game. Then one person at a time, you stand a person next to a bell. They hit the bell, we start a timer, you run, you have to complete every objective, and then come back and hit that bell and we stop the timer, and you have to try to beat everyone's time. So however you think you can get that one score on this, if you think you have enough points and bonus to move on to the next game, do it if you don't hit the objective in time, you're wasting time by having to start a new game it's called Gauntlet Style and it is the most fun there is a chance for people to hurt themselves by tripping and falling but it's pretty cool okay, that sounds awesome I've never even heard of that before let alone played in it, but that sounds amazing other than the whole running thing I'm kind of, I don't run well. You don't have to make it like running, running, but you can put like a bell at the beginning and a bell at the end, and then like when you hit it, that's when you say time, and people have to try to get through all those games as fast, if not faster than you. I think they should run. I think it would be fun. We could see some trampoline. There could be chaos. It would be basically like there was a big attack on the city, and everyone's like, what's going on? Yeah, it's like Double Dare. Yeah, you've got to run across the, make sure the machines are on opposite sides of the room, put a rope wall between them. Some barbed wire you've got to climb under. I think we got this. Awesome, awesome. All right, well, I think we went through all the competitive formats we wanted to, so let's go to the next pinball topic, which is there is a new remake happening. This was announced earlier in the, Well, I guess last week now that we're on Sunday, but that PPS would be making a remake of Cactus Canyon. That is awesome. Now, is it my buddy EP the Geek up in Wisconsin was the guy that did the code for Cactus Canyon Continued. Is it going to be Cactus Canyon Continued or is it like the original Cactus Canyon that is unfinished? All right. I don't I it's not going to be unfinished, but I don't know is is the is the short answer. So from what I read is I was wondering, I'm curious if it will have Cactus Canyon continued software, which I have not played. I've heard very good things about it. Oh, it's so good. They, PPS, has indicated that it will have extended code. So it's not going to be the original incomplete code. But they didn't say they would be using the CCC code. Rock and roll. I'm over the moon about this. I think this is awesome because I can't find that game anyway. I played a lot of it at Texas They had one or two of them set up there that I played several times, it's a lot of fun I didn't expect when I think about remakes Cactus Canyon wasn't exactly the first game in my head for a remake coming out, I would think something maybe with a bit higher popularity, but it's not a bad game, I enjoy it Is Cactus Canyon's Canyon's popularity low, you think, because they didn't produce so many of those games? Because I know, like, it being a low-number run of machines, I'd never seen that game before until I went to the Papa facility. That could very well be it, because it is a fun game. It's got a fun theme. And, I mean, so, like I said, the only times I've played it is on Pinball Arcade. Yeah. And when I played it in Texas. and I enjoyed it both times I've played it. Yeah, the one they had at Texas was so pretty. Yeah, it was in perfect condition, man. That was a gorgeous game. Yeah, I think you're right, Jack, about the low unit count because I believe they only made 903. So a lot of people never experienced it. I mean, even I didn't wait in line and play it at Texas, so I still haven't played an actual physical Cactus Canyon. and I've only ever experienced it virtually. Oh, with TPA? Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It was actually in one of my banks at Pinberg, and thankfully I didn't have to go first, and I got to watch someone play it, because I do not know the rules on that game. But like with Tony, I do agree. I would have, other than the rarity, which I think is why it was selected, I would have thought, from a popularity standpoint, Monster Bash or Attack from Mars would have been more logical picks. I think that was speculation for a very long time that it was going to be Attack from Mars or Monster Bash. Honestly, I'm sure those are on their radar for sure. They have to be. I would love for an Attack from Mars to be somewhere in a price range that I might be able to get someday. That's my favorite game, or darn near my favorite game. I could see Monster Bash maybe being a humongous licensing issue, but Attack for Mars, man, there's you know there isn't like iconic universal pictures monsters all over the thing that's true I hadn't thought about the licensing issue, but for anybody other than like Stern's reissue, I mean, they did Iron Man and then they did the complete recover of Spider-Man and what's the rumor now is that they're going to do Batman as Batman 66, that's the rumor out there now? I could only assume, I don't know why Adam West would be coming to that Stern party to hang out, which I will be emceeing by the way folks, if you're going I'll see you there awesome I don't know nothing about nothing I'm not saying nothing Muggsy you can't make me talk No one leaks anything on this show. It's so sad. I don't know why anyone listens. We'll get there. Okay. It's a slow build. So overall, everyone sounds pretty pleased with the choice. Good. Cool. Oh, I love the idea. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. I just like the whole remastering and remaking of games, period. Because Medieval Madness is a wonderful game, as much as I hated it when I first started playing it until I got to know it. But, I mean, all these games that are older and they're hard to get and their prices are shooting up, but you'd still like to have them. And I know some people are very much, well, I don't want a remake in my collection. But, I mean, I'm one of those people that would be like, I don't care. Is it a remake? That's fine. That's still the game. That's all that matters to me. You're still getting a medieval madness. Yikes. So. Well, for our final pinball topic, we wanted to cover WatchMojo's Top Ten Pinball Machines, which recently came out on YouTube, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Just a quick summary, the top ten list was number ten was Pinbot, number nine was Ripley's Believe It or Not, number eight was The Addams Family, number seven was Funhaus, number six was Revenge from Mars, number five, The Black Knight, number four, Tales of the Arabian Nights, number three, Theater of Magic, number two, Black Hole, and number one, Medieval Madness. So, I guess let's get going. What does everyone think of this list? I don't like this list. And, in fact, the honorable mentions that they had at the end of the video were just like, why the hell were these not in the list? Yeah, it's like Twilight Zone, Williams, Indiana Jones. You're like, what the, why are these, oh, whatever. It's infuriating. Twilight Zone, for me, honestly, Twilight Zone would be up there with, like, number two, number one. That game has everything you could need in a pinball machine. It has everything. Yeah, it's an amazing game. But I think that could pretty much be said for almost everything in this list is, well, that's fine, but why is this over that? Why would Revenge from Mars be over Attack from Mars? Why is Black Knight over Black Knight 2000? I mean... Fun. Okay, I'll say a little blasphemy here in pinball. I think Adam's Family is a very overrated pinball machine. That's not blasphemy on this podcast. It is overrated. It's a two-shot pinball machine. If you ripped the theme off of there and showed that to people, people would be like, oh, this game's all about shooting the chair and then the ramp over and over again. Yeah, I'm not sold. But because it's Adam's Family and stuff, it's fun, it's quirky, It's got the flippers snapped for you and stuff. Thing comes out and takes the ball. But on a competitive, just playing it for points level, it is a snooze machine, man. I don't know. I think Addams Family is one of those perfect games where the theme matches up, and it's the theme that really makes that game because of how it plays and the way they did it. I mean, nobody thinks about those movies anymore. I doubt a lot of younger people have even seen those movies, let alone the original TV show. But the pinball machine is everywhere, and it's still... It's their highest grossing... I think it's the most sold pinball machine, or the... Yeah, something along those lines. It's like the bestseller of all time. Yeah. Yeah. That's why everyone says that's their favorite machine, because that game was everywhere. So when you have a memory of playing a pinball machine when you were a kid, exactly. It's like, that was my favorite. What else have you played? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, so it's going to be Adam's Family. I was surprised at the two J-pop games in the list. And listeners of the show know that I'm not a fan of Theater of Magic, but I was really surprised it was in here and was put rank ahead of Tales of the Arabian Nights. There's actually three because they put it third in the honorable mentions, too. And of the Pinbot trilogy, I think Pinbot might be my least favorite. I think it's the weakest of the three. I like all three games, but Pinbot's the weakest of the three. Jackpot is my jam. And Bride of Pinbot is good, but with that 2.0 kit installed in it, that game is a masterpiece. I saw one in Texas that had that installed, and it was beautiful. My only issue with Bride is the unbalanced scoring if you don't have the 2.0 install, so of the base games, I think it's the weakest of the three. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Ripley's only gets a pass from me because I am a sucker for very targets, and that one has a very prominent very target on it. I've never played one. I've never even seen one. It's on the Pinball Arcade, for sure. Is it? I'll have to go through. It's probably one of the many, many games on Pinball Arcade that as I'm scrolling, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Ooh, Whitewater. There you go. Oh, man. It has everything. Yeah, it has everything. It's got very targets, spinners, magnets, ramps, just like anything you could think of pinball related, they threw it on that game. Twilight Zone is a great game. I played one. I've played one once in person I've actually played one and the very first time I played it it was just basically me going I don't even know where to look I don't know what I'm doing but this table looks awesome and then you play it a second time and you play it a third time and you're like wow I've played this game like six times in a row I should probably let somebody else play the third machine we ever got for our studio collection was a Twilight Zone and we had that thing for about five years before we gave it back to its owner and just absolutely love, love, love that game. So we all agree WatchMojo's list sucks. Okay, well, we've covered everything we plan to talk about in pinball, so now Jack actually gets to enjoy the other aspects of this show, which are not about pinball, but about other types of gaming. And so our second segment is always our video game segment, or almost always, and today it's only and entirely all about Overwatch. Bum, bum, bum. That's right. A game that I have watched, but I have not played myself. So you, Jack, I've added it to the wish list. I got a birthday coming up. I've added it. I got it there listed. I'll be like, you know what? I'll partake of the watch. Not yet. You said yourself that you are a console gamer more than a PC gamer, correct? That is correct. Now, I am so hopelessly addicted to this game that I have it on PC at work, but I don't have a PC at home. I have all Macs there, and this game does not run on a Mac, so I bought it for the PS4, so I had some way of playing Overwatch even when I'm at home. I can understand that. So you and Tony would be of agreement that Overwatch is a moderately decent game. It's okay. Yeah, it's all right. Okay, well, let's go ahead and actually do what we would call a deep dive on the topic, and I'd say for the listeners, let's go ahead and start with your favorite things about the game in general. Ooh. Well, I'll start us off. I'm a big fan of FPSs. I played a lot of Battlefield and Call of Duty and stuff just tinkering around, and I've always wanted one of these games where it's just, it feels sort of like, God, I don't know how to explain it. I like that every character is different because when you play other FPSs, RPSs, everyone is human guy with machine gun shooting at other person. But because of the complexities and the diversities of all the characters in this game, it really changes the way you have to think about how you're going to attack somebody. For instance, there's characters that have turrets, so you'll see the dude running around, and your instinct is to run after him and shoot him, but he's probably baiting you over there so that his turret can shoot you. or you know it and it's got this game has healers in a first-person shooter which is very unique so you could just be trying to kill somebody while you have this anna character who's a sniper but she only snipes healing which is crazy uh anyway sorry i can go on tangents all day on this oh yeah no easily with this game Yeah Now Tony what are your favorite parts I played a lot of Team Fortress 2 Oh, there you go, man. And I loved Team Fortress 2. And then this game took everything. Like Blizzard tends to do with a lot of games, is they took everything about Team Fortress 2 and the games kind of like it and just made it better. Yeah. Because that's what Blizzard does is they take things that other people have done and perfect it. Yes, they do. And it's, I mean, the way the heroes interact, the way the heroes have different personalities. And even though for some reason, I mean, it's not in the game at all, but the lore and background of all the heroes and characters and everything is awesome. They make these, their animated shorts they make are amazing. The Bastion one? the Bastion one like it brought a tear to your eye watching the Bastion one what's great is right when that Bastion video came out essentially Bastion is this robot he's like a sentient robot that could turn into a giant machine gun and just plows people down Bastion is the last of these robots that were built they were like war machines that were told to go just kill things this video was Bastion is like woken up by this bird and he comes alive and he starts having these commands going off like, go to this city and kill people. But this bird keeps distracting him and he's having a good time. Anyway, regardless, when this video came out, you're like, oh, it's so sad. I love this robot. The second I logged in to play Overwatch, someone played Bastion and everyone in chat is like, no one's allowed to shoot Bastion. If he wants to kill you, let him do it. He's the last of his kind. We love this guy. Just let him do his thing. It was like you just run in, shoot everybody, see Bastion, get killed, and it's heart-wrenching. Yeah. Well, Blizzard's always done good animation stuff, and all the Overwatch animations are a lot of fun, but the Bastion one was just the most heart-wrenching piece of animation I've seen in forever. It was beautiful. I mean, it was amazing. Yeah. I mean, my wife's not a gamer, and she watched that video and enjoyed it. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, so the game's essentially, what I also like about this is the game, it's not just like here's all the characters to go kill each other. It's broken into categories. So you've got like your attack class, your defense class, your healing class, your sort of like overarching support class. Tanks. Yeah, exactly. So a good composition of a team will be like one tank, maybe three DPS, a healer, and like a support character or however you want to set it up. And there's all these maps depending on if you're attacking, if you're defending, you want to change up your comp, change up who you're playing. I'm very into the idea of like taking a character that people think is the worst and trying to excel and destroy people with it. because it just is the most embarrassing in the world when the character you know is the worst takes you out in a game. So which character do you think is the worst? I love that Salt Loon. So I used to think Zarya was garbage. Like, I didn't understand her. I didn't know how to play her. I thought she was trash. Threw some changes. They made her really good. Yeah, she's amazing now. No one ever plays Symmetra. I never see anyone play Symmetra, ever. You know, Symmetra is one of my lowest time played. I played her yesterday and I got play of the game and did some amazing stuff with her, and I don't know where it came from. No one's playing her. And so I immediately latched onto her. She's a character that she's a support class, sort of a healer, but she doesn't heal. What she does is puts a very small shield on all of her teammates, which does almost nothing. But her thing is she has six little robot turrets that shoot laser beams at people if you come close. So you're sort of like setting traps. And what that does is it creates a very situational, like, you don't run in and just start blasting people. You have to bait people into rooms and stuff like that. And I just, man, I don't know. If I'm attacking, defending, I don't care what I'm doing. That character is who I'm playing. I don't care if my team is screaming at me. They'll understand once I get play of the game with that character. Yes. Symmetra is one of those characters that if I see her run out of a tiny little room, I've got explosive. I do not go in that room. You do not go in there. Nope. It's off. She's amazing at defending. If you're on a defense map where you can, like, turtle up and just put those little turrets everywhere, man, it just, not only are they hurting people, but they also send off a beacon to let you know where someone's coming from because it creates a little icon of all your turrets in the world that sort of sit on a HUD, and they'll start blinking if they're attacking something. So you'll know, like, if you're in voice chat, be like, all right, coming from the left side in that room, there's at least one person that's getting attacked by something. So run in there and just start spraying. Yeah, and her attack is really good because it'll penetrate Dixie Reinhardt's shield. Oh, yeah, just locks on. It's just a lock-on, continuous beam attack. The problem is it's super short range, but it hits. But she's also got, you can charge it up, and the shot will get more powerful, and it'll shoot it. It's a very slow-moving shot that just kind of tracks across, but if it hits anybody, it does massive damage, and it penetrates straight through everybody's shields. It ignores shields. She's also got that beam that she just holds down and it grabs somebody and she can just lock it onto them, run around them in a circle, and it eventually just kills them. Yeah, that's my preferred way of taking out Tracers. Oh, yeah. Because she can't zip around you. She's lassoed, essentially. Mm-hmm. Zenyatta was another character that I thought was pretty weak, but through some changes recently has turned into a very serious competitor. if he puts that discord thing on you and headshots you it's like two shots and you're dead oh yeah, I've died to a lot of Zenyatta and that's a healer that is killing yeah I've been building some time up on Zenyatta more my primary play has been Junkrat's my boy dude, he's just like just spraying grenades everywhere I know I still love the heck out of Junkrat I get so many plays of the game with Junkrat and he's so much fun to just bounce off a wall. It's like some of the old days where it's like, oh, I know there's somebody in this room. I'm going to stand beside the wall and bounce them off the wall so it bounces into the corner. So good. I love that stuff. But then in the exact opposite, my number two most hours played is Lucio. Because Lucio is just amazing. He's OP. He's like the most OP guy who doesn't come off as OP because it's like, oh, no, I didn't get the most kills, and no, I didn't cause the most damage. He's a healer that doesn't need to focus on healing, because just playing the character is healing people. Yeah, he's just a giant AoE heal of perfection, and he's so fast. He can wall ride. Most of the kills I've seen from him is him baiting people to an edge and doing this short-range blast that just shoots people backwards. It doesn't really do a lot of damage, but if it knocks you off the map, you are just toast. It doesn't matter who you are. Oh, yeah, I love Lucio. And on escort maps, he's so perfect because you literally just skate around and jump all over the thing, and it just keeps going. It's not uncommon to go, oh, yeah, I had one death, and I did like 7,000 healing, and I had three minutes and 45 seconds of objective time because I just stood on the payload. So would you both say that, or are you both in agreement that Lucio is the most overpowered character currently? Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, his healing is strong. It's AoE healing. It's pretty ridiculous. It's just hard to call him OP because he doesn't get on the kills, but he supports the team so perfectly. He's like a perfect support character. If I had to say OP characters, it's between Hanzo, McCree, and Genji. I have zero minutes of Genji time. I won't play him. Here's the deal. Genji, he's a hard character to play, but when you get a decent grasp on how to play Genji, you just destroy everybody. The dude can reflect alts back at people. He can climb up walls. He could, like, dash through people. Double jump. Yeah, if people shoot at him, he reflects the bullets back at him. It's ridiculous. Tony, why won't you play him? He sounds awesome. Why won't you play him? That's why. What's wrong with you? There's just something about him that just annoys the crud out of me. Yeah. I was playing last night, and there was a Genji on the opposing team, and he took like four gold medals he had most kills, most damage and most objective kills I think is what it was is I'm sure what it was because it's not like he can heal but geez he was, every time I turned around I think I died to him more than anybody else he had played the game he team killed our entire team with his ultimate as we were all running up, we were playing Dorado and we were on attack and we were all on the payload and you hear his little freaking sounder and everyone starts looking around and it's too late. He's falling down from above on top of us and half of us are dead before we know what's going on. So his ultimate is very short range. He's got to be really close, but when he swings, you're dead. That's just the end of you. You're just done. I think Dixie Reinhardt and Roadhog might survive a single hit from him, maybe. And that's it. Everybody else is dead. Roadhog's a pretty messed up character because he has this hook move that grabs you and pulls you to him. And then, so what people do is they'll hook somebody. You could be a full life. He'll hook you, pull you in, shoots you once in the head, you're done. It's two button clicks. You just kill the character. Yeah. Scorpion wins, I see. Yeah, absolutely. And all you have to do is you literally throw the hook out and you hold down the fire button because you can't fire until the animation's done, and you just make sure you're aimed at their head. And he's got a shotgun, so it just has to be kind of on the head. And anybody other than a tank is done. It's so great when you see somebody healing and you pull them over. Now, I did see a video the other day. A diva had launched her suicide bomb into the middle of the group. Oh, yeah. and the and the team's roadhog jumped off or down into the well because it was the map with the well in the middle where you can pull in the area and as he jumped in the well he threw the hook grabbed the exploding mech and pulled it down with him so none of his team died I was like oh my god that's amazing how do people think of that stuff man? I don't know I've never thought of hooking and trying to pull one out of the way I did a I played roadhog some last night and I unsuccessfully did it But I hooked one, and I tried to pull it into a side room, and it exploded before it got to the side room. But it's like, wow, that's an amazing idea because D.Va's like just – she was terrible when the game launched, and they buffed her, and now she's everywhere and awesome. Yeah, absolutely. But that suicide bomb attack that can just wipe out an entire team, and it's like, well, you have to run and get something between you and the explosion. And you can't just run away from the explosion because if you run away from the explosion, you can't get far enough. Yep, that's true. Yeah, you have to be around a corner or something. Yeah, I mean, even if you, depending upon where it is, you can even be on the side of the payload and be okay. Oh, man. On an escort map that I was playing two nights ago, we had a comp where we had a Dixie Reinhardt sitting on the front of the car. We had a Bastion sitting on top of the car. We had a Torbjorn with his turret on the car. We had my Symmetra with her turrets all on the car. and I think we had like a Winston or maybe a Zenyatta and Dixie Reinhardt just stood in front of the payload with his shield on so nothing could get killed. And this was just like this monstrosity death machine that was just killing anything that decided to pop its head out. And I was laughing my butt off the entire time because no one could even come and say hi. You didn't even see people's faces. They were just like melted instantly. Because this Dixie Reinhardt character, he's a tank. He has this giant sort of like ethereal shield that pops up in front of him, and nothing can penetrate that, but you can shoot through it if you're your own teammate, and you just melt everything. Yeah, that shield takes like 2,000 damage. Yeah. So the only thing I've seen is I saw a rig like that set up once where they were coming along, and we had three bastions. Oh, there you go. And his shield lasted a quarter of a second. Yeah, just melt it. Yeah, because what's great about this game also is if you see something like that, let's say you're running around and you're a reaper and you're like, okay, here comes this death trap you can run back to your spawn area change your character which is unique as heck come back out and you're like, okay now I'm this character, situationally just so, like I'm Pharah now so I can just launch some rockets at you to start knocking stuff off then go back, change into something else then start running around doing your thing, maybe your tracer drop into a mercy to heal someone for a little bit, then go back, come back, and it's awesome. That's probably one of my biggest annoyances about the game, is you get a lot of people who it's like, okay, this is not working. We are getting our butts kicked. We have to change our layout. And there's people like, no, man, I maimed this character. It's like, I'm Hanzo all day. Yeah, well, guess what? You haven't done anything, buddy. It's not working, so you need to be somebody else. Now, I had a game last night that was we won. It was Hollywood. We were defending but it was the most annoying match I've ever had. The opposing team had one mercy and five maze. Oh my God. So it's just ice walls, every ice wall everywhere. I, I mean, we, we were fighting and we were changing characters and I mean, we, we won, we kept them from going. They were going slow, but it was just the most annoying match. Cause it's like, Oh, I'm frozen. Oh, there's ice walls. Oh, I'm frozen. and on an ice wall. Does Maze Ice Wall stop a payload from moving? The payload will go through the ice wall. That'd be a pretty OP thing to just have all Maze to stop a payload from going anywhere. Yeah, no, the payload will just plow straight through it. It won't even slow down. But they were throwing up. Every time somebody ulted, they threw up. I was playing Soldier 76 and I flanked around and I jumped behind them, ulted, and opened fire and I took out their Mercy and three of them turned and they threw ice walls all the way across so the rest of my ult was gone. It was wasted because I couldn't get through the walls and I couldn't get around them. Your ult is essentially like you shoot but you don't miss but you do need to actually shoot. Right. I still have to actually hit them because Soldier 76's ult is basically an aim bot that lasts for a few seconds Okay. And it's just like, oh, okay, well, I just wasted my whole ult. Yeah. So it was just one of the most frustrating matches. Like I said, we won. They didn't even make it halfway. They didn't even make it halfway. And we won, but it was like, when it ended, it's just like, I never want to do that again. That was horrible. I was like frozen half the time. So as things currently stand as of the latest version of the game that you all are playing, what is the worst character? What's the one that needs balancing still, I would say? The one that you just won't play. Not because of Genji bias, but rather because you don't think it's effective. That's a good question. I think everyone has had some decent tweaks done to them. I know Symmetra has never been touched. In fact, on the council side, they actually made her turrets weaker because people weren't quick enough to respond to turn around and shoot stuff with a controller. She definitely needs some love because her ultimate is creating a teleporter that allows people when they spawn to show up wherever you drop this teleport. But it's a good asset. It definitely needs something else. But her shield that she puts on people, it's like a throwaway. It's garbage. It does nothing. Yeah, it sounds like one round. It does absolutely nothing. Yeah, if one bullet hitting you, you're going to lose that shield and part of your life. It does almost nothing. Other than her, I'd say, I don't know. I haven't seen a lot done with Pharah. Pharah is pretty solidly balanced, I think. I think she's not OP. Yeah, she came out of the gate pretty balanced. Yeah, she's not OP and she's not exceptionally weak. I know their first big, big swing of the nerf bet was McCree, who needed it. because when the game launched, McCree was stupid OP. He's the cowboy character that if he runs up to you, he can stun you, shoot you six times really quick with one button click and you're dead. Yeah, and he was taking out tanks like that with a single round. So they nerfed him out, and he's more balanced. He's still really strong, but he's not as bad as he was. Yeah, he's definitely not the, oh, look, there's a McCree, I'm angry. I don't know. They've done a pretty darn good job balancing. There's not any characters anymore like there was when it first launched where when you see that character, it's like, well, we have to build around this character and locking that character down. It's not – I mean because originally Bastion was OP, but now it's easy to get around Bastion. I mean it's not easy, but I mean you can deal with a Bastion. It's fair. It's right. Yeah, looking at the list, I think it's all pretty balanced. Okay. Well, let's move over into modes then. I've heard you both talk. I wondered what you thought was the best mode. My guess from your discussions would be payload, because that's what you both have been mostly talking about. But I do know that there's also zone capture and escort. Well, the escort and payload are the same thing. Are they? Okay. Honestly, I don't think I like payload. Oh, really? I just end up, like, whenever I play a map, for some reason, I'm always in a freaking payload mode. Well, I think there's slightly more. The thing is, I think there's a couple more payload maps, and several of the games are the first stage is zone capture and the second stage is payload. Right, yeah. I think I'm definitely a fan of zone capture. I like it where you're not attacking or defending. It's both of you rushing a point and trying to hold it. Yeah. Like, if you're on defense, you know what everyone's going to pick. If you're on attack, you know what everyone's going to pick. But when it's everyone rushing the point, you have to decide, like, are we going to go in guns blazing and then try to turtle up? Are we going to go in there with some heavy defense characters and hopefully we can take it and start putting up our defenses with Torbjorn and Symmetra's turrets and such? It's a fun gamble for sure. Yeah, I think the zone definitely seems to be more of an active play style. I think changing your characters are more important in zone based upon what you have. If you have control of it, it's better to have some more defensive characters, where if you're attacking, you definitely need more offensive bent or more tanks. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm more of a battlefield player in terms of my shooter background, and the most popular mode, and my favorite mode in that is Conquest, which is essentially zone capture, and the second most popular is Rush, where you have attack and defense, different teams doing whatever, and it usually flips for the next game. So, yeah, conceptually, I would have thought zone capture. It's just I've noticed a lot of instances of discussing payload were coming up, so I wasn't sure what ones you actually preferred. So you both like zone capture. There's a lot of payload maps, and I think some of the funnest maps are payload maps, or one of their – I can't think of the name of the map now, but it starts out zone capture. It's Hollywood. It starts out zone capture, and then it turns into payload. It becomes – yeah, while you're playing, it becomes payload. While you're playing it. I like that one. And several of the zone captures, there's several zone captures where there's one zone and you're capturing it. But there's also attack and defense ones that don't have a payload, like Volskaya, where you have to capture a zone and then you go on and capture another zone. You just keep pushing. Yeah, there's like two zones. You just got to push past them all or two or three zones. Right. Okay, well, actually, this is a great thing to move on then, because I was curious in terms of maps. What map or maps do you guys think are the best, and are there any maps that you think are bad? Like bad layout, or you just don't like playing them for some other reason? Oh, man. I like Volskaya. Volskaya is... I really like Volskaya. It's got two choke points, but there's ways around the choke points, so it's not super tight. whenever I get destroyed it's always on Temple of Anubis that map always screws me I think Temple of Anubis the final zone in Temple of Anubis I think it's a little too defender pro because it sort of funnels people in and then you just sort of lay waste to everybody I've seen several where one or two Chornborns or a Bastion can pretty much make that unbeatable no matter who you change to or the strategies you use short of i know i've gone through it a couple times where it's been like okay we know where the bastion is i will take pharah i will jump up and i will wail on the bastion from above and you guys try to get in while he kills me and hopefully i've taken him i can take him out or damage him enough that you guys can get in and finish him and try and hold the point yeah uh definitely oh sorry i don't mean Yeah, Volskaya definitely, like you mentioned before, super, super fun map. Moving platforms. Oh, yeah. The great thing about the moving platforms, plant some turrets on top of that thing. Now you have these roving guns that just start taking people out as they're cruising around the map. Oh, yeah, I love Volskaya. I think Volskaya might be my favorite. Yep. You know what? Looking through these, Ilios is fun. Lijiang Tower is okay. I like Lijiang Tower as Lucio because there so many options to blow people off the ledges Yeah Oh definitely Nepal gets me a little butthurt sometimes but yeah I think Volskaya wins Nepal, my big issue with Nepal was until I found all of the flanking spots, it was my least favorite. Well, it's because you're like, once you get inside of that building, you're just, you're fodder. You're just in the middle waiting to get shot in the head. I mean it's got it's got it's moments and some of it's flanking stuff helps out a little but it's still probably if not my least favorite it's one of my least favorite have you played the new map yet on the PTR? No I have not the castle that's sort of like an homage to Dark Souls yeah it's kind of the it's going to be kind of the German the big super German theme-y thing is that supposed to be like Dixie Reinhardt's place or something like that? It's one of the cities where the Crusaders like Dixie Reinhardt were based and stuff is from what I've seen. I've only seen a couple pictures of it. I haven't played on the PTR. I've watched a lot of PTR play of that map, and it looks pretty cool. The reason I love Blizzard is when they make stuff, it's damn near perfect, and they love to keep adding things. So, you know, the characters we have now, I'd say in a year, we're going to have like at least six more. I know there's at least, I mean, because isn't Sombra, they're dropping hints about Sombra. Sombra, Doomfist, which was like, if you watch the very first cinematic that ever came out about this game, before the game even came out, it was a bunch of people trying to steal Doomfist's fist from a museum. And he has been talked about as a character that's going to be in it as well. So that would be dope. There's just so much lore in this game, and they drop so many little tidbits here and there that there could be another 30 people in this damn game. Yeah, easily. And as long as they keep them balanced, it'll be fine. And maybe we'll stop seeing five Genjis and three Hanzos. Now, I think, isn't it in the competitive and ranked play, are you not allowed to have duplicate characters? You're not allowed to have more than two. More than two, okay. Yeah. Yeah, unless they've changed that. When it first launched competitive play, you couldn't have more than two characters. Right on. Because, like, full Tracer teams were just murdering everybody. Yeah. That's a hard one to deal with, a full Tracer team. I mean... For you folks that don't know, Tracer is a character that can essentially teleport around the map faster than even your human brain can comprehend. and even when you think you got her pinned down, she can just rewind time and vanish in front of you. Yeah, it's horribly annoying. She's the cheers love of the Cavalry's here. Yeah. Cheers love, the Cavalry's here. Yeah, from that time. All the time, yeah. And she's kind of become like, I think her and Winston are kind of like the face of Overwatch is how they've laid it out. Yeah, totally. You know, Winston, I think Winston could use a little buffing. Yeah, he could use some work. I mean, I don't see anyone really play him. Actually, I'd say in the last 20 games of Overwatch I've played, Winston hasn't been on any team, both opposing or on my side. I play him on a couple of occasions, but it's always for specific reasons. I think Winston is the perfect symmetric counter. Yeah, because his lightning will just clear out all those turrets. Right. and his lightning has the same range as those turrets so you just hold the button down and it just auto clears the turrets and I've used him on occasion for there's a couple, I can't remember the name of the map it's one of the Ilios maps one or two Winston's actually do pretty good at the zone because you can pretty much hold the shields The Lijiang Tower map, the one where it's like that tiny, tight, circular room. Oh, yeah. You get Winston in there, that bubble almost covers the entire freaking point and can hold all your folks in there. It works out really well. Yeah, but for the most part, no, Winston is not a heavy-played character. I'd say at this point he's the character I see played the least often, for sure. I would love to be able to see those analytics for these characters. Yeah, it would be nice. I mean, I know they have it. I know they track it because, I mean, before I did, I went and looked up my analytics for my characters because I'm setting that, let's see, total play time of 54 hours, 16 hours junk rat because, you know, I just like this. Yeah. It's junk rat. I like spamming explosives everywhere. 12 hours Lucio, 11 hours Farah Bastion, Roadhog, Soldier and Dixie Reinhardt are all at 2 and everybody else is under an hour I have a horribly imbalanced number of Symmetra plays versus anyone else when the game first came out I played Lucio exclusively for the first month I think that's what I did too in my mind I'm like you pick a character you get good with it and that's your character and it wasn't until maybe a month or two ago that I really learned to change up who I was playing based on what was happening at that moment. Yeah, see, and I really liked Lucio, and in the early game, when the game first came out, nobody ever played healers. Right. Oh, yeah, because why would you? There's no reason to. Yeah, it's like it's an FPS. I'm just going to shoot people. Right. So I played, I mean, because of my 12 hours of Lucio play, I think I got eight of them in the first month the game was out. I still go to him constantly. He's my preferred choice for a lot of game modes, but I've been trying to vary it up more. That's why Bastion and Roadhog are getting up there, and Soldier 76 is amazingly fun. He's the great starter character if you're used to playing Battlefield and stuff. It's like, play this just to get an idea of what the game's like, because you'll be used to this style of play. Okay, I'll try and start with that one. Yeah, I would. That would be the perfect start. And Dixie Reinhardt, I'm playing a lot of Dixie Reinhardt lately because I like the whole defensive, hold the shield, protect your team. But then when things get tight, you can really tear stuff up. And a nano-boosted Dixie Reinhardt is amazing. All the damage. I had a Dixie Reinhardt the other day that I got to play the game because I got nano-boosted. I used his ultimate which stunned four people in front of me and then I just walked up and basically slaughtered the majority of their team it was amazing I think we've done a very thorough overview of Overwatch and I know Tony loves Overwatch and I have totally failed him because I haven't been playing it I'm always willing to talk about Overwatch I will play it constantly it was really good, so thanks Jack because Tony really needed someone to host this who actually knew what he was talking about because I don't. I'll tell you, you won't be disappointed playing it on the console because it plays exactly the same. It's just I prefer to aim and shoot with a mouse. Awesome. Well, I'm hoping I'll probably be able to get it by early October. So I'm working on some other stuff right now, but it's now on the short list because you guys have talked it up way too much and you're making me blow all my money that I should be saving for pinball machines. Too hype. So you should feel guilty. At least do it next time. Donate a pinball machine to the Collected Games Podcast. Hey, an Overwatch-themed pinball machine. Let's go. Oh, there's a – I think Blizzard needs to get on the pinball train hype. For any IP that they have, I don't care what it is, it would slay 100%. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, between Warcraft and, you know, like Diablo. Oh, a Diablo machine? Diablo, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, just imagine. You'd be going for all that loot. You'd be dungeon crawling your way through ramps. It's like choose your class. All right. The barbarian. Choose your class. Have one of the flippers made to look like Wirt's leg. Oh, my God. Inside jokes abound. Butcher multiball. Okay, well, let's go to the third and final segment, which is tabletop. And, Jack, I know you're familiar with a game that I thought we'd go ahead and explore, because we've never really talked about social deduction games on the podcast. And so you play One Night Werewolf, if I'm remembering correctly. So what's funny about Werewolf is, so I'm a Twitch partner, and I go to all these Twitch parties. And my partnership guy, the dude that sort of like makes sure I stay in line and I'm not a ding-dong and don't get kicked off the website, when I go to these big meetups, I always find him, and he's like, hey, we're going to go play Werewolf. And the first time he mentioned this to me, it was like 2 in the morning. I'm like, we're going to go play Werewolf? Is this like Ghost in the Graveyard outside or something? What the hell are you talking about? And he brings me to a room, and there's just a whole bunch of people sitting around a table. He pulls out this box, and he starts going through all the stuff. He's passing out cards. He's got an app that does all the reading for you. And I'm looking around, and I'm a little hesitant. And I'm like, oh, this is nerd card game crap. and had maybe the most fun I've ever had ever at 2 in the morning playing a card game. Werewolf is just all about arguing, and it's incredible. I've played Werewolf several times, and it is an amazing amount of fun. As you said, hey, I'm not a werewolf. I swear to you, I'm not a werewolf. I'm just trying to be, it's not me. I'm just the normal guy. And it's great because the way it's designed, when you saw your card and you knew you were a werewolf and then everyone goes to sleep, you can only assume that you're still a werewolf because there's cards in the deck that trade people's cards around. There's cards in the deck that are people that are pretending to be werewolves because they want to get killed to screw everyone else at the table. there's uh it's just such a smart freaking game and i i only get to play it at these conventions because none of my friends want to play because they had the same attitude i did it's like why the hell would i want to sit and play this stupid car game with you but it's it's like trust me you buy this deck play this thing it is phenomenal now you both have been you've played i guess the original one night werewolf right where there's like a there's a moderator and well the original It's like a werewolf game, yeah. Okay, werewolf. It's like a standard two werewolves, a minion, mason's villagers, that kind of stuff. Yeah, nothing too crazy. I was trying to do background on it, and the first thing I actually ran across was something called One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which I guess is based on this, but it takes about five to ten minutes per game to play. Right. It's capped at ten, but most games resolve around five to seven, I guess. It doesn't use a moderator or anything. The game's entirely structured to be self-run, so there's timers. You use an app on the phone that kind of runs the game for you. The werewolves open their eyes all at the same time during the period where everyone else's eyes are closed. I guess it's designed to be werewolf but to flow a lot faster. I don't know. What's the average speed on werewolf? I'd say you could play a game in about 10, 15 minutes. It depends on the app. I think it has a timer on it. to say, all right, arguing stopped. Right, right. Who the hell's the werewolf? Yeah. I will say one thing is, if you can find one, get somebody to help you run this game. The reason being is when there's characters that wake up and you look at each other and there's characters that have to move cards around and stuff, if you're not a ding-dong, you can feel people moving next to you. You can feel the table vibrating. You can feel like if your hands are on the table and all of a sudden and you feel like a little brush of the table and stuff, you know, like, all right, the dude next to me is probably a seer because I felt him freaking move. So what I like to do is every time a card is called, I like to pretend to, like, fidget with stuff to, like, really mess with people if we don't have a moderator. That's devious. Werewolves look at each other, and I'll just start, like, lightly tapping or brushing the table just to... Every time I've ever played, we've used a moderator, so it's always the moderator does all of that work and makes sure nobody... All the cards wake me up. So it's almost necessary because, yeah, it's like stupid small stuff like that gives yourself away. Now, the social deduction games are, there's a bunch of them out there right now, like Resistance. I've played Resistance a fair amount. It's a pretty fun game. And the big one that's coming out and is really taking off is Secret Hitler. Yeah, my boys from Cards Against Humanity here in Chicago made that. That game is amazing. Yeah, buddy. I mean, it is, I don't own a copy of it. I need to get a copy of it. But that game is amazingly, it just takes the social deduction game and streamlines it while you get to keep all the fun parts. And you don't have to do nearly as much of the secret hiding eyes closed stuff. Yeah. Yeah, when I saw this was a social deduction game, that's the one that popped into my mind. Because, Tony, you summarized that a few episodes ago for us. Yeah, I don't remember what episode it was, but I remember talking about it. Because there's a group on Twitch that plays it every once in a while, and they'll play with eight people, Secret Hitler or something like that. And I'd watch them play whenever they played. That might actually be the Cards Against Humanity Twitch stream. It might have been. I don't remember which group it was, because there was a couple different ones I watched over the time. Oh, okay. Yeah, that game is a lot of fun. And I first thought when I saw it was because I'd played a lot of Werewolf and I'd played some Resistance, but it looks like a lot of fun. It's definitely shortlisted for me. I like social deduction games, but the thing is with social deduction games is you have to, I think they're better if you really know the people you're playing with. Yeah, because you can, like, if one person is treating the game like, you know, what's this dumb nerd stuff, it sort of kills the vibe of the whole arguing system and the whole, like, playing and bouncing off of each other stuff. The reason I really like these games is if you don't know how to play, that in itself is a way of playing. Like, if you, like, this is my first time playing. My card said I'm a werewolf. I'm not a werewolf. and people are just pointing fingers at you, you're doing your job. You're just, you're not a werewolf. I love the cards that are like the Ryan Tanner. He's like a depressed, lonely guy whose only objective is he wants to get killed and everyone else loses if he gets killed. And it's just, oh God. Anyway, the game is so freaking phenomenal. I'm sitting here looking at the cards and I'm like wishing I was playing this thing right now. yeah you know i don't tony and i we usually have a we're at a monthly game night i don't know if we've ever done a social deduction game though we don't because i don't own any oh well that would explain it when you need to own one i do either get us some werewolves or get us some some hitlers i don't actually i do own a copy of werewolf but there's not enough of us to make werewolf worthwhile typically. That's true. Because werewolf works better with larger groups. Like 30. We need 28 more people. Yeah, not necessarily that large, but... 25. 25. I have played a 28-player game of werewolf. Holy crap. How were you able to get anything done? We had two moderators and it took forever. Alex just turned it up. Two moderators solves everything. Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah, we had two moderators and it took forever. You need to definitely pick up Secret Hitler or this werewolf game, grab a Logitech camera, hook it up to a tripod, and stream that game. That would be awesome. See, because I've considered doing – there's the tabletop simulator and the people have built modules for games like Secret Hitler and everything else so you can actually play it. It's a simulated tabletop that everyone plays on their computer, but you actually move the cards and stuff using your mouse. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, really? Yeah. That's great. And there's modules for pretty much every really big popular game out there. There's a tabletop module for it. I think it's Tabletop Simulator on Steam. But, like, when I watch people playing Secret Hitler, that's what they were doing. because the people who were playing were all over the country. Oh, nice. And they were using it. It's a little finicky, but yeah, it's Tabletop Simulator. Awesome. Yeah, I just wrote that down. I'm going to have to check that out. Because it basically takes it and lets you do streamy stuff for tabletop games when everybody's not in one place. Not in the same room. Yeah. So if you and your friends are all over the place, you can do it. There's also lots of different streams that I've seen playing different things using it. Because it's a table, and you can even flip the table. I mean, seriously, there is a flip the table button. It's like, I'm pissed. Flip. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people I've watched play games, it's like, oh, we lost. Flip the table. So, like, if Dennis ever played Pandemic because he can't win Pandemic, he'd flip the table. Probably before the game started. You know, this comes up. I don't know why you continue to promote a game that's unwinnable. It's Kobayashi Maru. There's no – you might be able to cheat your way to victory like how you cheat at reading, but there's no winning Pandemic. Well, unless, you know, you're Zika, then I guess you win. I've won Pandemic. It's winnable. you just have had bad luck I don't know Jack stay away from Pandemic stick with your werewolves stick with things that can be won that you can manipulate things that aren't just completely based on luck it's not luck Pandemic is a well designed game because it actually makes you think you have a chance to win but you don't that's awesome All right. Well, that's the show. So our thanks to Jack Danger. No, thank you for having me. Actually, real quick before we go, I just realized something. I forgot the question. Uh-oh. Oh, no. Okay, well, we're not going to cut it and put it in the front, so it's just going to have to sit right here. Everyone's going to think they missed it until the end. So, Jack, I've got my pinball question that I like to ask everybody. Yeah, what's that? If you have no worries about licensing, no worries about money or anything like that, you could just make any music pin you wanted, what band would be your music pin? Beastie Boys, hands down. Oh, I've never even thought of them. Yep. They have a lot of iconography. Their songs are known by everybody. It'll start to leach into that sort of like hip-hop area that pinball has never touched. I think it's a perfect theme. Sabotage Multiball? Yeah, dude, come on. You can have a cool police car in there. You can have an airplane that's been crashed into the side of a mountain. Just like a sardine can that unrolls to let the multiball out. Dude, yes. Stern, get on this right now, please. That would be amazing. I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about bands, and they've never crossed my mind once, but that just seems so obvious. Yeah, man, they got a lot of good stuff. Man, Beastie Bands, let's do this. It's probably with what Jack pointed out, that hip-hop hasn't really been touched by pinball. So it's just not something we naturally move to with our minds. We've had rock. We've had the country musics. I actually think that's about it. Yeah, pretty much just country and rock. Yeah. Huh. Hip-hop. All right. That wouldn't be bad. Awesome. Yeah, I'd want to play it. Okay, well, Jack, do you want to plug anything here before we go? Yeah, just check me out on Twitch, twitch.tv forward slash dead underscore flip. You can go to deadflip.com. It has all the links to all the fun stuff there for social media. And, yeah, hopefully I'll see you online. And we will in the show notes in the link section. Just check it out. We'll have a direct link to his Twitch feed. And we'll also have a link so you can listen to Tilt Through if you want to learn more about competitive pinball with some really good pinball players. if you want to reach us here at the show you can always email us eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com we're also available on the web eclecticgamers.com and active on facebook facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast please remember to give us a rating and review on iTunes it helps others find the show if they happen to like a diversification of games like we do we're also available on twitter and instagram as eclectic underscore gamers as always I'm much more active keeping the instagram updated than Twitter. Oh, that's interesting. You're more active on Instagram than Twitter? I am. I don't know. I just cannot get myself... Every time I sit down on Twitter and I write something, it's like, oh, okay. Well, I went over by 375 characters. What am I going to do now? Be less wordy? Yeah. I have problems with that. Then you need to get that website. It's called like IFFT or IFTT. IFFT? Whatever. It's if then... Whatever. So whatever that is, type that in. what it does is it takes your social media and puts it to other social media. So you're like, if I post an image to Instagram, also post it to Twitter. Oh, there's an interesting comment. We use that at work, a similar thing. That's how I keep, like I have so many social media outlets, I'd lose my mind if I had to do them individually. Yeah, we use one at the office where one person does it, and so he tweets all the time. So all of his Twitter posts go on to Facebook, and they also go on to LinkedIn. If I take a picture on Instagram, it's going to end up on Twitter, and Facebook with all the captions that I put on it. Oh, I definitely need to do that because I do stuff on, like I said, Instagram, like when we're at tournaments or whenever I play a game somewhere or whenever just randomly I take little video clips or pictures or whatever and you throw it up there. Do it. See, Jack's improving our quality already. Everything's getting better. That's right. Well, I'm Dennis, and I'll say goodbye, everyone. I'm Tony, and Jack, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-06-06 | Item ID: 0922a2cd-18a7-4de6-b74a-25a832468711*