# The Electric Bat Cast Presents :: Pinpals Episode 4 : : John Wick, can Stern save the code?

**Source:** Electric Bat Cast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2025-09-29  
**Duration:** 137m 23s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cale630/episodes/The-Electric-Bat-Cast-Presents--Pinpals-Episode-4---John-Wick--can-Stern-save-the-code-e38s14d

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## Analysis

In this deep-dive episode of Pin Pals, hosts Serge and Cale analyze John Wick's code transformation under Mike Vinicore's team at Stern Pinball. They discuss how the game's initial 1.0 code was poorly received and has undergone significant revision, with a .98 update released the day before recording. The episode uses their ten-criteria framework for evaluating pinball code, beginning with an analysis of the game's 'moments' — specifically the Lights Out mode — and critiques the confusing BABA/YAGA lane mechanics inherited from 1981's Paragon. They also address community feedback on fan layouts and clarify game-time data from prior episodes.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] John Wick's original 1.0 code 'failed' and was poorly received by the community — _Serge: 'the code started at a 1.0 and sort of failed, I think would be fair to say. A lot of people, by failed, I mean, look, not everyone's going to agree with this, but a lot of people didn't like it.'_
- [MEDIUM] Tim Elliot left Stern and joined Play Mechanics after working on John Wick code — _Serge: 'He left Stern to go work with another pinball or gaming company.' Cale: 'he's over at Play Mechanics now.'_
- [HIGH] Star Wars has over 30 modes total, making it the most mode-heavy Stern game ever — _Serge: 'you have eight times three or 24 different character modes, plus you add the three Jawa modes and a bunch of Darth Vader modes, and you get over 30 modes in this game.'_
- [HIGH] The BABA/YAGA lane mechanic is confusing and 'should have died in the eighties' — _Serge: 'To me, this is an idea that should have died in the eighties. It wasn't enjoyable then, still not enjoyable now.'_
- [HIGH] John Wick's moments (especially multiballs) lack the intensity and buildup of games like Addams Family — _Serge: 'There's no showstopper. You know, when you're talking about the car, for example... And as soon as you hit the left orbit, you're immediately in multiball. There's no, like, showtime.'_
- [HIGH] On Pro, hitting Lights Out (2X) is relatively easy via a safe scoop/ski-pass maneuver; on Premium, it's much harder due to the crate mechanic — _Serge: 'on the pro, you could simply rely on the over and over again strategy of ski pass... The premium is really, really hard to get into the 2X'_
- [MEDIUM] Stern typically releases one fan layout game per year on average — _Serge: 'typically they make one fan layout each year on average... each year it seems to surprise people for some reason, but each year they come out with one fan layout almost always on average'_
- [HIGH] John Wick is not very good on 'moments' but is getting better with MXV's revisions — _Serge: 'My hot take here is that John Wick is not very good on moments, but it's getting a little better. There, I said it, not very good, getting better, not great.'_

### Notable Quotes

> "The reason we're going through John Wick is we put it up for a vote on our Discord. We offered ten different options of what our next episode should be, and this was the winner by far."
> — **Serge**, ~0:45
> _Establishes that community voting drives episode selection and John Wick was the clear winner, indicating strong community interest in understanding the code transformation._

> "To me, this is an idea that should have died in the eighties. It wasn't enjoyable then, still not enjoyable now."
> — **Serge**, ~35:00
> _Strong editorial statement on the BABA/YAGA mechanic as a design failure carried forward from 1981's Paragon; reveals critical perspective on John Wick's inherent design flaws._

> "I do think they should also probably advertise that more if you're going to make the premium unique. You want people, give people a reason to buy it."
> — **Serge**, ~15:00
> _Commentary on Stern's product strategy and the undermarketing of premium/LE-exclusive features; suggests opportunity cost in game positioning._

> "none of us should trust the pinball science, Cale. We should all look at the pinball studies ourselves to see what limitations there are in the methodology of the biased pinball scientist."
> — **Serge**, ~10:00
> _Meta-commentary on epistemology in pinball analysis; acknowledges limitations of data-driven analysis and encourages critical evaluation._

> "I don't think fan layouts are better or worse than non-fan layouts. I do think they play faster and that they're harder. And more than anything, I think it's nice to get a mix."
> — **Serge**, ~12:00
> _Nuanced position on fan layout debate; positions diversity in layout design as valuable and reframes the discussion._

> "Moments are made by a combination of lights and sounds and rules and playfield features... Usually, not always, the game pauses, the call-outs change to something exciting, the lights go crazy, the shaker motor goes off, and you feel the heightened emotion of the moment compared to the entire rest of the pinball game."
> — **Serge**, ~25:00
> _Defines core analytical framework used throughout the episode; establishes 'moments' as multi-sensory, intentional peaks in emotional engagement._

> "I played some copies where you literally, all you have to do is hold up the right flipper and do what I said. You just hold up the right flipper, and the ball will come there. There are other games where it's not enough oomph when it's coming through the in-lane."
> — **Serge**, ~40:00
> _Notes variability in machine-to-machine consistency on John Wick, indicating potential quality control or wear issues._

> "The most recent release yesterday is .98, so it's pretty close, and any criticism we have might well be addressed with future updates."
> — **Serge**, ~23:00
> _Acknowledges that John Wick code is still in active development and reserves judgment pending further updates._

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| John Wick | game | Stern Pinball machine, released 2024, designed by Elliot Eisman. Subject of episode; undergoing significant code revision by MXV team. |
| Mike Vinicore | person | Lead code developer at Stern; 'MXV'; face of recent John Wick and Uncanny X-Men code revisions; manages rule transformation efforts. |
| Elliot Eisman | person | Game designer at Stern Pinball; lead designer on John Wick; first layout credit for him. |
| Tim Elliot | person | Code designer on John Wick who left Stern mid-project; now at Play Mechanics; took code in 'interesting direction' before MXV takeover. |
| Serge | person | Host of Pin Pals podcast; code analyst; provides detailed rules breakdown and critical commentary. |
| Cale | person | Co-host of Pin Pals podcast; operator of Electric Bat Arcade; organizes community events. |
| Electric Bat Cast | organization | Podcast network/community; hosts Pin Pals series; operates Electric Bat Arcade; holding 7th anniversary tournament Oct 3-5. |
| Travis Murray | person | Respected pinball player; creates gameplay videos; referenced for John Wick strategy commentary. |
| Jay Schapple | person | Community member; critical commenter on episode 3; runs Tilt Pinball League; argues against fan layout speed assumptions. |
| Chad Cowan | person | YouTube commenter; prefers non-fan layouts for aesthetic/gameplay reasons; cites combo shot appeal. |
| Rich Ice | person | Discord commenter; questioned game time averaging methodology; operates games with 5-minute target average. |
| Star Wars: Fall of the Empire | game | Recent Stern release; corrected claim about mode count (30+ modes, most ever for Stern); referenced for premium/LE code differentiation. |
| Addams Family | game | Classic pinball game; used as exemplar of effective 'moment' design (Chair multiball lighting sequence). |
| Paragon | game | 1981 Gottlieb game designed by Roger Sharp; source of BABA/YAGA mechanic used in John Wick; used as historical counterexample. |
| Josh Sharp | person | Mentioned as son of Roger Sharp (designer of Paragon); context of legendary designer lineage. |
| Zach Sharp | person | Mentioned as son of Roger Sharp; noted as skilled nudge player; references Z-Mac gameplay. |
| Roger Sharp | person | Legendary pinball designer (Paragon, 1981); father of Josh and Zach Sharp. |
| Play Mechanics | company | Pinball/gaming company; currently employs Tim Elliot after his departure from Stern. |
| Stern Pinball | company | Primary pinball manufacturer discussed; released John Wick; employs Elliot Eisman, Mike Vinicore, and others; subject of product strategy commentary. |
| Uncanny X-Men | game | Recent Stern release; undergoing MXV code transformation alongside John Wick; planned for separate Pin Pals episode. |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Code quality and transformation, Game design philosophy and mechanics, John Wick playfield mechanics (BABA/YAGA, crate, scoop, ski-pass), Moments and emotional engagement in pinball
- **Secondary:** Fan layout vs non-fan layout design, Community feedback and player preferences, Product positioning and pricing (Pro/Premium/LE differentiation), Pinball history and legacy (Paragon, Addams Family references)

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.35) — Hosts acknowledge John Wick has solid mechanical design and potential but are critical of core rule design flaws, confusing mechanics, and lack of emotional moments. Hopeful that MXV's revisions will improve the game, but fundamental design issues (BABA/YAGA, multiballs) are seen as inherited liabilities. Tone is analytical and constructive rather than dismissive, with recognition that code work is ongoing.

### Signals

- **[code_update]** John Wick code overhaul by MXV team; version .98 released day before recording, indicating near-completion of transformation from failed 1.0 baseline (confidence: high) — Serge: 'Stern released the new update yesterday... The most recent release yesterday is .98, so it's pretty close'
- **[product_concern]** John Wick's original 1.0 code widely panned by community; failed to deliver expected gameplay experience; required significant rework (confidence: high) — Serge: 'the code started at a 1.0 and sort of failed, I think would be fair to say. A lot of people didn't like it.'
- **[personnel_signal]** Tim Elliot left Stern during John Wick development; transitioned to Play Mechanics; handoff to MXV team brought significant rule direction change (confidence: medium) — Serge: 'He left Stern to go work with another pinball or gaming company... he's taking it in an interesting direction... And that's when the new team came in and brought a fresh direction to this.'
- **[design_philosophy]** John Wick's BABA/YAGA lane system criticized as unintuitive and directly inheriting a problematic 1981 Paragon mechanic; confuses novice and intermediate players (confidence: high) — Serge: 'The least obvious thing to 90% of pinball players... To me, this is an idea that should have died in the eighties. It wasn't enjoyable then, still not enjoyable now.'
- **[gameplay_signal]** John Wick lacks strong 'moments' compared to classic games; multiballs don't feel climactic; Lights Out is only viable moment but even it is subpar (confidence: high) — Serge: 'John Wick is not very good on moments... And I don't think you would say... we wouldn't point to the multiballs as a big moment... There's no showtime.'
- **[product_strategy]** Stern's Premium/LE variants add code-based features (extra multiball, unique mechanics) but fail to market these advantages to justify price premium (confidence: medium) — Serge: 'I do think that for the higher-end models, you should probably add stuff in the code... I think generally that's a good idea... for me, it seems like a relatively cheap way to make those games more valuable'
- **[gameplay_signal]** John Wick Pro and Premium play radically differently; crate mechanic on Premium makes achieving 2X much harder than Pro's easy ski-pass exploit (confidence: high) — Serge: 'on the pro, you could simply rely on... ski pass... The premium is really, really hard to get into the 2X because... the crate will close at different points.'
- **[community_signal]** Discord and YouTube community challenges analytical methodology; argues that game-time data insufficient without code/mech standardization; hosts acknowledge and incorporate feedback constructively (confidence: high) — Jay Schapple: 'any game can be set up to play long or short... Basing anything off... ten games at the Electric Bat league is not enough data'
- **[content_signal]** Pin Pals episode structure shifts toward hyper-detailed code analysis using 10-criterion framework; audience voted for John Wick topic; hosts acknowledge trade-off between depth and accessibility (confidence: high) — Cale: 'Some will say... that this particular deep dive is way too deep... we'll see if it turns off the fans by going as deep as one can go'
- **[product_launch]** John Wick released with inadequate 1.0 code; required major overhaul; follows pattern similar to Uncanny X-Men (also undergoing MXV transformation) (confidence: high) — Serge: 'originally, actually, the vote was for both John Wick and Uncanny X-Men because both are recent Stern games undergoing a radical code transformation, predominantly by Mike Vinicore'
- **[manufacturing_signal]** John Wick units exhibit variability in flipper responsiveness; ski-pass maneuver requires up-nudge on some copies but not others; suggests quality control or wear inconsistency (confidence: medium) — Serge: 'I played some copies where you literally, all you have to do is hold up the right flipper... There are other games where it's not enough oomph when it's coming through the in-lane... try the up nudge.'
- **[market_signal]** Hosts discuss Stern's reluctance to differentiate Pro/Premium/LE through exclusive code features; suggests margin optimization favors code parity over perceived value (confidence: medium) — Serge: 'I think they should also probably advertise that more if you're going to make the premium unique... It seems like they've been hesitant to do that. For me, it seems like a relatively cheap way to make those games more valuable'

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## Transcript

 Hey, what's happening, ladies and gentlemen? You got Cale and Serge here back with another episode of Pin Pals. Which one is this? Cale, this is episode four of the Pin Pals. Oh, good. Man, we are just moving right along. We really are, and we're excited here, and we've hit a groove. We understand the kind of structure we want to go for on this podcast, some deep dives, especially into code, and I think that's what we'll be doing today. Cool. Oh, and what game are we tackling today? Well, Cale, we're doing John Wick. The reason we're going through John Wick is we put it up for a vote on our Discord. We offered ten different options of what our next episode should be, and this was the winner by far. And I think it's because the code started at a 1.0 and sort of failed, I think would be fair to say. A lot of people, by failed, I mean, look, not everyone's going to agree with this, but a lot of people didn't like it. They didn't feel the code from that game. And so MXV, Mike Vinikour, and his team at Stern have redone the code, including a release that just came out yesterday that we'll talk about. And we'll talk about if the code succeeded now that it's changed. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And let's give just a little bit of history on this game. It's the first layout by, what's his name? Elliot Elliot Eismin. Elliot Elliot Eismin. Elliot Elliot Eismin, and then, not Chris Elliot. No, no, he was in Cabin Boy, but. That's right. Some other shows. Tiny Hands. That's right. And then we had Tim Sexton on Code. And he was taking it in an interesting direction. He left Stern to go work with another pinball or gaming company. And that's when the new team came in and brought a fresh direction to this. And this is where we are now. And it's very interesting that we're tackling WIC because there was just, you know, today is Friday. They just released an update yesterday, which was Thursday. Yeah, that's right. And, by the way, I knew Tim Sexton left. I didn't know he joined another pinball company, by the way, but that's interesting. Yeah, he's over at Play Mechanics now. Oh, nice. Nice. Interesting. Well, what I thought I'd do first, Cale, to give our episode some structure is, you know, we give a lot of hot takes on the show, as you know. And any time you give hot takes, you're going to get comments, you're going to get criticism. And I, for one, welcome this. So I thought I'd start the show today and perhaps other shows going forward with comments and corrections about our hot takes from the prior episodes. Is that fair? Love it. Yeah. All right. Let's focus first on the corrections. The quick correction here is that we did a stream of Star Wars, the code the day it came out, and broke it down. And one of the things we talked about is how many modes it has, and I said it's like the most mode-heavy game Stern has made. And the question I want to make is that it's even more modes than I had initially predicted. I initially said that you'd have three totally separate mode pathways. We're talking about Star Wars, Fall of the Empire, the new game from Stern. And there's three different mode pathways that we talked about. There's character modes, there's Java modes, and there's Darth Vader modes. And that is indeed all true. The thing I said is in the character modes, there's eight different characters, and I said they'd each have multiple modes, so there might be eight times two or 16 modes. It turns out there's even more than that. There are going to be three different character modes for each character. So you have eight times three or 24 different character modes, plus you add the three Java modes and a bunch of Darth Vader modes, and you get over 30 modes in this game. And one of the reasons I wanted to make this correction, because I like to be precise, But also, according to my own internal analysis, this game will have the most modes of any Stern release ever, which is awesome. But what I don't know is why they don't market this more. I mean, people love Star Wars, and this game will give people lots of Star Wars. It'll give them modes that play scenes with call-outs. And, like, I feel like that's an under-marketed part of this game, to have the most modes ever, isolated modes that you play scenes of the movie. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And I think you were mentioning in the Discord, there's even an extra multiball in the premium layout, the premium in LE. Yeah, they just added that where the Premium has an extra multiball, which is a pretty cool multiball because in the Premium they have a ramp that goes down and up, and kind of like the Rush ramp that goes down and up, and when the ramp is down, it's a stand-up target. As mechanics go, generally, I don't love that kind of mechanic. I mean, people don't like to hit a dead-end shot that falls back down on a Premium. You know, it's ironic because in Led Zeppelin, where the Pro doesn't have a side ramp from the upper flipper, you hit a dead-end shot, and people are, like, unsatisfied with that. The premium, at least you have a side flipper, upper flipper shot that goes up a ramp. In this game, the premium has a dead-end shot. So I don't love the mechanic, I'll say that. That said, given the mechanic, I think it's smart that they programmed something unique to it, that in this Minoc multiball, which you get after, like, three mystery awards in the scoop, then it lights on the center, and you hit the stand-up repeatedly as many times as you can. sort of like strobe multiball on Attack from Mars with the stand-ups where you just have to hit them over and over and over again. And they have a similar kind of lighting effect where they turn the lights off and you just hit this shot over and over again. And I think that's really cool. I think they should also probably advertise that more if you're going to make the premium unique. You want people, give people a reason to buy it. I always think they frankly that, and I'm not even like an LE buyer anymore. I don't really buy the, don't go in for that. Games have gotten too pricey for me. But I do think that for the higher-end models, you should probably add stuff in the code like they used to do on Tron. You know, there's a separate multiball for the LE there. And I think generally that's a good idea. It seems like they've been hesitant to do that. For me, it seems like a relatively cheap way to make those games more valuable compared to, let's say, adding an entire mech. You know, you add some code. That's what I would say. So, anyway, that's what I think. Great point. Right. They also have done this before with adding multiballs. It's not, like, totally new. I mean, Stern has done this before, for example, with Iron Maiden. has a separate premium mode, you know, from, like, hitting the left ramp, you know, and starting something there, Tomb Treasure and all that. But anyway, that's the update on that correction. I also want to give some comments, and we get a lot of comments from our Pinpal fans out there, and I'll do three selected comments. I'm not going to do the comments where people say how much they like the show, which we very much appreciate, because that is what we love to hear, but that's not as exciting on the podcast. So I'll give three selected comments, and you can always give these comments through our Electric Bat Discord. We're hundreds of pinball enthusiasts, and even the manufacturers themselves join for a lively, excited community. Isn't that right, Kel? That's right, yeah, and if you want to join that, head over to electricbatarcade.com. Click the podcast link, and that will take you to all kinds of ways to listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube and join the Discord. That's right. And one other shout-out for Electric Bat is they're having your seventh anniversary tournament in about a week or so. Isn't that right, Cale? Yeah, October 3rd, 4th, and 5th. October 3rd is the Friday, which is an all-classics tournament. And then your main is on Saturday at finals. The top 16 go in the finals on Sunday. You're going to be there commentating for some of it, right? Yeah, I'll be there on Sunday for the finals. And Ray Day is going to be there. It would be fun to assume that he's in the finals. It would be fun to commentate on his games because he's such a great player and obviously a coder. And tickets are still available. Is that right, Cale, or I made that up on your website? Yep. Yep. They're totally available. Come on. There's plenty. All right. All right. Well, with that, let's get to the comments. Our first comment is from a John S. Maybe that's too obvious. I'll change it to Jay Schappel. and he sent us the following after our last episode where we defended fan layout and we were saying they were inherently faster playing, which is true, than non-fan layouts and we looked at the average game times across 10 different games played at the Electric Bats weekly leagues. And so here's his comment. He said, I just watched your episode three and I think that any game can be set up to play long or short. Basing anything off the game times of 10 games at the bat in league is not enough data. I know Jurassic and Foo Fighters both start games with the default left out lane ball save turned on. And in the Tilt Pinball League that I've managed, two of the longest playing games have been Guardians and Venoms, both fan layouts. On Guardians, I have to make the group virtual lock, pull the out lane rubbers, and make the right out lane ball save extra hard to light. And on Venom, I've been pulling all four out lane rubbers. And then he talks about Godzilla, has been a very consistently long player, so I pull all the out lane rubbers on that game. Other long players are Jaws and Foo Fighters and James Vaunt. So what John is saying is that you really can't decide game time to establish the fact of fan layouts playing faster. And I'll start by saying I have to acknowledge everything John said here. He's a smart guy, and there are far more variables than just the physical layout in determining game times. You know, after all, you could use game code to shorten or prolong any game. You know, you can adjust ball save time. You can allow players to start a game with a multiball, like Quill's Quest on Guardian. and you could have left or right outlane ball saves like on Jurassic Park or Foo Fighters or any sort of game like that. So code, of course, is a huge determinant of how long a game plays for. And yet, having said that, and yet, I believe if you could somehow play all these many games on a white wood with no code, with no art, no mechs, just truly the layout, On average, you'd have longer play times on fan layouts than you would on non-fan layouts. That would be truly hard to prove without the Whitewoods. So instead, I do rely on imperfect data by looking at the 10 games and their average game length. I still think the conclusion is right, even if the data isn't perfect. But I still like the comment because none of us should trust the pinball science, Cale. We should all look at the pinball studies ourselves to see what limitations there are in the methodology of the biased pinball scientist. Isn't that fair, Kel? That is very fair. We have to stay open. Yeah, that's right. All right, that's how we learn. That's how we learn. Two more comments. Next comment is from Chad Cowan on YouTube, who says that fan layouts are fine, but they just don't spark the imagination for me. I definitely enjoy playing them on occasion, but I prefer a layout that tempts a player into creating side-to-side action with an upper flipper, kind of a make-this-shot-or-miss-at-your-apparel. the feeling one gets when making a combo like the wave ramp to the upper playfield ramp on Jaws or the barrel roll combo on King Kong. You just can't replicate that by a fan layout. So my response here is, you know, I hear that. My own opinion is that I don't think fan layouts are better or worse than non-fan layouts. I do think they play faster and that they're harder. And more than anything, I think it's nice to get a mix. And, you know, I don't just like hot dogs or hamburgers. I like hot dogs and hamburgers. and I think pinball needs the variety. And if you look at Stern's games, typically they make one fan layout each year on average, so I don't think it should surprise anyone. Each year it seems to surprise people for some reason, but each year they come out with one fan layout almost always on average, not literally every year. What I thought I could do is even go to this list, and I'm sorry for all those listening, but we're kind of a video podcast, Cale. Would you agree with that? I mean, I like to draw on screens and such. I'll be doing that in here. You need to watch Pimp Pals on YouTube. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that, you know, it doesn't help the drivers unless you're a reckless driver that wants to listen to this podcast. But, you know, we like to draw on screens. But anyway, this is Wikipedia's list of all of Stern's games. And I just want to point out, starting at the bottom here from the most recent ones, Fan Layout, Star Wars, and then Metallica fan layout and John Wick fan layout and Venom fan layout. And we might have to go up a little bit here to, I'll say, Stranger Things and Elvira fan layout and Munsters, at least the pro, without the little play field, but even the premium play field. Maybe Black Knight. Maybe Black Knight. There is some controversy around that. Does a fan layout need to have its shots in the back or can it have it towards the middle or front of the game? I'm not strong on that opinion. I could accept Black Knight, too, at least the pro. So my point is, and then if you keep going up, Guardians and Star Wars in 2017, the Ritchie one, and Aerosmith, the pro, and Batman 66, all of those are fan layouts. So it's like it happens over and over and over again. It's going to happen next year, too. Yeah, you did mention Monsters, right? Was that on there? I did. I did mention Monsters, which is at the back, too. And that's actually two fan layouts. Yeah, a fan within a fan, fanception. even if you get the premium, which is there at the bat, by the way, a cool game. Not great code, but a cool game. Anyway, third and last comment before we get into the meat of the episode today. Rich Ice asks, where are you getting those average game times from? If any of my games last over five minutes, that's a good game. So important reminder here as I share my screen here, the game times we shared in the last video are for four-player games done at the bat. So the actual game time for an Iron Man, which says like 60 minutes here, if you're one single player, would be about four minutes. So in other words, Rich Ice, your five-minute games are just fine and dandy. So just a little clarification if that wasn't clear on the last episode. Fair, Cale? Those are my comment responses. I love that. Great. I think this is an amazing addition to the pinpals. Thank you, Cale. I appreciate your rampant positivity, which I like. Yeah. Okay. On to today's episode. So we're going to talk about John Wick Code, and this was chosen by our audience on Discord, as I said. And originally, actually, the vote was for both John Wick and Uncanny X-Men because both are recent Stern games undergoing a radical code transformation, predominantly by Mike Vinikour, MXV, and his team. But when I started thinking through this, I realized that each game deserved its own focus. What we're going to do is we'll walk through each of our ten criteria for good pinball code, as we've done in prior episodes. And with each criteria, we're going to say, how did John Wick fare with the first attempt at rules before the MXV team got involved with adjusting their rule sets? How are they changing now, hopefully for the better, post-MXV? And then we can add our own thoughts on how we might make the games better for each criteria if we were doing it. Some will say, as we go through this, that this particular deep dive is way too deep and that I am crazy. And I think it's all true. I think I am crazy, and this will be way too deep. And we'll see if it turns off the fans by going as deep as one can go into a rule set. This might be the deepest we've gone yet. What do you say, Cal? I think we need to go to the edge and beyond. Okay. That's our flavor. That's our style. And I'm really glad you're going to get into the transmogrification of the rule. You're going to go over the initial rules and the change because in preparation for this, I was like, hey, you know, let me watch some gameplay. So I head over to the pinball company, Travis Murray. You're right. Great player. Great videos. But he's going over the old rules, and none of it makes sense now if you're playing an updated version. That is true. That is true, absolutely. So that's what we're here for. This is going to be a deep dive, some strategy, all that will go into it. Worth mentioning some caveats here. I should recognize, we should recognize here that pinball code and rules are never done by a single person. So oftentimes I'll be talking about MXV, Mike Vinikour, and, you know, he's the face of the Stern streams. But I do want to credit the work of the entire Stern team when I do dissect code like this. And I also want to recognize that the code is not done yet. The most recent release yesterday is .98, so it's pretty close. and any criticism we have might well be addressed with future updates. And that may even well be the plan, and I just don't know that that's the plan now. In fact, as of this recording, like we said, Stern released the new update yesterday. I've already read it. I've downloaded the README file into my brain. So this analysis will include that, just to reiterate. And with that, I thought what we could start is, again, restate our criteria for good pinball code, our ten criteria. Number one, moments, then theme immersion, then depth and breadth, then clarity, then risk and reward, then fair and balanced, then innovation, then I was so close, which means like pacing, and then bugs. And we'll go through each of those ten, and we're going to start with moments. And my hot take here is that John Wick is not very good on moments, but it's getting a little better. There, I said it, not very good, getting better, not great. And maybe to do that, let's talk through the – what do I mean by moments? I won't define it every episode, but just because we're early in the podcast here, I'm going to give it some parameters. Moments are made by a combination of lights and sounds and rules and play field features. There's no single one way to make a moment. Usually, not always, the game pauses, the call-outs change to something exciting, the lights go crazy, the shaker motor goes off, and you feel the heightened emotion of the moment compared to the entire rest of the pinball game. For that moment to matter to the player, we don't just talk about the moment. We have to talk about the buildup to the moment. Because if you're handed the moment, it doesn't mean as much. You know, in Adam's family, a great moment where you get the multiball going by shooting the chair when it's lit, and then it says showtime. You earn that. You hit the greed letters on the bookcase. The bookcase opens. You do stuff to get there. So we have to talk about the before of the moment and the after of the moment, and that's what we'll do for this. Make sense, Cale? Absolutely. Let's go with it. And so I can explain this by, you know, a little bit better, by getting to the moments in John Wick to the extent that it has moments at all. And for me, there are two main potential contenders for moments in John Wick. I will ask you, Cale, like I don't want to just say them. Do you have an opinion, like what feels like a moment to you in John Wick? The only one I can think of is the Lights Out. That's for me, too, and I think that as well. And it is kind of cool, and so we'll focus really more on the Lights Out. Interesting enough, like, John Wick has three multiballs. I just mentioned a moment in Adam's Family where you get the Adam's Family multiball, the main one, and it's really exciting. And I don't think you would say, and I certainly wouldn't say, we didn't preface, We didn't talk beforehand, by the way, on this, but we wouldn't point to the multiballs as a big moment. They don't feel that amazing when you get into it. There's no showstopper. You know, when you're talking about the car, for example, to light the car, well, on the pro, you have to hit the left orbit, then you bash the car a few times, and then you have to hit the left orbit again. And as soon as you hit the left orbit, you're immediately in multiball. There's no, like, showtime. You know, it's just there's no pause to enjoy a moment. So if you're wondering, like, why we're not pointing out the multiballs, it's for reasons like that. I don't think they are moments. They happen in the game, but I don't feel a true heightened adrenaline, you know, other than the chaos of being in multiball. But it's not comparable to, like, Adam's Family, for example. So anyway, but let me agree with you and say Lights Out. So we're going to start there. And I think it's a cool effect, and the lighting is cool. That's great. It's not a terrible moment, but I don't think it's great. And so to talk about it, we have to talk first, how do you get it? How do you get to Lights Out? Well, deep breath here. You have to spell Yaga on the bottom lanes. And how to spell that is the least obvious thing to 90% of pinball players, including novices but also intermediates. So intermediates at pinball, they know that classic pinball, you have to rotate the lanes in all pinball games with flippers so that the ball goes through an unlit lane when the ball is coming back to an in lane from, let's say, a ramp. And that's standard pinball stuff. But these lanes are not standard, Cale, because they're two separate things to spell in the lanes. And so I'm going to pull that up for you here and share my screen again. All right, here we go. And so if you notice, at the top here, there's BAVA, B-A and B-A. And then below that are separate letters, YAGA, Y-A-G-A. And so it has two things to spell. Pinball loves spelling, you know. It has two things to spell. The Baba, if you light all the Baba ones, it gets you your bonus X. But bonus X is worth very, very little in this game, although it has kind of changed, actually, with the newest code update. We can talk about that, too, where bonus actually can really be built up quite significantly. But for now, the Baba hasn't been that valuable because the bonus X isn't that valuable in this game. It's not like Stranger Things where the bonus really matters. Yaga is how you get your lights out. It lights the center action button. and you could only get a Yaga letter if there is a Lit Baba letter on top of it. And the way I just said it is 100% correct, but I guarantee you that most players still don't get it. And this was used just as confusingly in another game. Do you know what game it was used on, Cale, by the way? I have no idea. I was just about to ask you. Oh, nice. Well, I set us both up for that. It was used in Barracora. 1981's Paracora designed by legendary pinball designer or pinball personality if not designer frequent designer is Roger Sharp and you know the dad of Josh and Zach Sharp and it's a fun game it was made in 1981 and if you look at the top of the game it's got these same things 1, 2, 3 and then 4, 5, 6 the 1, 2, 3 is really easy to light but if you want to light the 4, 5, 6 you have to have a lit 1 and then you go through the unlit four. If you want the five, you have to have a lit two, and then you go through the unlit five, and so forth. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah. To me, this is an idea that should have died in the 80s. It wasn't enjoyable then, still not enjoyable now. I get the rule. It's not like I don't get the rule, but it's not fun, is what I'd say. But it gets a little bit worse than that. You have to know how to definitely move the lanes and spell Yaga. And it's a different flipper for each, which also makes it confusing, by the way. It's like one flipper does the Baba, the other flipper does the Yaga. And the pro and the premium play very differently in this regard. So on the pro, when the most easiest shot in the game is really the scoop, it's a very wide scoop. You could even plunge into the scoop. And so what great players will do on John Wick is they'll plunge into the scoop, fine. The ball comes out, feeds into the in lane, which lights, when you first start the game, would light the B, like that. And then you ski pass. And for those who don't know, a ski pass is you hold up the right flipper and then the ball comes to the left. It rolls down and then you shoot this again. Then the ball comes back and now it will go through the B again, although you have to move your flippers to make sure the B is now lit over that. It'll then go through the G, you ski past, and you do it again. And while this process is happening, you are definitely moving the letters so that you can always go through a lit B with an unlit G. And if you do this four times, the first time to light the B, sorry, five times, I meant to say, the first time to light the B and the next four times to go repeatedly light the G in Yaga, to spell Yaga, you will light your action button. It's a pretty safe maneuver. That's the standard play. And a good player on a pro can always be in 2X. It actually, it's funny, this moment happens, like, very, very frequently with good players. You're, like, constantly in 2X if you want to be because that move is so safe. Yeah, and I've noticed a lot of players doing that on, And I think I saw, I watched a stream at the lab out of Riverside, California, where people were playing it like that. On Travis Murray's video, one idea he had was to do that short plunge, of course, into, what is that? Is that the trunk shot? What is that? What is that called? A weapon? Well, this is the weapons crate. I don't know. I call this thing the mode start. Or right screw. Okay, well, the mode start. All right, so it feeds your right flipper. He suggested go for the stand-ups on the left to get your left out lane, the ball save going, because you have like an eight-second ball save, right? That is a totally fair point. The thing I just mentioned, you don't need to do this right away on ball one. In fact, you might want to prep stuff because you don't want to use the 2X right away. I shouldn't have implied that. I meant to imply that the 2X is always achievable. The lights out is always achievable at any point in the game. Just hit into the scoop and do that thing I said repeatedly. If you were truly just a very ball one, I wouldn't actually do that right away because you don't need the 2X right away. You need to get your ball save. You need to get your modes prepped, your multi-balls prepped. So I actually agree with Travis there. The first thing you should actually do is shoot this. If you get these two stand-ups two times, that will light your out-lane ball save. So totally agree there to clarify that. And then after that, I might even start prepping these multiballs, the car and the Winston Captival bash there. So no argument there on that point. Anyway, cool. This is a pro, and so the pro, though, is quite easy. My point is to get into the 2X. The premium is really, really hard to get into the 2X because on the premium, you have this big meatball here, this giant rectangular object. And, you know, if you haven't seen many rectangular objects in pinball, there's a reason for it, Cale, in my opinion. That there's not many objects in pinball that are rectangular because when you hit this thing on the undersurface, it just goes, rolls along here and then out over and over and over again on the premium if you've played the premium much. I don't mind the concept of a bash toy there. I just, I wouldn't have made it a rectangle. I guess a crate is a rectangle, but there we have it. I don't know. That's my opinion on it. But anyway, what it does is it means you can't repeatedly hit the scoop and do the thing I was talking about. The crate will close at different points. And so you have to earn it. You have to really earn the 2x on premium. You have to, like, make a ramp and then change the letters and make that ramp and change these letters or make that ramp. It's much, much harder, whereas on the pro, you could simply rely on the over and over again strategy of ePass. One last thing I'm going to say on the ski pass. I played some copies where you literally, all you have to do is hold up the right flipper and do what I said. You just hold up the right flipper, and the ball will come there. There are other games where it's not enough oomph when it's coming through the in-lane, you know, the in-lane speed right there. And so what some players will do, like Z-Mac quite often, for example, who's good at nudging, will push the game up. So it's pushing the game up right at the point that the ball is right here to give it that extra oomph to make it to the left flipper. You don't have to do that on all games. You might have to do that on some. So if it doesn't work, just naturally holding up the flipper, try the up nudge. Anyway, that's my comment on how to get to the Baba Yaga, the lights out, I should say, moment. We didn't talk about the moment itself, but I'll pause there. Any questions on getting to it, Cale? One question on the – I haven't played the premium or LE much. How do you lift the crate? Do you just bash it to lift the crate on the premium? That's right. repeated hits to the crate. Three, usually, for the beginning of the game. And so I claim that, number one, about this lights-out moment, that I don't like how you get there. I can't enjoy the lighting letters under other letters. I'm not going to enjoy it. You can't make me. And it ends up becoming actually trivial. Right, most of the time that happens on accident, right? That's what I see with most players, is the problem with it. Right, because most players are not doing the depth lane changes. I was re-watching one of our streams, and you were interviewing Faye, and you asked her how was she able to play these multi-balls and pay attention to that and the lanes, and she kind of admitted she was like, well, I wasn't even paying attention to the lanes. It just kind of happened. Yeah, I'm sure now she pays attention to it. Maybe I was early in the game, but absolutely. And there's a lot of players. Let's talk about the moment itself. The award for the moment, it lights out, the lights go out, which is really cool. That part I have no problem with. The award for the moment is you get to 2x the play field. Cool, I guess, but honestly, most players don't care about that. If you're a journey player who cares about getting into the theme and connecting with the modes and shooting bad guys, you're not feeling that connection when you get 2x. You know, think about Adam's family. When you get that chair shot, you're in the multiball. Big callout, it matters. so you could do something new in the game. In Jurassic Park, you make the smart missile shot, you get Raptor, you get Chaos, or all sorts of other great things. You make actual progress in the game in those cases. In this game, you strictly get a scoring boost for it. And that's going to be a theme as we dissect this code, that to me, it's an over-reliance on scoring features at the expense of story advancement. And you could do both in a game. I'm not saying I only want story, like I'm a story player. I love score. I love playing at tournaments at the bat. But I want both. You know, I want that something for a journey player. And, in fact, journey players might not even start the lights out even once they get to it because, well, it turns off the lights. And it actually hinders your advancement in the mode progress. You don't see it there. It's an interesting idea. Right. But it's, you know, and I don't hate it and keep it in, but it doesn't serve as the – it lacks impact, I'd say, for those reasons. It's just how you get there is sort of wonky and what you get when you get there is sort of wonky. The moment itself is cool. But that's what I want to talk about, not just the moment, but the earning of the moment and what you – the after of it, what you get out of it. So I'll pause there. That's my analysis of why I think the lights out is an okay moment but not great. Would you hate that, Cale? 100%. And it's really funny, the stress level between, you know, I'm just at the arcade playing for fun or if I'm in a tournament, and you know that mode is ready. The action button starts lighting up, right? And if you're just playing for fun, yeah, why not go for it? But you're in a tournament. You're thinking, oh, I need this many points to get past this person. That's when the stress level goes up. Do I do it or do I not do it? 100%. And you may not even do it. So I like the stress level, and it works especially in a tournament because it's a scoring feature. But it's just not a long-term journey player feature. And I think pinball games need to have both. They need to respond to both kind of players. And often it's one player that likes both things. It's not just like they're separate groups. So that lights out. There is one other potential moment to talk about in the game, and it's especially apt to talk about it today because they've revamped it very strongly in the latest code update, and that's the adversary battles. By that I mean these five different battles right here. You played John Wick, Kale, a lot. How often have you got into these adversary battles? I have no idea. No idea. No idea like it's low or no idea like you just don't know. I don't know what I'm in or what's going on. Thank you for saying that. You've teed me up very, very well, Cale, on that point. And I promise audience that are listening, you pen pals fans, we did not discuss this ahead of time. We're going to say that repeatedly as we go. Cale is your good natural pen ball player, that's for sure. but you're not a deep dive rule person like me, right? Like you play the game, you learn the game. And so I think games have to respond to you. I think games, you're the player that like games should be coded for to send the message to let you know that you're in it. And you set me up really well for this. And that's the problem is that do you even know when you're in it? Let's talk about the before of this moment and how you get there. Well, the first thing you need to talk about to get to this is you need to kill enemies. Enemies are these blue circles that sometimes light up on different shots around the play field. And you need to get a bunch of them. In version 1 of this code, pre-MXV, it was kind of especially dumb. It was a variable number of enemies you'd have to kill and a whole lot of them. Now you just have to kill 10. So the adversary mode is easier to achieve. I like that. Though, most players are still never focusing on it because they don't tell you how to get it in the game. For example, there's no call-outs along the way, you know, that tell you, for example, like you have to kill 10 enemies to light the adversary right And there nothing like where Common you know like the rapper Common let say who played like Cassian in John Wick there no call from him that says like only five enemies left until you face me You know, like, that would be pretty cool if you were like, whoa, okay, something is happening. I just have to make some progress. So there's no call-outs that show you progress to it, right? There's no inserts that show you progress to it. You know, there's nothing in the center of the play field that says you have this many enemies left until you get to this place. And so the buildup to the moment is not there. What I want you to imagine is imagine a center insert at the center of the play field that showed you how many enemies you have left to kill. So I'll show you, for example, this is like an AI mockup, for example, so not drawn to size. And I did this in like one second. So don't judge the art or anything about it. I'm not an artist. But imagine a center insert that said, enemies left to kill. Sorry about that. Enemies left to kill with, like, a number counting down, you know, at the center of the play field. So that would have, like, a built... That would build you up to, like, whoa, I have to focus on that. You know what I mean? What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's great. Sort of like TNA. And I love that it's... Sorry, you can go on. Yeah. But I love that you put it, like, You put it right on the play field where people are looking because, you know, they didn't set this up for it. There's no insert for it. So naturally, if a new team comes in, they're like, well, we put it on the display. You're in the heat of battle. You're not looking up there. Correct. It is on the display on, like, the top left, and it says enemies remaining, but it's not prominent. There's no call outs. There's no insert. and you could say I'm judging unfairly because there's a new co-team that's coming in but the adversaries were always planned for this game. There was a different way to get them. There was different rules in the adversaries that they've changed but the adversaries themselves as a concept were always there. And it was always a number of enemies to get to them even from the jump. And so it's baffling to me that they didn't include inserts here for that. And I know in the last episode or two ago I was talking about how King Kong has way too many inserts, which is true, but you could also have way too few. I'm not talking about a lot of inserts. I'm talking about one for one of the main moments that you're trying to make a moment in the game. It's not like this is a new concept. Other games have done this. Walking Dead right there has a number for last man standing. That's how many kills you've had of zombies. Ghostbusters, how many ghosts you've caught along the way, that's there on the bottom. I don't particularly love these inserts. I'm not saying that's a great example of an insert with like 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, but it's there. But maybe the best example, as you said, is TNA because TNA uses an LCD like, for example, at the top in the upper play field. And I promise I didn't prompt you with that, Cale. You said TNA on your own. But TNA is like the best example of this. It's very simple, and it's got this very clear insert. You know when your reactor is ready because that number goes from zero to 100 when you do stuff in that area. So imagine this LCD insert instead. Sorry, imagine that LCD insert here at the center of John Wick, and it had enemies left to kill with, like, a scary skull and crossbones thing, and then it had a counter going down. You would be into that, wouldn't you, Cale? Genius, yeah. Hopefully some modders are paying attention and you can pull out your router, cut a big hole in the play field and add this. It's like ice fishing. basically. Why? All right. All right. So we're still talking about adversary, and we're talking about getting there. So it doesn't prompt you along the way to get there. That's one problem. Once you are there, it doesn't really tell you well that you are there. And that's why I'm glad you mentioned how, you know, you didn't even realize when you were there or when it was ready. So I'm going to show you a few videos, Cale, okay? These videos, let's say, hold on one second. These videos that I'm going to show you, I'm going to set up the looping on here. I want you to tell me on these videos what you need to shoot for when you're watching this video, okay? And I haven't prepped you. Okay. Well, I think it's real obvious that's center shot, right? Right. And this is Hand of the King, a big moment in Game of Thrones. It's a fan layout. But its code is real fleshed out, you know. And when you get to the Hand of the King, boy, you know it. It strobes towards that center shot. It seems like an obvious choice. Dwight is the best in the business when it comes to letting people know that something big is happening. The coding is sometimes imbalanced. The scoring, rather, is sometimes imbalanced for these things. Hand of the King is actually great scoring. But generally, he knows how to make it the lighting, make a moment sing. You know, here is another example right here. And, Cale, what are you going to shoot for in this Ghostbusters game? Oh, that amazing left ramp, which is so much fun. Looping supers. Yep, and it's there right here on the screen up there. Looping supers is ready. You hit that left ramp. Look at that shrub. I'm going to show one more example of this, Cale. And, all right, tell me in this video what you want to do. Well, there it is. Well, this is that mode shot, right? Right. And here it's the collect. It's the mode collect. The game is telling you, if you make this shot, something big will happen. And you actually score the whole value of your mode in Pulp Fiction if you make that shot. And the lighting goes crazy after you get it. A moment is made out of it. You know what I mean? And you clearly know what to go for. Now I will show you John Way. All right. hold on I'm going to put the loop on here okay yes I did set up some prep work here so let me mute that alright Cale what are you going for this is like a cruel trick it is cruel right so if I notice I want to point out how many things are flashing here okay alright there's a flashing light this is going to restart so I can show you There's a flashing light. That pop bumper is flashing. These stand-ups are flashing. That left eject is flashing. The flasher is flashing. That one is going off. Not just are there lots of the ball save here is going. Not just that there are a lot of lights going, right? Like pinball has lights fine, I guess. But half of the lights are flashing. How do you know that this thing matters? It turns out the thing that actually matters, this is the adversary battle. That's lit right now for this player. That left eject is lit. why they didn't decide to strobe it is like baffling to me, I would say, and still haven't strobed it to my knowledge, even with the code readme file. I might be wrong on that. I've read through the file. I don't see it there, and maybe they're doing it in the future. But it's not like there are no inserts there. There's a whole bunch of inserts there. Strobe, this one, then this one, then this one. It should be like such a standard thing in the pinball code that you just Control-C, Control-V, do a strobe effect, you know, for this shot when it's lit. Is that crazy, Cale? No, not at all. And what you're talking about, I mean, this is a problem with, like, almost every Jersey Jack game. It's just, like, too much lit, you know, when the coders are not directing you as to what to do. Yeah, and we'll talk about this perhaps in a future episode, like the purpose of lighting. And to me, lighting has four main purposes. Attraction, you want to bring people to the game. Jersey Jack, big checkmark on that one. making moments out of a game. And sometimes Jersey Jack does that. Like, Guns N' Roses has great song moments. Feels awesome when you're playing it. Rules, conveyance, zero out of ten for, like, Jersey Jack there because, like, you know, they totally fail. A lot of people say Jersey Jack has great lighting. To me, it has some of the worst lighting in pinball. It has good mechanics. Like, the actual lighting bulbs are very nice. But because they don't use it well, right, they don't actually tell you anything with the rules with those lights at all. Like, that's a fail. It's a core part of lighting. You know, and I just showed Hand of the King and Pulp Fiction and Ghostbusters. Like, that is light, using lighting to make a moment because, you know, you have to shoot that thing and that thing matters. And it's a rule. It tells you to do something. If we go back to Jurassic Park, it has a green dinosaur light and orange humans, and you have to save those, you know, humans from the dinosaur. That's using lighting to make rules for a player. By the way, the fourth thing I would say is theme immersion. You could use lighting also back to Jurassic Park. That's also theme immersion. When you have a green dinosaur light, it's not like attraction. It's not like it's a big lighting. It's not a big moment either. But it's rules and it's theme immersion pretty cleanly. And that does it well. And so I'm just saying John Wick can do a lot better with that. It doesn't give you the information to a player like yourself who's a good pinball player, But without a huge depth of rules knowledge, it doesn't – not to call you out there, Cale, but it doesn't give you that clue. What say you? Yeah, yeah, you're totally right. And to that point, this is – George Gomez talks a lot about this in pinball and just gaming in general where less is more. when you have these certain constraints where maybe you don't have 100 million LEDs, you end up making a better, more concise game when there are some guardrails set up. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's like art works when it has constraints. You know, it's like, this is a digression, but for those super film buffs out there, like Lars von Trier made this movie called The Five Constructions, I think it is, where he challenged this director to make movies in five different constraints. Like, you only can have eight-second edits, or it has to be animated. And it's the same story over and over again, filmed five different ways. And the theory behind that experimental artistic movie was that the more constraints you put on something, the more beautiful the art is. You know, like Mario Brothers, they only had, like, three chords, I think, to make a song, because the old Nintendo didn't have the capability. But damn if that song isn't catchy. You know what I mean? And when you have an oral orchestra, that's when you fail, actually. But anyway, that's a digression into some art. We're going to do an art episode one day, I think. I'm not an art expert, but we're still going to do an art episode, you know, that way. All right. So back to the moment. The last thing I'm going to say is, like I said, it should be strobing. But that's standard pinball. There is one thing that I think all pinball games should do, and literally no pinball games have done yet in lighting, and I don't understand it to my knowledge, no games, you could tell me if I'm wrong, when something is ready, the good coders, like Dwight, for example, will strobe towards the shot. But I would advocate for making the entire play field strobe towards the shot. And here's what I mean. Let's say you have the adversary lit. What I want to see is that the lights start here, then go there, then go there, then go there, there, there, and focus on this part, and then strobe on this part heavily. Think about like a baseball wave going, you know, at a stadium, going from the right to the left and focusing, where the entire play field is in service to let you know that something big is about to happen, not just on one shot, but the entire play field. Now, for me, like that would be a moment. Yeah, and the effect you're talking about, you'll see a lot during attract mode. Yeah, exactly. But do it in game is what I'm arguing for. not everything lit at once but the attract mode of like strobing towards from one side to the other towards a shot and i know what the coders will say some will say well yeah but if everything's if that's happening then you know how do you know if the captive ball is lit for the multiball and the other thing or whatever and i would say to that i overrule that i'd say maybe you could still make progress in those other things if you want but but make it a moment you don't have to turn off the code for everything else, or maybe you even should, if you make that moment very valuable, players will want to go for that anyway. So make it valuable, make the scoring high, and then make players go for that one lit shot. Use the whole playfield lights to achieve it. So I believe you should bring a little bit, not too much, not like Jersey Jack levels, but you should bring... A few moments later. Hey everyone, slight internet issue, but we're back here, we are live again, and I just wanted to follow up that last point, just saying that I think that all games should use the entire playfield to strobe towards a shot, and then with that, that covers the subject of how we get to the adversary mode, and now we can finally talk about the adversary mode itself. Is it a moment? In my opinion, it didn't used to be, but now it is. They actually did make it very special, now with this latest code drop just yesterday. So, in what it used to be, is you used to get into these adversary modes, and you'd have to hit a whole bunch of shots. After you hit, like, by a whole bunch of shots, I mean, like, 12 shots. And after you hit the 12 shots, then you could collect the bonus, the award that you built through those 12 shots at the left saucer, or scoop, I should say. And it doesn't stop there, though, because you'd have to hit five things to light the collect somehow without draining. So you'd have to hit this blood oath marker, the red circle pop bumper, the car, the captive ball, and the crate on the right. You'd have to hit all of that and make 12 shots, and then it would light the scoop. And it just wasn't happening for a lot of people. And so what that ended up meaning is that the adversary battles did not have a lot of value in the end. They didn't build up enough to other things you could do in the game. So what they did now is the 12 shots, they made it a lot fewer. It's about half as much. It depends on the mode, but it's like half as much as you need to beat the mode. That's how many shots you need to do. So it's fewer shots. And then once you're there, there's a callout for it, and then you have to hit the Blood Oath marker only, and then you can hit the scoop for collect. So it makes it a lot easier to achieve the collect, and then they did even better. When you get in that scoop, it gives you a choice. It used to just collect for you, but then it gives you a choice, and it says, do you want to collect or do you want to keep going? If you keep going, then it makes all the rest of the shots worth two times as much. And then again, you make a bunch of shots, you hit the Blood Oath marker, and then you can collect again. When you get back in, it asks you again, do you want to collect or not? And you could then, if you say no, you keep on playing the mode, you could get to 3x value of the collect. And then if you do it again, you could get to 4x value, and it maxes at 4x. And nobody has to memorize all this, but the point is that, number one, that mode now is easier to collect so you can complete the mode, but at the same time they made it far more valuable with a lot more risk and reward. And they also boosted the value of the shots in these modes too, so just overall they treated it really well, and I think they gave it the moment it deserves. It's still a problem building to that moment. I don't think that works, but I think the moment itself is good now. Is that fair, Cale? Yeah. Bravo, Stern team. John Wick is headed in the right direction now. Yeah, that's the right direction, no question. And from the readme file, it gets even better. They added a progress meter to the adversary battles. So in the animation, I haven't seen it, but that's what the readme file says. And they've also upped the actual volume of the callouts when the collect that I described is ready. so you actually know when you've made enough shots because without knowing how many shots you need for the collect, it breaks the anticipation. You know, you have to know, oh, I was right there. I just need one more shot, and then I have this 50 million point collect ready to go. And so you want to inform the player along the way, and from what I've read, they've done that, and I look forward to playing it. The other last thing to say is, you know, I said there's like the moment, there's the before of the moment and the after of the moment. So let's talk about the after of the moment. with the new code, they've added a specific light show for collecting that escape. So when you make a bunch of shots, and then you hit the Blood Oath marker, and then you get in that scoop, and you're getting call-outs to let you know that it's ready for you to do, which is important. Once you get in that scoop, once you collect, a big light show goes off in the game. It makes you feel like you accomplished something, and that was missing before, too. So I think they've done good there. And really, that's the first criteria we were going to cover, moments. I know that took a while. Maybe the other ones won't take as long. We'll see. Any question on moments, Cale? No, you nailed it. Alright, next category is theme immersion. And John Wick's actually good on theme immersion with the code. Not great, but good. First, let's cover the good. What's good about it? And again, I'm talking about rules. I'm not talking about the layout. Does the car, does the crate, is that good theme immersion? The art? There's other ways to get a theme immersion, but I'm just saying purely with the code doesn't do well with theme immersion. So lights out, for example. That's pretty good theme immersion. You know, Donnie Yen in the movie was blind, you know, and so lights out, it makes sense. And then you have the enemies. You can have one, two, or three enemies lit on shots, for example. And so when you shoot that ramp, let's say, when enemies are lit, if one enemy is lit and you shoot the ramp, it'll show John Wick killing one person on screen, and if two, he'll be killing two people, and three, he'll kill three people. And that's good theme immersion, I would say. I don't think the blue inserts actually help you feel it in particular because they're these little tiny blue circles that represent enemies. They're not particularly threatening, you know, I would say, so much so that players don't even notice them when they're playing, and instead they notice this big colorful arrow that takes up the attention. So I don't particularly think the inserts help you in that way, but it's still good theme immersion nonetheless. And then another good thing is they programmed the Stern lighting speaker system, speaker lighting system, I should say. It was designed in conjunction with killing the enemies. So, you know, it flashes when you kill the bad guys. And that's good theme immersion. All of that's good. Does that work for you, Cale? Yeah, right. Especially if you notice, if you're watching the LCD, when a gunshot goes off, it'll be timed with those speaker lights, which is kind of cool. Exactly. Exactly. That's all perfect. I like that. What would I say keeps it from being great at theme immersion? Originally, let's talk about version 1.0, the enemies blocked your shots. So when you made a shot, if there were enemies on it, you would get, like, essentially zero value to the shot. And that doesn't make sense theme-wise. I mean, John Wick, he notoriously, he mows down his enemies by the hundreds, you know. In the first release, they stopped you, the enemy stopped you, and you got no points. That didn't really make thematic sense to me. And even worse, it forced the game to be low scoring. And can I take a digression rant on scoring in games for a second, just generally? So I think that all modern games should have you score in the tens or hundreds of millions if you're playing for a decent game, and I think Stern usually gets this. If you notice most of their games, it's the same kind of scoring kind of thing. That's just good psychology. I think nobody enjoys walking up to Dialed In and a good game is 80,000 points or whatever. Like, I don't think people enjoy that. You can't make me think that people enjoy that. I don't think a lot of people hate it necessarily, but I think you can make more people happy by just giving them millions of points. You don't want to take it crazy. You don't need to do Johnny Mnemonic where it's, like, billions of points or whatever. Right. And also, like, from Mars goes high in that regard. I think there's a sweet spot. But I think, you know, it's ironic with JJP, because their early games have low scoring, that it's ironic because a lot of people are like, well, their lighting and their sounds, it's like Vegas, it's like bells going off and everything. And you think that, and I agree with that, and you think that they understand that a big jock pat alert, you know, if we were at Caesars Palace, you know, and the slot machine went off, and all the lights went off, and then a flash that you made $85, You know, I don't think that's getting everyone excited, you know. Right. And so I don't get why they love, like, the slot sounds and the lights and all of that, but then they give you, like, 80 points or whatever. That just never made sense to me. They fix that. The newer games at JGP don't do that, to be clear. But I just think that's, like, an own goal. You know, like, I get making pinball is hard and coding is hard. And, you know, but we use the base 10 system in the world. Let's take that base 10 system out for a ride. You know what I mean, Cale? Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I want to see more games that take points away. Oh, that's interesting. That wouldn't work for, the tournament players would hate it. And there have been opportunities for that in different games. I think JJP Pirates had something like that where you could steal points through, like, a mystery liar's dice kind of thing, if I recall. WHO dunnit? But whodunit is another example, actually. So it's like sometimes it's good and it could be theme immersion, but I don't think it makes the scoring people happy. I wouldn't say. And I would say one exception to my scoring rant is if you're making, like, a classic game, even as a modern one like Beatles or Pulp Fiction or Bond 60th, those are fine. I don't need millions of points in Bond 60th. I think it's cool that it has low scoring for, like, classic games. But it's a modern game. Like, it has all sorts of mechs and everything. like put some real scoring in that all right rant over except you accept that rant kill and do you disagree or agree no i totally agree okay good uh all right back to uh the game um so uh in point in version two uh post mxv world here they made a really big improvement in the enemies to me instead of blocking the shots and giving you no points when you hit a shot with an enemy on it which is bad theme immersion and bad scoring. Now they do the exact opposite. The enemies actually make the shot worth more. So if there's one enemy on the shot, it makes it worth 2x, and then two enemies would be 3x, and four enemies would be 3x. I think I said that right. So anyway, it just makes the shot more valuable. Most of the time players don't notice these enemies, but for better players, if you notice a shot is lit and there are two shots lit, One has enemies, one don't. You know, you might take that shot because it's worth more. Because, you know, John Wick is a badass. He's not a beta male who's afraid of bad guys. You know, he's there to take those enemies down. Fair? Yeah, absolutely. All right, I want to give one other idea, though, why I think that things that hold John Wick from being great theme immersion. And I'm going to do an experiment, and it might fail here, Cale, but I'm going to try it. We didn't prep this, again, so it might blow up in my face. But tell me, I'm going to give you different games and different modes, and I want to see if you know what to do in those modes. Okay? All right. Iron Maiden, Flight of Icarus. Do you know what you have to do in that mode? No, I have no idea. All right. Fair enough. Juggernaut and Deadpool. I don't play that game. I don't play that game much. But, you know, I'm not going to know any of these. I'm just not a rules guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, I'll try one more, and then I'll expect that this experiment fails, okay? Do you play Deadpool? Do you play Deadpool? I do. All right, Juggernaut. Do you know what to do in Juggernaut? Shoot the lid shots. All right, fine. I accept. And you know what? We're going to keep that in. Don't edit it out, Cale. Because, you know, I was asking players yesterday at a league night for a tilt here in Arizona, and I was asking them, like, can you tell me the rules of Juggernaut? Can you tell me the rules of Flight of Icarus in Iron Maiden? Can you tell me the rules of Foo Fighters, New Orleans? And they can. And then I ask them, hey, tell me any mode in John Wick, any one of the seven. You pick it and tell me what you do with it. And none of them could tell me other than hit the lit shots. And for me, I'd say, like, that's bad theme immersion because the modes don't mean anything to you other than, oh, I have to hit some lit shots. They're supposed to mean something. There's, like, escort to VIP and assassination and heist. but practically they just don't mean anything. And I think you could remember the modes better. Now, in fairness, Steelman, the argument against what I just said is a player like you doesn't really think about the modes anyway, necessarily. And so that's okay. I don't want to, you know, it's not a strong point then. All right. That's it for theme immersion. You good there? Good. All right. Next category is breath. And here's where I'm really going. If you don't think I've done it so far, here's where I'm really going to dissect the game rules even further than I have so far. And if you're not really into deep dives, we've been on one already, but you can skip ahead. I'm specifically talking to you, Jamie, of the JBS show here. Unless you're really into this kind of, like, detailed-driven ASMR-type stuff, and then I hope you're sleeping well. But get your pillows, okay? So I would say John Wick's average and breadth for a modern scurrant, like, what is there really to do in this game? practically everybody plays this game the exact same way. You prep a mode by hitting and bashing this area, and then the scoop lights, and then you prep a multiball, typically by getting the car ready or the captive ball ready. And you stack them together, and then you rinse and repeat. That's the basic premise of the game. And so when I say breath, I mean we're going to – Hey, can I ask you one thing? Yeah, sorry. Tell me. Didn't you mention there were three multiballs in this game? Yes, there are. And notice I didn't talk about, and I will actually in this section, there's this CaptiBall. They all have names we can get into, CaptiBall and Carr and this Dance Club excommunicado type multiball. The reason I haven't mentioned this one so far and I'm about to here is in the version 1.0, this thing was very hard to get, this third one. To get at this dance club or excommunicado multiball in version 1.0, you had to hit these two and actually three stand-up targets. Get all of them. You had to hit them like twice. Three times, actually. So nine total stand-up targets. Three at a time. And only then was the shot lit for that multiball. The problem with that is the type of player who is hitting nine stand-up targets to get there and somehow surviving is not the type of player who then notices a multiball is even lit after that. The two things are incongruous, is what I mean. It's like hitting a bunch of stand-ups is something not great players do. And then making a tight shot afterwards, the tightest shot in the game entire, is something great players do. And so the high-scoring multiball, to get it, you had to bumble your way to get there. Now, the only reason I knew about that multiball was because that was a – you would get a badge for that. That was one of the contracts. Okay. And with Insider Connected. Yeah. Which was a cool way to get people to kind of learn the rules of the game. They'll probably have to do that again with the new rules, right? Yeah, and we're going to talk about innovation later in code. And that was an innovation to have contracts timed events where you had to go play John Wick. I know that helped you guys at the arcade with Coindrop, right? Absolutely. And so while I'm on the subject of this multiball, version 2.0 is a lot better. In version 2.0, you just shoot that shot a whole bunch, and the more stuff you do in here, the more it bounces around and hits stand-ups, the more these lights will go off, and then it says max over there. and when you're there, then the multiball is ready. So you have to hit this hard shot a bunch of times, but if you have a good shot in there and it bounces around, you can prep it. And then to start it, you either have to hit it there or you could even skill shot it through a, not a diverter, but it's sort of an open gate there at the top, and then that would start it. And I think that makes more sense to use the dance club to get the dancing going. You know what I mean? I think that's a good idea. Way more sense. Yeah. But back to breath here, you know, like all games, You have, or a lot of modern games, I should say, you have modes, multipliers, modes, sorry, multiballs, I should say, is the third one, and missions or side quests. And this game, at first blush, is no different. Modes, it has the scoop to start the modes. On modes, there's one mode path in the scoop. I believe that nearly all games would benefit from having multiple mode paths. I've mentioned Jurassic Park in the past. It has control rooms. It has T-Rex modes. You could look at Deadpool. It has battles, but it also has quests, if you get the chimichangas. James Bond has Mayan villains, but also has the henchmen and specter weapons and Q modes. The new Star Wars has character modes and Vader modes and Java events. And for me, that's like the future of good coding. I think when you have modes, it's not just enough to have modes, and it's not about how many modes you have. Like, it has seven modes. That's quite a bit. That's fine. And Deadpool only has five modes in it with the quests and the battles. But Deadpool is better because it has two different paths to get to those. You're doing different things to light them, you know, to accomplish that. And that's the breadth. It gives players different directions to play in the game. Whereas in this game, even though it has seven modes, more than Deadpool, you have to do the same thing over and over and over again to get in that mode. Okay, I have to hit this and then go in here and hit this and go in there and over and over and over again. and then I ski past and hit it again to light it and get it ready. And it's just the same process over and over again can get stale, and that's what's necessary for breadth is different options, in my opinion. What do you say to that? Yeah, yeah. You nailed it. Once again. Thank you, Cal. You're a good hype man. For the electrical engineers in the audience, I would say, you know, think about, like, resistors in parallel, not just in series, you know, kind of thing. And plus, the single mode pathway in this game actually doesn't really give you choice of mode. Theoretically, it does. A lot of people don't know this. But when the mode is ready to go, the mode that starts will be the last shot you hit before you start the mode. And to clarify that, there's seven modes here with seven inserts. And each insert represents a shot. So this mode is this shot. And this mode is this shot. And that mode is that shot, et cetera. Right? for the rest of the seven, and hopefully I'm drawing carefully here. And so if I make, let's say, this right orbit shot, and then after making this right orbit shot, it comes around and I immediately hit the scoop before hitting another shot, that's how you start this mode. Does that make sense? Wow. And you didn't know that, right, Kel? I had no idea. Yeah, who knew that? Yeah, other games like Foo Fighters, they give you a choice. Which mode do you want to play? Do I want to play New Orleans? Do I want to play Los Angeles? Or King Kong? Do I want to play Saban? Do I want to play Pterodactyl? A lot of modern CERN games give you a choice. This one doesn't, and I think that's a mistake. It's an illusion of choice. And what I mean there is when you play this game, I bet you've played the same two to three modes over and over and over again without maybe realizing it. And the reason is that how unlikely is it, do you think, for players to hit this scoop, immediately bounce, and then hit that when it's ready. It's such a hard shot. People, the shots that are made are things like the right orbit a lot, for example, or the left ramp. So you often see this mode and that mode over and over and over again, the Marquis de Grimond or whatever it's called. You know, like you're seeing the same modes over and over again. And almost nobody, for example, hits the dance club shot, then comes back and makes that scoop to start a shot. So you're like almost nobody ever sees this white mode as an example, this fourth one. Does that make sense? Yeah, but I'm going to try it now. Right, try it out. You'll see that when you make any shot, the circle that's lit will move. And it's especially going to be important to think this through because we're going to talk about this later. they added perks. When you beat a mode, each mode has a specific perk. So you might want some modes over others, you know, to be clear. And so it's worth going through. So I think that not only is there one mode pathway, but in a sense, even though you technically can choose modes, practically, you don't choose modes, I think, in this game. And so it ends up being a restricted two to three modes that everyone is playing over and over and over again because they don't give you the choice. And frankly, I don't get why they don't give you the choice. I think, you know, like player choice is helpful in this context. It's proven over many games. You can't win me over on this point, especially if you're going to tie perks to the modes where it really becomes important to play certain modes over others. So that's my comment on modes and what's sort of lacking in breadth on that. Any question before I go on to the rest of the multiballs? Yeah. If I going into a tournament and you know how I always like Serge what do I do Which mode should I try for So I give you a very specific answer here and unfortunately it requires me to go to skip ahead to this All right, so here are the seven modes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, with the shots that I mentioned that you have to hit before starting the mode. and the answer is left ramp. So hit the left ramp and if you do that and then beat the mode, you can play that mode and maybe bring a multiball into it and while you're in the mode, if you can beat it, the perk for that is you get your multiballs extended and what that means is while you're playing the multiball from then on, you could do it once per ball. As soon as you get down to one ball, the multiball will restart. You don't have to press a button. It just happens automatically. So it's a very obvious answer to me. Always start, if you have the choice of going for a mode, stretch strategically-wise, left ramp, and then start the mode. Make sense? Yeah, that's good news because that left ramp is a pretty easy shot. Correct. Now, I will point, that's the answer, definitive answer to your question, but I'm going to give you a secondary answer for those who are interested in it, which is the right orbit. Sorry, I meant to say the right ramp, rather. If you make the right ramp, which is not an easy shot, and then you beat that mode, you'll get an add-a-ball. But a few things about this. Number one, a multiball extender is always better than add-a-ball because it restarts the entire multiball versus add-a-ball is you just add one ball. The other reason it's better is add-a-ball requires you to hold the action button down, whereas the multiball extender just gives it to you, so you don't have to think about it. If you get this perk on this third one, and you don't have to think about it, your multiball goes down to one ball, you're back in full multiball. Whereas in this one, even if you beat this mode on the right ramp mode, and you get the add-a-ball, you still have to remember to hold the button, and even then it only gives you one ball. Does that make sense? Wow. And so let's say on ball one you get that perk, the add-a-ball. Does it carry over? It does. The perk carries over for the rest of the game. For both Adaball and... Yeah, one time per ball. Oh, okay. So you could get a multiball each ball and use it again. Sort of like Martell in Game of Thrones give you an Adaball once per ball that way. Pretty standard stuff. It's sort of weird to me that there's a multiball extender and an Adaball, and they're both perks. And the multiball extender is on the easier mode to start. So if I go back to the drawing here, it's a lot easier to hit this left ramp. Like, let's say I prep this, right, and now it's red and ready for my mode. It's a lot easier for me to hit this left ramp. It's coming around here. And then you immediately shoot in there and start the mode. Not only that, this shot can be hit from this flipper or even more easily it can be backhanded. So it's very makeable. And it's a lot easier to do that than imagine you have to hit the right ramp, which is hard to hit, only from the left flipper, pass it over here, and then don't take a shot on the fly because if you do, it's going to change the mode, right? So instead, you have to somehow from here get it to the left flipper. You could ski pass, for example, then shoot in there and then beat that mode to get out of ball. It's a lot harder to do. So that's why the answer is definitively left ramp, then start the mode, and then beat that mode. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And that also makes sense how I ended up with an edible and had no idea how I got it. Right. That's the next thing I want to say about this. I miraculously finished, started and finished that mode on yesterday. They have done a pretty weird thing here. And it's worth getting into as we move away from breath to depth. And I'll touch on it at this point because you're mentioning it. They changed the edible. The add-a-ball used to be, when you're in any multiball, you hit the stand-up, you hit that stand-up, and then you hit that stand-up, and it lights this thing for add-a-ball. That's what it used to be. This is a very standard Stern coding. Think Metallica, the add-a-ball in Metallica. You also hit the stand-ups, the pick targets, and then you get into the snake for your add-a-ball, right? And you know what? Just for fun here, I will show it. So you hit that stand-up, you hit that stand-up, and that one, and that one, and then you get into the snake for Adaball, for Metallica. And quite a few games have that same idea. For some reason, they changed it. They changed the Adaball to make it much harder to get. Now, the only way to get Adaball in this game, the only way to do it, is if you get the mode ready, hit that right ramp, ski pass over, get into the mode, finish the mode, get an Adaball, have the action button, then get into a multiple, and then you could use it once per ball. They made it much, much harder to achieve. And frankly, I don't get that. One of the weird things about this game in particular is I feel like somebody hurt the Stern coding team's feelings when it came to, like, multiballs, and they're like, we've got to change how we handle multiballs. This game punishes you for multiballs in version 1 and in version 2 in very, very weird ways. So in version 2, it's like, let's make the multiball harder. Let's make anaball harder. Sure, it's easier on lots of other games. You just have to light mystery and hit a scoop, you know, on Rush. You just light the inlanes and hit a scoop. It's just three inlane. Here, it's like you've got to do eight things and a whole bunch of shots before you get out of all. So version two, that's a harder multiball. Then we could talk about how you actually get the enemies. So we said adversary mode earlier. You have to kill, like, ten enemies. It doesn't give you a counter on the play field. It doesn't give you inserts. It doesn't give you call outs. But you have to kill ten enemies, and if you do, it's a moment. It doesn't give you a nice light show to start the mode, to start the adversary, but the adversary itself is good. For some weird reason, they decided that the only way to get enemies that count towards your ten here is in single ball play. And a lot of people don't know this. When you're in multiball and a whole bunch of enemies are lit all over the play field, you can hit them all day. It does not progress your progress to the adversary mode. Does that make sense? Yeah. The reason that's weird is if I look at the missions of all other games, let's take Metallica as an example. In Metallica, you have to get the crosses and the electric chair and coffin and snake. And if you get enough of those, you will light the scoop for Crank It Up. And, by the way, they gave you inserts, unlike John Wick, for collecting those things to tell you when you're ready and what's missing on your Crank It Up. You can collect those items in single ball, in multiball. It doesn't matter. You can collect those things there. And in John Wick, you can't do that. If I think about other games, in Iron Maiden, you could collect the pop bumpers and the orbits and the ramps in single ball or in multiball. In King Kong, you could get climb arrows in single ball or multiball. For some reason, in John Wick, which most people would agree is one of Stern's fastest, hardest playing games they've ever made, that one, they're like, let's make it harder for you, and the layout's sort of tough enough, But let's not give you the add-a-ball. Let's not give you progress to the adversary, you know, in multiball. And it makes, and we'll talk about this later, it makes the pacing of the game very weird. When I say, I was saying before, one of the criteria we use, just to skip ahead a little bit, is I was so close. You're not close in this game. Because almost everybody plays this game, they try to prep the multi-balls, they try to prep the mode, and they stack them like you do in most current games. But if you did it in this game, it wouldn't help you get to your adversary. The only way you're getting to your adversary is if you're like, all right, forget everything I just said. I'm not going to do the mode. I'm not going to do the multiball. I'm just going to see what enemies are lit and then hit a bunch of enemies, and I don't care about the multiball at all. And I don't think people are actually playing that way, and so I don't think people will actually see the adversary much. I'll stop there. What do you say? Hmm. Yeah. Man, it just, I keep thinking about how this is all, Tim Sexton was the lead on this thing. And then he had a vision, and then he left. He disappeared. So now you have this crew coming in trying, you know, there's certain things that can't change, right? The play field, the inserts. now that they're coming in trying to just uh clean this all up with their new vision using just code and i'm just thinking about uh how difficult it is how creative they have to be uh this is a it has to be quite an adventure for these guys yeah just so i'm not just criticizing but actually offering like constructive feedback of something i would do differently um the way they have set have it set up where the multi-balls cannot progress your adversaries means that most players will never get to experience the adversary battle. And so they might say, well, I want this game to be tough. I don't want them to always be an adversary battle. One thing you could do is there's five adversary battles. So if you just want to do the first two adversary battles, let players advance towards them in multiball, and then you, for whatever reason, want to make it harder. And then later adversaries, you could only do in single ball. That would be kind of confusing. A lot of higher-level players would have to learn that nuance. But at least, practically, it would pace the game better. It would give people to let them see more things in the game that they're just never going to see otherwise. And so then you'd get to experience the adversary and all the work they put into it. And I don't think right now people are playing the game in a way where they would avoid multiballs and then go for enemies to then light the adversary. I don't think, except for really high-level, knowledgeable players, I don't think they're doing that or even thinking to do that. And, therefore, if they get into adversary mode, most of the time it's accidental because you've just hit random shots while in single-ball play and happened to get enemies. And that's what I think most players are doing to get there. So, anyway, that's what I say about what they could do to improve the breadth and pacing of the game is make the adversary modes, at least the first ones, more accessible. open it up so you can collect the enemies during multiple. I'll stop there. Or at least on that point I'll stop. Yeah. After learning all this I just can't wait to play this game with you. We'll get there. We're going to go do that and we still have to stream it by the way to talk it through. Alright. The next thing I want to say about this. We're still finishing out Breath. And to do this we talked about modes already. We have talked about the multiballs already. The multiballs were made better. Like I mentioned, the excommunicado, you just hit this shot over and over again, and you build up the inserts that are already there, and those inserts now matter. And then you get in there. Oh, that's a good idea. I like it. The other multiballs, they haven't changed that much in how you get them, but those are fine. We talked about the mission, which is the scoop and getting your enemies. And now the fourth M. The fourth M is multipliers. And this is where I'm going to get real detailed, alright? Multipliers. There's a few ways to get multipliers in this game. And I'm going to talk about it because I think they made a mistake with the code on this one. And so the main multipliers in the game, enemies are great. That part works. The enemies, if there is enemies lit on shots, it's going to make those shots more valuable. I like that. The lights out, we talked about already. You get the bottom four lanes, and then, which I don't like how you get them, but you get them, and then you're in 2x, the light's out, you press the action button, and it turns off all the lights, and now all shots are worth two times as much for a timed period. That works. But there's a third way to get multipliers in this game, and that is the allies. So we didn't talk about the allies yet, and that's what we're going to be doing in here. And the ally system was bad in 1.0, and I'm sorry to say it actually might be worse now. First, how do you get allies? Version 1.0, you just hit the shot. Think about it like Deadpool. So in Deadpool, if I hit the Wolverine shot a bunch, I collect my Wolverine ally. If I hit the Dazzler, I get the Dazzler shot and the Dazzler ally. That was like team-ups in Deadpool. In this one, there's an ally here that's lit, an ally here, and their art is on the insert. Right there, so it tells you those are your allies, for example, and there's the insert for them. And, okay, that works. But it used to be you just hit the shot, and then that collects your ally, and then you start a mode, and the ally would help you in some way. So now, instead, to get an ally, in single ball play, you have to hit, and only in single ball play, you have to hit the gold coin targets. Kale, do you know where the gold coin targets are? uh man i'm trying to remember it it's somewhere on the left right and i'm glad i asked you gold coins oh no it's a stack it's a stack of gold coins on the right correct so there are stand-ups that i can't even show you but that are right here they're not facing the flippers there's their stand-ups there right there but i could show you these stand-ups right there I can't show you those stand-ups because they're not even facing the flipper. And so you have to hit this essentially impossible shot to even set up that you might get allies. And the only way to hit the shot is either a perfect left flipper that somehow skins them, which is really hard to do, or the most likely way is you hit this stand-up and it bounces into them, and that's actually programmed into the game as like a ricochet shot, they call it. And nobody is doing that on purpose. Every time you'll get an ally in this game, from now on, will be accidental. You'll just randomly, a sling, most commonly will get into that, and then suddenly your allies will light, and you won't know why at all. And then once you hit the gold coin targets, your allies will light, and the next shot collects that ally. So now you have that ally, and then you start it in the mode, and the ally helps you in the mode. We'll talk in a moment about what the ally does, but I consider that a problem, like how you qualify your allies. is that it's just baffling. It's like hitting a target that's essentially unhittable. Ninety percent of the time it's hit accidental. So nobody is strategically bringing allies into the mode. I don't believe we're going to even see that on stream, where people are strategically bringing allies into the mode. I'll be shocked if I do. I mean, I've seen it happen, but I don't know. I'd be surprised. So I'll pause there. Does that make sense on how you get the allies? That totally makes sense. And, man, the placement of those targets, I think it was on Travis. I think Travis was on actually Triple Drain talking about that, where you just can't hit those on purpose. No, and he's a great player. He's like top 50 in the world or whatever, but, you know, and you just can't hit them on purpose. You know, like it's just accidental nine times out of ten you get it. It's a slingshot. You know, that'll get it for you. All right, so that's how you qualify the allies. Then the next problem, the allies themselves, what do they do for you? So the only thing these three allies do for you in the game is helps with scoring in modes. And this feature only becomes attractive to players who are chasing scores rather than people who are going after the journey. And that's not the case in other games. There are lots of other games that have used the theory of bringing in allies into modes. Like in Deadpool, for example, some of the allies help you with scoring, but some of them also help you with progress in the mode. Like Wolverine makes you do double damage. So once you get Wolverine, if I make a shot in the mode, it takes off more energy off the villain that you're facing, for example. So it lets you get through the modes more quickly. Or in Foo Fighters, there's van upgrades, and there's three van upgrades. Two of them help with scoring, but one of them helps with progress in the mode. Or you could also get an Aerosmith. You could get smart missiles that help you press a button and, you know, get rid of a shot. For some reason, in this one, in this game, or actually Dune is another example. there's like a lase gun that you can get on the drop targets, and that's sort of an ally. You press that, and then it helps you, well, you get that, and then it helps you take down the harvester battles, for example. It's all standard game theory stuff. Allies, stuff you can do to make the modes easier so that you can progress through the game more. But in John Wick, all three allies only boost score. They do nothing for progress. It's just like also to me like a wrong decision. Like I get maybe making one or two of the allies do that, but do something to make people progress through the modes, especially if you're going to tie perks to the modes and make it valuable to complete. Because otherwise it's just scoring, and you're only kind of attracting one type of player to that game rather than, you know, getting the people who want to advance through the game. And you can do both. Like, getting through in Deadpool, using Wolverine to beat the mode means that you can get a big finishing bonus, you know, for example. So it's not like I'm saying they're exclusive, but if you just make it about scoring, then you're not going to have anything to do with progress. If you make it about progress, you could also help with scoring. You could get perks in the game, and they could boost your score. And so what I thought I could do then is dive into these three allies, and I want you to know that nobody who's listening to this, I don't believe anybody, literally anybody who's listening to this will remember what I'm saying here. But that's the point, Cale. Now, the point here is I want to tell you what these allies do so that you can, like me, listen to them and think that's way too ridiculous afterwards. That's what we're going to do. Fair? Yeah, let's go. So I want you to zone out while I tell you what these allies do. I'm not doing them so you learn them. I'm doing them so you don't learn them. That's the point here is that they are unlearnable. All right. So, all right, we talked about how to get the ally. Let's say you hit the gold coin targets, and then you get Akira on the left ramp. So when you get this mode, start a mode, and now you have Akira, every time you hit the Akira shot, it will take enemies and move them over. Let's say there's enemies here. It'll move them over to one shot over. So all it does is it moves your enemies like a carousel, and it wraps around. Like if I have enemies here and I hit the left ramp, it will move those enemies around to here. If you are a super high-level player, this looks like a Madden game that I'm drawing here right now. If you are a super high-level player, then maybe you're that conscious about it that you want to move the enemies so that now they're on a lit shot, so now I could hit that lit shot and it's worth more because there's more enemies on it and there's the shot multipliers. But wow, that's complicated, right? Man, that is insane, yeah. I'm going to make it even worse, Cale. I'm going to bump it up a notch. Let's say you hit the left ramp. You hit the left ramp, but now you're holding the left flipper while you do it. If you do that and you're holding the left flipper while you do it, now the enemies will shift to the left instead. And if I have enemies here, they'll wrap around to that shot over there. How many people are really playing this, getting an ally, which is hard enough because it's a random shot to the gold coin targets, And then thinking, let me hold the left flipper as I shoot this shot to Akira so that I move the enemies over. It's almost like it's the disease of it, is what I would say is. You want to know with every layout, is this a fast-flowing layout or is this a stop-and-go layout? If it's a fast-flowing layout, don't make the player stop and make decisions like this. You know, like Star Wars has the multiplier that you have to move around. Don't do it. Don't do it. I mean, if you want to do that, and I could argue never do that. Do it on stop and go. Sorry, you got a deal. Okay, so what you just explained, the way that the Akira, what do you call it? Akira ally. The friend. Yes. The ally. The ally. Was that in Tim Sexton's code, or did the new team add that, the way it works? No, the new team added it. The old team, they helped you get rid of shots. Sorry, helped you get rid of enemies so that the shot can actually be hit, at least. Because of the old code, the enemies block shots. which, again, was a bad decision, in my opinion, because it led to low scoring and frustration. Like, why isn't that shot working when I hit it, you know? By the way, that was another game. In version 1.0, the multiball, that was like the one Stern game where you didn't want to bring a multiball into your mode because multiball would spawn enemies, and then those enemies would block shots, and it would actually make the mode worth less, paradoxically. The whole thing was rather confusing. But anyway, back to this. Yes, the version 1.0 handled it differently. I think both of them handle it poorly, version 1.0 and 2.0. Make the enemies simple to get, simple to advance. I'll give you some, like, examples or whatever. You know, one ally, if you use it, if you bring in the ally, you get to make fewer shots in the mode before you complete it. Fine. Another ally, you can take out adjacent shots, like the flamethrower in Venom. What I mean is, let's say I have a shot lit here, a shot lit here, and a shot lit here, and I hit this left ramp. If you hit that left ramp and you have that particular ally ready, it gets rid of all shots next to it, you know, for example. Like, nothing new that I'm saying, but just allies that help you advance the progress of the mode and also helps you get scoring. Or maybe another ally, this ally, when I hit the right ramp and I have this ally, it clears all the shots on the play field, you know, as an example. Those are three different allies that I could envision that would do both progress and scoring. and then take away this gold coin target nonsense, that's just like a crazy idea for allies. Just nobody's going for it. I don't think, I can't see the, I like to see the value of sometimes the things like the steel man argument. I have no argument for that. I can't make one. My opinion. Other than they wanted to use the gold coin targets because they're there and they're being underutilized now. But anyway, those are us. We need like a, we need an air horn to wake Jamie up. You're right. Okay. So I'm done now talking about allies. Everybody wake up. I mean, I didn't talk about the other two. I could. They're just as bad. Well, I want to know how they work. All right, fine. All right, you're going to press me to it. I'm going to do it, Kale. Everyone back to sleep. Get your pillows. We're going back to the other allies. All I did was explain one ally. All right. Yeah. Let's name the middle guy. The purple guy. Yeah, so the next one is Charon. Is that how you pronounce his name, I think? So that's this guy right up at the center. Let me scroll it up here. So the next one is the middle ramp one. And in that one, if you have it, and again, to qualify it, you have to hit the random gold toying targets, then hit that ramp, then start a mode. So now you're in it. And you can only bring one ally into a mode. That's another kind of weird thing they did. But let's say, okay, so you bring Charon into the mode. If you shoot the center ramp during the mode, what it does is it allows the next enemies defeated to immediately respawn. And so what that means is, let's say I hit this. I have a shot lit here, and it has three enemies on it. And so that means if I hit this shot, I'm going to get 4x on that shot. When I hit that shot, it's going to make the enemies go away. But if first I hit the center ramp, then he passed it over, then hit the left ramp, it will keep the enemies back on. They won't be killed. It'll keep the shot multiplier for a few seconds, like four seconds, something like that. But then they go away, so that's another weird thing. And anyway, so it keeps the enemies on, makes the shots recurrently more valuable. Does that make sense? Yeah, cool. That seems a lot. Easier than the Akira one. It is easier. Is it Akira? I started with the heat. Yeah, I started with the heat on purpose because I really wanted to just drive home my point of insanity here. Right, right. The final one is the best one. This one, because you don't have to think through it. I would say there's three levels of thinking. Akira is like, wow, I really have to think. Do I want to move the enemies to the right or the left? You know, with that one. So forget about that one. People aren't doing that. Charon is, okay, I have to hit that ramp. And it's a little bit of thinking because I have to notice the next shot that has enemies on it and then hit that one, and then I can hit it again in a timer, you know, before it goes out. And so that's a little bit of thinking. This right ramp one is the least thinking. So, again, to get that, you get the gold coin targets, then you hit the right ramp, then you ski past and start a mode. Now I'm in a mode and I have the Katya ramp. If in the mode you shoot the right ramp, all it does is it takes the enemies and it moves them to lit shots. Because otherwise you have like an enemy here and maybe an enemy there and a lit shot over here and a lit shot over there. All you have to do is move the right ramp and it's going to make the lit shots more valuable. That's all you have to know. You don't have to think it through. You just say, okay, let me hit the right ramp and then hit a lit shot. That's all you have to do and it's going to work. And so if you are going to use the ally system, which you're not because it's accidental to get into it, But let's say you happen to notice you bounced off a slingshot and then went into the gold coin targets, and now you have three allies lit. If you have the wherewithal, before you start a mode, I would recommend shooting the right ramp, ski passing it over, and then shooting the mode, because now at least you're going to have an ally that's sort of easier to understand. Use the right ramp whenever you want to make shots more valuable. I'll stop there. Does that make sense? Yes. All right. those are your allies. And all of this conversation, talking about the allies in the category of multipliers, and then talking about the modes and the multiballs and the missions, was all in the service of talking about the breadth of the game, having options as you go through the game, what to do, where to go. And I think it could be better because it's limited in what you practically do, as I said earlier. I'll pause there. That's it for Brett. Any questions on that? No questions at all. I am totally lost. Okay, good. That was the intention, by the way. I'm going to bring everyone back, and we're going to take it down a little bit more simple now. And we're going to talk about depth in the game. Depth is having something to achieve after you do a bunch of tasks. Right now, there's essentially no depth in the game, and I can't fault him for that. It hasn't been done yet. There's no wizard mode for essentially anything. So let's assume that MXD and the team will get these in the game in the future. They're going to have the duel right over here, and that will light when you've played through all these modes. Then you're also going to have the staircase, and that will light when you've played through all five adversary modes, which is like near impossible right now. And then if you do both of those, you'll get to special assignment in the middle, but none of that is in the game right now, so it necessarily gets a zero for death. But I can't fault it. It's .98. I am quite sure that Stern will program those in, And so I'm going to assume that one day they'll be programmed in. Having said that, even once they're programmed in, I don't like the depth in this game because there is nothing in the middle of the game to do. Like, on Guardians, there's Cherry Bomb in the middle. On every Keith Elwin game, there's, like, 50 things going on at various points. It paces it better. So the depth is really far out here. You know, like, you have to play the modes and you get to something, all of seven. and you have to play all the adversaries, and then you get to something. And so I think that in this way, you might think it's kind of similar to original Metallica. In original Metallica, before it became remastered, what happened is you were playing multiballs, and then there were no modes, really, in Metallica. You get into multiballs, and you get your crank it up lit, and you get your crank it up lit on the right scoop, and you play your crank it up, and that was the mini wizard mode, and that was basically the game. There is technically an end of the line if you go through all crank it ups, but almost nobody except for the very top players get to that. And so that game, as good as it is, and this is kind of sacrilegious to say about an otherwise great Lyman code, that game had problems actually. And there's a reason why Ray Day added to it. And adding is the right word here. He didn't replace anything. It was additions. You know, Ray Day understood that as sacrilegious as it is, Metallica had pacing problems. A lot of owners would tell you that Metallica got boring and felt like wood chopping, the original Metallica. It had a beginning of the game. You know, you start a sparkier grave. It had a middle of the game. You get it to crank it up. But there was no late game, you know, there. There was nothing else to do after you did that. So Ray Day, he added a mini wizard mode for getting through all the multiballs. So back to Metallica, for example, there's four multiballs there. There's grave, there's chair, there's coffin, and there's snake. and if you get through all four, you get to crank it up. Sorry, blackened, rather, the new wizard mode in the game. It's sort of another thing to go for that helps with the depth of that game. It gives you a reason now to play all four multiballs. In the past, when you were playing the original Metallica, the only thing you'd really go for is the chair and the grave. Nobody would really consciously go for these two because they're so hard to get and they're not that much more valuable, whereas now you are going to consciously go for them in Metallica Remastered because you really want to get to that high-value blackened mode that you get for playing all four. So that's kind of what Ray Day did to add to this code. Does that make sense before I go back to John Wick? Yeah, yeah, perfectly, yeah. And so back to John Wick is John Wick should 100% do the same thing. You have three multiballs. You have a car. You have a captive ball. You have the dance club. Make it valuable for me to actually get all three of them. And maybe they're going to do this, I don't know. Do the same thing. Play three multiballs and get to a mini wizard mode. That will add a pacing part to increase the depth of the game and have you go for something else in the game as you're doing it, and a reward for that. And there's no insert for it now, but they can still do it without an insert. And I think that, for me, this is the latest re-innovation in code. A lot of manufacturers have recently independently arrived at this sort of idea of do all the multiballs and get to something. And that's sort of newish. I'll define what I mean there in a moment, why I'm saying newish. Most pinball games, if you get through all the modes, you get to a mini wizard mode of some kind. But the multiballs, nothing happens when you get through them. A few games recently have changed that, where, for example, in Metallica Remastered, You get through all the four multiballs, and something happens. It's not just about getting through modes. If you look at Spooky's game, Evil Dead, they also did that too. If you play the multiballs well, you get to Hero from the Sky mini-wizard mode, which John Schappel did on our stream a month or so back. And so I think that you could do that with, frankly, other games, like X-Men has three multiballs. Do it with that. Star Wars has three standard multiballs. Do it with that. Looney Tunes has three standard multiballs. Simple rule of threes, barred from video games. A lot of pinball games have, like, three standard multiballs. And you could do this with everything, and I think you should. I don't see a reason not to. Otherwise, what I think people playing John Wick will do will be to just go for car over or captive ball multiballs over and over again, and they're still going to avoid this one, you know, for example. There's just not, you know, you're not focusing on it as much. I'll pause there. I said a lot. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. I think that would make it more fun. I mean, I see a lot of people playing Metallica Remastered, and they're just like, they're only going for all of those multiballs and trying to stack them, getting to the mini wizard mode. Right. It adds a new way to play. You don't just have to go for crank it up. Now you can go for black it. And, you know, it adds some, like, wizard mode to Dangle as a reward for the players. It's not just for modes, but also do it for multiballs. To me, that's the latest re-innovation in coding. And I'm saying the word re-innovation and not innovation. And the reason is that this idea was thought of over 20 years ago already. And here we bring in one of the five best coded games in history, which is Lord of the Rings. And Keith P. Johnson, at his peak, and unfortunately I say his peak because I think he's gone off the rails with JJP games and stacking everything. And, you know, I say it too many times in these podcasts, but those games have problems with code. but Keith P. Johnson is a brilliant coder he's made one of the best coded games of all time that have moments, that has theme immersion that has everything about it the modes actually matter they make sense while you're doing them collect the path of the dead, everything is there anyway, there are three multiballs in the game fellowship, two towers and return of the king and completely separate from the modes in the game, which are up the middle if you get all three of these you get to destroy the ring which is one of the best mini modes or wizard modes in a game ever made where if you destroy the ring you hit the great theme immersion you trap the ball in the magnet, you hit the ball, it destroys it, the game stops, it shuts off, it comes back on, but it's a big light show, and it's a brilliant design. And then, for some reason, this idea, this concept that a mini-wizard mode would be achieved after the multiballs was like abandoned for some reason. It was lost in the woods for so many years. And now I think it's back 20 years later, and I'm glad it's back, and I think it should be in almost all games. It seems like an obvious thing to do for pacing and to give the game more depth. I'll pause there. What do you say, Cale? Yeah, that makes a whole lot more sense. I didn't know that about – I haven't had much time on Lord of the Rings, so I didn't know that about the way Keith programmed this. Is there anything similar in The Simpsons? Well, yeah, The Simpsons has its own things. There's nothing for getting all the multiballs, except to say that to get to the ultimate wizard mode in that game, you have to play all the multiballs and the modes and do a whole bunch of other things. So it's not the way I'm describing. It's like a lot of games, because I should be clear about this, what I mean and what I don't mean. a lot of games will have, like, Aerosmith. To get to the final wizard mode of that game, you have to play the multiballs. And so you could argue, well, Serge, okay, so isn't that an example where, hey, there's something you achieve after playing the multiballs? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying a dedicated mini wizard mode for just the multiballs. So you just focus on the multiballs, and then you get a mini wizard mode. Not like you have to play the modes and the multiballs and get super jackpots and in Simpsons a whole bunch of other things, by the way, and then you get to the wizard mode. That's cool for, like, the final Wizard Mode, but because nobody's getting to that, what you want are waypoints along the way, like road stops, you know, for a trucker, of saying, like, I may not make it from New York to L.A., but I can make it to Mississippi or whatever, and when I'm there, I'll play my three multiballs and I'll get to destroy the ring. And that hasn't been done for many games between Lord of the Rings and the current crop of games that I mention now. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Very good point. Some of you, and some of you really deep diver people out there, might say, well, Serge, it was kind of done in other games. What about Mandalorian, you might say. And I'll pull up Mandalorian for this purpose here. And so you might say, well, look, Serge, in Mandalorian there are three multiballs. And if you do three multiballs, you will get into a mini wizard mode. And that is true. However, that's also not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is having three completely different multiballs that have nothing to do with each other. The Captive Ball and the car and the dance club. Or in X-Men, the Sentinel and the, to me, my X-Men multiball and Save the City multiballs. Things that are completely different. You do those different things, and that gets you to a mini-wizard mode. The Mandalorian code doesn't work because all three multiballs, you do the exact same thing over and over and over again. You just hit the center shot. How many times? Well, it increases each time, but don't worry, you're still going to hit it again. It's the easiest shot in the game. You're going to shoot it, you're going to trap up, and you're going to hit it again over and over and over and over again. And so I consider that the same multiball. They call it three multiballs. It's not. You know, I mean, maybe the rules are different on the multiballs. I get that. But to get them, it's the same thing. And that's not breadth. You know, breadth is having different things to do in the game. They should have separated these three multiballs. Maybe one of them is there and put the other two somewhere else. Do something else to get them, you know? And like John Wick in most games do, by the way. And so I'm just saying three completely different multiballs, and then give it an award like Blackened for the four multiballs of Metallica. Do the same for John Wick. That's my argument here. Yeah. I think you win. Okay. Good. Good. Thank you, Cal. I'm going to add one more thing for depth here. So one constructive thing I could say for depth, like I mentioned, is to give the multiballs some mini-wizard mode. But I think you could use these gold coin targets in some way. Right now, they're quite useless. They are spot and ally, like I mentioned, and that's bad. And there's also a mode where if you hit it, it destroys all the shots in a heist mode, and that's interesting, fine. But one thing they have is all you do is you hit it, and it lights a yellow shot, and then you hit that yellow shot, and you get some points. And people don't even notice when it happens, other than, okay, There's a gold shot there for some reason. What I'm saying is over the course of the game, if you make enough gold shots, then some mini wizard mode happens. You know, just like making enough combos in Deadpool gets you mech suit multiball. So make light enough gold coin shots, hit it, and something happens afterwards. It's not something to go for on purpose because the gold coin shot is not something you could go for on purpose, in my opinion, but at least it provides you some utility out of those gold coins. So I would add some sort of wizard mode or mini wizard mode just for that feature. So anyway, that's my depth conversation. Anything else before jumping to hopefully shorter subjects as we go along in this massive episode of Pen Pals Episode 4? Nail it. I think you nailed it, man. The funny thing is, you know, when we talked about doing this episode, I was like, oh, this is perfect because I'm going to learn about what to do. You're going to learn nothing, Cal. Yeah, it's hard to make. I've overloaded you too much. Well, you know, all I'm thinking about now, next time I want to play, I just want to purposely add an ally. That's all I want to try to do. I dare you to try, Cal. I dare you to try. I want you to play four games and see if you could add an ally, even one game, on purpose. I'll take an ally. And use it on purpose. That's what I dare you to do. Right. That's the dare. You and Chad, I dare you to do the same thing and tell me if I'm crazy. All right. Next topic is clarity. Is the game clear? There's some things it does well. There are not a million inserts on the game. I do think it's missing that insert of how many enemies are left, but it's not overly crowded. There's not a million screen transitions at all, like on King Kong, for example. But diving in on what isn't clear, if we talk about the modes, for example, it's pretty clear how to start a mode. There's a big flashing red light there to start a mode on the scoop. They used to have this really weird thing where if you look at the inserts, I'm not going to name them all, but if you look at the inserts for the modes, they all have these fancy names like Marquis de Bermond and other things, but then the actual mode name is like Gather Intel or Heist. And these were this difference between factions and jobs that they used to have. And ignore everything I said because they deleted all that for version 2 post-MXV. Now it's just all the same thing. they essentially are acknowledging that it made no sense to have these different names for the inserts, where sometimes it's called this and sometimes it's called that, and now everything is just called everything else. So, for example, what I mean here is the faction, it's the Bowery mode, but that's really the Nightwatch mode. The New York Continental is really the assassination. And from now on, you could forget the word faction and all of these names. Unfortunately, their names are on the inserts, so I just wish it was consistent, and there's a little lack of clarity there, but at least they didn't make them different in the code. And so back to the game, that's it for the modes, things that could be clearer. The other thing beyond that is that, you know, it's clear what to do in the modes, but it's not clear how much progress you have in the modes. Unless I'm crazy, I didn't see it in the readme file. Currently in these modes, they don't actually tell you how many shots you have left. There's no progress meter. You know, think Deadpool. You could see the villain's power meter. And in Avengers, you could see their power meter. And even in Aerosmith, the first LCD production Stern game, you know, there's like a meter of how many shots left. In Guardians, there's a meter of how many shots are left. But for some reason, in John Wick, they didn't think that matters. And I can't understand that. There's no progress bar. Especially, I'd call that unacceptable, especially because now you really want to beat the mode because you get all these perks. Like I told you earlier, if you're going to memorize one thing from this two-hour podcast, hit the left ramp, start a mode, and then you get the multiball extender. But how are you going to know, Cale, if your mode is almost done? You know, in that you're not, is what I'm saying. You're just not going to know because there's no progress bar. Again, maybe they're going to add it. Strange thing not to have, but there you have it. They also made the modes clearer, at least one good thing is. It used to be like the inserts of the mode didn't match the shots. So what I mean is, like, this yellow mode is called the heist mode. And so what they did in version 2.0 is now all of the, when you're in that mode, all of the shots you have to hit are also yellow. So it's, like, very obviously tied to the mode you're in based on color. Version 1.0, like, didn't do that. It just had these other color shots. It made no sense. So, anyway, that's it for modes and clarity. Multiball is much clearer now. I mentioned before, you hit into the dance club, there are clear inserts, and they advance you. before it used to be hit a bunch of stand-ups, and you didn't even know how much progress you had. There's no way to really easily know that. I'm not even sure if it was in the info screen, frankly. And so now it's very clear to go for that multiball and when it's lit. And Winston has clear inserts when the captable shots enough have been made to light the lock. And the car similarly has inserts there. And I think that's all good. It's pretty simple. I don't particularly like that the premium is different than the pro to start a car. for those who are really deep in this. On the premium, you hit the car a few times, and then you hit the left orbit, and that starts the multiball. On the pro, you first have to hit the left orbit, then the car a few times, and then the left orbit again. I don't get why that's there. I can't imagine why that's there, that nuance. It shouldn't be there. I would just make them the exact same, but I feel like I'm missing something, and that's certainly possible. That's it for multiball. Any questions on multiball and clarity, Cale? nope you cleared up the only question i had about the uh the car multiball right um multipliers this is where it's just not clear um for example allies i mentioned that baffling ally of moving the enemies to the left and right and then left if you're holding the left flipper and that whole nonsense that that's uh i don't curse on this podcast that stuff is just baffling i would say that's nobody's understanding that i understand it and i don't understand it. That's the level we're talking. And then there's the lights out, and it has this double in-lane light thing that I can't get a lot of people to understand, necessarily. And so I don't find that to be clear. I don't think they're going to change that in the game, but I think it's just too baffling right now. And then at least now in version 2.0, the enemies are clear on the multipliers. Okay, the more enemies, the more the shot is worth. I can learn that pretty easily. The inserts are there to explain it. And then back to, finally, the adversaries, the missions or side quests in the game. They made that very clear. They added, I believe, a progress bar for that in version 2.0, so at least you know how far you are. And they added call-outs, so they made it pretty clear. So that's all I was going to say about clarity to wrap that up. Does that make sense or any questions on that, Cale? Yep. You cleared it all up. All right. Don't worry, audience. The last categories are much shorter, okay? Risk and reward, I only have good things to say about that. Well, almost. In version 2.0, there's a lot of risk and reward. So, for example, we talked about the adversary mode and how you can collect it or keep going, and then it makes all the shots worth 2x, and then you can do it again and make it 3x and again and make it 4x. And there's a lot of multipliers in the game, like enemies on shots might make you go for a riskier shot. Maybe I see the enemies are lit on this shot, so I really want to go for that one because I know it's worth more. That's great. The allies still don't work with the risk and reward because I think people aren't going to be playing for them. You're going to prove me wrong, Cale. We're going to see. But I think people aren't going to actually use them effectively for the risk and reward. And then there's the lights out. But for most good players, getting to lights out is trivial because you could just do the ski pass thing I mentioned over and over again on a pro. And so, like, if a good player is playing John Wick, they're always in lights out, you know, most of the game. and so it becomes sort of trivial, and I don't find that to be much of a risk because you are ski-passing it over. I suppose the risk is you don't see what shots are lit, so that's maybe a balance there. So I'm not saying it's bad. It's good, actually, the risk and reward. It could be a little bit better with the allies, but overall it's pretty good there. Any concern or comment on the risk and reward? No. All right, we can move to fair and balanced, and this game is fair and balanced. I have no issue there. fair, I mean, does a player's choices affect other players, like in Godfather, for example, or Scooby-Doo? No. Where you pick a character or something like that. Balance, does the game make you use the whole play field? Yeah, generally when modes are lit, all the shots are lit, you have to hit them, I have to use the left scoop, I have to use the right scoop, you know, car multiball starts on the left orbit, all the shots do something in this game. And the next thing is making harder shots in terms of balancing. You want to make sure that harder shots in the game reward you more and easy shots in the game reward you less. And the game does that. So the easiest shot in the game is to keep on getting into that scoop, but other than the 2x, once you get the 2x play field going, there's nothing more lit there. The enemies are where the value is in the game, and the game tends to be smart that it puts the enemies on higher value shots and harder shots. So you might be tempted to hit that scoop, for example. So you want to make the harder shots worth more, and I think the game does a pretty decent job at that. Another thing I could say for balanced gameplay, you don't want the game to reward you for nothing. Like, you know, if you're playing Guns N' Roses, you plunge the ball and you're in multiball in that game. And this game makes you earn it. You know, it doesn't give you multiball after zero to one to two shots. Like, you have to do stuff to earn your score here. and the game makes you earn your score and I like that the scoring is not lopsided in some games you would time out modes and there's nothing like that here where you're going to time out a mode at all that's all good and then the other thing I'd say is the game doesn't make you do the same thing over and over again to an extent you have to play a mode and a multiball over and over again but it doesn't make you hit the exact same shot over and over and over again like a center ramp over and over and over again. It's not going to do that. So anyway, that's what I'll pause and say fair and balanced. I think the game is fair and balanced is what I mean. I think they did a good job of that. But that doesn't surprise me because they focused a lot on scoring with the update, a little bit less on progress on wizard modes, on mini wizard modes, stuff like that on like a journey. And so the scoring is tight in the game. I think that's done pretty darn well. I would give that like an A. Any comment there? I said a lot probably. Yeah. No, I mean, just the most interesting thing after listening to you really break this game down, I knew maybe 10% of what you mentioned, right? But I still had fun playing the game. And I know this game, as an operator, and I can only speak for our location, has been a success. It makes really good money, and people speak with their money, right? I mean, people are putting money in this game and always have. The time-sensitive contracts seem to do a lot, got people excited about it, but we haven't seen those in a little while. But people are still coming back to this game. Rachel and I were working at the arcade this week, and we had to be there. We had a 12-hour day. We were working from like 8 a.m. until almost like 8 p.m. And while we were sitting in the arcade, we noticed this game was played more consistently. And you have like, I mean, throughout the day, you have some like casuals like hanging out. But for the most part, we kept hearing people play John Wick. and I'll be hard-pressed to think that these casual players know everything you were just talking about, but something keeps bringing them to this game. It's just like it's a fun game, a cool layout, and the game looks really cool. Compared to the other modern games, this has a different color palette. This looks very interesting. but one thing I want to ask you and we already we touched on this and you told me what mode to start every time I play this game in a tournament I do okay I can get like I can get 80 to 100 million points and end up winning a game by just like trying to start a multiball and accidentally getting into a mode but if I want to like If I want to dial that in, let's say I'm a player that's never played John Wick. What do I do to win my round? Yeah, so a quick strategy there is short plunge into the scoop. Ideally, you want to short plunge, and you have unlimited short plunges, so it's not, like, timed like some games are. So you keep on short plunging until you get to here without triggering the switches that are over there. and the better you can do that, the more it just advances you to starting a mode right away. So basically you get into that scoop. It comes through. Hold on. Why don't I want to hit those switches? So there are skill shots here. When you plunge, there are actually two switches. If you don't hit any switch, which is really hard, and it just goes right in the scoop, it's called a Baba Yaga skill shot, and it advances you essentially all the way to start your mode. Whereas if I hit one switch, let's say, so there's switch here, there's switch here, and then I go here, and then it goes through. That's like a super crate skill shot. And then it advances you some degree towards your crate. And then if I go past those switches and go in, it doesn't advance you that much towards your mode. So it's basically mode advancement is the answer. It allows you to not have to hit as many times up against this wall, which if you're on a premium and there's literally a brick wall there that blocks you, it's especially important to plunge into that. Does that make sense? So don't get the premium is what you're telling me. Don't get the premium. I'll tell you games that you should get pro, premium, or whatever. This is a pro all day. This is a pro. Anyway, it plays better, and you're missing, like, nothing, in my opinion, on it. Anyway, like you're missing the real physical blood oath marker, you know, like no thanks. A drop target. Right. And the drop target going into the dance club. Yeah, nobody cares about that. Sorry. Okay. Anyway, that's my opinion. The car is different, whatever. It's not in those physical locks. It plays better on the pro. Pro is the answer. Anyway, strategy. So, okay, I plunge into there. And then I agree with the ball save time. You want to wail on these. Maybe just once if you can't get the ball and do it again because, remember, you actually need two hits to both stand-ups to qualify that. And I don't want you to keep on going for it and then ball save runs out and you're done with your ball. So maybe one, maybe two shots to that thing. And then. Does your progress on that carry over? It does. It does, yeah. Okay. And then after you do that, and now you're hopefully in control, then you want to prep your mode and your multiball. If you're in a pro, I would say shoot the left orbit if you can, because only when you shoot the left orbit will car hits progress you towards the car multiball. And if you don't hit the left orbit at the beginning of your ball one, what's going to happen frequently is balls are going to bounce through randomness into the car, and it's going to give you no progression whatsoever, and you're going to be sad about it, and you're going to wonder why you're not getting anywhere to your multiball. So you could hit the left orbit, and then you're ready to bash the car a few times. Generally, I would only bash it from the right flipper because it's a backhand. It could hit it and go right back there, whereas from the left flipper, it could bash it, and it might hit it to the sling and into the out lane and all sorts of things like that. So I really favor hitting the car and the captive ball from the right flipper and not from the left flipper if you could avoid it. And only from a trap because usually it's going to come right back down in a safe way. and then after your multiball is ready on those things, you'll know your car is ready because all of these lights will be solid, and there'll be a flashing tiny arrow here there on the left orbit that's ready for the multiball, or you could hit all the captables and then shoot like two ramps to get this multiball ready. But anyway, after one of those multiballs is ready, then I would get the mode going. And to be specific, the mode I would start is very much this one. Left ramp, then start the mode. And if you do that, and as the ball is coming out, you then hit the left orbit to start your car. Now you're in the right mode with the multiball. And during that multiball, if you could actually beat the mode, hit all the red shots, that's what you're going to focus on. Whatever red shots are there, that's what you hit. Hit all the red shots, then you will get the perk for multiball extender for the rest of the game, including that multiball. So when you're finished with that multiball, you will restart the multiball automatically. That's my full John Wick strategy, which is probably all people really want to hear through this podcast. And you can ignore the other two. Yeah, yeah. Put that on the reel, Cale. Put that on the reel. That will be the real thing. And that's great. I love that. You know one shot I really like that I've gotten pretty consistent with? Hitting the captive ball, which is – that's the Winston, correct? The Winston shot? Yeah. Okay. I like hitting that from the left flipper and glancing off of the captive ball and then hitting that orbit. What do you do when it comes back, though? Yeah. I nail it again. Got it. Okay. There you go. My concern there was that it works, but it gets you out of control. That's my concern. But I've been able to repeat it. Yeah, it's fine. Well, you're a good guy. You're a good pinball player, just to be clear. You're a very good pinball player. All right. I'm just lucky. 10% of the rules, but you know how to play, that's for sure. That's right. All right. So to close out, and we're pretty close, we're still going through the criteria. The next one is innovation, and the game does have some innovation. I mean, one of them you mentioned, it's contracts in the game, and that brought a lot of people to play the game into arcades. I think this game, and it's really great to have you on podcasts and something that's missing in a lot of other podcasts because you're an operator. And a lot of other podcasts are about collectors or distributors or, you know, home players, and it's not the people like yourself who run arcades and can have a very – because the home buyer, the value of this game has dropped. But you're absolutely right. I've noticed, too, in an arcade this game slaps, right? And so I think that there's some reasons for it. I mean, it's fast playing. It is a modern theme. It is, you know, like a lot of flashing lights and such like that. So I think it works, you know. It plays really well in an arcade, I'd say. And the coding has really lent itself to scoring more than it has to the journey. And it's not a hard and fast rule, but the journey is more important, like a Lord of the Rings type game, is better for the home buyer than necessarily an arcade, you know. That's my opinion there. So innovation is there in the coding. Right, and for a modern Stern, it's an actually, it's a dark theme. You know, it's basically about a hitman, right? You know, it's not Star Wars, it's not Marvel. They killed his dog. It's not Star Wars, it's not Marvel. You know, it's not, you know, and that's the, you know, and the, you know, word on the street is they did some kind of, like, focus group, and, you know, this is the game you should use to bring in, you know, the demographic they were looking for. And this really does hit a different spot in the fan group and the arcade folks, you know, that we noticed. And I think it's that darker theme and just, you know, the look, the darker look of it. Yeah. And there's some other innovation in the code, too. I mean, the lights out is an innovation. Most play-filled multipliers are like a good thing, and they made lights out sort of a mix. Like, it's a good thing because you get 2x, but it's bad because the shots are dark, and you have to memorize where the shots are. I think that's pretty clever, actually. It means some people don't even want to use it, though, because it's lights out, but I think that's a clever idea. It's a new thing in code to make it a double-edged sword to use the multiplier, you know? I don't know. Do you like that? Sure, yeah. Yeah, I totally love it. other innovations there's the speaker lights that fire in response to shots in the game you mentioned earlier that's a cool thing there's non-stop shot multipliers that's sort of unique, a lot of games you have to do something to get a shot multiplier, if you think about the new Star Wars game you have to hit a bunch of pop bumpers and then hit a shot to light the ion cannon and all that, but in this game shot multipliers are there, you just have to find them, they're always there with enemies on them I think that's pretty clever and interesting and so you just have to notice them. So innovation, I think, is fine in the code there. I don't have a problem with that. The second to last category, we've covered a lot already, which is pacing. Or, as I like to say, I was so close. You know, that feeling in an Elwynn game when there's one or two shots away from something. And I already talked about this, so I won't go into too much more about it, but I don't think this game has great pacing in that, you know, things that would help with the pacing are like B3 mini wizard mode, B3 multi-balls and you get a mini wizard mode. collect enough gold coin shots and something interesting happens. You know, more things along, more, you know, rest stops along the way on the drive. That's what I think is missing for the pacing here. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Perks also kind of help in the pacing, but it's really hard with the perks to matter because, if I go back to them here, because, number one, nobody knows what all the perks are associated with everything. Nobody's going to memorize this except for me, maybe, you know? And so, like, you're going to memorize the left ramp gets the multiplier extend, and that's a good thing. But if you don't really know what the perks are, you know, you don't know, and you don't know how many shots you have left in the mode to complete it, you don't even know which mode to go for to get what perk and how many shots you have left in the mode to begin with. And, you know, like, other games just are much clearer about that. And so what helps pacing is informing the player where they are in the progress. And pacing needs something in front of you, and it also needs to let you know where you are on the highway. And I don't think this game does a great job of that through the ways I mentioned before, that it's just not giving you a sense of what's happening. And I also think, back to something I mentioned earlier, if the multiballs don't let you progress the enemies to get to the adversary, It keeps the adversaries far away, and that's also a problem with pacing. Anyway, does that make sense for pacing, or I was so close? I don't think it's great, is what I'm saying, and I think it should be better with very specific pieces. No, no, it's totally fine. Did you make this chart that we're looking at? No, I borrowed it but then edited it because it had mistakes from Tilt Forums. Shout out to Tilt Forums. It did have some things around there, so I edited it to what I believe is most accurate now. Cool. Very cool. I don't do that much work. Yeah, Cale, I don't do that much work for this podcast. A little bit of work, but not that much work. Right, right. Most of this is from the demo. Everything's a remix. Everything's a remix. Yeah. That's right. And then the very final thing to say, and there's no problem here, is bugs. I always want to finish with bugs because I want to mention this as a criteria because it's overlooked. And to Stern's credit, at Stern, they rarely release a game with significant game-breaking bugs. Maybe there's some scoring imbalance that they change in later versions, later code versions, but nothing that's game-breaking. And that's worth credit. I mean, a lot of boutique companies release code that has bugs, and they can be as fancy as they want with the theme immersion and the moments, stuff that I love and as a home buyer I would love. But we said it before, like, you know, even though every time I mention a certain game, I'm going to say bugs, none, because they just do a great job in that. And it's overlooked, and I don't think it should be. I think it's really to their credit that the game actually works as advertised. It's not an obvious thing that's missing from other games. What say you? Yeah. The only issue we have with Stuns at the Arcade is the biggest issue of resets. And I don't know if that's considered a bug or what have you. But, yeah, other than that, everything's running well. You're saying your game is playing and suddenly it resets. Yeah. Yeah. How often does that happen, would you say? Because I know you run all the time at Electric Bat, like seven days a week. It depends on which game you're talking about. Elvira is known for doing that a good bit. We just had it in the last tournament. It happened with Venom, maybe. But from what I understand, they're going to have to retool all of the code on any Spike 1 and Spike 2 games to make it run on Spike 3 boards, because they're going to be backwards compatible. So they might end up fixing any. And I don't know whether it's spaghetti code or what's going on. But, yeah, so many games do use that a good bit. Yeah, it's like using AI. But, no, they're doing a good job. I think Stern does a great job with, like, crushing bugs most of the time compared to a lot of other games I've played. But, really, that wraps up everything I was going to talk about about John Wick, you know, in probably over two hours. And we'll see how this is done. And, yeah, do I go too far sometimes, Cale? Maybe. And I fully expect comments and welcome them to say, If this has gone too far, I need to know if this has gone too far, because this is the level of craziness we could bring to the pen pals. But I want to know from you in the commenters, do you want this level of craziness, or do you want, like, 20% of this level of craziness? Or more, actually. And let us know here on our Discord or on the videos where we see the comments and we're happy to respond, and we love the enthusiastic response we're getting from everyone. What do you say, Cal? Absolutely. I can't wait to see what everybody has to say about this one. Okay. Well, that's what I got, my pen pal, Kel. Anything else on your end? Right on. Nope. I think this is going to be fun. I'm going to get to editing this thing in this crazy storm we have right here in the middle of the valley. But I thank all of you guys for joining us. Thank you, Serge, for assembling this. What do you have in the pot? What are you cooking next? What's in the chamber, Serge? All right, I'll tell you, and I'm going to base it on the vote, other than emergency podcasts that come up to cover something that new comes up. In general, I think we should do what we did with Star Wars. When a new game comes up, day one, I will try to download the code and break it down in the same way we've done here, probably shorter, because it's early code, and we'll do that with every new release. That's the goal. In the meantime, we'll do some regular episodes based on the order of the vote on Discord. So the next one will be I'll do a similar breakdown like I did here, but for X-Men, unless it's too crazy. And then I'll take it back a notch. But I could do the same for X-Men. And then after that, we'll talk about Avengers. And then the one after that is interesting. It's controversies in pinball art. Go through the history of pinball art from, like, 1950s onwards. And that's the episode where we get canceled, Cale, if you're looking forward to that. That'll be, like, episode seven or so. That's where we stop the podcast. Yeah, and get canceled. We're going right to the edge on this one. Yeah, because I know the controversies. Some of them have long been forgotten, and they are highly controversial, and I don't think I have the tact to walk through them, and yet I'm going to try. That's what I'll say. I'll help you out with that, Serge. All right. Thanks, Gail. Pleasure as always. Right on, right on. We'll see you all on the next episode of Pimp House. Thank you all for joining us. Bye, everyone.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 0927ed35-3640-4e19-9ece-feaca8e6f704*