# Episode 15 - Don Discusses Divergent Distractions

**Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2016-08-18  
**Duration:** 117m 22s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-15

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## Analysis

Don from the Pinball Podcast joins Eclectic Gamers to discuss pinball news and community topics. Key discussions include the Pabst Blue Ribbon Can Crusher pricing controversy ($6,995 MSRP, viewed as overpriced at $1,400+ higher than expected), speculation about Stern's next music pin (Slayer rumored based on Comic-Con photos and concert sponsorship), and broader market concerns about rising pinball prices and potential market saturation. The group debates game valuations on Pinside's Top 50 list and reflects on secondary market cooling as new game pricing escalates.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Pabst Can Crusher pricing at $6,995 MSRP ($6,399 on sale) is $1,400+ higher than expected market rate of $5,000-$5,500 — _Dennis directly states pricing expectations were $5,000-$5,500, current price is $6,399 on sale_
- [MEDIUM] Original Pabst concept was to build only 50 machines and place one in each state at Pabst-supporting bars, but this plan was scrapped — _Tony references Pinheads Pinball Podcast coverage of this original plan change_
- [MEDIUM] Slayer is rumored as Stern's next music pin based on Gary Stern posing with a band member at Comic-Con and Stern sponsoring a Slayer concert — _Dennis presents circumstantial evidence: Comic-Con photo and sponsorship banner sighting_
- [HIGH] Don was under NDA with Stern but gave it up voluntarily in March 2016 regarding Ghostbusters; Slayer was not on the list of games he heard about — _Don directly states he released himself from NDA and did not hear Slayer mentioned_
- [MEDIUM] Secondary market for used pinball games is cooling; games are sitting longer on Craigslist and Pinside than previously observed — _Dennis observes sitting inventory patterns and attributes to market saturation with new expensive titles_
- [MEDIUM] Jimi Hendrix pinball was accidentally leaked by Gary Stern's daughter nearly a year prior but no official announcement has been made — _Tony references previous episode discussion of Hendrix leak with no follow-up announcement_
- [MEDIUM] Coil stops became a supply chain constraint affecting all pinball manufacturers — _Don mentions coil stops as a big issue; other retailers like Pinball Life could still sell them but manufacturers couldn't obtain them_

### Notable Quotes

> "Theater of Magic is one of my favorite games ever, and I did have one. I regret selling it."
> — **Don**, ~mid-episode
> _Personal game preferences; Don contradicts his earlier frustration with Tony and Dennis's choices on overrated games_

> "At $3,500, I would be tempted to get one because I like Wonelli... at this sort of pricing, it's like, no, there's just no way I could ever really consider it."
> — **Dennis**, ~Can Crusher pricing discussion
> _Demonstrates price elasticity; same person interested at $3,500 but unwilling at $6,995_

> "Stern is, they're not leaving any money on the table. They're starting as high as they can, and they're trying to raise the bar of the whole industry to match the secondary market."
> — **Tony**, ~Can Crusher analysis
> _Industry pricing strategy critique; suggests Stern prioritizes margin over volume_

> "I used to be under NDA with Stern, but I gave that up by my choice back in March when we were looking at Ghostbusters stuff. So I can say Slayer was not in the list of games I've heard."
> — **Don**, ~Slayer discussion
> _Insider knowledge release; confirms Slayer not on earlier Stern roadmap_

> "I started Game Machines in 2012 and just how much different it is now, where even lesser desired titles like when I got my Jurassic Park, I probably could have spent $700 less had I bought it in 2012 than when I bought it this year."
> — **Dennis**, ~market pricing discussion
> _Long-term market inflation observation; even secondary machines showing 4-year price escalation_

> "Slayer doesn't have the history that an AC/DC does or KISS. It doesn't have the audience. And I don't think it has a worldwide appeal."
> — **Don**, ~Slayer analysis
> _Skepticism about Slayer as next music pin; questions fan base and global appeal_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Don | person | Guest host from Pinball Podcast; former Stern NDA holder; pinball enthusiast and podcast personality |
| Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; attended Hobbit launch party, competitive pinball player |
| Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; founder of Game Machines in 2012; attended Hobbit launch party |
| Gary Stern | person | CEO/leader of Stern Pinball; photographed with Slayer band member at Comic-Con; daughter accidentally leaked Hendrix pin |
| Jody Dankberg | person | Senior executive at Stern Pinball; comes from metal promotion background; may have ties to music licensing |
| Joe Zink | person | Helped Don customize Metallica pinball music soundtrack with 90s metal songs |
| Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer; pricing strategy under discussion; rumored to be developing Slayer pin |
| Pabst Blue Ribbon | company | Beer brand; commissioned Can Crusher pinball game from Stern; selling directly at $6,995 MSRP |
| Pinball Arcade | product | Digital pinball platform; hosts Fishtails and other classic tables for play |
| Pabst Blue Ribbon Can Crusher | game | Licensed pinball by Stern; Spike-based; no mechanical crate included; 6-8 week delivery lag; priced at $6,995 MSRP |
| Attack from Mars | game | Classic pinball; both Don and Tony want it from Pinside Top 50; viewed as 'perfect pin' |
| Theater of Magic | game | Classic Williams pinball; Tony considers overrated; Don owns/owned one and regrets selling it |
| Fishtails | game | Classic pinball ranked #46 on Pinside Top 50; Don considers overrated; limited shot variety |
| Metallica | game | Stern music pin; Don customized music with 90s metal songs; improved performance and enjoyment |
| Hobbit | game | Jersey Jack Pinball launch party discussed; Tony made it to round 5, Dennis to round 6 in three-strike format with 24 players |
| Ghostbusters | game | Stern pin; Dennis performed better at Ghostbusters launch party than Hobbit launch party |
| X-Men Limited Edition | game | Don considered this as most-wanted from Pinside Top 50 before changing to Attack from Mars |
| 403 Club | event | Pinball tournament venue in Kansas City, Kansas; hosts monthly tournaments where Dennis typically goes two-and-out |
| Pinheads Pinball Podcast | organization | Podcast that covered Pabst Can Crusher development and original concept change in detail |
| Pinball Life | company | Retailer that could still source coil stops when manufacturers could not |
| Red Fang | game | Pabst Can Crusher features Red Fang music; considered music-related license by Tony |
| Slayer | game | Rumored next Stern music pin based on Comic-Con photo and concert sponsorship; metal band with limited recent album sales |
| Kiss | game | Recent Stern music pin release; just over one year old at time of discussion |
| Jimi Hendrix | game | Accidentally leaked by Gary Stern's daughter nearly a year prior; still no official announcement despite leak |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pabst Blue Ribbon Can Crusher pricing and market viability, Stern Pinball's next music pin theme (Slayer vs. other bands), Secondary market cooling and pinball price inflation
- **Secondary:** Pinside Top 50 game rankings and subjective valuations, Supply chain constraints (coil stops), Stern's pricing strategy and market positioning, Music pin design considerations and band selection
- **Mentioned:** Licensing and sponsorship as signals for unreleased games

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.45) — Positive about classic games and community engagement (Hobbit launch party, tournament play), but skeptical and concerned about industry pricing trends, market saturation, and Stern's pricing strategy. Slayer rumor discussed with measured skepticism. Price criticism is direct and negative.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Rising new pinball prices ($6,000-$7,000+) creating market saturation; used game secondary market not sustaining previous price escalation rates (confidence: medium) — Tony/Dennis discussion of game pricing escalation; Dennis: games sitting longer; prediction that newer titles will 'slide a little bit more'
- **[design_philosophy]** Music pin band selection criteria: declining relevance of 1980s-90s bands (Slayer lacks modern album sales); potential future shift toward alternative/early-90s acts as collector demographic ages (confidence: medium) — Tony: speculation about shift from metal to alternative/early-90s acts like Nirvana; Don: 'Slayer...doesn't have worldwide appeal'
- **[leak_detection]** Jimi Hendrix pinball accidentally leaked by Gary Stern's daughter nearly a year prior; still no official announcement (confidence: medium) — Tony references this as 'original talk in one of our earliest episodes' with no follow-up announcement despite leak timing
- **[market_signal]** Stern appears to be pursuing volume-agnostic, margin-focused pricing strategy; willing to accept lower sales volume at premium pricing rather than volume-driven model (confidence: medium) — Tony: 'Stern is...trying to raise the bar of the whole industry to match the secondary market... cool with not selling that many'
- **[community_signal]** Don voluntarily released himself from Stern NDA in March 2016 regarding Ghostbusters; no longer bound by confidentiality (confidence: high) — Don: 'I used to be under NDA with Stern, but I gave that up by my choice back in March when we were looking at Ghostbusters stuff'
- **[market_signal]** Pabst Can Crusher priced at $6,995 MSRP ($6,399 sale), exceeding expectations by $1,400+, viewed as unsustainable market positioning (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'That price is pretty crazy' and expected $5,000-$5,500; Tony: 'At $3,500 would be a home run'; core sentiment that Stern 'not leaving money on the table'
- **[announcement]** Pabst Can Crusher now available for direct purchase on Pabst website with 6-8 week delivery lag; produced in batches rather than large production run (confidence: high) — Tony: 'price is currently on sale... $6,399... regular price of $6,995' with delayed delivery; Dennis infers batch production model
- **[rumor_hype]** Slayer pinball rumored as Stern's next music pin based on Comic-Con appearance and concert sponsorship visibility (confidence: medium) — Dennis: Comic-Con photo with band member and sponsorship banner sighting; Don: 'Slayer was not in the list of games I've heard' (6+ months ago)
- **[sentiment_shift]** Secondary pinball market cooling; extended inventory sit times on Craigslist/Pinside; newer game prices not holding as well despite initial MSRP escalation (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'I'm seeing a lot of stuff sit now... sit longer than I used to notice'; notes used game prices have inflated significantly even for lesser-desired titles
- **[supply_chain_signal]** Coil stops became a supply chain bottleneck affecting all pinball manufacturers; availability issues despite retailers like Pinball Life maintaining stock (confidence: medium) — Don: 'coil stops were a big issue... manufacturers could get coil stops' but retailers still had supply

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## Transcript

 Welcome to the Collected Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, August 14th. It's episode 15. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're joined today by our special guest host, Don, from the Pinball Podcast. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us, Don. Thanks for inviting me. We will have a link to the Pinball Podcast in our show notes. If any of you listen to Pinball Podcasts, you've surely encountered them because they have the best name for a podcast about pinball ever. Good for the Google searches. Yes, yes. I can see everyone else must be really regretting it as they try and figure out ways to work in the word pinball into their subject line. I like your format where you can talk about any gaming. Ours were pretty limited by being called the Pinball Podcast. We can only talk pinball. Well, Tony gets full credit for that because I probably would have made us pinball exclusive. But, you know, the concern was there wasn't always a lot of pinball news. And so it's sort of like, well, what are we going to do even if we're going every other week? It's like, well, we throw in these other topics. So, yeah, on the plus side, we get to talk about everything. On the other side, we have a lot of people, I think, that might get turned off by the fact that they don't like one of the three topics. So, you know, it's a trade-off. But we ain't making money, so we do what we want. I hear you. Okay, well, normally we would go ahead and start with our intros here. So I guess, Don, do you have anything going on that you want to share? I'm on the outskirts of potty training, which is really exciting, and just about to start preschool with my kids. So my life is about to start over again. Yeah. I'm looking forward to having eight hours of free time every week. It gets even better when I start school, school proper, because I just had that. My youngest just started actual full-up school school, And it's amazing. It sounds amazing. Other than that, I've been trying to fit in some video games and some movies and whatnot. So, yeah, pretty boring week, actually. So, sorry I have nothing exciting to talk about yet. That's all right. We often have really boring weeks. We just try and make it sound really awesome for entertainment purposes. So, for me, no, not a whole ton. A couple pinball tournaments since the last episode. Had our monthly one up at 403 Club in Kansas City, Kansas. Went two and out as I usually do. Took it to game three both times, though, so I guess I can kind of pat myself on the back for that. Hobbit launch party was last night. Actually did decent. Not as good as I did at the Ghostbusters launch, but I did survive six rounds. It was the three-strike system, so that was nice. I actually took first on a few of those games, which is atypical for me. I'm pretty scrubbed compared to a lot of the players. How many players were there? Oh, gosh. It was 24, I think. I thought it was 24. I think the official first start count was 24. I don't know if everyone stuck through all their strikes or not. And then other than that, video game-wise, lots and lots of Gems of War. It is my puzzle quest clone, and so I have fully embraced it. I haven't touched Dying Light for two weeks now. I don't even know if I'll ever go back to it because it's so mundane, and I just like making my little bejeweled combinations and advancing my little characters. But I did also find there was a free Adver game on the Xbox One called Ben-Hur. Apparently, there's a remake. I almost said a terrible remake, but I probably shouldn't jump to conclusions, but I kind of have. And so it's just three chariot races on the same track. The only difference is the number of laps you need is one higher each time, and it's just to promote the movie. Every time you start the set of races, it tries to show you the trailer for the film. And currently, it gets a highlight because on True Achievements, which is one of the top Xbox gaming websites, it is currently recognized as being the lowest rated game ever on the site. Is True Achievements unlocked or just gamer rating? Gamer rating. Wow. The number of stars they're giving it on the site. So the price is higher? It currently is the worst. Worse than Yaris, worse than a lot of the other advert games. Doritos Crash Course. I was going to say, Doritos Crash Course was pretty bad, and it's worse than that? Oh, that was a great game. It's rated worse than that. And Doritos I thought was okay. I never played Yaris. Yaris was notoriously bad because the control scheme was so awful. And this is not like that. If you know how to play a racing game, this is not that bad. I full cleared all the achievements in under an hour. And there was one that took a little bit of work because you have to wipe out all five of the chariots, and you have to do it yourself, and you have to do it in each of the rounds, so you have to destroy all 15 opponents yourself. And that takes a little bit of getting used to, but anyway. It's definitely not the worst game I've ever played, but it also isn't very special, and it didn't make me want to see the movie. Anyway, that's all I've been going on with me. Tony, what's up? I took my certification exam last week, and I passed it, so I don't have to worry about testing again until March. Yay! Congratulations. I went to the Hobbit launch party as well. I made it to round five, so that was really solid for me. Two and out at 4.03, just like normal. The caliber of play at 4.03 is just insane. I went to a local board game night on Friday night, and there were a bunch of people there who had been at Gen Con, so we had a couple games that were only for sale at Gen Con at the time that were playable, and a couple of new Kickstarter games that had come out that we played. That was a lot of fun. And otherwise, I've just been working on a variety of random around-the-house projects and stuff. I did finally get a chance to go see Star Trek Beyond. It was better than Into Darkness, and I still don't like the design of the new Enterprise. That's just, I just cannot like it. The Abramsification doesn't resonate with you? I don't know. She's too curvy or something. I just, she doesn't look right to me. It looks off. Well, I know a lot of people thought the Star Trek Next Gen Enterprise, I know that sets some people off that it looks too weird, too rounded or squat or something. I don't know, because that's my Enterprise, because that's the show I grew up with. Yeah, I was always an A fan. I've seen some fan things where they've taken the original Enterprise from the original movies, but put on the larger, rounded nacelles like were in the new Abrams movies, and that actually looks pretty good. but something about the rest of the ship I just don't like. But it was still a good movie. It was better than Into Darkness. I didn't walk out of it with the rage, and it was a lot of fun. So I was pretty happy with it all in all. I heard if you keep your expectations low, you'll have a lot of fun with it. Yeah, and that's exactly what it was. I went into Into Darkness expecting it to be this giant huge thing, and I walked out so angry at that movie. And this one I went in, I was just like, okay, it's a matinee showing. We'll just see it because I've heard it's not that bad. and I watched it. It's like, okay, that was actually a lot of fun. Yeah, I think it kind of felt more like how the shows used to be in its approach. It wasn't just a whole bunch of action set pieces. Still some issues with the science versus what we used to get out of the shows in terms of the logic being stretched. That was the thing for me with Into Darkness is I'm not that grounded into the science of Star Trek, but there were just elements in that where I was going, what? How is this happening? It makes no sense. and, of course, the blatant ripoffs of taking Wrath of Khan and just doing little twists on it, whereas you had that very first Abrams Star Trek, which was what I thought was so nice about it, was they went into that alternate timeline. So you had the potential to not have to duplicate things. And then what do you do? You try and clone the greatest Star Trek movie ever. And as you would expect to try and live up to a classic, you don't. Yeah, that's pretty much how I felt with Into Darkness. Anyway, we'll have to save that for the Eclectic Movie Podcast, which we don't have. I was going to ask if you guys had seen Suicide Squad while you were on that topic. I have not. Yeah, I haven't. It's rating too low for me to go to the theater and spend the money. I only had a chance to go to one movie, and I went with Star Trek. My wife and I were out of town, and we told my in-laws watching the kids, we told them we were coming back late, but we came back early and saw a movie before they knew it. And yeah, we saw Suicide Squad last weekend. Did you like it? I wish I had seen Star Trek. It started out strong. It just got kind of boring. The end is pretty bad. Yeah, the third act is a mess. It is. There's no motivation for the Suicide Squad to kick into action. I don't know. I don't want to spoil anything, but I never saw that Batman v. Superman movie. I've heard it's better than that. I finally watched the ultimate director's cut that they put out. I never saw the theatrical release. In the ultimate one, they added quite a bit of footage, and people were saying that that cut is a lot better, and I walked away from watching Batman v Superman thinking, it's all right, but the first, I'd say, 45 minutes is a big struggle because it's hard to kind of understand what exactly is going on. And for a comic book movie, it seemed a little off. But Star Trek wishes you had seen it as well because I've read that they are struggling to make back the money that they've spent to create the movie. So they've already announced a fourth one, but my guess will be that they're going to have a drastically reduced budget, which could be good. I mean, Rathacon had a really reduced budget because Star Trek, the motion picture, was such a bomb. Are they bringing back Justin Lin to direct, do you know? I don't know. I think they just were, you know, they were just getting out there that they're not cutting it off of the trilogy that they're going to go on. But, you know, in the wake of these numbers, I mean, we'll see when the worldwide comes in exactly where they end up. But it's just not, people just aren't going to it to the volume that would warrant a, I don't remember what it was, $180 million before advertising money. So pretty high. Yeah, I think that probably comes off of the whole end of darkness. So many people were upset with end of darkness. I think that hurt them. Well, let's go into topics that we are sure about, our three main areas. And the first one, as is almost always the case, would be pinball. And before going into some of the actual news that we want to tackle this time, we thought we'd go ahead and start with a general intro discussion, because we have Don here, and he's a pinball expert. So we have a number of things that we thought that we've recently covered or covered over various episodes that we thought might be fun to have a discussion with you about. Sure. And I know Tony has one that he loves to ask any of our pinball interview subjects or guests that are associated with it, and so I'll let him go ahead and lead off with that one. Yeah, it's my favorite pinball question. If you had no rules and you could do anything you wanted, what music pin would you have made? Oh, I was looking over your questions and I skipped this, or I forgot about this one. My favorite band is Pixies, but I don't know if they'd fit in a pinball game too well. I'd probably do something kind of over the top, like a Megadeth. I'm not huge into the music, but I think their imagery has, you know, they've got 30 years of imagery to make a pretty badass game. Metallica didn't really have that same level that Megadeth does, and they made a great game out of that. I think Megadeth music would be great in a pin. Maybe not the most creative answer, but it's something I would love to have in my game room. Yeah, that wouldn't be that bad either. I don't think Pixies would be horrible if you laid it out right either. No, it's just they don't have any iconic toys to convert in there. Eyeball slicing mode? I don't know. Not a whole lot. But, yeah, I wouldn't mind listening to Pixies playing. Ween is kind of the easy answer. But I talked to some other pinball. It seems like a lot of pinball people are Ween fans, and they all say they wouldn't want to get burnt out on Ween music beating a pin. So you want to pick a band that's not your favorite band, but that you wouldn't get sick of right away. Or you just pick up that program that lets you flash whatever music into the pen you want anyway and just change it randomly as you go. You know, I did that for Metallica, and actually Joe Zink has helped a lot, and I put in all these 90s metal songs that I liked, and it made me so much better at the game, and I really enjoyed it a lot more. I had Pantera and Queens of the Stone Age and Helmet, and it was more fun playing because I wasn't hearing the same 15 Metallica songs anymore. I was just hearing songs that I loved and playing pinball at the same time. Awesome. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I don't know. I've heard you guys put in Fergie and Justin Bieber songs and stuff as a joke. I don't know if that would help or hurt. Maybe if rage fuels you, it could help. There you go, yeah. Okay, well, kind of similar to that, but one of the things I wanted to go over is in our last episode, So Tony and I went over what we thought, what pin we most wanted that was in the pin side top solid state 50, and also what one we thought was the most overrated. And I can say that from the one we both wanted, Tony wanted Attack from Mars, and I wanted Lord of the Rings. And on overrated, Tony's overrated one was Indianapolis 500, and mine was Theater of Magic. So just sort of curious, Don, what you would, what you don't already have, what pin side top 50 table would you most, or pin I should say since we're talking the physical ones, would you most want to have? And on that list, what one do you think is the most overrated per whatever definition you use for overrated? You reminded me that I was upset with your choices on most overrated last time. That's why I give these refreshers to fuel that rage. Think of me as your Justin Bieber. Theater of Magic is one of my favorite games ever, and I did have one. I regret selling it. But if there's one that I wish I could own, it would be Attack from Mars as well. It's kind of an easy answer, but looking over the whole list, I had picked out X-Men L.E., and then I was scrolling back up to the top, and I'm like, man, I would really like to have Attack from Mars. I've never had that one. I never get tired of it, so that's got to be my pick, too. It makes sense. It was on my short list. I'd say it was probably one of the top three that I would have gone with. It's just like the perfect pin. It is, yeah. Yeah, the light show, the sound, the theme, the shots. There's not much you could do to improve that game. Maybe take out the neon pink, but that's about it. And overrated, what do you think? I've got to say Fishtails, right? Fishtails is sitting at 46. There's not a whole lot of shots. It's a cool theme, but it just doesn't come together for me. It seems like you're shooting the same two or three shots every time. They well integrated the theme, but it's just in the top 50, I've never been too excited about Fishtails. I've seen a lot of people kind of talk it up. I think I've only ever played it once in someone's collection, and so I don't really have any thoughts on Fishtails because I have had next to no exposure to it. I guess I played it twice on Pinball Arcade also, so I guess it really never hooked me, pun intended. Oh. Yeah, I don't think that's that much better. It's easy to say Adam's Family because that's one I kind of get tired of, but that's a classic. I can't throw that one under the bus, right? there's a discussion on the pinball subreddit uh actually about is adam's family overrated i did not start the topic but it's got a number of interesting comments because you know a lot of people think it is and some other people think well no it kind of deserves it so i it's never really resonated me i like it uh i like it better than i originally did after having played it so much we had it on location in one of our monthly tournaments for quite a while and it's still on location they just moved it to one of the non-tournament spots and so i'll still drop some coins in it, but it's just, yeah, I don't know. Those bigger games with lots of flippers, I start to not like anyway, so that always sort of stacks against me, or against the pen, and I don't like that little flipper on the far left that just seems to be designed to shoot balls into the right out lane, and it seems like all you do is walk the mansion or, you know, shoot for the piano and try and get your multiball, but, you know, that was pretty common for games of that era, so that you'd and they have a couple of really good strategic options. I'd love to see that layout today with current code, with a current theme, like a new theme. Oh, that would be interesting. The layout is pretty solid. There's a lot they could do with it. Yeah, I agree. Hey, maybe that's what Lawler will be doing here with JJP. Hopefully, eventually. Or we'll have Roller Coaster Tycoon 2.0. Those are really the only two options. That's all right. I'm kind of surprised that announcement hasn't been made yet. I expected it before the end of the summer with Hobbit coming out. I expected them to have announced that Maid said something about the new pen. I think they're just behind. All the games have been behind. That's no secret. I think they're really waiting for Expo, and we're going to see something at Expo. Yeah, I think it makes sense. But, you know, if they're still committed to getting it announced this year, I think that's when it would most likely be. but I don't really hold JJP to any sort of time frame expectations at this point. No, I don't know. Even if Stern is running out of parts or having issues, it's like if everybody's feeling this crunch. Oh, ghosting. Yes, ghosting. Well, yeah, that's another issue. But I'd heard that coil stops were a big issue. The world was out of coil stops. Somehow you could still buy them from Pinball Life and whatnot, but none of the manufacturers could get coil stops. I don't know what the deal was. I don't know they made them all wrong they're wrong size they're all got the wrong metal or something they're all snap let's go ahead and move on to our first we'll call it real topic within pinball which Tony I know you put this one in for discussion it was some more information about the Pabst can crusher they announced it is for sale on Pabst's website we'll have a link to it but the big thing is the price is the price is just, I'd call the price about $1,400 higher than I expected. So it's not a minor difference. What were you expecting? I was expecting between $5,000 and $5,500. Okay, so sort of in the neighborhood of pro pricing. Yeah, and it's currently on sale. At least the last time I checked, they wanted $6,399 for it with a regular price of $6,995. And it's like, wow, that's much higher than I expected. Yeah, I guess, you know, thinking about it, thinking about what I'm assuming is a shallower rule set than their normal lineup, than the true CERN's lack of dots, so no animation was needed. I do, personally, I do find it to be too expensive for a glorified EM. But, you know, it is a boutique item, obviously, since they're only selling it through Pabst. And from what I can gather, and this, you know, shout out to the Pinheads Pinball Podcast, which spent a lot of time going over this. It sounds like originally Pabst was pushing to do this really unique idea where they were only going to have 50 pins built, and they were going to put one in each state at a Pabst-supporting bar. And that apparently got scrapped, and instead this concept has come about instead. But I'm getting more of this sort of vibe that they want these for promotional reasons, but if you're a real big Pabst fan, they've gone ahead and created an outlet for you to be able to go and buy them. That doesn't sound like they're stockpiling them either because that link indicates that there's a big lag on the order time, you know, like the six to eight weeks for delivery. So I'm assuming they'll just take the money and then they'll tell Stern how many they need on some periodic basis and get those run up off the line, assuming the coil stops are okay, of course. Yeah, it sounds like they're doing them in batches, possibly small batches. That price is pretty crazy. The price on Lonelli is pretty crazy. They already had the art, the layout. Everything was already done when they received the project, so there was no cook time, you know? Yeah, it's the Shrekification syndrome. I guess. And Pabst doesn't come with the crate either, which seems like that would be a big, unique item. Like, it won't only have the crate you could sit the game on, as well as legs. This doesn't have the crate. It's still the same price. It doesn't have the unique cans that you crush to level it. The system was already there. It's using Spike, so it's not like it's a trial game. I think this type of game at $3,500 would be a home run, but Stern is, they're not leaving any money on the table. They're starting as high as they can, and they're trying to raise the bar of the whole industry to match the secondary market. But the secondary market is going to cool as every game costs a fortune now. Yeah. So it's not like there's the 10 hit games from the 90s that everybody's kind of saving their money for because everyone wants. Now that pool is much, much bigger than it was five years ago. But Stern still isn't on board with that. So they're cool with not selling that many. I don't think it's going to be a big seller at that price point. At $3,500, I would be tempted to get one because I like Wonelli. I like the layout. I love Dirty Donnie art. I like this theme. I'm not a PBR guy, but I'm cool with it. And Red Fang, that's cool. It's just a cool pinball theme. Yeah, I think it works on a lot of levels, and I would be more inclined to have something like this than Wonelli itself. I hope I think the art package is better. But, you know, at this sort of pricing, it's like, no, there's just no way I could ever really consider it. Actually, when we were at that Hobbit launch party yesterday, we were in a discussion just before we left about, you know, the whole pinball bubble and the price of everything going up. And, you know, I remember I started Game Machines in 2012 and just how much different it is now, where even lesser desired titles like when I got my Jurassic Park, I probably could have spent $700 less had I bought it in 2012 than when I bought it this year. And, yeah, I think, you know, I'm seeing a lot of stuff sit now, sit on Craigslist, sit on Pinside a bit. It seems like they're sitting longer than I used to notice. And so my guess will be, I don't know if the bubble's going to burst in the sense that prices are going to collapse, but I do think that they're going to quit going up on these old games. Because as all this volume of new stuff keeps coming out, everyone's trying to sell it for basically the same amount that they paid new in box. It's like, oh, I stuck Cliffy's in, so give me my new in box price back. I just, you know, I don't think that's going to be tenable, and I would actually expect some of the newer stuff to slide a little bit more than we've been seeing, but maybe not. We'll have to see. Well, guys are filling up their game rooms, too, and they're not willing to sell games at a loss, sell games at early 2000s prices. So those games are sitting in their game rooms. They're not flipping games as often. So the turnover factor is gone. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, there are a lot less that I, that I've been seeing. We on our Kansas city area, there's a Facebook thread and then, you know, they'll throw them up there and I'll see some people that will still be trying to ask for what I'm sure they probably paid for on some of these things, but it's just like, Oh, I'm sorry. That's a got leave. And there ain't no way I'm paying two grand for that. Oh, well for them. Oh, well for us. Okay. Well, speaking of Stern, the big rumors that have been going on for a long time is, or predictions, I should say, is what's Stern's next music pin going to be? And the biggish news that I've seen lately is that the rumor is now that it's Slayer. And this is based off of a couple of items. One was that Gary Stern posed for a photo at Comic-Con with one of the band members, which in and of itself I wouldn't read all that much into. In another instance, there was a Slayer concert, and someone took a picture of one of the sponsorship banners, and Stern Pinball was listed as a sponsor of the concert. So, I think that has naturally led to the discussion that Slayer would be the next music pin. So, I guess, what are your guys' thoughts about that? I personally had never, Slayer never entered my mind. Part of that is I just, I never listened to them. So, I just didn't, you know, I'm thinking, big bands, big bands, what would that be? Well, Aerosmith is a big band, Iron Maiden is a pretty big band, Slayer, you know, They're just not in my first breath of metal bands to speak about. But, you know, the evidence is seeming to point this way now. Yeah, I used to be under NDA with Stern, but I gave that up by my choice back in March when we were looking at Ghostbusters stuff. So I can say Slayer was not in the list of games I've heard, but I haven't heard anything in six months, and I don't seek it out. I think Slayer, if they did something like a re-theme, if they rethemed, you know, X game, whatever, Hyrule or Casino or Lord of the Rings into a Slayer game, they could maybe pick up some sales that way. Slayer doesn't have the history that an ACDC does or KISS. It doesn't have the audience. And I don't think it has a worldwide appeal. But for a small run, it's possible. Well, my thought are, I mean, some of the big bands they've listed makes a little bit more sense, But everybody's continuously still listing, you know, metal bands. And I'm wondering if we're going to start seeing a shift to something more as the grouping and the collector's age, where getting to where it's more like the alternative in the early 90s, early to mid 90s stuff is getting to be more, you know, worse what we grew up with. If we're going to start seeing a music pen shift to something more along those lines instead of just saying, I mean, because right now everything's been pretty much metal except for Elvis. So I can see a change coming, you know, a Nirvana pin or something from that era that could be interesting. I just, I don't know. It's Slayer's, it doesn't grab me like the thought of an Aerosmith pin did, but it's one of those things that it's like I guess I can see it through circumstantial evidence. It's just not something that, they wouldn't have been the first band I would have thought of. As far as the sponsorship on the banner, Jody Dankberg, who's a big wig at Stern, he comes from a metal promotion background. So it's possible he has ties in that industry still, and that's where some of that licensing crossover is coming from. He may be as a hookup where they can get some funding there or more exposure to that sponsorship. And having the metal pins, I think that audience is a good audience to be promoting pinball to. doesn't necessarily mean they're having a Slayer pin. Iron Maiden's kicked around forever. It's hard to think of bands in the 90s that are iconic yet. Something like a Rolling Stones, a Kiss, they have 40, 50 years of still being relevant pop culture-wise, even if their albums aren't. Slayer, I would say Slayer is still relevant in a pop culture aspect, but I don't think their albums have sold maybe ever, but definitely not the last 15 years. Yeah, it could just truly be promotional efforts. There could be people that attend a Slayer concert that they may think, you know, these guys could be susceptible to wanting to buy a Metallica pin or something like that. So we're just going to get our name out there and try and get more people into pinball that way. So, yeah, it could be all for naught, but it at least gave us something interesting to speculate about. Did you guys hear the Jimi Hendrix thing? Yeah, we did. So, yeah, Gary Stern daughter kind of accidentally leaked that they were working on a Hendrix pin. We still haven't seen anything from that, and that's been almost a year since that happened. Yeah, because that was some of the original talk in one of our earliest episodes where we talked about that and Aerosmith and Iron Maiden because those were all the things that had been talked about and rumored and this and that. And it could just be completely that the next thing on the list isn't another music pin. I mean, there's nothing saying there has to be continuous music pins. they're coming out with KISS having just come out. So it could be just a big break here with several non-music pens. Yeah, KISS is just over a year, and that was two years separated from Metallica. But I would say Red Fang being a part of PBR. PBR to me is kind of a metal license, music-type license. Then Red Fang fits into it pretty well. I do love the artwork on that machine. I don't know if Stern's considering the Can Crusher, though, as part of its official lineup, or that's more of a, like the Domino's thing, where that, you know, Spooky says, well, we've designed and are doing Domino's, but don't think of Domino's as a spooky pen. It's a contract job. Yeah. As late as Ghostbusters has been, both with the announcement and actually getting them out the door, they might just be down to two pens this year. We might just wait until October to see whatever it is, and who knows what the rumor will be in October. I will say the game that I had heard was next has been rumored, but it is not the strongest rumor right now. So I don't know if they shuffled the lineup. When I was in the know, they did shuffle the lineup, and they definitely shuffled the dates. Every game that I had heard about was delayed. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, the only other non-music rumor that I've heard, which is so obvious that it's not surprising that people would talk about it, would be Star Wars. But, you know, then everyone starts speculating about how long do they wait to incorporate. Like with Star Trek pin, for example, the desire to incorporate more than one movie. Same with Iron Man. Get more than one movie into your modes and stuff. Expect to at least be close to the second movie, major movies released before you'd see anything. They almost always wait until the sequel of a film like Iron Man and Dark Knight and whatnot and Spider But I wouldn be surprised if we saw more than one Star Wars pin from this new series Yeah between the new series and the new Star Wars stories movies coming out there's going to give so much fodder that can be used. Yeah, we might see one from the new trilogy. We might see two from the new trilogy. We might see a Legacy pin where, oh, 40 years of Star Trek's coming up, or Star Wars, rather. Yeah, I could see that. Can we get a Donnie Yen-themed pen just because it's Donnie Yen and he's awesome? Yeah. Wishful thinking. Okay, so lots of speculation there regarding Stern. So let's go ahead and go to our last pinball topic of the day. It is not about Stern, but it could be, I suppose, depends on what you think of the scenes. I thought we might have some fun with a little discussion about the sort of the best bad slash not great pinball machine you'd like to own. And so it can be any machine with just the following criteria. It's a machine you do not have, but you kind of wish you did have. And my only criteria on this, I turned to Pennside and I said, all right, if you're going to choose a solid state game, it cannot be ranked in the top 200. So it can be number 201 or lower, but no higher than that. if you're going to go off of their EM list, just the top 100. So anything ranked 101 or lower is okay. I just thought that we'd use a little bit of thresholds, get some sort of communal agreement on what might be a not good game or bad, depending on what you think of it. But I guess, Tony, you want to kick us off? Well, mine is from a game I've talked about in the past, Campus Queen. It is ranked number 211 on the Pennside Top 100 EMs. I played it in At the Texas Pinball Festival And I hated this game I hated it so horribly And then I played it a second time Because I needed to get a better score And that second playthrough was like You know I kind of like this game And I ended up playing that game probably Four more times over the course of the weekend And every time I played it It's like you know this game is really not that bad I kind of like the mushroom pops I kind of like how it feels And how it flows I mean, it's a reskin of an earlier game that was reskinned a third time after that. I mean, it's nothing special, but something about that game just really draws me and has become a sort of, I won't go so far as to call it a grail game for me, but it's on the edge. It's on my actual watch list that I look for them for sale on like Pinside and stuff. Well, that's pretty significant. I mean, that's pretty close. It's quasi-grail. It's got kind of a cool layout. I was not familiar when you named it, but it's kind of interesting for an EM. Yeah, one of the other skin versions is the one I'm more familiar with. But, yeah, I only played it during the tournament. Because, of course, that game wasn't allowed to be played publicly for quite a while because it was locked in that tournament bank for so long. Yeah, well, because the other versions of it are Cleopatra, which was a one-player version, and Gator, which was a four-player version with zip flippers. I think I've seen Gator played on some Twitch streams of some tournaments. Yeah, Shiba, not Kuya. Yeah, Shiba, that's it. Yeah, Gator's a fun game. And they're the exact same layout. The only difference is Gator has zip flippers. Yeah. It's just weird. It was a game that, like I said, I played it the first time, and I'm like, screw that game. I hate that game. That's the worst game in the bank. And the more I played it, it's like, okay, I kind of see how this game flows. And I actually really kind of enjoyed this game. You actually, you ended ranking pretty high on the qualifiers on that game, if I remember right. I did. I burned several plays on that game because I started getting into it. Okay. Well, Don, do you have a pick? Yeah, this is one. If you've ever listened to our podcast, you've heard it a million times. Roller Coaster Tycoon. Oh, this is why you didn't bite at my bait when I made fun of Lawler being that a roller coaster tycoon. I heard you. Okay, well, I'm working really hard here trying to fish that anger out. But, no, Rollercoaster Tycoon's got such a unique layout. He threw every toy you could think of in there, every odd little shot, and it's just a dog license. I don't even like the license that much. I like the rollercoaster theme, but the trolls and whatnot are kind of hokey. The dogs aren't necessarily that good looking. But, man, it is such a unique layout. Every time I see them, they're beat to heck, and they don't play that great. But every once in a while, I'll find them with some good slippers and have a great time with it. I just want my own that I can just fix up that plays well. I know it'll be family-friendly. I don't have to worry about anything like that, scaring my kids or whatnot. I was thinking of my list of grail pins are almost all dogs. I think maybe the highest rated one is Gladiators. Oh, yeah, Gladiators. I've seen a few people actually interested in Gladiators. What is Roller Coaster Tycoon ranked at, do you recall? 218. 218. And what was Campus Queen, Tony, do you remember? It's 211 on the EM. Okay. All right. That's saying something. 2.11 on the EM is a scare, man. Yeah, it's down there. Well, looking on their for sale list, I've only ever seen a single machine for sale on Pennside, and it's the same machine that's been sold three times. It's just, who knows how many of them have survived this long. So that's always a challenge with those EMs. Rollercoaster Tycoon, I actually can't say a lot about. I've only, I've never played one that was fully working, and that's frustrating. And I know they're notorious for being not functional fully. There's so much stuff on it. Yeah. That little troll, he was just staring there at me, and I was like, I can't even get the ball up. I think that one was one that wasn't even launching right, one of them. I may have tried two different ones. I don't recall exactly. This would have been at Texas where I saw him. So that's some really tall vertical up kickers that you need to have working to get the ball around. Well, my pick is also on the solid state list. It's ranked 229, and that would be Gottlieb's 1988 Bad Girls. Why Bad Girls? Why Bad Girls? What a great question, Don. I'd be more than happy to explain it. Bad Girls, I've never played it, so this is a very bold statement. Very bold. However, it has a horrible art package, very 80s, horrible sound design, arguably 80s, more arguably just poor, but the play field is a mirror image of 8-Ball Deluxe. It is, yeah. So, based solely off of the layout, and I am familiar with 8-Ball Deluxe, the layout's solid. This game has multiball, which is something that 8-Ball Deluxe lacks. They added a few other creative scoring methods to it as well, so it's got a little bit more depth to it than the old 8-Ball Deluxe game does. So for me, it's on there because it's so ugly, but it's still got the same basic gameplay that it actually puts an 8-Ball Deluxe-type experience into the affordability range. They didn't make a whole lot of bad girls, but currently, 8-Ball Deluxe, I would never spend the amount of money for 8-Ball Deluxe that it goes for. I could see getting an 8-Ball Deluxe LE, which again, because it's so ugly, drops into a price range that I think is reasonable. But bad girls should go for even less than that. So based off of the layout and looking past the 80s-ness, the sheer 80s-ness with those photo backglasses I fell in love with because they were so cheap to do, bad girls would be the one that I want the most. That backglass is so terrible, though. There are a lot of really terrible ones. I know a lot of people hate TX Sector. I've made fun of Genesis. Some people love Genesis because it's so campy that it sort of gets into that so bad it's good category. The Genesis is kind of popular, so that actually, for an 80s Gottlieb, that one kind of sells for a bit. Bad Girls, there ain't no reason why you shouldn't be able to find a Bad Girls for under $1,000. Wasn't there one for sale in Omaha like three or four months ago? Yeah, he had it listed for a while. I even contacted him because he had it in the Kansas City Craigslist, and I wondered if he came down here a lot or something. He said no. He knew there were more pinball fans in Kansas City, so he wanted a list. but he wanted $1,200 for it which is probably twice what I think it should go for I mean he LED'd it but you know that's all subjective sort of stuff so he thought he had that much in it and I was a little skeptical that it really should command that much even if it was restored because it is an 80s Gottlieb and they're just because I have to consider if I get bored with it you know how much of a hit I could take a hit but how much of a hit am I going to be willing to take to bring on something like this which not very many people in this area would be interested in buying But I am interested currently. So, anyway, that's the dog of a game that I most want, because I actually think that with that layout, it can't suck. It just looks bad. Well, 8-Ball Deluxe is next up on the pinball arcade. Is that enough to scratch the itch where you wouldn't need to have the real thing? Oh, sure. Could you pay five bucks? Sure. Yeah, could be. In fact, 8-Ball Deluxe, I mean, I have it on my little, like, tracking wish list on Pinside. I've kept my eyes out on it. I never really considered it from an ownership standpoint until I had someone contact me back when I was first trying to sell my Xenon, and I listed it for trades, and someone said he had an 8-Ball Deluxe LE that he hadn't been playing, and he wanted to discuss doing a trade, and he ended up backing out. He decided he'd rather keep the 8-Ball Deluxe. But then I just started like, oh, okay, well, you know, what do I not have? None of my games are drop target city. So I thought, well, it could be kind of fun, at least for a while, to have something that's sort of drop target heavy. I finally actually, yesterday was the first time I ever got to play World Poker Tour, and I could see that kind of fitting that, you know, scratching that itch. But even though that's a low cost for a modern Stern game, it's still very much more than what you would be able to get an A-Ball Deluxe LE for. Yeah, that one keeps going up in price. Yeah, people have decided that it's got some decent. I thought it was a fun shooter. I mean, you know, I think, again, kind of like this one, but not to the same extreme. It was sort of hampered by an ugly art package, but it doesn't feel like a Steve Ritchie game, even though it is one. Bad Girls, what is on top of the slingshots? Is this supposed to be chalk? I don't know. Dude? Probably. Who knows? Who knows? I don't know people that wouldn't want Bad Girls with kids around because it's seen as a little risque. You know, you could get Bad Girls and then reskin it so it didn't look quite so horrible. I mean, we could get some, you've got a niece, we can give her some markers or paint or something, and that would obviously make it look better. You know, she was over one time, I don't want to complain about Nora, because I love Nora, but Nora was, I wasn't paying that much attention, and we were down in my game room, and then after she left, I realized she had taken stickers and stuck them all over the left side of my Star Trek. And it was like, oh, no. So, I'm like, who's the best Metallica ones all over the front? I was going to say Diamond Lady was on my wish list for a while because I thought it looked really fun. And it's an 80s Gottlieb. But when I finally played it, I was like, I'm glad I didn't bite on this. Because I was on the hook for one for a while. And the guy sold, somebody snagged it from me from a local seller on Craigslist. After I finally played it, I was like, this really isn't a good game. I could get over the ugly art. But I'm trying to think if I've ever played Bad Girls. I think because you have such a home run layout with 8 Ball Deluxe, you're probably thinking the right thing where this would still be a fun pin. Yeah. Even though you haven't tried it yet. Yeah. Very, very bold statement. But, again, 80s Gottlieb. It shouldn't cost – failure shouldn't cost that much if I were to find one. But it wasn't one of their bigger runs either. No, 2,500 games. Yeah. So not bad. But, yeah, I've never – yeah, other than that Omaha one, I've never really seen one pop up. But most of the local collectors, they don't do Gottliebs. I think I've seen someone who just recently was selling his teat off, and that's the most recent Gottlieb I can remember in at least a year that I saw listed. That wasn't an EM Gottlieb, of course, because that's a different story. Okay, well, we got through the pinball segments. So now we can transition off into topics brand new for Don. Yeah, you can loosen up and live the good life, the EGP life now. So we're going to go into video games, which is our normal secondary segment. And the first thing I think we need to talk about is the only major video game that has recently come out, and that would be No Man's Sky. I'm sure everyone who's heard about anything about video games has heard about No Man's Sky because it has been heavily promoted for years now at this point. The PS4 version arrived early last week. PC was released a little bit later. Just before the release, there were a lot of concerns that were coming out based off of the preliminary PS4 copies that some people were getting because vendors were breaking street date. The developer, shortly after that was happening, had announced that they had already planned to do a day one patch. That day one patch did happen, and it significantly modified the copies of the game that were circulated. Review copies were held up because they were waiting to have the day one patch so that they would be able to review what was sort of seen as the finalized release version. And all in all, I'd say this was sort of the icing on the cake of concerns that were really circulating over the last six months or so about No Man's Sky. But it's out now. People are getting to experience it. And I guess I should ask, Don, have you played No Man's Sky yet? Yes, I have. Yeah, I picked it up Tuesday. I had it preordered. and I think the only other Hello Games game I'd played was Joe Danger, which I loved, but it is a small indie, you know, popcorn arcade game. No Man's Sky I played maybe four or five hours the first day, just whenever I could I played, and I hit a bug because the game is procedurally generated. Okay. There's like 18 quintillion planets or whatever. Each planet kind of just comes into its own as you're traveling across it or maybe when you arrive, but there's a lot of pop-up, kind of like an old Tony Hawk game where you don't see the buildings in the background until you get closer. The game kind of works like that, but I need to talk to an alien, and he was inside a mountain. The mountain had built itself into the base that he was sitting in, so I literally could not reach him. So ultimately I had to delete my save, and once I played it again, restarted it, it only took an hour to get past where I was the first time. It doesn't give you much as far as tutorial, or it doesn't hold your hand much at all. So the first five hours I played was a lot of just figuring out what needed to happen and trying to figure out how to survive, which wasn't what I expected from the game. I thought it was more exploration heavy, and it is, but the whole time you're trying to watch your shields and your life support system, you're constantly having to find resources to plug in there to keep them going. After a while it becomes kind of second habit. You're just constantly thinking about, oh, I need space in my inventory. Let me just fill up my life meter again kind of thing. I think it will get boring quick, honestly, because I've heard hour one is the same as hour 25 and all the hours between where you just, you know, you got a drill, and you're drilling to find material. That's most of the game. It sounds kind of Minecraft-y, and I've heard other people say it's kind of like Minecraft in space type thing. but does it have that same kind of draw? Well, you can't create. It plays a lot like Minecraft, but you're not building anything. All you're building is mods for your gun or your weapons and whatnot, which you would be doing in any game nowadays. You're not building a castle or roller coaster or something. So there's no creation side. It's just all exploration. The planets do have variety. Some are toxic. Some are all water. Some are all dirt. Some are jungles. one planet I was on it was snowing so there's a variety in that but sometimes it'll be in the galaxy you don't know what the planet's like until you get to the planet and you're using up resources to travel from planet to planet or a space system to a solar system to a solar system so they might as well be the same thing because you've got to travel to them anyway to figure out what they are there is sort of a loose story where you're following an objective from system to system to try and get the next mod or upgrade. So it does lead you somewhat if you wanted to, but you can just stay on one planet forever. I think they said it would take weeks if you wanted to walk around a planet, like weeks in real time. Wow. But you're kind of seeing the same thing over and over. There are like one-biome planets, like Tatooine, it's the desert planet, and Hoth is the ice planet. It's not like Earth where, depending upon where you are, it can be something completely different. Not that much. I mean, there are planets that are mountains and water and cold elements on top of the mountains, but not the way Earth is. Not that I've seen so far. I've been on maybe 30 planets or 25 planets around there, and there's variety between them, but nothing like Earth. And I have met several aliens, maybe, well, several being like five or six. So it is exciting when you find an alien or somebody else or something else out there. It is exciting just because there's so much space, and all the planets are basically uninhabited. There's no cities, anything like that. There's just outposts, which are maybe, the most I've seen is maybe three buildings in an outpost, and they're all pretty small. So as far as exploration, have you ever seen Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Oh, yeah. Okay, it's that video. I've seen it a couple of times. Yeah, it's the video game of that. That kind of has a draw to me. My issue is the initial reports of the PC port are having some serious issues, so I haven't picked it up yet. Because if people who have really amazing systems are having frame rate issues, my mid-range system is not going to be real happy. So I'm going to wait until they get some patches out and I start hearing that things are fixed. But this is a game that's interested me for a while, and I've watched some videos and seen some reviews and this and that, and you're playing on the PS4, and I hear that doesn't have any real issues at all other than minor stuff. Yeah, I've heard reports that it's freezing, but that has not happened to me. There was an issue. If you pre-ordered the game, you got a ship, and if you use that ship right away, it'll let you jump to a different solar system. Once you do that, you've bypassed where the story gives you the hyperdrive to jump between systems, and you're out of fuel. you can't make any more fuel to do so, so you're stranded in this other system, which is what I did as well. So I was stuck in that system, and my objective was inside a mountain. So if you're playing, if you're listening to this podcast, wait until you get your hyperdrive, wait until you can build everything, and then upgrade your ship. So it's not a skip-the-tutorial game. No, no. A little bit of a tutorial there is from the sounds of it. Yeah, yeah, stick to the tutorial. And you can get through it. If you know what you're doing, like I said, I got past that, under an hour. I think it'll be the kind of game I'll come back to. I just want to relax and play for an hour, and I don't want to think. I would do that with the Lego games. I just want to smash stuff for an hour. I don't have to think about anything. I used to do it with Puzzle Quest. You're talking about Gems of War, same developers. Puzzle Quest was my go-to when I was like, I wanted to play a game, but I was tired too, and I wanted to fall asleep. So I played Puzzle Quest every month for years because I could play for an hour. I see that being the same way with No Man's Sky. Oh, I want to go check out some planets. I could see my kids. If I was teaching them dual stick controls, which are kind of hard to understand, I think at first this is a good game. You don't really get into trouble unless you want to get into trouble as far as enemies attacking you. So I think they could wander around and find some cool animals. The animals in it are cute, and my kids, they get excited when I see a dinosaur-looking animal or whatever. Yeah, I thought it looked, a lot of the animals seem to look a little, it's like, oh, they're all a little different, but they're all kind of samey from a lot of the videos I saw. It's like, you can tell they're different, but you can also tell they're all built from the exact same palette. Right. If you have a scanner, you're supposed to scan every animal and every plant, and holding it up, it'll kind of zone in on what you haven't scanned yet, and sometimes it'll tell me, oh, you've already scanned this animal, and I'll think, oh, I thought it was new, or it'll say, it'll start scanning it. I'm like, oh, I thought, I was trying to get that plant over there because I haven't seen that before, not this animal I thought I'd seen before. Interesting. We were watching Wreck-It Ralph, and the Candyland world that he's in looks a lot like this. It's kind of a unique, it's a unique location. Yeah, I like the art style. It's kind of soothing. The art style is kind of soothing, I guess. and I was watching a video of a guy playing and he's running around and he comes up to this giant boulder of gold and he's just like, well, I'm just going to explode this giant boulder of gold because it's gold and I want gold. Well, that's another issue though is there's no real physics engine. If you blow out the bottom of that gold chunk, the whole chunk doesn't fall down. It just stays in the air. So one time I landed on top of a gold chunk that was maybe like 100 feet tall, and I got out of my ship and fell down, and then I had to, if I destroyed the gold, I couldn't get back to my ship, so I had to like carve a staircase out of the gold to like work my way back up. Oh. It does give you the option to reload a previous save instead of the last save. It'll give you two save files, so if you screw yourself, you can go back an additional step, which is nice. So you don't have to full-on start over, start over. Right. Hopefully you get back far enough. If you make a mistake, you need to kind of realize it so it doesn't save twice. But in this case, I was okay if I couldn't have made it to the top. It's an odd game, but one nice thing is that for the company, it feels like they've got all their eggs in this basket. Like, this is their banner title. So they should be good with doing patches and updates and adding content for a while. There is no DLC for the game. Patches and stuff seem to be the big thing. I mean, there's been a lot of games lately that have had rough launches that have actually ended up pretty good by the time they got done patching them and fixing them. So hopefully that'll be, like I said, I know there's the issues on the PC side that I'm just waiting for because it's still something I want to try. Until I know that it's going to actually run better than five frames a second, I'm not going to waste my time. And I don't have a PS4, so I can't just grab the PS4 version or else I would do that. Well, and I think kind of this mediocre early reviews might send the price down to $40 in the next month or two, kind of a Battleborn thing where they need to sell these copies to lower the price to do it. I think people wanted Fallout 4 with 18 quintillion planets. I did. Yeah. That kind of thing where you're running into cool stuff all the time. Yeah, that would have been insane and awesome. Yeah. I think I was hoping more for Star Citizen but released. It's coming, right? I don't follow Star Citizen. I expected more space exploration than what this is, and the idea that the planets might have an import, not just the constantly resupply. So the whole survival thing, like, you know, I'm hearing good things about learning the alien languages and stuff. The more Minecraftian elements seem to be going over really well for people who like that sort of thing. But for those of us who, when we saw the first trailers and weren't following along with this, were thinking more along the lines of Wing Commander with planets, and that's not what it is. So my interest in the game is very low myself. But it's just as well because I doubt my PC could handle it. And since I don't have a PS4 either... Yeah, there's nuggets of a great game in there. So No Man's Sky 2 or 3 is going to be really good. Just waiting for them to... Or even just the right DLC launches probably would help. Yeah, they said there'll be no paid DLC, but they might... I would hope they would add certain things. You just mentioned the language thing. That's probably the coolest part of the game for me. Aliens talk to you no matter what, and you just learn random words now and then. And so I might know 20 words of their language. So when they talk to me, I might understand two or three words. Yeah, that's one of the things a lot of the reviews have been positive about has been that alien involvement resonates pretty well. And some people like the survival elements. It seemed like a lot of people found it somewhat challenging early on. I think the comparisons to the Dark Souls were a little overblown. Yeah, no, nothing like that. but just i'm i'm telling you like i i've i know someone mike who co-hosted with us on uh the e3 episode he's got no man's sky so he he let me know a few things about it but he's like it's not like i'm dying all the time like okay well then it's not dark souls because i may not have played no man's sky but i have played dark souls and that is i mean its brutality is renowned for a reason so yeah dark souls you die 30 times the first hour this one i've died twice total, period. In both playthroughs, I've only died twice. All right, excellent. Well, I'm glad we had someone on who actually played the game because then we could have some decent coverage here. Let's go ahead and transition. And I guess my segue will be that even with the reviews not being as glowing as I think a lot of people were hoping for No Man's Sky, the studio, I'm sure, will do very well with the number of sales that they are having, unlike 38 Studios, which for those that aren't familiar, just a brief recap. 38 Studios was a video game company. It was founded by the famous Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and they moved to Rhode Island back in like the 2010, 2012 sort of time frame because they were given a $75 million loan from the state. The company collapsed into bankruptcy in 2012. They only ever released one game, Kingdoms of Amalur, and at the time I believe they were working on some sort of MMO that was kind of in the same world. And they were in the news recently, basically a week ago, and that is because the criminal investigation concluded and the state of Rhode Island determined they were not going to pursue criminal charges against 38 Studios. But there are some civil cases related to this that are still ongoing that kind of revolve around the lack of transparency in terms of how the state allocated that loan and, you know, kind of all really hinging, all of this is really hinged on the idea that the taxpayers got ripped off by 38 Studios, be it deliberately or just through ineptness. So I guess to lead off on it, have any of you played Kingdoms of Amalur? I have, yeah. I played it on the Xbox 360. What did you think of it? I thought it was fun. I didn't get too far in, but it played similar to Fable, I'd say, or Dragon Age. It was good. I don't know, solid, but kind of forgettable, too. Yeah, I downloaded the demo on the Xbox 360, and I played through the demo, and it wasn't enough to convince me to buy it. But, yeah, it kind of gave me, like, the single-player Warcraft vibe. I've heard others do the comparison to Fable. I've only played Fable 2 and 3, and I guess the combat in Fable 1 was different, and this mimicked that version of the combat. So most people I know have at least said, you know, middling to positive things about the game. It wasn't a hated game. My brother-in-law loves Kingdoms of Namalur. He still, if I ever mention it, ever bring up something like this, this situation with 38 Studios, he goes, Kingdoms of Namalur was a great game. It's like, well, not great enough to sell, I guess. But anyway, there's a lot of love for it. I guess my thoughts, I just wanted to bring this up because it was video game news and before No Man's Sky, this was really the only news I had to go off of. But I'm not surprised that the criminal case was dropped. The whole thing on that had to hinge on intent. And I don't think, I mean, Curt Schilling is known for being a bit of a loud mouth, but that his company was poorly run, it's a big stretch to all of a sudden jump to the idea that, well, no, they wanted to steal $75 million, which was never the impression anyone got. But they made a ton of mistakes. But they had a pretty deep talent pool. It wasn't on the creation department where they had trouble. It was more in the managerial, so the administration of the company itself. But what I do think is interesting is, though it would be more interesting for a political podcast, would be what this brings up regarding economic development and involvement in governments using taxpayer funds to help encourage it And that kind of gets more towards my day job sort of stuff But I just thought it was really interesting because it was a big black eye for the industry. And to me, the analogy, jumping back to our prior segment, would be, you think about the damage done with the pinball failures of Zidware and Skitbee. This is such a larger scale than that. but it's also different because it wasn't the individual consumers that were damaged. It was the entire taxpaying base of Rhode Island. So I think my generalized take is that governments are probably going to be a lot more skeptical doing economic development packages with video game developers because they're going to look at the mess that 38 Studios was, and they're going to say, we don't want to live through that. Let's just throw it into another amusement park. Yeah, whoever okayed that loan, that tax break, they're the ones who should get fired. I mean, 38 Studios, it's not a crime to run your business poorly, and they suffer the consequences by losing their business. But $75 million, I live in a really poor state, and that is so much money for our state. I don't know about Maryland because they've got Baltimore and whatnot. Or it was Rhode Island, sorry. Yeah, they pulled them from Massachusetts, I believe, over into Rhode Island. I don't know if it was just a hop across the board. But, no, it wasn't because I recall the families uprooted and, you know, went with the company. And, you know, it was a real big thing. And this was during the, you know, when the governments were still being really hit by the 2008 recession because the taxpayer-based recovery has been – it always lags versus when the economy tanks on the governmental side. So it just has to do with how the tax collections work. So, I mean, it was a big deal for them to do it then. I saw also this week, probably just coincidentally, the civil suit is moving forward against Wells Fargo, which was involved in doing the loan approval. And the accusations there are that they were deliberately hiding things from the public when they did it, is my sense. It's a transparency claim. And so the judge is advancing that. So the state might still be able to recover something. The civil suits aren't against 38 Studios. They're against the individuals that were involved in approving the loan. Do you think there's too many games? There's too many companies grabbing out of the same pot of dollars from the public? Not necessarily. I think in this case, what it really came down to, and without going into, because I don't really know, how the company internally was run, the release of Kingdoms of Amalur, I think, was handled very poorly. It came out just after Skyrim did. Oh, yeah. So, dumb. That's dumb, yeah. I mean, that's kind of the same thing with the Battleborn release and Overwatch type thing. Sure, yeah, I think that's a good analogy. One of them just dominates and the other one's wiped out because of it. Right. And so while I think the video gaming public could consume the number of RPGs that are coming out, they can't if they're stacked together like that. And so you could say, well, they could just wait and then buy it later. But are they going to remember to? And how long are they going to spend in Skyrim? I mean, Skyrim is Fallout negative one. So I'm sorry, I'm more of a Fallout fan. But the idea is, you know, people putting 100 plus hours into those games is not unheard of, especially on the PC side with the modding. So it's just you had a game, decent, possibly good, depending on your impression. But compared to Skyrim, it was nothing. So it was an ant and the ant was crushed. And that was where all their capital to keep going was going to come from. They were living off of the loan from Rhode Island. Games hardly ever maintain their full retail price for more than two, three months. They're almost always down to $40 right away. Call of Duty and Nintendo first-party games are about it. Maybe some Madden games. For a game like that, you knew it was going to be $40 in no time. $20. Okay, well, let's move on over to some hardware news. Xbox One S, we've talked about it previously, and it is now finally actually available for purchase. Reviews have been pretty positive. It's 40% smaller, and a lot of people are saying, you know, just how shockingly noticeable it is. I don't know why that's surprising. 40% would be fairly significant, you would think. But I guess people just saw the photo of it, and they didn't see it side-by-side to an original Xbox One. So, anyway, the power brick's now internal, even with that shrinkage, which if you've seen an original Xbox One, the power brick is massive. It is bigger than a normal brick, like a brick for a house. So, I mean, it's pretty significant. the main thing to note feature-wise that was different besides the size change is that it kind of supports 4K, and by kind of I mean it will upscale the 4K for video games. It's not true 4K. However, it is true 4K if you have Blu-rays that actually are 4K. So for movie-consuming people that purchase Blu-rays, that may be an attractive incentive. The main thing on the video game front that is attracting some attention is that the console supports HDR. So you have an HDR, which I believe stands for high dynamic range. You plug that into an HDR TV, which those TVs are pretty new. So generally, you've got a TV that's older than a year old. You almost assuredly do not have the HDR feature. But it lets you have more, the range on the color is more noticeable. So like the blacks are blacker and the whites are whiter sort of thing. and you just fill out that range more. Let's see, some other tidbits I've read about it are the intensive testing has shown that they have actually overclocked the graphics card on this version, but we're talking really slight, around 4%, so you would not visually be able to see it as a human being. And so I guess, just to run out of that summary, it's been selling like gangbusters. So the reviews have been really good. I heard Europe's already sold out of the 2TB version, And interestingly, Microsoft, I can't say they've exactly been coy, but they were asked because the word came out that they were not going to sell any more two terabyte versions of it. And what Europe got and is sold is that's it, other than special editions like the Gears of War thing and all that. And they seem their response to that query didn't say yes. Then clear cut say, yes, we are not selling any more. However, they didn't say that they were going to sell some more. So it sounds like the kind of by silence have confirmed that they really aren't making any more of those. So I guess, you know, it's sort of a I thought it'd be an interesting thing to sort of cover. I didn't know if this was going to convince any anyone, any of you to to get Xbox ones, because I don't think either of you own one or what you think about the sort of this technology spec stuff. The rumor mill says that Sony's PS4 Neo is coming out this year. We're getting really late in the year, and they still haven't announced. There's still another big event coming up where we can expect an announcement, I assume. Regardless, Xbox's Project Scorpio is expected for the holidays of next year, and obviously that's going to be significantly specced higher than what the 1S is. So just thought I wanted to get some thoughts from you guys and, you know, what you think about Xbox 1S. Maybe if you want to weigh in broader on the strategy that Microsoft seems to be trying to do because they have been lagging compared to the PS4 sales. It's hard to know exactly because they don't release the numbers anymore. The generalized sense based off of sort of proxy figures is that PS4 outsells Xbox One 2 to 1. Yeah, one of the heads of EA, he leaked how many copies they were producing, I guess, for Xbox One, and it led people to believe that they were making it. They had sold a third the amount of Xbox Ones as PS4s, but that was over the winter. So you had mentioned the 2-terabyte version they're not making anymore. Is it just going to be 1 terabyte? My understanding is that there's going to be a 1-terabyte kind of souk and then a half terabyte. So they've got different flavors. The whole benefit now is, to me, the major benefit would be it's 2 terabyte. Yeah, like you said, nobody has a 4K TV, or a few people do. It doesn't play Ultra HD, which is kind of the new Blu-ray, right? To my knowledge, no. Because that would be the cheapest Ultra HD player by far. Those are like $600 to $800, I think, or even more. Yeah, I do have an Xbox One. I got it when they really got cheap. Oh, yeah. Maybe two years ago, almost two years ago. It's fine, but the memory is one of the hardest things because almost every game is like 50 gigs, so two terabytes would be huge. And you can add an additional external drive, but that's another $100 or whatever. yeah and that's what I ended up doing is I have a I think I have a 5 gig external that I actually I bought an internal and then put it in an external case and then stuck that in for about a hundred because the price differentials on these models which I didn't note but it's the one terabyte will sell for 50 bucks less than what the two terabytes were selling for and then it's another 50 bucks off for the half terabyte so it'll be a hundred dollars spread between the low end model and the high end model It pays $100 if you can get it to terabyte. If you don't have one, I think it's a home run. I mean, why not? If you want an Xbox One, you don't have one. But, yeah, I don't feel like upgrading. There's no need to. And it looks like size-wise, it's the size of a PS4 now, pretty much. I saw an Xbox One S laying on top of a PS4, and they were about the same size, whereas my Xbox One is about twice the size. Yeah, it's massive. It's a big, ugly black box. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the, you know, I guess the question is to why they wouldn't want to keep selling the two terabyte, especially since they sold out so quickly. I guess the thought is that their initial and perhaps final number of units being made was so low because of the concern that the sales would fall through the floor once the NEO hits. and they're going to bank on Scorpio being their actual big sort of resurgence attempt. And so they didn't want to make too many Xbox One S's and then no one want to buy them because 14 months later they want to buy the Scorpio, which if the specs that were leaked for the Scorpio and leaked for the Neo are true, the Scorpio is going to be approximately 40% more powerful than the Neo is. And so that's going to be the strategy is they're going to try and beat Sony on the power side, which they've never done before. and the thought would be, well, but the Xbox One S essentially has the same power as the original Xbox. It just has some 4K movie features and HDR, and we'll be able to give all that in the Scorpio. So that is just really for people that still want an Xbox, but they didn't want it enough with the Kinect baggage and all that. And so I don't know. It's one theory. Yeah, the blunder was announcing the Scorpio right now. They should have just let the S do its thing, let the Neo come out, and then boom, they got the Scorpio ready to go. to counter the Neo. I don't think they would have announced the Scorpio if the specs hadn't leaked. I think they felt their hand was forced. I think their E3 presentation was just going to be the 1S, and that's why you just have that weird sizzle reel at the end where they were having developers talk about their experience with the dev kits, the alpha dev kits on the Xbox Project Scorpio. Because it was so weird. Why would you ever announce two different consoles? You do one and be like, here is a slightly better version of what we've currently got, which answers some of the concerns you all have had. Hard drive too small, unit too big, stupid power brick is a weapon, and change all of that, and then say, oh, but you know what? You should probably just wait a year and a half and then get the really good machine. Well, see, and as a non-console player, between the announcement of the Neo and the Scorpio, I have no desire for a 1S because I don't see why I wouldn't just wait until I could get a Neo if I wanted to go the PlayStation router or Scorpio when they're going to obviously be so close to coming out at this release date. I think the same thing. I think their hand was pushed and they had to do something. That's a good point. I think they are supposed to announce the Neo next month, but they're also announcing the NX next month, the rumors are. So it's going to be a busy year. It will be, but, you know, if Sony's reaction is similar to my reaction of the leaked NX specs, I don't think they're worried. It's two different products. Yeah, and they've been so divergent for a while. I don't know if that's Nintendo's intent, or that's just sort of how it's ended up ever since the Wii, where they've kind of said, we are our own thing, we're all about our Nintendo products, and the shovelware that wants to come out on them. Not meaning that towards the primary Nintendo products, I just mean Wii ended up having a lot of... It's kind of funny to me, because I'm thinking back to the old NES days, where there was the Nintendo seal of approval that was on almost all the games because it was all that 1984 Atari video game crash, and everyone's trying to reassure people. And now, well, with the Wii, I don't know any on the Wii U, but on the Wii it just got like, oh, my gosh, it's turned into the phone app store. What is all this crap? So is the Xbox One. Xbox One has a ton of crappy arcade games just looking out every week. So many they don't advertise them. They just come out. I don't think they have any seal of approval. No, no, they don't. They just need to get the certification. And there have been a lot of gamers who have complained about it. But, you know, my sense is Microsoft felt they had to do it because Sony's attack line when they were pumping the PS4 up was that Microsoft was hard to publish on. They make it very difficult for arcade games to come out. There was a lot of criticism about the old rules that were there. And then you had people like Phil Fish who were coming out publicly and really attacking how Microsoft's certification on the 360 was. And so they just kind of said, okay, we're Steam now. We're just going to let everything come out. And then we can say, yeah, in a lot of ways, I agree. Look at me playing Ben-Hur. What's wrong with me? It doesn't make any sense. This is madness. But, yeah, it's sort of twisted so that they're able to now say we really support the indie developer. And so, yeah, now you get to go to Drink or Porrow. It supported the consumer with the 360. Having a demo for every arcade game. I had over 300 arcade games on the 360. She goes, yeah, I'll try this one. Oh, I like it. I'm going to pay $10 for it. Now they look like garbage, and you can't try them. How would you ever know if there's... Well, yeah, and Steam's kind of got the same thing going on with their green... Because they were doing their green light for a while, and now it seems like any indie developer can put anything out on Steam. If you look at, like, the Steam's release list, and I don't know if Xbox has the same issue, but like Steam's weekly release list, like 90% of it is like RPG maker stuff that somebody's put together in their thing. It's like, oh, yeah, I'll sell this for five bucks. And it's all, I mean, it's just the sheer amount of insanity that there's so many people developing games and so many games being developed by just one or two guys or girls or whatever that it's not, some of them are amazing and some of them are just what they are. I mean, like, last year we had Undertale, which was amazing, and Rebel Galaxy that was amazing. And those were both developed by very, very small teams. I think Undertale was one guy and Rebel Galaxy was two. Oh, that's interesting. Rebel Galaxy just hit PS4, and I was playing it last week, and I was like, oh, this isn't bad. I'd never heard of it. It looks weird. Yeah, it came out last, like, October on the computer, and it's like a two-man development team. and it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's a fun little space game. But there's been a lot of those lately, but it just amazes me when I look at the new releases. It's like, wow, there's like 500 new releases today. You scroll through them and there might be one good game, maybe. Not including like AAA titles, but... Do the good games float to the top? Eventually. Eventually they do. I know when Undertale was initially released, It didn't take long before everybody was spouting how just wonderful Undertale was. And there were some other games that have done that where it's been like, and like Undertale, it didn't look like it was an amazing game to look at, but it had an actual, its gameplay and everything was amazing. Or like, what was that other game that I played that came out? Like Superhot. Superhot doesn't look that interesting But it's actually really fun And it's just an insane little game I don't know Maybe there are too many people Maybe there's not enough curation anymore I think that might just be the problem Because it seems like If you make a game You can release it on any platform And just let it see what happens Which can be good But at the same time It's like man You feel bad It's like man You spent like five years making this game and it's terrible. And then everyone forgets right away. Right. Probably your life or gone. Yeah, that's a, I don't know, I think that might be something that we're going to see changing. Maybe there'll be more curation appearing in the next few years as more of this happens, or maybe this is just what the status quo is going to be for a while. Well, if they make Steam the Wild West, and then the cherry pick from that to put on, get picked up by EA to put on Origin maybe, or to bring to consoles where only the best come to there. that's not a terrible idea, honestly. I mean, that would let the Steam and the PC crowds weed through the worst of the stuff and everything else get cleaned up. I played one PC game in the past, I don't know, four years, and it's Undertale because nobody would shut up about it. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was for I don't know how many weeks listening to video game podcasts after Undertale came out. That was like the only discussion was Undertale. And if you didn't want it spoiled, you had to play it right then. Right. And I didn't. I didn't play it right then. I started playing it a few months ago, but by that point, everything had been spoiled, so the magic wasn't the same for me as it must have been for the people who played it with no spoilers. Yeah, the story on that was killer. Speaking of magic, we have our final video game topic, which actually has nothing to do with magic. But, unfortunately. However, it has to do with technology. So the magic of, and what is the difference between technology and magic? Often it's just ignorance. So, Battletech. Apparently there was a Battletech Kickstarter. I knew nothing about this. But Tony knows all sorts of things about it. So, Tony, please tell us about the super pre-alpha first look that happened regarding this Battletech. Yeah, the Battletech Kickstarter happened last October, and it was run by, it's by Hairbrain Schemes. They're the guys who put out the new Shadowrun games The three new Shadowrun games that have come out just recently It's a Turn based mech combat game Kind of like the old mech commanders That came out That is going to be on Computer and it's Battletech setting the 3025 And they just released A pre A super pre alpha Video and we'll have a link to the to the video because they sent it out to all the backers and said to share it. And it looks amazing for a pre-alpha, for a super pre-alpha. I was surprised because their art looks awesome, and it seemed to play pretty well. It's still real buggy. There's still a lot of things not in it. But for something that is pre-alpha, it looks really good, and it really increased the interest in the game that was already pretty huge. The Kickstarter was huge. It was a huge Kickstarter. And they went ahead and they opened up a late backer group for people to get in that wanted to get on to it after seeing the videos that hadn't been in on the original Kickstarter. The video leaked, and after the video leaked, there were a lot of people like, we want this game, and they're like, okay, we'll set up a preorder for you. So there's nothing they're trying to reach. It's not like Star Citizen. They're just, they're like, okay, if you want a pre-order, here's a pre-order tier. I watched a little bit of the video, and for a pre-alpha, it did look really good. Yeah, it's one of those things, I think it's a very directed game. I mean, if you're not a battle tech person, I'm a hardcore battle tech person, and I have been since the early 90s. So for me, this is, you know, dream game, bread and butter type thing. But I'm pretty happy with how it looks. They also announced that they did a lot of really big physical rewards tiers And theirs are shipping now They're starting to get pictures of they've arrived I'll put mine pictures up when mine arrives It's not come in yet But I'm going to be a late shipper because of what all I went a little insane on it I backed the higher tier Oh, so you didn't like back the little You have my name in the credits for 10 bucks here No, I'm getting a bomber jacket and wall hangings, and, yeah, I could have bought a pinball machine. Wow. A cheap pinball machine. I mean, I could have bought a cheap pinball machine, but, yeah, I backed at the Elite Mech Warrior tier, which was $275. So, yeah, I'm insane. Yeah, I have, actually. I've had two pinball machines that I bought for less than that. Not combined, but individually. EMs, of course. But I also watched some of the footage, and, yeah, I thought graphically it looked pretty good. You know, I don't know. Whenever I think mech games, I just assumed it was going to be real-time, not turn-based. Well, yeah, they've done a lot. There's a lot of mech warrior and Battletech-based real-time games out there, and that's why this one they were going for a certain feel. this one's designed to be a lot like the tabletop game, which is what I, the first tabletop game that I really broke my teeth on when I started gaming back in the 90s was the tabletop game, and it uses a lot of similarities to that, and it'll play a lot like that. So that's why, one of the big reasons it did so huge and why I was so interested in it. When did you back it? When did the Kickstarter end? It ended in October of last year, I think. Oh, wow, that's really fast to have something playable on there. Yeah, they have the demo playable at Gen Con, and their current goal is for release next May. So they were looking at a year and a half is production, basically. Awesome. Well, speaking of Gen Con, I think this would be a good time to go ahead and segue into the final section of the podcast, which would be the tabletop section. And Tony, I know you've pulled a few more tabletop-oriented items for discussion that were driven from what came out of Gen Con, so why don't you go ahead and kick us off? Yeah, there were a whole lot of games at Gen Con that got announced and demoed this year. I did not get to go to Gen Con this year. I'll go one of these years. It just didn't happen again this year. But I've been following some people, and I went ahead and I picked out like ten, and then I realized how long this episode was going to be already, so I just picked two of the ten I picked out to throw into the list to talk about this time around. I was going to ask, what does Gen Con mean? Gen Con is, it started out as, I want to say Genesis Con or something like that. No, Geneva Con, because it was originally in Lake Geneva, Michigan is where the convention started. And it was a big RPG con. And as it grew, they moved to Minneapolis. and then when they got really huge, they came down to Indianapolis, and they're currently the biggest gaming con in the U.S. and I think probably the world. I thought it was an acronym or something, Gaming Entertainment something. No, it started out because it was in Lake Geneva, Michigan is where it was started. Cool. So that's the, and it's enormous. When I went, like I said earlier, when I went to the board game night, There were several people there who'd gone, so they brought some games from there, one of which we're going to talk about. But the first one I was going to talk about, we didn't get a chance to play. They didn't get it picked up because it was sold out. There's a Harry Potter Hogwarts battle coming out. Yeah, Wizard Harry. It's my personal favorite type of game. It is a deck-building game, and it is a cooperative deck-building game. So you're not actually fighting each other. It's you and your friends playing against the deck. and the way the game is set up is it teaches you book by book. You play the book one game and you learn how the game plays and then you add the cards from book two into the deck and you play the game again and it adds more and it goes through all seven books like that so you slowly build your way up with you and your friends playing against the various enemies that are added with each book. And it's all about the, there's all the big villains from Harry Potter, so the big Harry Potter people are into it and this and that. But I just like cooperative deck building games and watching a demo of it, it looked really easy and fun. So that was one of my big draws on this one. I like the idea of it being cooperative. I was thinking about Castle Panic yesterday. You're kind of going after one objective, you're not fighting against each other. And I think with our friend group, a game like that would be more successful. I don't know anything about Harry Potter, really. It looked like from the video you posted, it's based on the films, or at least they used the licensing. They used the licensing from the films, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, no, it is. I mean, it's not like Castle Panic, like Castle Panic, but it's the same type, the whole working together thing. Yeah, yeah, not the same type. That's how we play in a lot of our groups, too. We play either games that are very cooperative or games that don't allow you to be quite so directly attacking other players. Like we play Sentinels of the Multiverse and games like that where you're, and that's what Sentinels of the Multiverse is. This is a cooperative game where you're playing against a villain who's built out of the deck. And that's one of my favorite games. And it's not actually a deck-building game, but it is a lot of fun. But I like cooperative games. Pandemic is a cooperative game that can be won no matter what Dennis says. Actually, I bought that game, and I still haven't played it with anybody. It's a fun game. I enjoy Pandemic. It can be incredibly hard, and it can be really, really frustrating because nine times out of ten, if you lose, you lose just on the cusp of victory. So it's not like you get wiped out. we're almost, oh, we lost. Which can be kind of frustrating. But I like co-op games. They're a lot of fun. And I think this one, with the design and draw, and it's being simpler, I think it has a good draw, especially for kids. Because kids get really into Harry Potter, and the younger kids can learn it as it steps up, and it should be a lot of fun. I think it's just going to be a nice little family-ish game. Yeah, I really like the idea of the progression they've got with the books, with the adding of more and more cards. I favor cooperative games a lot for tabletop settings because I think it's always a little awkward if you're playing with casuals, which would often be someone like me. And so you're having to have the rules constantly explained. It always seems a little awkward when it's a versus game and your opponent is essentially trying to teach you how to play while they are destroying you at the same time. I mean, it kind of works, but in a way it doesn't because it seems so awkward because you're also trying to legitimately play the game and you're realizing you're having to reveal everything to the opponent because he's the only one who can teach you. Deck building, I'm not particularly partial to versus other cooperative forms. I generally like all cooperative forms. But, yeah, I think this looks interesting. Because I could see it possibly looking at how the sort of layout with the table and all the cards going out. I could see it being overwhelming to first-time players, But since it's cooperative, there's no reason why, as long as one person had at least a little bit of experience with it, that it wouldn't go smoothly. So, yeah, I think it looks like it would be a lot of fun. But I guess it was sold out. Yeah, it was sold out. Nobody there got it, so I didn't get a chance to play it. Your overview has made me a lot more interested being not a Harry Potter guy. I'm sorry, you didn't destroy the Dominion and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. The first couple of times I ever played Dominion, it was... I like Dominion but man it can be rough Yeah we have a friend He play his whole deck twice on his turn Like okay guy Can do this Yeah, see, that's one of the reasons I like. Like I said, I play with, I mean, the group that we play with a lot, there's a lot of casuals. And, like, when I go to the board game nights, it tends to break into these segments where there's more casual players and then there's the more hardcore players. And you tend to know who's who and you settle in where. I'm pretty good with any of them, really. But, yeah, I think for casuals, cooperative games work better, and I think they're becoming more common. It's not like the old days where you sat down and set up and play a 12-hour game at risk where you're just basically beating the crap out of each other. Well, I think from a development standpoint, it's harder. It's harder for the game developers to make a balanced cooperative game because you have to come up with, I mean, especially if there's a randomization to the nature of the opponents, because it's all essentially automated. So they have to figure all that out. It's not just like if we were to play Magic the Gathering against each other, and I'll use my mind and what colors I own versus what you've got, and we'll come up with what we think is going to work. And the other game I was going to talk about is another Wizarding-themed game. This one is called Potion Explosion. I did get a chance to. This one was at the game night the other day, and it's a pretty simple game. You're basically, all the players are creating potions, and the ingredients for the potions are marbles that are set up in a box. And there's a bunch of rows, and they come down in rows. And when you need an ingredient, you just pick a single marble out that's your ingredient, and then the marbles, you know, fill back in by rolling down. And if two marbles that are the same color hit, well, you've got to pick those ones up, too. So if I picked up a red and there's two blue on one side of it and two blue on the other side and they roll together, I get to pick up all four blue. And if picking those four blue up caused them to roll together and bring like two yellows together, I can pick the yellows up. So it just chain reacts. So you can fill out the ingredients on your potions. And then once you fully fill in a potion, it comes off and it has a power that you get to use and it's got a number of victory points on it. and the whole thing is going through building to trying to get the most victory points. It looks really cool just looking at the actual board game. So it sounds like it plays like Zuma. Yeah, you know, it does. It plays a lot like Zuma where the way it chain reacts together. I was really happy I got to see it because I liked it even more after sitting down. They were already started the game when I got there, but I sat down and watched them play out the rest of the game, and it was really interesting. It does seem to have a little analysis paralysis when you're going with hardcore gamers because you just sit there and you're running all the options through your mind, but with the people who aren't quite so hardcore, when you're avoiding the real try-hard, when you're just grabbing and going, it tends to be pretty fast and fun, and it looks like something that would be really good for kids, except for 8 and up because of the marbles and the whole putting marbles in your mouth thing. But is the box is full of marbles then? Yes. Okay. That box is full of marbles. It's got, the way it's set up is there's a slight slope on the top. So after you finish a potion, you pick all your marbles up off the potion, you throw it on the top of the box, and it rolls down into the slots in the back, and it feeds the troughs. You keep refilling it then. And you just keep refilling it with the, yeah, as you finish a potion, Those marbles go back in, they refill them to the troughs, and it just keeps going. The only things that might be issue-ish is, it's not a surprise, the actual box is made of, like, paperboard or, like, kind of thickish cardboard. It's pretty strong, but I can see where it could have some issues after a while. You can't store the marbles actually in the box. You've got to pull them out because the weight for extended sitting periods can cause a mess and kind of bend the box thumb. But there's already people that have been talking on like Board Game Geeks and this and that about looking at putting together laser cut wood diagrams. So you run it through a laser cutter and put together little thin wood sheets to build a wooden box that matches the exact size and way the paper board one works. That's what it looked like. I thought it was wood. Yeah, that's what I thought looking from the videos and the pictures. But when I actually saw it, it was paperboard. So that's a little downer. But, I mean, it's still, I mean, it's not a horrible, it's something that will have to be seen. I don't know how well it's going to work. For $50, I was expecting wood, honestly. But there's a ton of marbles in it. But it was fun. It was really enjoyable, even more than I thought it was going to be when I had originally seen it. How many players can participate at once? It's four, I believe. It's four or five. I think it's four. I played a lot of games Friday night. I'm sure you did. Well, that one, yeah, it caught my eye. I like the idea of it. I haven't played anything but marbles, and I don't even know. Maybe since I played marbles in the 80s. You know, I don't know if I've ever played Kerplunk. I can't remember. I've seen it. I just don't remember if I ever actually played it. I played it. Solid. It's like Connect Four for bourgeois fancy people. I couldn't be one of them. Hoity-toity podcast. That's right. They collect the fancy pants. He only plays Jenga with solid gold bricks, you know. Right, of course. And the last little bit in the tabletop section I was wanting to talk about was, during our last episode we talked about having gone to Can't Call On, And I've been thinking about D&D a lot lately since I played it at CanCon. And specifically, I've been thinking about character generation. And I've been thinking about Thagosh, who was my pre-gen that I started with. And I've actually created a backstory for him now. And I'm kind of looking at getting into playing some more D&D, 5e. there's a local RPG group I've been thinking about joining up just to get to play it some more but as I was looking at it and playing with stuff and thinking about it I realized that you know my favorite part of RPGs as much fun as they are is actually the character creation and the backstories because I like creating the backstories and the histories for the characters and I said I've spent an ungodly amount of time this last two weeks building up a character for Thagash I've actually built up another character idea for this game and two character ideas for the superhero game that we picked up. The name is slipping me and the book is stashed away, so I don't want to grab it right now because I haven't had a chance to go through it yet. That just had me thinking just on character generation. I don't know, Don, if you've ever played any RPGs. I've played Heroes Quest. Hero Quest? The clicker game? No, no, no. It's a board game from the 80s. It has a Dungeon Master and whatnot. Oh, okay. Right? HeroQuest? Yeah, HeroQuest. I've heard of it. I haven't played it. But yeah, it's a very similar thing if it's the game I'm thinking of. It's a... Dungeons and stuff. Yeah, dungeons. You get populated when you walk into the room. Yeah, that's pretty similar. There's been a lot of push to do the whole board gaming type things. You're talking about a board game, right? Or are you talking about a video game? Oh, neither. I'm talking about a pen and paper tabletop RPG. Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons, and there's a Battletech one, and there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I don't play them often, but I think they're probably what I would consider my true love of this type of gaming. I like the idea of it. I've never played one. I'm not very creative. Even on video games where you create your character, I'm like, yeah, he looks fine. I'll just click, click, click. Yeah. See, and for me, that's the whole creation, the backstory creation of the characters and how you interact. And the interacting is fun, but I like the backstory creation thing. I've done this. I actually, like a lot of people, I tried to write a book at one time, and I realized that I liked creating the world. But when it came time to actually create the stories and write the books, I didn't care that much. I created the world, and that made me happy enough. so it's a thing I've picked up I've got a book that I've journal like thing that I just create characters in sometimes but I just I didn't know I mean I know Dennis played some RPGs I didn't know if you had but just how people look at the whole character creation because I've played with people who their character creation is literally how hard can I hit something and how quickly can I kill stuff and then there's people who the only thing they care about is the backgrounds. And I find myself going more into that side of things. I'm more of a background and RP player and less of being optimizing my character to be the ultimate murder hobo. Murder hobo, yeah. I play a lot of Skyrim and stuff and Oblivion, so I'm familiar with creating a character and having to class them and whatnot. But not in a pen and paper game. Well, they're very similar. The only difference is is really that you don't need a whole lot of other people when you're in the video games, and typically they give you, like, backgrounds to choose from. But creating the character and balance, they're all very similar. I mean, they're taken from the same general. The video game creation comes from the tabletop stuff that started, you know, back in the 70s and 80s and this and that. I know there's a lot of resources out there to play online, I highly recommend if you ever get a chance you might try it out just for fun I've been looking at getting into an online group because there's a lot of people who use Roll20 so I've been looking into getting into that just so I can play some more what is that? an online pen and paper type game? yeah, Roll20 is literally what you do is you fire up Roll20 and you all talk on Skype and Roll20 acts like the tabletop on a pen and paper tabletop. It's got the dice. You literally type in Roll3D6 and it rolls 3D6. Roll1D20 and it rolls a single D20. And it gives you everything. It's a completely virtual tabletop for doing that type of gaming. I don't know if you watch a lot of Twitch, but I know there's a lot of channels on Twitch now that they use Roll20 and LiveCam and they'll livestream their games they play. that's kind of cool yeah it's something it's something that like when they started in the 80's and the such you know everybody was you know D&D was the whole big evil Satan coming to steal your kids type stuff and I like video games and like so many other things it's kind of becoming more and more mainstream and I think a lot of it has to do with technology but just I like the whole character creation. And in video games, that's why I like Fallout and Skyrim because your character is your character. Yeah, they give you the backstory, but you make your character who you want your character to be. And I love that. I actually, I think on Oblivion, I was a red guard. I was basically a heavy. And so I just made all the opposite decisions of what my gut said when I played Skyrim. I was like an elf and whatnot. just because I wanted a different experience. I figured the games would be similar. And I'm glad I did. It made me kind of a more well-rounded player without having to overthink anything. Yeah. Well, I find that like on Fallout, I have to force myself to not be a hyper-stealthy sniper because nine times out of ten, that's the way I'm going to build my game. Fallout is a hyper-stealthy sniper. And some of the most fun, One of the most funs I had in that type of thing was on Fallout New Vegas. I created the lowest possible intelligence guy, and I had him hit stuff. A low intelligence melee guy in New Vegas was hilariously fun. Yeah, that's a good idea. My Skyrim experience made me that stealthy player. So then I was playing Assassin's Creed, and I was like, I might as well just play that if I'm going to want to play that type of game. and that's funny in New Vegas yeah I think my next one would be something like that just a big dumb with a club dumb guy with a club I play a lot of dumb guys with clubs I mean in video games and paper RPGs this and that I like being the dumb guy with the club I uh I mean that's how Thugosh started was it's like I'm just gonna oh I'm gonna take the barbarian he's intelligence 8 and really strong so but I kind of he had fun backstory and I got to feed into it and this and that. I really enjoy that portion of it, the creation portion. That's just interacting with the other players by creating something yourself. It's one of the areas that I think video game RPGs have been weaker on, is the relevance of the backstory. I was sitting here trying to think of video games. A lot of them will let you choose a backstory for your character, and I'm trying to recall when, if ever, it comes up. And the only example I can really think of is I believe they did do some incorporation in Mass Effect games, where you would be able to say, like, you survived a colony attack at some point, and that would come up conversationally from time to time. Most video games don't really bother. It might let you choose a particular title, or it might just be in the write-up if you go to read your character sheet. That doesn't actually involve itself in the gameplay. And in the tabletop RPG setting, it often really can because the personalities mean so much because you don't have the scripted personalities. I mean, even in Mass Effect, which I think has some great storytelling, you've basically got the, I'm really nice, or I want to punch you, or you can go with the Fallout route. you have those same choices plus the middle choice, which is generally I'll do the right thing, but you have to pay me. In the tabletop setting, you can have so much different sort of flavor to it. And it's not an area I'm particularly strong on in terms of, I'm trying to recall if I ever did a whole lot of effort into the backstories. I know on character creation, I definitely min-maxed. Like if it was cleric time, he's going to be a dwarf because I need the wisdom. I need the maximum wisdom. I would never contemplate having a gnome be a cleric because their stats weren't right. You couldn't maximize what was most valuable to the class. So even if I gave personality to my characters, they were always min-maxed racially and class-wise. See, when I was younger, I min-maxed everything. But I found as I get older and the more I get involved, the more I go for my characters designed around who the character is, even if they're not the most efficient. even if there's, oh, this choice makes sense for who the character is, but it does me no good and it isn't helpful to the gameplay of the combat side of the gameplay. A lot of times I found myself, I'll start choosing that choice just because it feeds into the person I'm creating as opposed to just the super Terminator, kobold killer that I built. Sounds cool. I'm just not a creative dude. well a lot of people don't I mean it's not my looking at it is not the way a lot of people look at it the min maxing tends to be the standard from what I've seen overall yeah I'd probably go that route I always had more fun creating the stories back in the day I mean I like playing the RPGs but in terms of creating the character backstory I'd rather instead create the game session and create the plot and write up the story that everyone would go through. I enjoyed that a lot. It is your fault that you had the door open towards me. Your fault. If I can hold the door open and we can smash the stuff that was trying to push the door open through the gap, I wasn't the one who decided the door opened that direction. It sounds like you guys should team up and finish Tony's book. I have no idea what Tony's book was. You know, I still, I think I have a draft book around here somewhere. I can't remember. Everybody does. I don't know if it's a rite of passage, but I think everybody gets an idea and they start writing a book at some point. Oh, sure. I think I probably sat down and I thought, this is easy. I'll do that. And then I stopped and I thought, I'm bored. I had a similar question, something you brought up, Tony, if you guys have a moment. Something I want to ask both of you. When you're learning how to play a tabletop game, you mentioned watching these guys playing D&D on Twitch. And I had never even thought about that. I was going to ask if you could recommend any YouTubers to teach you tabletop games, but maybe there's Twitch guys that do it too. Well, there are both, and I will, and we'll put these links in. I'll get the links so we can put them in the thing. But probably one of the best out there, definitely probably the largest on Twitch that I can think of right now is ItMeJP. ItMe or ItMe? It's I-T-M-E-J-P. and he does the he plays video games a lot but he also does lots and lots of D&D and other role play systems his whole game series is role play is what it's actually called, they use role 20 a lot that's actually where I learned about role 20 and they are a very role play heavy they've got tons of games, I mean they've got I don't know, you're probably coming up on, if you go to his YouTube channel and look at his back stuff, it's something in the area of like 200 hours plus. So you can just jump in randomly and watch stuff. And there's another gentleman who I really like whose name is Koibu, and he has a whole series where it's literally just a two-player. It's one person playing as the DM, and then the other person is playing a solo campaign. So it's just the DM and the guy playing a solo campaign. and the way they play it is they play until that character dies, and once that character dies, they flip who's the DM and who's the solo player, and then they play again. That's kind of cool. See both sides. Yeah. So, yeah, I'll get some links for you and into the group and this and that for those. Those are probably the two I recommend the most. I know Twitch has a whole RPG section now that you can look on, and it's definitely, it gives a good feel for the way things play. Even not just RPGs, but a guy bought Smash Up, a tabletop game, and just didn't understand the instructions, so watching some guy on YouTube made a lot more sense. But then you type in Smash Up on YouTube and there's 400 guys. My answer there is also my go-to board gaming podcast, and this and that is Dice Tower. Dice Tower is probably my favorite there's several others as well that are pretty good but I know Dice Tower is my go to for anything like that they have yeah yeah Tom Vassell he's like a superstar of board gaming and reviews and lists and stuff it's definitely where I go to primary for any of that information cool thanks I'll check that out I end up getting games that I just almost never touch because when it comes to a night to play a game, it's like, oh, I'm kind of tired. I don't want to learn a new game. Let's play. You know, we play Mission Red Planet a lot, so that's like our go-to. You know, let's just play Red Planet. We tend to jump into Cards Against Humanity if no one wants to learn anything new. Cards Against Humanity, I really enjoy if there's more than four people. With four people, I end up just getting annoyed because there's always... Yeah, we typically play with six to eight. Yeah, that's perfect. Is when we play it typically. When it gets pulled out, normally the kids are off playing video games or watching movies or in the other room or something, and we'll pull them out on game nights. Because we have monthly game nights where a bunch of us get together and we play video games and watch movies and just have dinner and just catch up type stuff. That sounds fun. Well, not a problem. But, yeah, no, those are the go-tos. Those are the ones I go to straight off the bat. Okay. Check them out. We played, what is it, Momotokori? Mentokori? You know what I'm talking about? It's like this Japanese city you're building. We played that for the first time last night. I haven't. No. It's pretty fun. Hmm. It's a pretty popular game. I bought it on clearance at Target because friends had recommended it. I just can never remember the name. I don't have it. I was looking around the room. I don't have it in here with me. But that one was easy enough. It's only four pages of instructions, so it's easy enough to pick up. But Dominion, we played Dominion wrong the first several times and thought it was the worst game ever until we finally figured out, oh, I forget what we were doing wrong. But then it became one of our favorite games. Yeah, Dominion's a great game. It wasn't my first game of that type, but it was a game that has definitely picked up because there's a lot of people at the game night I attend that play it. Yeah. And that and Thunderstone. Have you played Thunderstone? It's very similar. No. Thunderstone. My first experience with Thunderstone was one of the gaming guys slamming me in the chest with a Thunderstone box that was completely full and it weighed about 35 pounds. And it felt like I'd been hit by a bowling ball. And he's like, we're playing this. It's like, oh. Yeah, that's exactly. It was, and I'll, when we do the links, I'll also, I know because I know like It Me JP and Quayboo, they've got a lot of stuff. So I'll put out the exact series that are the ones to watch for fun. The pandemic episode. I know there's a pandemic episode with, I think the Dice Tower has a pandemic episode. I know Tabletop has a pandemic episode. Have you watched Tabletop with Wil Wheaton? I've seen a couple episodes, yeah, a couple years ago. Yeah, they've got a pandemic episode, if I remember correctly. Okay. I'm just kidding with Dennis. That's fine. So I can learn how to play it. There are a number of people that have tried to win it, so, yeah, there are plenty of streams. You could also just fire up Mario Brothers and go to the Game Over screen if you'd like to know how it'll end. Well, it all ends the same way. Disease always wins. Okay. And just in case you randomly jump into, like, one of It Me JP's things he has, like, he, every year for around Christmas time, they do the Made RPG special where they play the Made RPG game, which is a game where you're literally a Japanese it's a Japanese style like anime game where you're a maid taking care of your master and this and that and just to give the warning one of the rules of going in to play it is typically all the players wear maid outfits so yeah it's it's wonderful wonderfully large bearded men in maid outfits is just amazing and they also he's also got a game that they've been playing that's the Star Wars Age of Rebellion system that they've been doing so that's the channel if you want to see a lot of different RPG type games and then Dice Tower is board game after board game after everything you need to know about board games it's yeah that's the one to go to for everything board game related like ever awesome thanks you're welcome and i think that's about it for us uh i don't have anything else no we're unless don has anything else you'd like to bring up niftyled.com your source oh sorry yeah we're waiting for that that audible and casper mattress money to just roll on in right yeah well was it you guys i had an audible ad no i talked about audible but it wasn't us that had an ad. I just talked about it the other day. Oh, it was Loot Crate. One of the small podcasts I listen to, not negating you guys, it's a small podcast. We don't actually know. I think it might have even been a pinball podcast. Loot Crate was sponsoring them. I'm like, whoa, how did they figure that out? It must not be one I listen to, not to disparage all the pinball podcasts I don't listen to, because I don't recall hearing it, and I'm caught up. I don't recall. There's a lot more than there used to be. because when I first started listening to Pinball Podcast, there was like three. And now there's 20 now. Yeah. And it seems like there's like two new ones a month. Yeah, it's growing. I'm starting to think I'm going to have to add more just so I can make sure I'm not being too duplicative. It's obviously very difficult because the news is so, it's just a small hobby compared to these other two topics. But, yeah, I'm starting to feel a little bad because I know there's some of them I've tried and I dropped them off, and now they're doing, I guess, fairly well. And it's like, well, I should probably add them back to the list so I can know what's going on with them. But there's so much to listen to. There's too many. I go through waves of pinball podcasts where sometimes I want to know what's going on or what people's opinions are. And sometimes I'll go months without listening to really any pinball podcast, maybe one or two. What I like about your show is you guys hit on different stuff. So even if I'm not in a pinball mood, at least I'm going to get some video game news. I'm not into some of the Warhammer stuff, but there's always some board game knowledge in there that is interesting. And it's usually a quick listen, so, you know, under two hours, an hour and a half or whatever. Yeah, I think we've only ever gone over two hours once for E3. Oh, that was rough. That was rough. That's nothing. I can't do the five-hour podcast. Just that number throws me off. The one, I was into Film Junk, and that one is usually about three hours, but I love that show. That's the one podcast I don't miss. I'll listen for a couple days then if it's long. My longest is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, and he finally wrapped up his Persian Empire one. It is over five hours. I just finished it this week, so I really like that one. And, of course, I still got to learn about Rome because of my deus ex faux pas. I have to continue to learn about Rome. I'm just past the Septimius Severus' reign, so I'm working my way through all those emperors. You're over my head. Hey, I had to work really hard to memorize that, so I'm glad I actually got to use it in a conversation because you'd be not surprised at all how rarely being able to refer to obscure Roman emperors ever comes up in day-to-day life. Depends on your audience. Hardcore History was like the very first big podcast that I got huge into, and I'm still huge into it, but man, they are long. But he only usually releases quarterly. Yeah, that helps. Yeah. Takes him a while to write that script. Well, speaking of writing, if anyone wants to get a hold of the show, you can always email us, eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We're also active on Facebook, which would be facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. We're at eclectic underscore gamers on Twitter, which I'm horrible about, and eclectic underscore gamers on Instagram, which I'm much better about checking and putting stuff on. That's right. check out the pinball podcast with Don and Jeff we will have them at the top of the show notes so just give them a click and give them a listen if you like pinball or even if you don't like pinball because at least they'll talk about some LEDs that's right niftyled.com alright well that's it thanks for joining us

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 160aebb9-7f1b-46bc-a7d1-57c78b6abdd9*