# Episode 35 – Hanging at TPF with Mr. Cooper **Source:** Head2Head Pinball **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2018-03-19 **Duration:** 116m 39s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.head2headpinball.com/2018/03/19/episode-35-hanging-at-tpf-with-mr-cooper/ --- ## Analysis Ryan C. reports from Texas Pinball Festival 2018 on Stern's announcements (Brian Eddy joining as designer, Elvira 3 confirmed, AC/DC code updates, Iron Maiden/Archer teased), industry reveals (Circus Maximus's Kingpin and Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle from Dutch Pinball), and personnel moves (Bowen Kerins hired by Spooky Pinball as code lead). The episode covers gameplay impressions, design feedback on Kingpin's difficulty curve, and enthusiasm about the co-op mode in Spooky's Total Nuclear Annihilation. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Brian Eddy will be working for Stern and releasing a game in 2026 — _George Gomez live announcement at Stern of the Union seminar; Eddy is described as '3 for 3' designer with three released machines all acclaimed_ - [HIGH] Iron Maiden (codename 'Titanium Man') features four flippers and will be announced in April — _Ryan C. heard from 'other people, a bit more liberal with what they said, not Stern employees' at TPF; George Gomez indicated announcement timeline_ - [HIGH] Black Knight 3000 is the next Steve Ritchie game (99.9% confidence) — _Ryan C. claims unnamed source confirmation; will feature upper and lower playfield like original Black Knight games_ - [HIGH] Bowen Kerins hired by Spooky Pinball as code development lead — _Official announcement at TPF seminar; Bowen previously denied this 'very carefully' two weeks prior_ - [MEDIUM] Oktoberfest is the next American Pinball game after Kingpin — _Ryan C. heard from unnamed non-American Pinball source; will contain German imagery_ - [MEDIUM] AC/DC pinball receiving new code with mini-Wizard mode rewards after songs 3, 6, and 9 — _Lyman Sheets told Ryan C. at TPF; goal is to encourage players to try different songs vs. replay same song_ - [HIGH] Kingpin shipped 100 units with five demo units at TPF — _Ryan C. observed at event; described as 'quite amazing' production quantity for first manufacturer game_ - [HIGH] Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle features direct-printed cabinet art ('butter cabinet') with premium finish, costs extra $1,000 — _Ryan C. saw cabinet in person at TPF; described as 'possibly the best looking art package ever'; made in batches of ~10 which bumps order priority_ ### Notable Quotes > "Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness critically acclaimed games. What about The Shadow, George? Come on, The Shadow deserves to have a picture next to those two games." > — **Ryan C.**, early in Stern discussion > _Playful criticism of George Gomez's slide showing only Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness as examples of acclaimed games, noting The Shadow also outsold both_ > "It's 99.9% sure that it's Black Knight 3000. And this is the funny thing, like, will he get a good artist now? Because he always gets the biggest licenses, right? Like Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Spider-Man. And he hasn't had good art on any of them." > — **Ryan C.**, Black Knight discussion > _Speculation about Steve Ritchie's next game with criticism of his artwork on licensed titles_ > "I feel like every person that plays the game should at least be able to play one mode with like two hits. I think people would have a better appreciation for the game if they did that." > — **Ryan C.**, Kingpin feedback section > _Design criticism about Kingpin's difficult mode startup; suggests software adjustment to improve accessibility for casual players_ > "It's one of those things you have to see in person, and if you ever see Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle in person and see the butter cabinet, you'll be blown away." > — **Ryan C.**, Alice Cooper cabinet description > _Emphasis on visual presentation quality of the direct-printed art versus traditional decal methods_ > "I know this sounds super lame, but they really do feel like a family. I know they are a family, right? But like, Scott's like the cousin... It doesn't feel like a corporate environment. It feels like they all really like each other." > — **Ryan C.**, Spooky Pinball discussion > _Personal observation about Spooky Pinball's team dynamic and culture with Bowen Kerins joining_ > "No, he put it in there because of my suggestion. Man, look at you. And so I joked around and I said, I expect to see my name on the credits. And he was like, no, there's enough people there already." > — **Ryan C. and Scott**, TNA co-op mode discussion > _Story about suggesting callout changes for TNA multiplier jackpots that were immediately implemented_ > "As soon as I saw that video I went, right, I now absolutely get this. I love the art. I love the layout. It looks great... So don't go by pictures, everybody. Look at the videos." > — **Ryan C.**, Alice Cooper reveal reaction > _Clarification that top-down photo angles poorly represented Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle; video footage showed game properly_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Brian Eddy | person | Pinball designer announced as new Stern Pinball hire; releasing game in 2026; described as '3 for 3' designer with three acclaimed games; co-designed Black Knight | | George Gomez | person | Stern Pinball executive/designer; gave live 'Stern of the Union' address at TPF; defended Lyman Sheets in public argument with Kaneda about retirement status | | Bowen Kerins | person | Elite pinball player and consultant; newly hired by Spooky Pinball as code development lead; previously denied this move with 'carefully chosen words' | | Steve Ritchie | person | Stern pinball designer; next game confirmed as Black Knight 3000; gave seminar at TPF with priest/confession theme; criticized for weak artwork on licensed titles | | Lyman Sheets | person | Pinball code designer; discussed at TPF regarding retirement rumors; working on AC/DC code with new mini-Wizard mode rewards; confronted George Gomez in crowd during seminar | | Scott Darling | person | Designer/lead at Spooky Pinball; discussing TNA improvements with Bowen Kerins; implemented co-op mode changes; treated like family member by team | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer; announced Brian Eddy hire, Iron Maiden (Archer) game, Elvira 3 confirmation, AC/DC code updates, Guardians code rewrite; quality control discussion at TPF | | Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer; hired Bowen Kerins; showcased TNA co-op mode at TPF; described as family-like team environment; working on improving TNA ruleset | | Dutch Pinball | company | Manufacturer revealing Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle at TPF; features innovative direct-printed 'butter cabinet' art option ($1k extra); made in batches bumping order priority | | Circus Maximus | company | Manufacturer/remake company; revealed Kingpin at TPF; shipped 100 units with five demo machines at event; first game release with positive reception | | American Pinball | company | Manufacturer revealing Kingpin at TPF; Josh Kugler available for gameplay feedback; next game is Oktoberfest with German imagery | | Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle | game | Dutch Pinball title revealed at TPF; features 3D playfield design; butter cabinet direct-printed art; revealed on Saturday after Saturday tease on Friday | | Iron Maiden / Archer | game | Stern Pinball game (codename Titanium Man); four flippers; announcement expected April; shown briefly in TPF facility tour photos; heavily guarded announcement | | Black Knight 3000 | game | Next Steve Ritchie game for Stern; 99.9% confirmed by Ryan C. unnamed source; will feature upper and lower playfield like original games; original art by Ritchie expected | | Kingpin | game | Circus Maximus first release; beautiful lighting/presentation; tight shots; challenging first mode; 100 units shipped; feedback given on difficulty curve and mode progression | | Oktoberfest | game | Next American Pinball game; will contain German imagery; described as 'another bit of information from unnamed non-employee source' | | Total Nuclear Annihilation (TNA) | game | Spooky Pinball title; co-op mode demoed at TPF; holds start button for 2 seconds to enable; 3 balls each player; mirrored score display; Bowen Kerins will work on improvements | | AC/DC | game | Stern pinball machine; receiving new code with mini-Wizard mode rewards after songs 3, 6, 9; goal is encourage song variety over repetition | | Texas Pinball Festival (TPF) | event | Major pinball industry event in Frisco, Texas; 3-day festival (described as could be 4 days); venue for multiple manufacturer reveals and seminars; heavy streamed content | | Straight Down the Middle | organization | Pinball content creator; Zach provided most coverage from TPF; uploaded 13-minute video of Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle from side angle that corrected initial photo impressions | | Ryan C. | person | Co-host of Head to Head Pinball podcast; attended Texas Pinball Festival; stayed at Charles Thomas' house; conducted interviews and gameplay at TPF; primary content provider for Australian audience | | Martin | person | Co-host of Head to Head Pinball podcast; remote from Australia; conducted interview with Ryan C. about TPF events and industry news | | Josh Kugler | person | Designer/developer at Circus Maximus/American Pinball; confirmed Kingpin mode difficulty can be adjusted via menu settings | | Kaneda | person | Industry figure; confronted George Gomez publicly at TPF about Lyman Sheets retirement discussion; described as 'provocative' by Gomez | | Head to Head Pinball | organization | Pinball industry podcast; Episode 35 from Texas Pinball Festival 2018; maintains Facebook page for festival coverage; provides weekly content | ### Topics - **Primary:** Stern Pinball designer hiring and game pipeline, Iron Maiden/Archer game announcement and anticipation, Black Knight 3000 confirmation and design expectations, Bowen Kerins joining Spooky Pinball as code lead, Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle reveal and cabinet art innovation, Kingpin design critique and difficulty curve feedback - **Secondary:** TNA co-op mode mechanics and gameplay features, Code updates for AC/DC, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.82) — Ryan C. expresses enthusiasm about most reveals and announcements, particularly praising Spooky's team culture, Alice Cooper cabinet art, and Kingpin's visual presentation. Constructive criticism offered on Kingpin's difficulty curve rather than negative sentiment. Only mild disappointment with initial Alice Cooper photos (resolved by video). Overall tone is celebratory of industry growth and new announcements. ### Signals - **[code_update]** New Batman code released at TPF with new Catwoman scene; new Guardians code with five modes rewritten; AC/DC code with mini-Wizard rewards (confidence: high) — Ryan C. played updated machines at TPF and reported gameplay changes and new content - **[sentiment_shift]** Bowen Kerins hire to Spooky Pinball widely praised as logical fit combining elite player status with game design expertise (confidence: medium) — Ryan C. frames as 'huge news' and 'why didn't this happen sooner'; describes as 'really good mix' of skills; Scott treating him like family - **[design_philosophy]** Kingpin first mode difficulty too high for casual/location players; requires multiple attempts to understand progression (confidence: high) — Ryan C. took 10 games to 'break the barrier' and reach first multiball; suggests software-only menu adjustment to one-hit mode start out of box - **[leak_detection]** Oktoberfest confirmed as next American Pinball game (confidence: medium) — Ryan C. heard from unnamed 'non-American Pinball employee' source; will contain German imagery - **[leak_detection]** Black Knight 3000 confirmed as next Steve Ritchie game (confidence: high) — Ryan C. claims unnamed source confirmation (99.9% confidence); details about upper/lower playfield alignment with originals - **[leak_detection]** Iron Maiden (Archer) details leaked before official announcement: four flippers, April reveal timing (confidence: high) — Ryan C. received confirmation from 'other people, a bit more liberal with what they said, not Stern employees'; Stern employees refused to confirm when pressed - **[manufacturing_signal]** Dutch Pinball implemented direct-print art on wood with clear coat finish ('butter cabinet') for premium presentation vs. traditional decals (confidence: high) — Ryan C. observed in person at TPF; described as possibly best-looking art package with more saturated colors due to black base; made in batches of ~10 - **[personnel_signal]** Bowen Kerins hired by Spooky Pinball as code development lead (confidence: high) — Official announcement at TPF seminar; Bowen previously denied this 'very carefully' two weeks prior, suggesting he was negotiating during that time - **[announcement]** Kingpin released by Circus Maximus with 100 units shipped and five demo units at TPF (confidence: high) — Ryan C. played multiple games and provided detailed gameplay feedback; five machines visible at event - **[announcement]** Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle officially revealed at TPF with innovative direct-printed cabinet art (confidence: high) — Machine wheeled out Friday, formal reveal Saturday seminar; features 'butter cabinet' with $1k premium option - **[product_strategy]** TNA co-op mode implementation with 2-second start button hold to enable; 3 balls each player with mirrored scoring (confidence: high) — Ryan C. played co-op mode at TPF; Scott Darling described mechanics; multiplier callout changes implemented based on feedback - **[business_signal]** Stern expanded design team significantly in last 4-5 years; now has five designers (Elwin, Ritchie, Gomez, Borg, Eddy) managing large production capacity (confidence: high) — George Gomez stated in live address; Ryan C. noted they make 'insane amount' of games and 'can't keep up' with demand --- ## Transcript Welcome Welcome everybody to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 35 and my name's Martin and with me... It's Ryan C. all the way from New York, baby. Yeah, you're there now. Yes, I'm staying at Charles Thomas' house. He's got the biggest house I have ever seen in my life. And you know those big houses that you see in movies? Just the really big ones. How many people live here? Like 30 people? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm staying in one of those houses. So I am amazed. And so you're fresh from coming from Texas? Yeah, I spent three days in Texas at the Texas Pinball Festival in Frisco and had an absolutely amazing time. And a quarter flight, I was on the airplane with Charles and Greg Pavarelli was in there as well. And it's 1 a.m. currently and let's talk about pinball, mate. How was your Texas experience from all the way in Australia? Were you glued to your screen? Yeah, look, I was. I was very pleased that a lot of information was being fed. Most of it was coming from you, thankfully. So everybody go to the Head to Head Pinball Facebook page. You'll see all the stuff that we posted there. So, yeah, no, look, from a very large distance, I managed to get a lot of information about the seminars just pretty much all of them were filmed and streamed to the reveals, to people doing walkthroughs of the whole area yeah, I got my fix so the bandwidth was really bad there so yeah, it was mainly Zach from Straight Down the Middle that was providing most of the content but I see now that the festival's over people are starting to upload a large amount of their photos so you will continue to see more Yeah, okay. So then overall, before we get into the individual manufacturers, so overall, how did you find the event? It was absolutely amazing in pretty much every single way. And there are so many people there and so many things to do that it could almost be like a four-day festival instead of a three-day. Just to get everything in, I wanted to play more games, I wanted to talk to more people, I wanted to do more things. the two and a half days goes lightning fast and I would definitely go back everyone enjoy I didn't hear anyone say any negative things about it but let's get straight into it let's talk about let's talk about the manufacturers and what they showed and what they revealed so let's start with Stern and they did a live Stern of the Union update and we learned a lot of things we learned that Supreme Pimple Machine they won't release the numbers or the prices and that's up to Supreme and they said it was similar to the deal they did with Cancrusher where I believe they approached Stern and they commissioned it on their part. So it's super duper interesting about Supreme. Well he also did say, just a little bit on that as well, he did say that it is based on the Spider-Man Home Edition that they've got, but slightly tweaked. He did sort of change some of the ramps just to make it feel better. Isn't that funny that like a Supreme Female Machine has better ramps than Spider-Man Well only because like Spider-Man like is meant to be like that slow fest but I guess that's a different game The big news from Stern is that Brian Eddy will be working for Stern and releasing a game in 2016 now the funny thing was that did you see the slides when it was being live streamed was he like showing the slides or was he just zoomed in on George's face? I think it showed the slide as well. Okay, so he put up a picture of Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness and he said who knows what these two games have in common. And I screamed out Lyman Sheets because I thought he was going to talk about Lyman and then someone else screamed out Brian Eddy. He said, yes that's right, Brian Eddy. And then he announced it. And then later on he said you know AFM and Medieval Madness critically acclaimed games. What about The Shadow, George? Come on, The Shadow deserves to have a picture next to those two games. Obviously, George doesn't... And I think The Shadow actually outsold both those games as well. Not only chosen as a remake, but as our Slam Tilt buddies say, Brian is a 3 for 3 guy. He's released 3.1 machines and they're all good. They're all amazing machines. Well, yeah, and... Well, he also did co-design Black Rose. Yeah, he did a software group as well. So, I mean, CERN now has five designers, I believe. Keith Alwyn, Steve Ritchie, George Ramirez, John Borg, and now Brian Eddy. And that's a lot of people. That's a lot of designers. Almost as much as Deep Root, I guess. Well, yeah, and it was one of the points he did make was that, you know, in the last, you know, I'd say four or five years, the design team has grown significantly. Design, programmers, you know, the animators, that whole department has just grown significantly. Yeah, it's good for Pinball. I mean, I think they're making an insane amount, and you just heard whispers of just how busy they are and how they can't keep up because they have so many pinball machines that they can make. They're not just making one or two, they're making, I don't know, like Aerosmith, Ghostbusters, they're still making all these games. Alvira 3 is still happening, someone asked about that and he said yes, it will be happening so I'm guessing 2019 or so what else did we get we had a little bit of an argument in the in the seminar where basically someone asked if Limecheese is retiring and George Kermis says he pretty much was talking to Kaneda directly and he said that he's provocative and to be provocative is to say a lot of bullshit that's his game, etc. And then Kaneda started to scream stuff from the crowd back to him. And I didn't want to be sitting next to Kaneda at that point in time. I wanted to kind of like, you know, call into a shell or something. It was a bit embarrassing. It is what it is. Well, I think George Gomez handled it well. Yeah. I mean, he didn't even want to look in that direction. Yeah, it was awkward. Anyway, what else? I mean, this is some news about Stern that was just from a conversation I had. We talked about how ACDC was getting more codes, and it was kind of about code balancing. But Lyman told me that he's also planning to give rewards. I guess it's kind of like mini-Wizard modes, but I don't think he'd be playing a mode. It's more like, hey, you got this far, you get awarded this. And he didn't detail what it was, but he said it would be available possibly after you finish song number three, song number six, and song number nine, I think. So kind of like building you up to encore, so it wasn't just like you're just playing all these songs and nothing happens until you get to that final mode. So further encouragement for people to play different songs. Exactly. I mean, that's his goal. His goal is that people try to get to encore every time they play versus just playing the same song over and over again. So, look, there's one thing that you haven't mentioned so far about Sturm's, and that is Iron Maiden. Was there anything about Iron Maiden? Well, the game was shown, like, literally like one inch of the machine. They had their tester, I think his name is Dave. Basically, they gave everyone an inside look of the, what are they called, the testing facility, the gaming facility. It's basically where all the cool kids in Sturm hang out and not like the people that are putting, like, assembling the games. So it's that locked room with no window where everyone works, and no one's ever seen inside publicly. And he showed a bunch of slides of what goes on, and there was a picture of Tim Six in the correct joke about Steve Ritchie being disappointed, etc. But there was a picture of what their, I guess their codename is, Titanium Man, or what they joke that it was called, which is obviously Iron Maiden. And yeah, not enough to see what it was but I took a picture of the picture and you can't see anything. And I pestered a lot of Stern employees like just show me, you're going to show it in a couple of weeks. But they wouldn't even confirm what it was. But other people, a bit more liberal with what they said, not Stern employees and it's Archer. and it's got four flippers and it's going to be amazing. So I am looking forward to that. April, I believe, is when they're going to announce it and Gomez pretty much said he'll be doing the game sometime this year, which will be Deadpool, which I guess is in August or something like that. Yep. Were there any code updates released at Texas Pimple Festival for Stern? Yeah, we got new Batman codes. I didn't play too much of the Batman there There was like an African American Catwoman I haven't watched the show But obviously that's a scene And that's like the first Catwoman scene that you play I've played a lot of Batman in Vegas And I did really well And then put me on the stream with Jack Danger And I got under 10 million By the way, Jack Danger is so tall And I know he's tall That it actually hurts to talk to him Because you have to creak in there up at such a weird angle. I'm too short. He's too tall. You have to be at least five meters away when you talk to him. There's a new Guardian's Code. I believe five modes have been totally rewritten from the ground up. I didn't play. I only played one game on it. And I noticed I mean, I think every mode before was like, you start the modes and you just hit shots. But one of the modes that I played, you have to hit every in-lane, like the top in-lanes next to the bumpers, and then the in-lanes next to your flippers. So that was different. I'm not sure how different the other modes are, but that's a welcome change, I guess, than every mode being just hitting the ramps and the orbits. And look, the other thing that I took from the Stern of the Union live address was he talked about quality control um and you know it was interesting because you know he couldn't really say things like you know our machines break or you know there's problems with dimpling and all that kind of stuff but he kind of did say yeah you know what we do our best we try to look after people but you know sometimes we don't get it right they're making an insane amount of games so uh who knows what the percentage is it is of games breaking down but because there's so many people that have the game, you know, people are more, they'll have it with their voice. Whereas, you know, Spooky Valley shipped, say, 100 TNAs. I mean, there might be 10 people with issues. I'm not trying to call out names or anything, but that might be like 10%, which if there were 10% of Spooners that had issues. So I think it's always blown possibly a bit out of proportion with no boards, but who knows? I mean, I only still don't have the numbers and I'm not going to release numbers of no board flatties and things like that. And so did you get to the Steve Ritchie seminar that he put on? It's weird because it was being live streamed, so I kind of left. I think it was right after the Franchi talk. Unfortunately, I was in a line to play Kingpin, and I was playing a game with Steven Bowden, and instead of lasting five minutes, it lasted 45 minutes. So I only caught the end of it, and then I left. and people watch the stream of what's happening in the other room, like from the pinball room. You walk around and you can watch what's going on in the other room without being there. So I saw that he was pretending to be like a priest and people come in confessing their sins, their pinball sins or something. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Were there any good ones? Not really. Okay. I was just, you know, I was just hoping someone would say, look, I want to confess that I desperately want you to make Black Knight 3000. Oh, shit, that's the other bit of news. Yeah. It's pretty much going to be it, isn't it? Yes, I had a chat to someone who I can't name. I mean, we said this anyway, right? We were the first people to call this out, that it was going to be Black Knight 3000. Someone pretty much confirmed that to me. Like, if Steve Ritchie is, yeah, I can't say too much, but it's Black Knight 3000. So, like, 99.9% sure that it's Black Knight 3000. And this is the funny thing, like, will he get a good artist now? Because he always gets the biggest licenses, right? Like Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Spider-Man. And he hasn't had good art on any of them. It's like he has Photoshop heads on all the playfields. so doing an original game will he now have like a zombie yeti or a dirty donnie or a Christopher Franchi doing art for him that'd be quite exciting that'd be good that'd be good oh yeah I'm looking forward to that yeah like the Black Knight and Black Knight 2000 were two of my favourite games well not only like artwork stuff I mean he can do whatever he wants like no that's right yeah it better not be like the whole it better not be like like Star Trek or Spider-Man Can you imagine that? If it was, no, it couldn't be. No, because the things that were very prevalent about the Black Knight was that it had an upper and lower playfield. So it will, at a very minimum, have to have an upper and lower playfield. It just has to. A lower playfield? You mean like the normal playfield? Well, normal playfield and upper. So you've got an upper and a lower. It was so big, though. I don't know. I played it the black knight and, yeah, I don't know. I know people like the music and stuff, but you can't see half the playfield and you just spend... Anyway. Well, no, not really, because it's not like there's a lot that's happening underneath that top playfield. So it's not like Gamera Thrones with the top playfield where things are happening underneath it. Particularly the first black knight, you've literally got ramps that go up to the upper playfield, but there's not really... There's a loop shot and locks and all that kind of stuff, but there's not really a lot that's happening underneath that play field. Kingpin and Circus Maximus, let's move on to that. Did you see any footage from where you were with Kingpin? Yes, I did. I actually saw quite a lot of footage, and I'm keen to know if it's any good. Okay. Kingpin plays like... It's like a bed of fishtails. It apparently has like six main shots on the play field, Like, yeah, you get the two ramps, the hotel, and then the seven shots, I think. Okay, I played Houdini right before I played Kingpin, and it's like night and day. And we'll get to Houdini in a second. But I think anyone can play Kingpin and feel like they're a good pinball player. And it's weird because you see photos of it, you see videos of it, but unless you're in front of it, you don't realize how, like, steep those ramps are. like they are like mountains they're like steep they're like you know the the ramps on the like the bicycle girl ramp on the Walking Dead premium alley they're like that steep but because they don't have like a ramp that goes up and down they're like super smooth they have spinners on them and the ball has like absolutely no issues getting up it's like just like this amazing design anyway well that's what we talked about with the other Capcom airborne yeah having those really, really steep ramps. And the flippers from Capcom games are the only flippers that are strong enough to be able to get up a ramp like that. Yeah. It's weird. As I said, I've watched a whole bunch of videos, seen photos. Unless you're there in person, you don't realise how big they are because, you know, no one gets as low as kind of your eye. I don't know. So, yep, it's a nice flowy game. Does it look good? Yeah, the playfield looks good. I don't know about the grey. I don't know if there's any grey pinball machines. I think the artwork looks a little bit unfinished, but not that I care too much about that. There was only one there, so the lines were always pretty long. There's a lot of code bugs, and I think it needs possibly more code, like, to think about it and to finish the game, pretty much. And I think the issue is that you can stack modes, right? So I was struggling. I wasn't having a really good game when I was playing against, well, with Steve. and, um, but I was relighting modes and then shooting into the, like, the hotel, or, like, or camera, whatever it's called, and starting modes. So, like, with a craft score, I had, like, five modes running and, um, you can kind of, if you, like, can you imagine if Simpsons, like, it was super easy to light modes and you could just have them all running at the same time with, like, two shots each? Um, by making the modes that harder, then, you know, people concentrate on finishing the mode more than, more than stacking them I don't know if they have a plan on completing the code more than just kind of fixing the little bugs that are in there. But I guess we'll learn more about that soon. So there is a bug where basically you build up your power meter to kind of like do this sudden death mode, right? There's a bug where if you're playing a multiplayer game, if the first person activates that mode, right, what happens is your flippers die. They lose strength until there's like no power at all pretty much. that'll then carry on to the second player and the third player so they can't play their third ball at all. So for them it comes like... And it was really funny because Steve was player one when we were playing and me and Ron and someone else were player two, three and four. And we thought that he was playing for so long that he burnt out the coils, but it was just a software bug. And there's another bug where I was playing with John, John Cosson, and I did something and the whole machine kept on playing, but the screen was in Linux. It was some weird bug. So I think I've got a long way to go. Building a prototype, I believe, with parts that already existed, I think is a lot easier than probably building parts, you know, proper parts from a factory and manufacturing this in bulk. It is going to be an unlimited run, I believe, except for the Ali version. And there's no price on it yet, But I did talk to the guy in charge, and he said between $7,000 to $8,000 is the rumored price. US dollars. So I guess I would put it in the, like, between the premium and the LE range. That's the term? Sure. I believe. I think so. Okay. So then overall, you've now had a look at it, and you've had a bit of a flip. Should we be excited about this? It depends on what you value in a game. If you value a game that shoots really, really well, yes, get really excited about Kingpin. If you like insane code depths and, like, ignore this and get, like, a Houdini or an L-Squid, you know what I mean? Like, if you want something, you know, it depends on what you're craving. And I'm not sure if they're planning on working on the rules more, but it's a very basic game. Well, that's what I read. I'm pretty sure I read in the This Week in Pinball, sort of the release that came with Kingpin. So what they're doing is they're going to complete the original rules, so to sort of take all the bugs out, but they're actually going to write a new sort of extended rule set as well. But you'll actually have the choice, kind of like, you know, write a Pinbot 2.0 where you can choose the original game or the enhanced game. Okay. So that'll be cool. You sure that wasn't... Yeah, I can't remember reading it, that bit. I hope they're not talking about the sudden death mode or something where the flippers get weak. I'm not sure. But yeah, if that's the case, then yes. If they get a good rule set on this play field, then you've got a winner. Because I don't know what it is about those two ramps in the middle with spinners on them. I mean, not many games have spinners on ramps. I can only think of Rob Zombie, but that's on a return and not the entrance of the ramp. And I can't remember what mode it is, but there's a mode where basically you have to get a certain amount of switch hits. And that's on a lot of games. And what do you usually do? Usually you shoot an orbit spinner, or you shoot into the pups. And I was playing that with Steve Batten. He's like, shoot the rounds, man, shoot the rounds, fishtails. And you just go left round, right round, left round, right round. It just feels good. It feels good to hit those rounds. Okay. That's Kingpin. So then, so let's move on to Houdini. I'm curious now that you got to play Houdini, and so I want to know your thoughts. Okay, Houdini. Absolutely beautiful looking game. The way it's lit, the presentation of the playfield and everything on top of the playfield, the side art, the back glass, the LCD integration. 10 out of 10. It's beautiful. It sounds good. It was one of the only games I could hear properly because there was four of them set up together so they weren't competing with different types of games. It is true. The shots are tight. Are they findable? Yes, you can find them. But I think for someone who's new to pinball, I'm not new to pinball, but when you step up to it, I think it's very, not confronting, I don't know how to say it. It's a bit daunting because you brick a shot, and then you trap up, and then you brick it again, and then you trap up, and you brick it. Maybe it's me because I'm not a very good player, but I had a lot of average games on the machine, you know, and then I had some slightly better than average games. I'm like, okay, I'm warming up to it now. And then on the last day, like I think it was the last night, I had a massive game. Well, compared to my other scores, I got over half a million. I got three multi-balls. I finished the modes. And the game awards you well for hitting those hard shots. I mean, the harder the shot is, the more it's worth. So it's not like when you're in a mode, every shot is 10,000. If the mode makes you shoot the hardest shot in the game, then it's going to give you a higher reward for it. Because the game isn't a slow fest, I feel like the first mode should be more inviting, right? So I thought about it a bit, and basically there's a lot... OK, dialed in, for example, how do you start a mode when you first start playing? You hit the guy, the QED guy, you hit the scoop, okay? Then when it gets a bit harder, you hit the QED guy a couple of times, then hit the scoop. So I talked to Josh Kugler, and he said it's a menu adjustment. So you can put the hit down to one. But I feel like out of the box, when someone puts it in a location, they're going to just leave it on default settings. The first mode should be either available straight away with the stage open or teach the person how to start a mode. just have it one hit because the shots are tight and it's not as easy as like a Steve Ritchie game where you've got these big wide open kind of ramps that you can backhand I feel like every person that plays the game should at least be able to play one mode with like two hits I think people would have a better appreciation game for the game if they did that because people people are you know if someone has a good game or something they're like oh wow this game is really cool. If you don't have a good game, you feel like the game's punishing you or something. I don't know. What do you think, Marnie? Yeah, I, look, I don't know about this one. It's, it kind of, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say, I'm trying to say something, for God's sake, but it kind of reminds me of Wizard of Oz, where beautiful looks great, but isn't really that intuitive and doesn't really give you that first obvious thing to do to then... Okay, wait. I think this is a very talkative game, and I think it is intuitive, but it's still hard to do what it tells you to do. Like, you know, to start a mode, as I said, it's a number of shots. to start multiple is one of the tightest shots. As I said, I mean, after I had that good game, I really like this machine, right? But I'm saying, it took me 10 games to break that barrier. If that was on site, I would have stopped after the second game. So that's what I'm saying. I think to hook people in and to make them understand the game more, I think it needs to have... And as I said, a lot of other games do it. Many were madness. The first castle to bring the drawbridge down, how many shots does it take? I think one, right? And then when you're up to the fifth guy, it's like, you know, ten hits or something. If they progress like that, I think more people will enjoy playing the game on site and in their home. Just a very, very small adjustment. Because they're not going to change the playfield, obviously. It just has to be controlled by software. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah, it is. So for a, you know, Let's call it their first machine. What do you think? Yeah, it's amazing. I'm not saying that it's not a good game. I'm saying that I want it to be popular, and that's the only way I feel like people will like it more, is if... That's the only thing I can think of. The first mode is easier. It's not going to solve all the problems, but I think this is the type of game that is more suited to a home collection, so you can play it over and over again and get better at it. It's good, man. It's for a first game. They knocked it out of the park. It is in almost every department. Yeah, it looks good. It sounds good. They had five of them there. It was impressive that five of them were there, and they shipped 100 units, which is quite amazing. And their next game, this is another bit of information that I got off somebody that I can't name. Don't go on a witch hunt. It's not an American pinball employee. but yes, Oktoberfest is next and it will contain a lot of German boobies. I can't wait to see how this one goes down. And sausage jokes. Oh, wow. Bring it on. That's all I could hope for. That's all anyone could hope for in the Oktoberfest pinball machine. So, yeah, I mean, they still haven't sorted out the... We talked to them about why don't we have one in Australia yet and they just redesigned the power supply so it can handle multiple voltages, blah, blah, blah. It'll happen. There'll be ones in Australia and people will order them and I think this pinball machine will do very well. Awesome. All right, can we talk about the big one? Yeah. So speaking of pinball, we finally, well, you in particular, got to see the reveal of Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle. Yeah, so it was wheeled out onto the floor, like straight away. So while everything was setting up, it was there and you could see the cabinet, you could see the side art, you could see the front of the machine but basically there was a bunch of like non-see-through packing material. It kind of like stuck to the inside of the glass. You couldn't even remove it and then they turned the machine on so you can kind of see all the light underneath and it was such a tease because it was right there and it just like time is limited show us the game and everyone was like show us the game show us the game No he didn show the game until the planned seminar and I'm still unsure why that couldn't have been bumped up to Friday, especially since there was only two machines there. But I think everyone got a game in it and got their kind of impressions of the game anyway, but it was painful to see the game there. A little side note before we get into the game. the busser cabinet looks absolutely insane like possibly the best looking art package ever right when you see it in like okay maybe not the best art like you could say oh this art is better and this art is better by zombie yeti and stuff but that art is a decal okay this art is on like direct printed to the woods and it's got like clear coat over it and it just looks premium it looks shiny you put them side by side the other one still looks amazing like don't feel like you need to go spend an extra a thousand dollars i think that's how much it costs but it looks i don't know i don't know how to describe it it's like i think that they said that when they print a decal they print it on white paper when they print this they paint the wood uh like it's spray painted or something black and then they direct print on it and because it's printed on black the colours are more like, probably more like vibrant or more saturated. Yeah, they just look, and then it's got the shine over it because of the clear coat. It's one of those things you have to see in person, and if you ever see Dallas Cooper Nightmare Castle in person and see the butter cabinet, you'll be blown away. What's it called? Butter cabinet. Yeah, they call it butter because it's shiny and it looks oily like butter. It has a butter layer over it. So it's an extra $1,000 if you want one of them. and they make them together because of the process. So you actually get your order bumped up because they can't just make one. They have to make like 10 together. Butter cabinet. That's the butter cabinet. Before they revealed it, you know, during the seminar, before they revealed it, we got the other big news of like the new highs in the industry that our good friends, Bo and Kieran, who just two weeks ago or last week said, you know, denied something. denied that he would well okay I asked him afterwards and he said well go and listen back to it I didn't actually I just chose my words very carefully he said he wouldn't be very good at it he doesn't seem to be very good at it so he is the new hire for Stern which is huge news because everyone knows that Bowen Kieran is an amazing player and he kind of dissects you know rule sets and who better to kind of be leading the co-development at Spooky Pinball and And Bowen also does consulting for game shows. It's his job to kind of work at the odds and balance game shows. So, you know, couple that with being one of the best players. It's a really good mix, I think, for someone to be designing code. And I think it's really one of those things people are going to say, well, why didn't this happen sooner? It's exciting. He's already talking to Scott about, you know, like certain TNA things, like TNA somehow needs to be improved. It's cool. Okay. well I think that's a great thing and just probably to your question people ask why didn't it happen soon enough well you know but Spooky had to make it on their own feet before they can get big enough to then you know to be able to afford somebody like Bowen I'd imagine I'm pretty sure he's going to get paid a million dollars a year that's what the written was so quickly talking about TNA before we go to you know since it is still on Spooky before we go to Alice Cooper they demoed out their co-op mode and I got given the co-op mode like right before I left, I didn't have anyone to play with, but I said I'll play at TPF Scott because there's no point in playing it one day before by myself, that's just like putting it on six balls absolutely amazing experience playing co-op because it's one of the first times that you're you know, you're really enjoying playing with friends and not wanting them to try, you're cheering them on and especially if you can hook up with a really good player like Steven Bowden or something. So how does it work? How does it work? This is the funny thing. At the moment, it's not like you press start and it'll say, hey, you're going to play this way or that way. You hold in the start button like for, say, like a second or two seconds. It's probably about two seconds. And it'll start the game and then it'll start doing the intro and then it'll say co-op mode enabled. Right. Now, if you plunge the ball, it'll then switch back to normal play because you've only done, you can't do co-op mode with one player. Sure. So then you press the start button as many times as you want to add how many plays you want. Basically, you get three balls each. There's no extra balls. The score is mirrored across all digit displays. The only thing that is different is that when you blow up a reactor, you get a one added to your score and no one else does. So you can look at the score and it'll be all the same, but you will know who has blown up a reactor and who hasn't. and I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that someone is a better player than another because someone can set up reactors and then drain instead of multiple for someone else. But I guess it's a good way to keep tabs of how people are progressing. There was another change as well. I had a funny conversation with Scott about kind of Lord of the Rings and I said it's really cool in Lord of the Rings how it's double jackpot one, double jackpot two, triple jackpot three. you know exactly how much the jackpot is progressing the score or the jackpot is progressing the mode because it's all in the jackpot callout. Whereas with Total Nihilization, if you have four balls out, it's a 4x jackpot, but it still just says jackpot, double jackpot, triple jackpot. So I said it would be cool if you could change the callouts depending on the multiplier. And they were like, ah, yeah, that's kind of a good idea. and then I went to play the game and boom, it's in there. And so I'm not sure if it's going to survive because it's just beta codes. Was it already in there or did he just change it on the fly? No, he put it in there because of my suggestion. Man, look at you. And so I joked around and I said, I expect to see my name on the credits. And he was like, no, there's enough people there already. We need to get head-to-head Zipper codes. Oh, no way. That's Jack Danger level. We were very far from that. It's good, man. I mean, it was so cool hanging out with Spooky. I know this sounds super lame, but they really do feel like a family. I know they are a family, right? But, like, Scott's like the cousin. Do you know what I mean? They treat each other like they've known each other their entire life. Like, they really are. and then you add Bowen to it and they're all just hanging out and I don't know. It's like, you know, they all... Yeah, I'm not sure how to explain it, but it's not like... It doesn't feel like a corporate environment. It feels like they all really like each other and they all hang out with each other. Okay, so let's go back to Alice Cooper. Come on. Okay, Alice Cooper. So just for me, so I saw... When it was revealed... I feel sorry for you for the reveal. Well... Like, that stream was, like, really... Yeah, it's weird because we... Yeah, go for it. Well, I was just going to say, I saw the pictures that you put up, and I looked at the pictures and I kind of went, huh, okay, that's not as sort of feature-rich as I thought it would be. I don't know. I just had this sort of, I don't know, it was a bit disappointing. Which pictures, like the 3D pictures? Because the first picture they showed was like the top, like they literally set up a camera, and it's the absolute worst game to show from a top-down view because it's a very 3D game. That's right. So, yeah. And it was the pictures that you sent through. I think it was about four or five of them. Okay. And I just went, oh. It just sort of didn't meet my expectations. However. Really? No, no, no. Wait, wait. You hear me now? Okay. Because that was just from your lame-ass pictures. Oh, gosh. Because I then watched. and it's not even like a lot of people had video footies from the side but it wasn't until i saw the straight down the middle um their video footage he went back up to his hotel room to upload that what a professional well he did and that that angle and you know it goes about 13 minutes as soon as i saw that video i went right i now absolutely get this i love the art i love the layout, it looks great. But it was just, I saw those pictures at first, I kind of just went, oh, they're not quite loving it. So don't go by pictures, everybody. Look at the videos. Or, Ryan, tell us what it looks like in person. Yeah, I mean, that was the weird thing is that, like, they kind of did a, they dressed up and, you know, they hyped it up and then when they did the reveal, it was, you know, Charlie's kind of talking, he even posted on Facebook that he's kind of, like, nervous and he doesn't like public speaking and, yeah, he's not a sales guy. so the reveal for me was fine because it was like, he just kind of stopped and he was just like, well, let's just like stop the seminar now and we'll just put it back on the show and you can apply it and you can like judge it based on that. Let me sit here for half an hour talking about the pinball machine when you can't see it, which was good, but then I thought everyone else that's not in this room is not going to get that experience. It would have been good, I guess, to have maybe some pre-filmed promo video. They kind of had an Alice Cooper one, but it was kind of just, you couldn't really hear it properly. Like, the sound was only coming through, like, the computer and not the main speakers. Anyway, so, I mean, I guess a bit of a fumble on the reveal, but as I said, I don't care about that. I'm just thinking about you at home watching it from your computer. If you put this machine side by side with, like, a Rob Zombie and an America's Most Haunted, for me, I don't feel like they look like they're from the same company because it is a step up just in the looks because it matches the TNA cabinet. Obviously, it's the normal size of a pinball machine because it's deeper, and TNA is a lot more shallow because it doesn't have deeper, you know... Ramps or anything. Ramps, yeah. It's got the same channel system as TNA. It's got four RGB LEDs. It's running P-Rock, and because of these things which weren't planned, they initially said the price was $6,250, but now the price is 6,500. So a little bit of a jump, but it does look like a premium kind of machine and it's limited to only 500 units. What else can I say? There's no Alley, but obviously there's options. The speaker grill that you saw on there is changing. It's not going to be the one that is going to be on the machine. I think it might be an option. I can't remember. They're going to change it to an Alice Cooper spider web kind of thing. they put the game on one ball games to give everyone a fair go and it's not the kind of game that lends itself to one ball games because like Houdini I mean this is very early code right this is alpha code but like Houdini this game is actually quite hard and I'll explain why to start a mode you have to hit the left orbit twice and the right orbit twice not in that order so you can hit left orbit right orbit, left orbit, right, or right, left, right, left. Just those two shots two times. And then you're battling out the monster. When you shoot those shots, you can collect things to battle the monster. We all read the Ben Heck interview on this week in Pinball about that. The left orbit is easy. The right orbit, maybe it was just me, but I saw other people as well. It's really hard, man. It's a very tight shot. I don't know. I'm not good with shots on my left lip. I can never hit right orbits. But because of that, like, my first five games, I didn't start a monster. And I didn't see how anyone started monsters. Maybe if it was on three ball, then you would do that on the second ball or third ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. Like, the American pinball thing is a solution to make it like you hit one shot and you're batting a monster straight away just for the first monster, just to give you a taste, and then it's down to normal play. Because the last thing you want is people playing the game and not progressing at all five times in a row. Well, I mean, that's what the feedback is going to get now, right? So I'm sure everybody would have said, well, could it do this, could it do that, right? Okay, you've got Bolin working there. And he spent like half an hour on our show talking about Simpsons Pinball Party and how it's not good for new players. so if anyone's going to agree with me on that sentiment it's a very early code, it's going to be Bowen so I don't have any worry at all that the code will be inviting to new players and challenging for the best sort of players So then talk about the layout I know it's got an upper playfield so talk about the layout and how that felt Yeah, I don't know, I mean because I learned the rules of what I need to do to start a monster I wasn't really going for anything but starting a monster. I know to start multiball, you have to kind of shoot up the ramp and then shoot up the other players and hit the drop target. There's not enough code in there, I think, to fully enjoy all of the play field yet. So it's just something that we're going to have to watch on like a dead flip stream. I mean, I know how it shoots and the layout is fine, but the software has to lend itself to the layout to comment on it, right? it's not like I know a fear where you go yeah every shot's cool and it's flowy I guess a bit more stop and start because you've got I think you've got like five entrances to the upper playfield or something something insane like that I'm not sure if that's it number four I couldn't hear anything like they put TNA next to it it was kind of like TNA Alice Cooper TNA Alice Cooper TNA right so it was kind of waiting in between and those three TNAs or was it two I can't remember totally overpowered Alice Cooper even though they had the same sound system, everyone was listening to TNA while they were playing the scooper. Yeah, it's all I could hear on the stream. Yeah, chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-beep. Beep. What else do we have? I mean, the sound system is the same as TNA, and I mean, I could feel the sound. When you hit the spinner, like, the whole machine shakes. Like I said, obviously the spinner sound is very bassy. Yeah. The display is absolutely amazing. the LCD screen is crisp I mean I guess we saw the LCD screen on TNA but TNA is blurry on purpose because it's meant to be like a you know, AV VCR tracking thing I guess I would say it's the closest to Aerosmith in its style where it's kind of like that comic book but it makes I would say it makes Aerosmith's animations look very basic right, like someone in high school is doing that and someone has worth especially. That's the best I can say. It looks amazing. It looks like high def. I don't know. It just looks good. Yeah, too early to judge the machine, but people are ordering. One of our friends, I'm not sure if he's messaged you, has ordered. Lucas? Yes. I don't know his name, just in case. He's just messaged to me. He said, let me know how it is, because I'm really interested in ordering it. I love Alice Cooper. I totally forgot. And then before I could play more than one game, And he's like, you're too slow already. He also said to me, you know, being a massive fan of Alice Cooper, and he was saying, you know, Alice Cooper was how he really got into loving music. He was pretty much predisposed. So it would have had to have been really crap. So I think he was kind of a, he just saw one picture and, yep, I'm in. That was it. That's how much he just wanted it to be really good. And the good news is, Lucas, you'll get this. Oh, that's fine. yeah as I said I think everyone was blown away by the art package the castle looks amazing I think it shoots fine it shoots a lot different there's no game I can compare it to to how it shoots because it is very unique but I don't want to pass any judgement and that's all I can say I'm not going to say this is a winner or this is a loser because the code is very early I couldn't hear what I was doing the software's not there yet it's going to be I look forward to watching the deadfoot video and then trying to overlay my experience on the newer software and they say, okay, that makes sense now. So do you reckon they'll sell 500? 100%. There you go. I do believe, and it's almost I felt that as soon as I saw the I just found so stupid, as soon as I saw the butter cabinet, without seeing the play field I was just like, holy shit, like I would If I had that in my house, I would have to rearrange my whole room so everyone could see the side of the cabinet. Okay. I'm fucking serious. It is the best looking pimple machine I've ever seen because of the shoddiness. I don't know. Shoddiness makes things look good, right? Sure. Yeah. Well, it's just really interesting coming from you. because you've been on record saying you don't really care that much about art and all that kind of stuff, but for you to be blown away by that, it must have shined you. I've never seen shiny art before. I've seen pictures of the rad capels and stuff like that, but I think this artwork lends itself. Like, I saw the butter cabinet for the T&A there, and yes, it looks better than the normal cabinet, but because of the colours they used in Alice Cooper, it really pops. It pops and shiny. Pop, shine together. I don't know. Piney? Piney, yes. And as I said, everyone that's listening to this that hasn't seen it will be like, he's exaggerating, he's exaggerating. Every person that was there that saw it will agree with me. Okay, so a lot of people aren't going to be able to see it, right? And you're saying it's $1,000 extra. Would you say, and I know this is hard, and people shouldn't necessarily make a decision just based on Ryan's opinion, because I certainly don't ever. But if someone was going to buy, you know, spend the extra $1,000 for the butter cabinet, would you say do it? It depends on two things, I guess. It depends on how long you plan to keep the game for. There's a lot of people that just buy everything new and they play it for a little bit and they pass it on. I guess there's no point in the butter cabinet for that. There's people like me that have all their pins in a line with their head boxes almost touching. And I guess that would almost be a waste of money, right? If you have your pinball machines set up, in a way where you can see the side cabinet. Because the cool thing is, each side is different, and each head box side is different, which some pinball machine manufacturers are doing now, some of them aren't. I think that's cool. It looks good from both sides in a different way. So that's my advice. If you really love Alice Cooper, and you're going to see the side of this thing, and you plan on having the machine for a while, go for it. That's your limited edition machine. The one that looks better than all the rest. There you go. All right. Okay, that's our last paper. So we will be waiting for the Dead Clip stream, and it will happen, and hopefully the code will have progressed a little bit from there, because some of the monsters that I was battling, they didn't even have animation, so I kind of just had a black screen with text saying... Coming soon. You know, coming soon, but this is what you need to do. Yeah, right, okay. This will be the first. Yeah, okay. Give it time. Did you have to jack? Yeah. They were there. Pirates of the Caribbean. I didn't get to play or see much I didn't see the seminar I saw Eric setting up the machines and I went in early and the first thing he said was show me your tricep progress and yeah I got a long way to go and the next thing he said was you want to really be impressed and he showed me his calves I didn't even ask for this he just showed me them he has the most insane should I be saying this because it's going to become a thing that people ask me about now, because about 10 people ask me about my triceps. Here's the most insane calves I've ever seen. Like, this guy must work out like a beast, like extreme mode. Like, his muscle looks like it's like an implant or something, but it's not, because then he unflexes, and it's back to normal. Anyway, I just wanted to get that story in. I only played one game on Pirates, and I had to turn off the machine, because right when I defined, so I got into multiball. it is a lot better than when we played it I mean we know that already from the JJP streams they've been doing but even when you play in person yeah it's an amazing game it shoots well, the codes come together really well after that one game that got ended early I didn't play it again because there was actually probably I would say the most consistent line on those machines versus as any other machine. I mean, maybe Kingpin. I mean, there's always a line at Kingpin. Sometimes it's super long, sometimes it's only a couple deep, because they only had one. But I think there was either two or three pirates there, but there was always at least, I think, like five or six people on each of those machines waiting. Yeah, right. I didn't want to kind of waste time, since we have one at Wayne's, I could play at any time. But even Alice Cooper died down a little bit at the end when people were kind of leaving and stuff, because it was only on one ball. but yeah I mean they have machines a little bit more floaty than we had and it's kind of shown on the screen and even the dialed in we played one game with dialed in and I did absolutely horribly and it was a floaty machine and it's I feel like almost like Jersey Jack themselves don't know how good dialed in is when it's set up well like yeah I'm like who from dialed in jacks up their machine and plays it like like everyone like all those women players are playing it I don't know it's like they don't even know how good their game is I didn't play any of the remakes I mean they were there but you know who cares did you get to play Ultimorphic before that I want to talk about Ziddy Glabowski was it there there was one there not represented by anyone it was just there someone bought it and it was in the far left corner like literally the last machine in the corner and there was was a line to play that as well. And, ah, God, the line was so, like, it took half an hour to play the game. And I was just like, I don't even want to line up, but you know, we'll do it. It's a really fun game, man. Like, I forgot how fun it is. It's pretty cool. It makes me laugh. Any game that can make me laugh, it just increases the enjoyment. And I really hope they get their shit together and make a game. They will, right? I can't say. I don't know Multimorphic Multimorphic Did you get to see Cosmic Cart Racing? I did, I played it very early on and I played the heads up game as well a couple of times I felt like I was either playing someone else's game I think I did I was about to say because I think when you start the game properly it's like shoot the green shot to accelerate your cart and when I played it There was only one shot lit, and I couldn't hear it for about two minutes, and it was so painful. But then I saw someone else play it, and all the shots were green to start off with, and then it starts kind of eliminating the shots. So I think there's like two rounds, and I think someone walked away from the machine, and I thought I was playing a new game. It's cool, but, you know, like, you support the choice of TPF. You've got so many freaking games there. Yeah. I don't know. I certainly like all the LED lighting and stuff in it. 100% and they can I mean they got magnets all over it like where the ramp starts they can accelerate the ball they can stop and stage the ball they can pass it from one to the other they can do a lot of stuff with that layout and that's the cool thing with Multimorphic is that that's a Cosmic Car kit but that can become two or three other games very easily but as far as the actual gameplay goes from what I could see it was just hit as many green shots as you can to accelerate your your vehicle it's like a hovercraft kind of thing and the faster you hit the shot obviously the faster you're going to complete your lap and there's lap records so um I don't know I wasn't good enough to like you know at one point my car was just dead and I was just like it was at zero kilometers per hour and it's depressing because I couldn't hit the shot um yeah I don't know is everyone what's the deal with that does everyone get that game for free that will let the early early pre-order people is that right no I do not know I do not know I know you can obviously buy it separately yeah sure I think it's two and a half thousand dollars or I should look it up but it's something like that but I remember I think Michael Fisher the guy that went to his house and played it I'm pretty sure he said he's waiting for it and he got it as part of like a deal so you'll probably get to play that in a couple of months if he's you know have you sent him a nice message and said thank you for coming over so we can get invited again well we can both do that send him a bunch of flowers Now, what else? So speaking of games that, you know, a bit of a surprise for me, you got to play Wizard Blocks. Oh, yes. Wizard Blocks. So what is Wizard Blocks? People that don't know, what is Wizard Blocks? So Williams, back in 1999 or whenever they decided it, said that Timber was an initiator and it's going to fail unless we do something different. So they designed Timber 2000. You can watch Tilt, the Battlestar of Pinball, which is an amazing documentary which documents this. I can't recommend it more. It's great. It is great. It is written so well, and it just gives you a real insight into how things were at the time. And what they did is they designed the Pinball 2000 system, which the first game was Revenge from Mars, and the second was Star Wars Episode I. And because of the issues they had, they decided, even though it was financially successful, they decided to pull the plug. And as you know, with some world companies, things are always in development. Kind of like Big Bang Bar and Kingpin were with Capcom before they pulled the plug. So the other two games were... Wizard of the Blocks was meant to be the third game, and it was an original game by Pat Lawler. And that was the game that was meant to kind of like really... It was meant to be the good one, right? because Revenge for Mars had to be the one that showed off the technology to get people hooked. Star Wars is the one where they're constrained by licenses and they have to be shut off and NDAs and all that kind of stuff. The Strike both goes off the list. Wizard Boss is meant to be the original thing, so they can do whatever they want. Pat Lawler, great designer, and he didn't get very far. And he's been on record saying that no one should try and resurrect this project because there wasn't enough there to build a 14-more machine. But someone has. I mean, it's not completely finished yet, but you can shoot it, you can get into multiball, you can get jackpots. It was kind of hat-together, like the ramps weren't perfect and this and that, but it was amazing to... I mean, it was Ron Hallett, Steve, and then I played a game after. There's a repeatable loop shot. There's shots under the ramp. It's a cool little game. It definitely shoots better than... I mean, I guess Revenge of the Mars kind of shoots pretty well. I just don't like the software. I don't know. It was cool. It was very surreal. I didn't even know it was going to be there. And when it was there, I was just like, holy shit, like this is a Wizard Blox and it works, like the software and everything. Well, people have said as well, and maybe it's just because of the crisscrosses on the playfield, that some of the design elements from Wizard Blox made its way into Dialed In. Could you say that? Is that true? well I mean 100% those lightning crisscross you know the array of inserts bringing up to your flippers I didn see that getting activated by anyone but I guess I didn spend more than 10 minutes watching him playing the game Sure I mean the coolest thing I guess is the repeatable loop shot, kind of like what we've got on Pirates of the Caribbean, that repeatable upper inner loop. Yes. There is that, but on the other side, so there's a flipper kind of, I guess, like a warp ramp. Sure. But I don't think it's going up a ramp, it's just kind of looping around. Like high speed. Yeah. And I believe that has never been on a Pat Lawler game. So my question to the people I was playing with is, do you think that Pat Lawler had all these ideas that never got to come to fruition? And he never did them. I don't know why. Maybe he wasn't allowed to, but we've seen one dialed in at JGP. Will his next demo machine have that same kind of shot? I know it's a totally different cabinet size and platform, but it'd be cool to have a Pat Lawler game that has like flow but also a repeatable loop shot flow. I don't know. I think it's cool. Okay. Well, there you go. So that was an interesting bit of history to say there. Yeah. I'm not sure if the guy has plans to put into production or stuff like that but I mean the Pitbull 2000 thing is kind of like what Alien plans to do where you have sufferable playfields So you can just take a Playfield out and put it in. Well, I think there'd be a lot of people that like a Playfield they could swap in. So speaking of, was there an alien there as well? No, there weren't any aliens, actually. At all? No. It's quite funny. Like, there were seven TNAs. Like, there was a couple that Spooky Brang, but, like, everyone bought theirs. And there were five Houdinis, and there were so many Spider-Mans. But there was no, like, Lord of the Rings. There was no Tron. I mean, there's a lot of games that are popular. I'm not sure if Aliens is one of those ones, but, yeah, there's a lot of repeated games, and there was Zero Aliens. Okay, well, there you go. So I didn't get it. I mean, who the fuck would bring their alien to a show to get beat up on when they can't get spare parts? I don't know. Ah, yeah, okay, I guess. Yeah, I mean, they bought a Houdini. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Good point. So anything else? Anything else you've missed on your list? Yes, I would like to talk about what I did besides playing all the New Magic Mattress games. So I watched a bit of a tournament and it was won by a guy called Robert Byers and he's quite an animated person. And me, Ron and Dr. John were kind of like watching the finals, but we also said, let's have a game of Congo while we do that. I was playing Congo and I just heard this screaming and I looked over and this guy's on Paragon, right, right behind us. And he just like screams like he just like won the championship, which he hadn't, but he was just destroying Paragon, right? And he turned to the camera and he did, how do I describe this without showing you a picture or something? You know when you grab your two hands and you like, you slap them on your crotch? Sure. Yes. Yes. Okay. So that means something to me. And I was like, well, did he just do that to the camera? So I went up to him after the show. congratulations on winning. I said, what were you doing? Did you stop your game, look at the camera, and do that for all the stream views? He's like, oh, yeah, I'm really into wrestling. And that's what Triple H does before he gives someone the smackdown or something. Like, okay, well, in Australia that means suck my dick. He's like, oh, what, really? I'm like, doesn't that mean the same thing as well? Like, oh, my gosh. Anyway, there were 160 players in the tournament, and he won. He won over Carl D'Python Anghelo, and I can't remember who else was in the final. Adrian Augustine and one other guy. I didn't participate in the tournament at all, but by everyone's reports, it was very well done. I met a lot of people, a lot of our fans, Marty. Everyone was asking where you were. Did you get the email from the Canadians? Hi, Pete. Yeah. I hope that's part of the mailbag. I'm actually horrible with names, as I've mentioned a couple of times. I'll remember people's faces, but I don't remember many names. But a lot of good feedback. I met Ron Hallett from the Slam Tilt podcast, and I spent a majority of my time playing games with Ron and Dr. John from Queensland. And we just went around and we just played three-player games. and we mainly concentrated on the games that I'd never played before and John's never played before. Ryan's pretty much played everything. Sure. I hardly remember any of them because I enjoyed them, but, you know, a lot of them blend into each other. But, Marty, there is one game, right, that was sitting at Ryan's come-up pinball booth and Ryan said, hey, you have to play this game, Ryan. It's pretty cool. And it was a very nice game in a very nice condition and Ron proceeded to explain the rules to me of this game in 20 seconds. And Ryan was there and he confirmed and was like, yep, that's how you play the game. I said, like, what else do you do? He's like, that's it. I'm like, wow, that seems like a pretty cool rule set and you just explained it in 20 minutes. Now, I want to see if you can guess what the game is without me saying what it is. Okay. And I hope Ron hasn't, like, missed you or something. No, I know nothing about this. Okay. it's a got lead game believe it or not right and by the way like I really like this game and I want to add this to my collection because I had that much fun playing it okay it's a got lead game what you have to do is you have to hit a bunch of targets on the right hand side get it in a hole a saucer on the left hand side and it starts multiple that's pretty much the game but what you want to do is you want to get your multiple multiplier up And to do that, you have to hit the spinner. Every time the spinner spins, it increases the multiple multiplier. It goes two, three, five, then back to two. So you have to get it on the right spin, right? So it's not random. It's going up sequentially, but then it resets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah? Do you know what we're saying so far or not? No, not yet. Okay. If you're in multiple and everything is 5x, you hit the spinner and it goes nuts. if the ball hits the left in lane, so the right in lane, and then you hit the spinner, it's 10x. So it's 10x times 5 times 1,000. So it's 50,000 a spin, right? And it just makes the absolute most amazing sound. It's like jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. Is this Alien Star? Yeah, bitch. Oh, yeah. I love... Okay, so sound is really important for me in a game, particularly of Gottliebs of that era, I love the sound that comes through that game. I love the layout. It's a great game. It's a great game. It was so simple. And, like, I mean, every other game was explained to me, but it wasn't fun, right? I mean, some of them were, but, like, this game just totally stood out to be, like, just this... just trying to do just one thing and doing it well, and then how many times can you rip the spinner? And, like, every spin is pretty much a jackpot. and basically I think Ron said that, like, you know, you can, it'll give you a couple of seconds after the last spin for that kind of like the 10x or whatever it was to expire so you can kind of like keep on hitting it. I don't know. And there's no ramps to feed that inner lane, but, you know, it's an old game. You can chat the lane and that's what Ron was doing. And I managed to do it and it was fun, man. I don't have any room, so no one can see me having a start, but it is definitely on the radar. And so where did you say that that was at the Comet Pinball stand, did you say? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if there's a couple of them there, but yeah, Ryan. So you got to meet Ryan Wenger. Hi, Ryan. Yeah. Ryan's got to meet each other. We had a good chat about LEDs and everything and... Yeah, he's a great guy. Yeah, he's a cool guy. Yeah, we like him. Cometpinball.com. Cometpinball.com, all the LEDs. Yeah. He did a really good job as well. You know what I've noticed on a lot of games? A lot of people have been putting the Star Post lights under their slingshots, Star Posts, and it just makes the old games look amazing because it's almost like a spotlight but without being intrusive. Right. And Ryan sells those. I sell those. A lot of people sell them. Give them a go. They're not that expensive and they're not intrusive. And it's literally just undoing a Star Post, putting it underneath, and then running some wires and hook it up to a GI. I just soldered him into a GI and that's it. So, super easy to install. There you go. I played Joust for the first time, I believe. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was one at the Chicago Pinball Festival Expo and it wasn't working or something, but this one was in absolutely amazing condition and I think I played two or three times and I had a blast, but I got absolutely smashed. Like, people were telling me the rules, but I would think I was having a good, you know, winning, and I look at my score, and I was like 100,000, the person was on like, you know, 2 million or something like that. So, that's a fun game. If someone's going to remake a game, remake that, Jesus. That's a fun game. Yeah, I haven't played, I played Joust when it came out many, many years ago, and the last time I had an opportunity to play it, well, besides Arcade Expo, two years ago when I was there at Banning Me. It was there, but it was not working, so I was really disappointed I didn't get to play it. Because you can actually play a single player. Yeah, you can, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Ron said, like, you play this game now because you would never play a working version. Like, they're always broken. But, yeah, this one was, like, restored and, like, clear-coded and, like, the guy that... I can't remember what booth it was in, but he had, like, an amazing centaur next to it as well. It was cool. So for those people that don't know, So Joust is a pinball machine by Williams, and it's head-to-head. So you play against somebody on either end. It's very cool. And there's multiple as well. It's very good. Yeah, I mean, after the game finishes, you get like a multiple frenzy where basically it's kind of like an end mode where you get four balls coming out, two to your side, two to the other side, and you've got, I think, 30 seconds to rack up. It's kind of like your bonus rounds. Rack up as many points as you can, and yeah, before the flippers get killed and the drains. This is not pinball related, but this was there. Have you seen the Atari Pong machine? Yes. A couple of years ago, yeah, on Kickstarter, there's like a $600 Pong machine. It was really cheap. It was under a grand, and I almost considered it. It was like this cool retro physical thing where like magnets would move it around and be like the original doll from Pong. You've seen it, right? You know what I'm talking about? I do, and I saw a video. In fact, Charles Thomas, I think, was showing me the video of the Pong machine there. Yeah. So they're now $3,000 because, as everyone does with Kickstarter, they totally underestimate the cost of how much something is to make. And I had a lot of fun playing that. I'm not sure if it's $3,000 worth for me, but it is cool, man. I'm not sure how it would be cool for it as well, but I played like three or four games, and it's like a laugh out loud fun. I like two people playing at the same time. Lou Frigno was there. I was excited about that until I realized he was there because he was charging $40 for a photo with him, and I was like, ah, no. I'll pay $20. I did see a picture of him. He played the Hulk limited edition of the Avengers. That was kind of cool. Yeah, he had two original Hulks next to him, and I believe his payment possibly for coming was that he gets the restored one. Right. And the restored one was like mint. It was like a brand-new play field, clear-coded. It was absolutely like a 10 out of 10 restore on that. So, what else can I tell you? I know I'm doing 90% of the talking, but I did fly all those to the US. It's worth it. Okay. Me and Ron played split dick flipper pinball. Do you know what that is? No. Okay. It was just like really late. I can't remember why we were doing it. But it was me, John, Ron, and Steve Baden. And we couldn't be bothered playing a full game of Batman. Because it was going to take too long. It's a long-playing game. So I was like, should we play Slipper one-handed? And I can't remember what he said. Like, let's play Dick Slipper. So I stood on one side, Rod stood on the other side, and you have to hit the Slipper with your crotch. I was laughing. Okay. There's a video out there. I think John Cossman has it. There's a video out there. I was post-parting to Ron, and he hit... Okay. Anyway, I found it absolutely hilarious. And I never thought of doing it because all my opinions are close together, but maybe a stream suggestion, Marty? Yeah, okay. To get viewers? Yeah, sure. Why not? Probably not going to happen. Okay. I had to add it in there. Okay, I wrote the notes down. I'm just going through them. Dennis Nordman of Deeper Same. I had a little chat to him I had to let him know that Demoman is an amazing machine and he laughed about it and I said Ron has one as well and John Coulson has one as well so we were all Demoman fanboys he was there representing I guess his company is it Value Dynamo? No, Value Dynamo are the ones that are making it he's Pitch and Bat and I played that for the first time and I played against Ron and got absolutely destroyed it was like 25-2 it's fun it's a fun thing it's very expensive they have old pigeon bats there as well that was for sale for a grand or two grand or something so but yeah that was pretty cool I got him to sign my t-shirt I had the t-shirt and he went up for five days of Deep Rooting he signed it Barry Houser signed it David Theus signed it everyone there that was representing Deep Root in any way signed it except for Robert Mueller like Mr. Deep Root And apparently he was there, but I didn't see him. TPF is so big, and it's like a maze to kind of get through. It's not even like rows that make people walk around in kind of like a maze kind of fashion. So it's an incomplete t-shirt. It's got three signatures on there. I wanted four, but it's my limited edition Deep Root shirt. And they were all good sports, and they were laughing about it. And I think David Thiel actually took a photo of it. Every signature that I got, it was the first time to sign it. Then Dennis took it up. He wanted to add it to his collection. So it was good to meet all of them. I met Scott from Pinstadiums. He had his little booth set up. And he's a really nice guy. And I don't know how his voice wasn't lost. He was talking to customers the entire time. And so I got an email from him today because I was getting... He's got the new universal adapters that you can have. So he was sending me an email and he told me that he actually lost his voice halfway through Saturday. Yeah, I don't know how he got it back, because he was talking to me on, like, today, Sunday afternoon. And, yeah, I mean, all the machines were set up there in the pin stadium booth. It's funny, because, like, pinball machines with the pin sound boards are, like, you know, seem to be premium machines, and then you put Invisiglass on there, they're premium machines, and then if you put Color D&D on there, they're, you know, some of those machines that were set up in that booth had all of them, including the pin stadium, so they just look like, do you know what I mean? Like, that's the ultimate mod, right? Like, four things together, perfectly lit, can't see the glass, color display, and the pin cellar. You know what I mean? That's how you feel about your pinball. That's how you feel about your pinball machine. And people said that. I mean, Ed said you'll find a lot of machines there are pimped up, and it's true. Like, people bring up their machines that are, like, fully restored pinball machines with mods galore. and let's be honest, some of the strings were absolutely shit and wouldn't work at all but 80% of them were in really good condition and it was a testament to everyone, I guess, that drove across the country to do that. So, also met Gabe from Pintastic. He's a really nice guy. I'm not going to mention everyone. Please don't get offended if I didn't mention you because it's 2 o'clock in the morning here and I'm on a very limited sleep. I also met Robin like the Robin from Pintside he's a he's a very chill guy and I didn't have a roost sack for him but John John Costin like bought a bunch of roost sacks from the airport and he was like the backup roost sack guy and I think between us we distributed about 25 roost sacks and I've got to tell you it was the talk of the show because the amount of people that counted me like hey I got the roost sack off you yesterday do you have more do you have five I'll buy five I'm like I've got nothing I'm not a Roo-Sack distributor, but I want to drop a hint. Someone in the U.S. might be distributing Roo-Sacks in the near future. I cannot mention who, but don't worry. You might be able to get it in your country to all of our U.S. listeners. Awesome. Exciting news. What else? I met a guy, right, called – he rocked up to the Pinside Meet and Greet wearing a Coast to Coast to More t-shirt. the first thing I think is like, oh my god, Nate Shivers. I look down, his name is Nate. I'm like, oh my gosh. I look at his last name, Nate Heater. I'm like, what? Is that a joke? I'm like, Nate Shivers? He's like, no, that's my actual name. He's the opposite of Nate Shivers. Shivers is cold. He is Nate Heater. He is the Nate that will warm up Nate Shivers. I just found that because he was also wearing a Coast to Coast shirt. But anyway, that's pretty much TPF, man. As I said, it's, I don't know. I'm glad I went to Vegas before I went to TPF because so many people were tired and conking out early. And I've been surviving on such little sleep from Vegas. But it was a breeze for me. I didn't drink a crazy amount of alcohol and stuff like that. But yeah, it was amazing. I probably couldn't pick a highlight, but I did get to have dinner with Lime and Cheats. It's not like a one-on-one romantic candle dinner. I mean, it was Lyman and it was Franchi and Franchi's daughter. Straight down the middle, Zach, Jeff from This Week in Pimble, Robert Blakeman, who did the artwork for Cosmic Chaos, the guy next to me, which I've forgotten his name three times, Super Rude, Jack Danger, Chris was there, and he went to this super expensive steakhouse and just, I don't know, it's like, you know, you wish you were flying the wall while I was a human being on the seat. so it was good it was fun obviously I can't repeat it so if I can then just indulge me going a little bit back before that so you did go to Vegas, did you get to go to the Pinball Hall of Fame? is this my This Week in Pinball? This Week in Pinball, yeah sure I did go to the Pinball Hall of Fame and it is quite a I think it's like 15 minutes from the strip and the first thing I said to you, Marty, when I got there, I think, is that like, why are Vegas maps so deceptive? Like, everything, for some reason, on a Vegas map looks close. Yep. But then when you're there, it's like their blocks are, like, huge. Yep. If you go to the CBD in Melbourne, a block takes, like, two minutes to walk across. In Texas, it's like a ten-minute walk. Anyway, it's about it. Yeah. Sorry. In Vegas. Pimple Hall is the same. What can I say? It looks like nothing on the outside. You walk in, Super loud, no entry fees. You just put stuff into the, you know, put quarters in and the games work. First thing I played was the, what's it called? Pinball Circus. Yes. And I didn't manage to get, I managed to get to the top and then I drained on my first game. So I was like, I'm not going all the way here and not hitting the jackpots. So I did it on my second game and then I was like, okay, I never have to play that game again. Yeah, it's not super deep, is it? it's not super deep and after playing it I'm just like why would you remake it I mean like Big Bang Bar I understand Kingpin I understand because those were games that were going into production right Wizard Blocks I understand that was a game that was planned for production the reason why this game wasn't made I believe right someone can correct me if I'm wrong wasn't because the company went bust is because they thought it was a shit idea. Right? It never got past the concept stage, yeah. Well, I know why they're trying to do it. It's the legacy of Python Anghelo. They're doing it for him. It was kind of one of his dying wishes was that he would hope that somebody would, you know, finish off what he started. Okay. I mean, I don't want to shit on someone's dreams who, like, you know, isn't alive. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's not that great. I mean, I know people are going to be buying and they're just going to be buying to collect. I'm just being a realist, okay? It is cool because there's only two in the world and one of them is in someone's basement, like a Larry DeMar or someone, I can't remember. And so the only one that you can play is in Vegas. So I went all the way on a plane for like 25 hours and I got to play the only playable version out there. That is why I went and played it. I didn't play it because everyone said this is cool. And after I played it, I don't want to play it ever again. I know, it sounds horrible, but I don't have the desire to play it again. Yeah, fair enough. I probably did play it the most when I was there just because it was a novelty and I just wanted to experience as much as I could. But again, I sort of came away thinking, I don't know what you could do rules-wise to make it more interesting because each of the levels that you go up only have one rule. it is either hit the flipper to get it across to hit the elephant and then you know there just wasn't that much to do yeah I mean I thought I was going to have to do something on the bottom play field to qualify my chances of getting up there but I mean without I didn't really watch any video I wanted it to kind of be a surprise you just shoot the ramp you just shoot the ramp and you rip again and then you shoot the ramp and you're up yeah and then you hit the teeth and you get a jackpot yep that's what happens yeah anyway I mean the reason why I didn't play it more as well is because my name is Ryan and I'm newly into Pimble and there are all these other games that I haven't played that are there including Punchy the Clown which is an absolutely amazing game now that is a game that deserves a remake Punchy the Clown fucking amazing game it's not it's terrible I know who was next to this guy when he was in like a meeting and he was like I'm going to create a game called Punchy the Clown and this is the layout and these are the callouts I finally get the most annoying motherfucker ever to do, hi, I'm Pudgy the Cat. Oh, my gosh. And they're like, okay, let's put this in production. I don't know. I know it's like a museum of pinball, and they have to have all these things there, but there are some bad games out there. What else? I played 24 for the first time. Right, okay. It shoots well, and it does have the worst unenthusiastic call-out ever. that's my take from that game yep well done what else do we have the Batman 66 has like magnet wear on it like the play field was chipping and the Groot the Guardians of the Galaxy Groot heads at the New York New York Arcade in Vegas had like chipping there the balls were being whacking his shin too hard right and it chipped as well I'm not sure how many games these things are being played but that's something I wanted to kind of bring up the games at Pinball Hall of Fame some of them are in decent condition but they're usually the newer ones a lot of them kind of have quick fixes to get games working I mean some of the games you can't get any progression because things aren't working like Lagoon, you couldn't hit certain shots but it's hard man you know me and how frustrated I get with things that aren't working I couldn't even tell the attendant because they were so busy fixing ball. It's like they're always behind, right? And I don't think they can ever catch up unless they hire like 10 people or something. I didn't even mention, like at Batman 66, for example, you know, like pretty damn new game, the last switch on the ball lock wasn't working. So every time I'd get multiball, it would sit there and it would do a ball search for like three minutes or something until it spat out all the balls. It's like the longest, like it does a ball search like maybe 10 times or however many, and then it's picked up the balls. And then you lock one more, and it goes into ball lock number one, and that treats it as ball lock number three. It's just, I feel like saying, can I please have the keys? I'll fix it for you for free in, like, two minutes. But there's, like, 20 pinball machines that are off. Like, they're not even, like, so, like, how can you be that guy to say, can I fix the ball lock issue, which I can kind of get multiball, but it's just really annoying, and it wastes you minutes every time I play. You just got to let them do what they do and just kind of keep on. I know. And so my biggest disappointment when I was there was I played Apollo 13, which I haven't played for many, many, many years. And I finally, like, I got up to the 13-ball multiball. I know. And it didn't work. Oh, fuck me. It didn't work. And I went, what have I come here for? That was, you know, I wanted that moment. That moment would have satisfied me But no, even that But yeah, look, I also saw There were games there that had Targets that had snapped off They hadn't been replaced You know, things like One of the games there World Poker Tour The At the top playfield where you get eight in the hole The little sort of teeth That trap the ball They weren't releasing the ball So once that happened, the game stopped. It was just some things you just think, oh, give me a day and I'll fix everything. But what you've also got to understand, though, is this place, when I was there as well, had a lot of people passing through. Yeah, that's the really encouraging thing is that regardless of what someone who plays a lot of pinball thinks, a lot of people that are there wouldn't know the difference between, like, you know, the things that aren't, you know, work and don't work. and it was the busiest pinball place that I've seen, I mean, besides TPF, of course, but, like, there was that New York, New York arcade that I went to and it was, like, it was a ghost town. It was a super busy, hustling, bustling arcade where, like, everyone was on every machine and then you walked to the pinball area and at that moment, it was, there was no one there. I got a picture of, like, every single machine on place and the Pinball Hall of Fame is off the strip and it's doing well. I mean, the quarters were getting, like, every single row it was like full of people and this is at like 11am in the morning so on a Tuesday or something so I think they're doing okay for themselves you know giving Pimble a decent enough name and keeping it alive and I saw Tim I believe that's his name and I wanted to say something to him I was going to go all the way and not say anything and I recently listened to his interview with Joshua Clay Harold on the podcast and it's absolutely amazing so I definitely recommend I'll link in the show notes he talks about I think he just opened it at that point and he talks about like he's pretty much his whole life story through arcades and pinballs and you know the belly mafia and he was just super open in that interview and someone said something to him like thanks for keeping pinball alive he looked at the guy's face and said thank you and then I was right behind him and he was soldering on a pinball machine so I thought okay this is a good point to say something because I didn want to interrupt his soldering I was like hey Tim And I don know how I scared the fucking shit out of him He like lifted up his head because he wasn't expecting someone to say hey. And he hit his head on like a pop bumper. So he was like pissed off. He was like, oh. I was like, oh, I just heard your podcast that you did with, yeah, it was a long time ago. Like, see, I couldn't say anything after that. It was just like, I made the man hit his head on a pop bumper by scaring him. You did the one thing that he doesn't like people doing. Yeah, well done. What do I do? It's scary. Everyone says that he's like a grumpy guy, right? There's all that kind of pressure, and then you say something and he hits his head. It's game over. So you've ruined it for the next 12 months for anybody that wants to say hello to him. Exactly. Yeah, he's going to have blood on his head. So there you go. What else? Well, you got to see Ricky Martin. Yeah, I saw three shows while I was there. I saw Ricky Martin. He's absolutely amazing. He hasn't aged in 20 years, and he put on an amazing show. And the only weird thing is that the Vegas crowd is very mixed. If Ricky Martin is playing in Melbourne, there's a certain type of demographic. If he's playing in Vegas, it's like anyone off the strip. There was a grandma with me in the pit. Yeah, it was a weird vibe. But, and there's spoil, I mean, he plays every day for a month or something, so the place was half full, but I enjoyed myself. Also, David Copperfield. Yep. I found out he's a robot. He does it twice a day, seven days a week, and 80% of his stuff was kind of fluff. 20% was, like, batshit crazy tricks that I have no idea how he does. Can someone please, like, Because I tried to Google how he does certain tricks, and it's like you can't have your phone on you. You have to have your phone in a box, and if they see you with your phone out, they'll just kick you out of the whole place. So there is no footage at all of the tricks he does, and people don't really talk about it online, unless my Google skills aren't good. But can someone tell me how he appears on a motorbike, how he makes a car appear out of nowhere, how the UFO appears above your head. Like, it's... You took me out. I know, but... I saw David Copperfield a couple of years ago when I was in Vegas. He didn't do the UFO trick. He didn't do the UFO trick. He made the car appear. Yeah, that's freaky. Do you know how that happens? You do? Yeah. Okay, you can tell me after the show. I'm guessing it's the same as how he made the UFO, but I mean, the UFO was huge. She was, like, bigger than, like, three rooms. Right, okay. Yeah, okay. Anyway, we'll talk after the show. Yeah. The last show was Zumanity, which is recommended by someone who went to go see it with his wife, and I was there alone. So it was a very weird show to see alone because all the couples are like, ooh, wow, sexy show, and I'm sitting there by myself in between two couples like, yep, I'm not going to see anyone tonight. Okay, have you seen Zumanity? I saw I saw three Cirque du Soleil's when I was there So I saw the Beatles one which was called Love I saw the Michael Jackson one which was Spectacular And I saw another one called Car K.A. which is a big martial art art Spectacular When you watch Cirque du Soleil shows Do you ever wonder what people These amazing acrobats Look like naked No I really don't Because that's been one of my life questions. Like, you see these beautiful acrobats do these tricks. I'm like, I wonder what her asshole looks like. All you need to do is go to Zobos Humanity and these questions will be answered. Because it is a Cirque du Soleil show performed naked, basically. I'm sorry to inform you, I also couldn't take any photos. I can't provide you with any footage of that, but it was a decent show. I wish I was there with someone versus by myself. Ah, Vegas. Crazy place. Did you get kicked in the nuts before or after that? That was... Was that that night? I don't know. Yeah, it was that night. Okay, that's what I did. I didn't go home and make love to my wife. I went to Fremont Street, and someone was holding up a sign saying... Okay, I was pretty drunk at this stage, just in case anyone's wondering. So Fremont Street is an absolutely amazing place. It's old Vegas. It's what Vegas used to be like back in the, I don't know, 70s or 80s. I'm making up the number. There's a guy holding a sign saying, kick me in the nuts for 20 bucks. I bet you could be like a bitch. If I flinch, you get your money back times two. So I was like, I'm not paying. So like, you know, I was with a group of people. I'm like, that's stupid. And I was like, wait a second. I'm like, where else am I going to get a chance to kill myself? So I walked up to the guy and I said, are you wearing a box? And he said, no. I'm like, can you prove it? He's like, go for it. I'm like, no. Like, show me, like, show me not wearing a box. He's like, go ahead, have a feel. I'm like, I'm not touching it. Anyway, I'm not telling you how we confirmed it, but we confirmed that he's not wearing a box. And I gave him 20 bucks, and I kicked him in the nuts as hard as I could, and he didn't flinch. And I was, as I said, I was drunk. I was like, how the hell did he do this? So a girl in one of the groups, I didn't want to ask a guy, I said, I went in the same position he was doing and I said, can you just kick me the same way that I kicked him, but just super duper soft. I just want to see if this is the trick that he's doing. So she was drunk as well, so what does she do? She kicks me in the nuts as hard as she could and yeah, that's it. Well, you know, I didn't know you did that, but I did get this message come through today, so this is how I got aware of it. Good afternoon. This is Sheriff Tex Peckerwood of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. We're currently looking for an Australian man last seen wearing a hat to hide some long, heavy hairdo. He goes under the alias of Ryan C. Our intel has told us that Martin is listed as the emergency contact. Ryan is being investigated in an assault charge here in Vegas for kicking one of our local boys in the testicles. Now, I know you Aussies get off on your rude nut sacks, but here in the United States of America, we settle our differences without playing hacky sack on a man's junk. We do it the old-fashioned way, pistols at dawn, or the new way, public shaving on Facebook. Either is fine, but we do not allow some Aussie trying to kick a field goal through a man's uprights. Get your shit together, boy. Now, there is a clue to who that was in one of the words. Without. Go back and rewind it, listen to the word without, and see how the air was pronounced, and that will give you a clue to who that was. That was from the Las Vegas Police Department. Definitely. A hundred percent. Oh, gosh. Vegas, at this point, is a total blur. it was amazing it's definitely a place that you have to go to I think with friends it's much more fun when you're with there with friends I wasn't with there with anyone so I made some friends and met up with them a couple of times you will lose all your money in Vegas even if it's not gambling the entire city is designed and built around sucking as much money out of your wallet as possible and it does an amazing job of it because you cannot walk down the strip without zigzagging through all the stores, there's flashing lights everywhere. The showmanship in the light show of a pharmacy, a fucking pharmacy, is better than the light outside any store in Australia, and that just proves how insane Vegas is. A pharmacy will go through more effort to flash lights in your face, say, hey, I'm here, walk in, than any store in Australia. A pharmacy. Right. It just blew my mind. And I couldn't sleep on the first day because I went to sleep and I had, like, bright white lights flashing, like, with my eyes closed. It's amazing. I had enough of Vegas while I was there. I mean, March Madness started, which I didn't even know what it was. Everyone comes to Vegas to watch and gamble on college basketball teams playing a bracket elimination all weekend long. It's a weird culture. and apparently they all come to Vegas because you can't bet anywhere else in the US. How weird is that? I mean, you can carry guns and you can do all this weird stuff and you can smoke weed now but you can't gamble in like anywhere but Vegas unless you gamble illegally. Did you know that? No. Yeah, something I learned. I'm learning a lot about these Americans. Awesome. So, that's it. Ah, one more thing. One more thing, sorry. In-N-Out Burger is amazing I know White Castle is the possibly the worst fast food I've ever had in my life like it makes McDonald's look like some premium Michelin star restaurant shit have you had In-N-Out White Castle? I've had In-N-Out In-N-Out is spectacular I have not had White Castle okay it is think about think about if you were to sit down on a table and say I want to design a food that the person who digests it pretty much doesn't have to do anything. It's already in, like, shit form. That's what they did. It's not... Think about McDonald's cheeseburger, like, ten times worse than that. Oh, God, okay. That's White Castle. Wow. Sounds terrible. I'm looking forward to having some when I'm there next. So, Pete, people need to tell me... Well, I've not done... The only thing I did this week because I organised my holiday for Pinberg. So for those people, you tell me whether there's a White Castle in Toronto, Pittsburgh, Chicago or San Francisco, because they are the four places that I'm going to. I mean, I don't recommend people avoid that place. I mean, you have to do it just to say that you've tasted it. Well, that's why I want to do it. You might want it, yeah? I love fast food. So, you know, I've experienced some crappy stuff just because. It's famous. I'm pretty sure I haven't gained any weight because of the amount of walking and standing that I've been doing. But I've been eating absolute junk. I haven't had one healthy meal here. Well, there you go. So, no, look, all my week has just been dealing with travel agents and getting that all sorted. But it's confirmed. I've now seen my name at ReplayFX, confirmed player for Pinberg. so I'm going everyone's everyone's like you coming back with money for Pimberg I'm like no okay next year I'm like you don't understand Pimberg's the best it's the best I know it's the best if you're a tournament player and look people say it's good even if you're not a tournament player I mean like it is just a social gathering of pinball people I know but I did also hear that you know most of the pinball machines that are there are being used for the tournament. So there is some others on the outside, but, you know, I don't know. I think you did really well going to Texas Pimple Festival. That's where you should be, and this is where I should be. But on saying that, I'm tempted next year to go to Texas Pimple Festival. Ooh. I mean, the tournament is 160 people, so I guess there's nothing to be sneezed at. but it's a limited entry, 20 things, so if you mess up, it's not like you keep on going back in. Well, no, if I went to Texas Pinball Festival, I wouldn't go for the tournament because I think that that would just take away time from experiencing it. For me, Texas Pinball Festival would be the festival. Pinburg is the tournament. Okay. Fair enough. So, okay, those cities again were Toronto. Toronto? What's in Pittsburgh? Ah, Pinburg. Pinburg. Pinburg. Oh, God. Good one. And then Chicago. It is free. Chicago? Yeah. What are you doing in Chicago? Just chilling? Stern. Okay, yeah. A private Stern tour with our mate Gomez? Sure. Yeah. Get in touch. Well, why not? I would do it. You know, why not? I'd love to see their secret facility and steal all their secrets and then report it first exclusively on our podcast. San Francisco. Okay. Why not... Free Gold Watch. I'm really going to go for that. Okay. You know that is a pinball venue, right? Yes, I have no idea why it's called Free Gold Watch, but I know I've heard it before. Yeah, well, no. Look, I'm really going to have four solid days of pinball in Pittsburgh, and then outside of that will just be little gatherings of it. Are you going by yourself, or...? No, no, no, don't be a friend. Okay. Um, Marty. Yes. Some pinball news you've written down here. What's Pinball 102? Okay, so, do you know what Pinball 101 is? I've heard about it, but, I mean, you can't watch it online. You have to order, like, a DVD and put in a DVD player. Is that right? Yeah, I know. Yeah, so, this was... Do you have it? No, I don't. So, this was an instructional DVD that was released by Keith and Randy Owen. And I don't know. It was a long time ago, I think, that it was made. but Pinball 102 has just been released. Cool. So is this like, is this all of his secrets to become like the world's greatest pinball player? Yeah, I'd say it would be. And I like that because, again, it's like, well, I'm going to show you what to do but it doesn't mean you can do it. So, you know, my week in pinball, so when I streamed on Sunday night, I had somebody, a good friend of the podcast and also of the stream, Paul RJ. He's written into us a couple of times. And he's always said, you know, how can I become a better player? And, you know, everyone plays differently now. So I had him over for a tutorial and I was just doing like some of the basic, like dead bouncing and post-passing and all that kind of stuff. But you can be shown what to do. It doesn't mean you can do it because you've got to just do it over time to get good at it. So I think it's great. Keith Elvin's going, here's all my secrets. Good luck doing it. Cool. Are you going to order one, or are we going to order one, or do you get one for free and then we talk about it? No. No, I'll get it. We're not that big yet. You get it? No, absolutely I'll get it. For sure. Okay. Can you get 101 for me? Because I've got to start from the start. All right. I will pay for both of them. That's the kind of nice guy. No, I'll do it. I haven't bought you anything back from the U.S. I'll buy 101. You buy 102. You've got plenty of time to go and buy me something really special. so maybe I'll buy you something from Deep Roots is that our next topic of conversation well it is only because I think it was in maybe it was in the flyer of of Texas Pinball Festival but there was a note there from Deep Roots saying thanks for your support Texas Pinball Festival rocks because of you and your machines and in 2019 Deep Root will rock TPS the fifth day of Deep Roots oh so the the four days will be leading up to it and then TPF next. Is this why you want to go to TPF next year, Marty? Yeah, I want to be deep-rooted. Oh my gosh. Okay. This is the big topic of conversation from TPF. It wasn't Alice Cooper or anything. It is the Deep Root logo, the new logo that they showed. Have you seen it, Marty? No. I mean, I haven't. Have you actually, are you pretending or have you actually not seen it? I didn't notice the logo. I just saw the text. oh shit okay do I have a picture of this this is going to have to be edited because it's probably going to take me five minutes to find this photo oh my god here it is it's like they know it's like they know okay let's not like speak in code here okay? That's not the head-to-head way. Martin, what do you see when you see this new logo? It looks like it's been inserted into an anus. It's been inserted, but it also has two straps. It's like a ball gag, but an ass gag. It has to stay in there. If you want to be deep-rooted, then it needs to stay in. Oh my gosh. We can't keep that in. No, we have to. Please. Everyone was talking about it at TPF Oh my gosh Alright It's hilarious Come on Well I think good on them They are now They have now become aware I mean there were There were Deep Root signs everywhere I mean they had like Big banners up Like they obviously Chucked a lot of money At TPF So This guy is super serious About this company That's Deep Root Well so So let's just quickly talk, not in detail about Texas Pinball Festival again, but people have been saying for the last couple of years that Texas Pinball Festival is the new expo. And before I ask my question that I want to ask you, since our last episode, Mike from Pinball Expo has come out saying a few things. And there is a letter that came from him formally of Pinball Expo. It says, greetings to all past, present and future Pinball Expo vendors and attendees. as you may have heard, Rob Burke and I parted ways after 33 years of putting on the Pinball Expo Rob decided he no longer wanted to be a partner and chose to go his own separate way decision of his own choosing, blah blah blah there will be two shows there will be a pinball, can't use the name Pinball Expo will be called something else, but the show must go on, is effectively what he was saying so, that and now what you know, you've been to Pinball Expo and you've been to Texas Pinball Festival, what would you say? And I don't think it's a one or zero moment here where the one's better and the other one's crap, but how do they compare? The biggest difference is that at Pinball Expo, you only, and this is, Ed Vanderveen said this in our interview with him, the other guy who runs Texas Pinball Festival. At Expo, you only have pinball people there. They don't advertise. They got a shitty, like, 1980s website. There's industry people there. There's people that are obsessed with pinball. That's it. They've got a competition there. Texas, it was packed, like a bit more packed than I would like. I would like to walk up to any machine, even like a shitty machine, like an EM or something, and be able to play it. And that's what you can kind of, you know, not that there were many machines at Chicago Expo, but you could do that because there weren't that many people there. Texas was so busy and a lot of the people there. I would say, I'm just going to pull this figure out of my ass, 50% of people there weren't pinball people. And that's amazing for pinball, not amazing for my selfish desires to play pinball machines quicker than I could. So, I mean, yeah, it's not really a horrible thing to say about Texas, but Texas was absolutely packed. There were a lot of people there that weren't pinball people. there as well. So, there's a lot more games there. Texas wins on that front. The people there were a lot nicer. The hotel, yeah, I mean, I think both hotels were good. I don't know. It had a better vibe. The pinball expo was very serious, whereas Texas, everyone's just having fun. Well, as I've said, like, the pinball expo is, it's an expo, it's an industry expo, whereas Texas Pinball Festival, we'll let you go it's a festival for the people so they have very different target markets yeah I mean I went there a weird year the year I went was the 30th anniversary one so I felt like I was kind of funding Stern's celebration you know it was a weird feeling but yeah that's what dialed in was revealed and everything yeah it is I mean everyone says it's the best it's so far beyond you know the Chicago Expo, and now the Chicago Expo is being split up into two, I mean, there's kind of no competition. And I know there's other ones out there, like Gabe from Pintastic, and he does apparently an amazing job, and he's growing that year by year. I mean, there's others out there. I mean, Americans are really spoilt for choice because they can point to something and say it's not that good, whereas if we had anything even remotely similar to that in Australia, it would be, like, mind-boggling, right? I mean, what's our biggest event every year now? Flip Out? Flip Out was... Yeah. What was the other one in Caves Beach? What's it called again? Princess. Yep. I mean, it's got like 80 machines. Yep. Yeah. Like in the US... They're not bad. Yeah, I mean, that would be a bad event. But in Australia, it's a lot smaller. People are more spread apart. Yeah. I mean, maybe one day we'll have something really big. So how many pinball machines were there, do you think, at the year? Some, I mean, I saw an Instagram post from Stern, I think, saying over 450 machines. I don't know if that's true. I mean, you could say there was 200 or 450, and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference because they're not in a grid like a pinball style thing. I mean, it really was. You couldn't see the back of the place at any point until you were at the back because it was black, big dividers making people kind of circle through the entire place. So, with that many machines, did they have a stern Rolling Stones? No, they did not. I definitely would have played it. They didn't want to do the same either. I'll send you a note. Someone told me of where there is one. In Melbourne. In Melbourne, they played it last week. So, let's go out and have some fun. Okay. let's stream it let's oh we should oh yeah terrible anyway um so let's let's just go I don't know whether we've got time to do a a slam the top 100 let's do it let's do a slam this is your chance to destroy me because my brain isn't working as much as it does let's do one next week because I want you to have more time to come back all I want to say is that last week um we did have a slam the top 100 and it was Shadow vs Medusa How did we go with that, Marty? How did we go with that? Let me just say that. Because Shadow got 36 votes to Medusa's 8. And that's all well and good. I just want to call out a few people. Stacey Bullock, Daniel Liu, Michael Bendis, Bruce Nightingale. I mean, Paul Arjay, Jeff Teolas, Zach from straight down the middle, Richard Argyar. You people, Nicholas, Peter, Mark, I thought you were my friend. I thought you actually understood a good, well-constructed argument. Well, you don't because you voted for the shadow. So, there you go. You know, you were never going to win that. No, I had absolutely... You know why I had no chance? No one's ever played Medusa. They don't even know what it is. It's an old game and it's, you know, even Daniel Luth, who voted against it. He actually had a Medusa, but he sold it. Oh, wow. Okay, he sold it. Nobody knows Medusa. It was going to be a very tough, tough ask. Do you think people choose favourites? I've noticed that Mr Lucas Barton has voted for you every single time. Yeah, he wants me. Okay. Come on, Lucas. Vote with your heart, not your wallet. He understands I give the better argument. You just happen to have picked the better machine. Okay. And this last time, it was random. Okay. All right. Should we head to the mailbag? Let's go to the mailbag, shall we? So we've actually just got a couple of mails here. First one from Pat Nichols. Thank you, Pat. Unfortunately, you got trapped in our spam trap again. Just wanted to say that the Death by Pinball, we talked about this, the Death by Pinball event at Netherworld is a really fantastic event. So similar to Stu Thornton, we spoke about Stu. I got up at 4 a.m. to fly up to Brisbane, played pinball for 18 hours and flew home the next day on a 9 a.m. flight, no accommodation booked. It'll be interesting to see how the extra six hours will affect people this year. Last year, at the end of the competition, people continued to play on for a while for fun. It was great to see that even the Zac Stark members of Netherworld were playing in the competition as well. They could have had Easter weekend elsewhere, but chose to spend it at work. Shows the great environment that Jimmy and Ben and others have set up there. So thanks for that email, Pat. Who else do we have? Bjorn Jarvis. So Bjorn sent through. There was an article in, I think it was in the Canberra Times maybe. It's the Evening Morning Herald. It's the Evening Morning Herald, yeah, talking about the Vice City Players, so the Canberra Pinball Club, and there was some interviews with people there. So we will link that in the show notes as well. But we love it when pinball gets a bit of publicity. Yep. And the last one, this is our Canadian friends. I think it was the Canadians. Maybe. I've forgotten. Never. Never. What is he saying? This is quite an interesting email just out of the blue that said, Ryan came all the way to Texas to bring me a... What was the subject of the email, Marty? It was, lame-ass Martin. Okay. Now read it. It says, Ryan came all the way up to Texas to bring me a kangaroo ball sack, and you didn't even fucking show up. Thanks, Davis. That was great. Yeah, well, I wanted to go, but as I said, I did reply to him and I said, look, this was all about Ryan wanting to go to TPF. I'm going to go to Pinburgh this year. Who knows? It's fair game next year. Okay. I recommend you get a shirt that says, no, Ryan is not here, because next time I go to TPF, I'm going to get a T-shirt that says, no, Marty is not here. Because, like, for the first day it was, oh, hey, Ryan C., where's Marty? Bomb's not coming? I just want a t-shirt. I'm like, just read the shirt, please. I don't want to answer this for the 15th time today. Just a card or a little handheld sign that you can just go, not here. Yeah, like, what's his name? It would be really disappointing if I do go and no one asks for after you. Harsh. Shall we call it a day so at 3am I can go to bed and I'm doing New York tomorrow? Hey, I might be playing this week in the Sunshine Laundromat. weekly, monthly competition. Greg Poverale was on the flight, and he invited me. He was like, hey, if you're playing a tournament here, because you didn't play at Texas, come play in our thing. And apparently machines are really well set up and brutal and competition-informed. So I think I'll do it. They are very tough, but immaculate condition. So Sunshine Norton is amazing. I was going to go there anyway. Yeah, I was going to go there anyway, so I might as well time it to go there on Wednesday night. so yeah I think next time we record I will possibly be in back in Australia or we might miss a day because I think I might be like lost through time it takes two days to come back so I'm not sure what I'm going to record next but we'll see everyone next week so if you do want to get in contact with us facebook.com slash head to head pinball twitter is at h2hpinball email us at head to head pinball at gmail.com or instagram is head to head pinball thank you Matty thank you everybody see y'all later bye everyone _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v1)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 25ab4976-2f0f-4a8f-bd74-2ca219b4ef2f*