# Drunken Farmer **Source:** BlahCade Pinball Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2015-03-24 **Duration:** 83m 3s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blahcade-pinball-podcast/episodes/Drunken-Farmer-e1bkg6p --- ## Analysis The Blockade Podcast discusses community-driven improvements to Pinball Arcade, including Jared's Android user guide, Farsight's positive response to tournament difficulty settings, and technical limitations of digital pinball physics. The hosts explore frustrations with Pinball Arcade's unrealistic ball physics compared to Visual Pinball, discuss ColorDMD's expansion to 18 supported titles, and highlight why Twilight Zone remains technically incompatible with ColorDMD due to its layered animation architecture. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Farsight has committed to implementing tournament difficulty settings with adjusted ROMs, outlanes, nudge strength, and tilt sensitivity across Pinball Arcade tables, starting with eight community-voted titles — _Jeff Strong reports direct email response from Farsight confirming Addams Family Gold ROM leaderboard was a test for tournament setting implementation_ - [HIGH] Twilight Zone Color DMD support has been technically infeasible because the game layers animations on top of each other rather than sending full frames to the DMD, breaking ColorDMD's color detection processor — _Sean Don Carlos explains ColorDMD discovered this technical limitation when attempting Twilight Zone implementation_ - [HIGH] Pinball Arcade's ball physics make it impossible to execute certain shots from a caught ball position that are executable on real machines, such as the right ramp from left flipper on Attack from Mars — _Jeff Strong describes attempting right ramp shot from caught ball on Attack from Mars and confirming with other players it's impossible_ - [MEDIUM] Visual Pinball has significantly improved physics and table quality over the past year, offering shorter game times and more realistic ball behavior than Pinball Arcade — _Jeff Strong reports returning to Visual Pinball after hiatus and finding notable improvements in physics and gameplay_ - [HIGH] ColorDMD has now released color display support for 18 pinball machines, including recent Stern additions like The Simpsons Pinball Party and Lord of the Rings — _Sean Don Carlos confirms ColorDMD announced their 18th title and details Stern machine compatibility additions_ - [HIGH] Bonzo played No Good Gophers for 2.5 hours on ball one, reaching approximately 600 million points, before Pinball Arcade crashed when he clicked the taskbar — _Bonzo recounts the incident during Table of the Week discussion_ - [HIGH] Pinball Arcade lacks ball spin and variable kickout behavior, making high-score play scripted and predictable compared to real machines — _Multiple hosts note ball physics limitations; Bonzo cites Funhouse kickout behavior predictability as example_ - [HIGH] Jared created a comprehensive Android user guide for Pinball Arcade using AsciiDoc on GitHub to address poor user experience and undocumented features like custom menu adjustments — _Jared explains guide creation motivation and GitHub implementation at jaredmorgs.github.io/android-users-guide_ ### Notable Quotes > "I was screaming as I was riding home on my scooter going, there's a menu for that, there's a menu for that." > — **Jared Morgs**, early segment > _Illustrates frustration with undocumented Pinball Arcade UI features that prompted the Android user guide creation_ > "If they're able to do it for the Gold ROM, then maybe that's a possibility that they could do it for other things." > — **Jeff Strong**, mid-episode > _Key reasoning that led Farsight to confirm tournament difficulty settings are technically feasible_ > "I realized that there was nothing I could do from a caught ball to make that shot. It was absolutely impossible." > — **Jeff Strong**, mid-episode > _Core criticism of Pinball Arcade physics engine limitations compared to real machines_ > "All the variables you just can't program into a video game. I mean, I do think that the biggest thing that Farsight could work on to improve that would be putting in ball spin." > — **Jared Morgs**, late segment > _Identifies ball spin as the primary missing mechanic needed for Pinball Arcade physics realism_ > "Once you've seen the machine with it in there, like every other machine that doesn't have one, you're like, I can't play this anymore. This is too blah." > — **Sean Don Carlos**, ColorDMD segment > _Explains the transformative visual impact ColorDMD has on machine aesthetics_ > "It's like when you hit the rocket, the little rocket animation goes off in front of whatever it was doing before. So it doesn't send full frames to the DMD to do that. It does it by layers." > — **Sean Don Carlos**, late segment > _Technical explanation for why Twilight Zone remains incompatible with ColorDMD_ > "They basically can do like 85%, 90% of the animation in X period of time. That remaining 15% to 10% of the animation coloring takes the exact same amount of time." > — **Sean Don Carlos**, ColorDMD segment > _Illustrates the Pareto principle in ColorDMD development work and why niche titles are slow to get support_ > "$26 million is awesome on Funhouse, usually. If you don't get $26 million in Pinball Arcade on ball one, you like restart and start over." > — **Jeff Strong**, physics discussion > _Concrete example of Pinball Arcade's score scaling mismatch with real tournament play_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jared Morgs | person | Co-host of Blockade Podcast; technical writer who created comprehensive Android user guide for Pinball Arcade on GitHub; based in Australia or overseas | | Chris Frebus | person | Host of Blockade Podcast (also known as 'Shut Your Trap'); leads podcast discussion from unspecified location | | Jeff Strong | person | Blockade Podcast guest; previously considered quitting Pinball Arcade; contacted Farsight about tournament settings and received positive response confirming feature development | | Bonzo | person | Blockade Podcast guest from Germany (Guten Tag); experienced extended gameplay session on No Good Gophers (2.5 hours, 600M points) that ended in Pinball Arcade crash | | Sean Don Carlos | person | Blockade Podcast guest from St. Louis; ColorDMD enthusiast and league organizer who provides detailed technical analysis of ColorDMD implementation and limitations | | Farsight Studios | company | Developer of Pinball Arcade; confirmed plans to implement tournament difficulty settings with ROM adjustments and physical tuning; implementing Gold Edition leaderboard as proof-of-concept | | Pinball Arcade | product | Digital pinball platform with tables, physics engine criticized for unrealistic ball behavior and scripted shot mechanics; Addams Family recently released; tournament settings incoming | | Visual Pinball | product | Open-source pinball simulator with superior physics (ball spin, variable kickouts, flipper physics) compared to Pinball Arcade; gaining traction with returning players | | ColorDMD | company | Manufacturer of color LED display replacements for pinball machines; released 18 title-specific display packages; recently added Stern machine compatibility; co-owner Chris Enright runs local pinball league | | Heretic | person | Active Pinball Arcade community member referenced for forum posts about recommended tables; mentioned in context of No Good Gophers chat moderation | | Baron Rubik | person | Pinball Arcade forum member who created rough camera settings guide for Zen Pinball on Android | | Knight | person | Pinball Arcade forum member with tuning experience who created physics tuning guide for Zen Pinball on Android | | Zen Pinball | product | Digital pinball platform available on Android; free-to-play with $30 gold pack option; highly configurable custom cameras and physics tuning | | No Good Gophers | game | Pinball Arcade table used for Table of the Week; notorious for extended gameplay sessions and grind mechanics | | Attack from Mars | game | Pinball Arcade table discussed for physics issues; right ramp from left flipper impossible to execute from caught ball position | | Twilight Zone | game | Classic Williams table; technically incompatible with ColorDMD due to layered animation architecture; uses gravity-warp-like ramp acceleration physics | | Funhouse | game | Table used in Papa tournament finals; demonstrates gap between Pinball Arcade scoring (26M easily achievable) and real tournament play (top scores 60-65M) | | Medieval Madness | game | ColorDMD supported title; exhibits unrealistic ball physics in Pinball Arcade (catapult magnet suck, accelerating ramps) | | AC/DC | game | Stern pinball machine owned by Sean Don Carlos; newly released for ColorDMD support at $400 price point | | The Addams Family | game | Recently released Pinball Arcade table with Gold Edition leaderboard; cited as successful test case for tournament ROM implementation | | Chris Enright | person | Co-owner of ColorDMD; runs pinball league where Sean Don Carlos plays; provides insider previews of new ColorDMD titles | | Papa (Professional and Amateur Pinball Association) | organization | Official tournament circuit; Funhouse finals showcase gap between tournament and Pinball Arcade gameplay difficulty | | Blockade Podcast | organization | Pinball discussion podcast featuring four rotating international hosts; implements Table of the Week and Blockade Tournament of the Month community events | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball Arcade tournament difficulty settings, Digital pinball physics limitations (ball spin, kickout randomness, shot execution), ColorDMD implementation challenges and technical incompatibilities - **Secondary:** Android Pinball Arcade user experience and documentation, Visual Pinball resurgence and community migration from Pinball Arcade, Table of the Week community engagement format, Scoring gap between Pinball Arcade and real tournament play - **Mentioned:** ColorDMD as aftermarket enhancement and operator investment ### Sentiment **Mixed** (0.58) — Positive sentiment around Farsight's tournament settings commitment and ColorDMD innovation, but substantial frustration with Pinball Arcade's fundamental physics limitations and unrealistic gameplay compared to real machines and Visual Pinball. Community engagement initiatives (Table of the Week) viewed favorably. Overall cautiously optimistic about Pinball Arcade improvements while acknowledging systemic design constraints. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** ColorDMD development limited by Pareto principle—final 10-15% of animation coloring requires equivalent labor to initial 85-90%, constraining production pipeline for niche titles (confidence: medium) — Sean Don Carlos reports ColorDMD owner explaining development: 'They basically can do like 85%, 90% of the animation in X period of time. That remaining 15% to 10% of the animation coloring takes the exact same amount of time' - **[community_signal]** Blockade Podcast implementing Table of the Week and Tournament of the Month community events to re-engage lapsed players and drive Pinball Arcade activity (confidence: high) — Multiple hosts reference participation in Table of the Week, cite it as motivation to return to Pinball Arcade despite prior disengagement; Bonzo specifically credits tournament activity for renewed interest - **[community_signal]** Community members (Jared, Baron Rubik, Knight) creating supplementary user guides on GitHub to address gaps in platform documentation and improve user experience (confidence: high) — Jared created comprehensive Android user guide citing undocumented UI features; Baron Rubik and Knight followed with Zen Pinball camera and tuning guides on Pinball Arcade Fans forum - **[competitive_signal]** Scoring imbalance between Pinball Arcade and real tournament play; casual Pinball Arcade scores (26M Funhouse) represent tournament-competitive performance despite being routine in digital platform (confidence: high) — Papa tournament Funhouse finals featured scores of 60-65M from top-4 world players; Jeff notes 26M Funhouse in tournament is 'awesome' while it's trivial on Pinball Arcade ball one - **[design_philosophy]** Twilight Zone technically incompatible with ColorDMD due to layered animation architecture rather than full-frame DMD updates; represents technical debt in game design (confidence: high) — Sean Don Carlos explains ColorDMD discovered Twilight Zone's animation layers prevent color detection processor from functioning; community has repeatedly requested Twilight Zone ColorDMD support without success - **[market_signal]** Visual Pinball renaissance among players frustrated with Pinball Arcade physics, offering superior ball simulation and realistic gameplay despite being community-developed project (confidence: medium) — Jeff Strong independently explored Visual Pinball after hiatus, found physics improvements 'way more realistic' with shorter game times; multiple hosts reference Visual Pinball's ball spin and flipper physics advantages - **[market_signal]** ColorDMD expansion to 18 supported machines indicates growing demand for color display aftermarket upgrades; Stern compatibility expansion opens new market segment (confidence: medium) — Sean Don Carlos: 'Once you've seen the machine with it in there...you're like, I can't play this anymore. This is too blah.' ColorDMD recently added Stern support including Simpsons, Lord of the Rings - **[product_strategy]** ColorDMD installation simplified to approximately 10 minutes per machine due to low-voltage design (5/12V power) eliminating complex driver board integration; aftermarket accessibility increasing (confidence: high) — Sean Don Carlos: 'Literally, I put the one in Twilight Zone in about 10 minutes, and that's because I was being really careful about it' due to simple cable disconnection/reconnection without voltage concerns - **[product_strategy]** Farsight confirming tournament difficulty settings implementation with ROM adjustments, outlane tuning, nudge reduction, and tilt sensitivity increases; starting with 8 community-voted tables; eventual rollout to all tables (confidence: high) — Jeff Strong reports direct email confirmation from Farsight that Gold Edition leaderboard was proof-of-concept test for tournament settings; Addams Family Gold ROM leaderboard implementation demonstrates technical feasibility - **[product_concern]** Pinball Arcade stability issues documented; Bonzo's crash after 2.5-hour session demonstrates potential data loss risk for long play sessions (confidence: medium) — Bonzo: 'I clicked on the Pinball Arcade icon in my taskbar, and the game crashed' after 2.5 hours reaching 600M points on ball one - **[sentiment_shift]** Jeff Strong and Bonzo represent returning players initially on verge of abandoning Pinball Arcade, re-engaged by Table of the Week community format (confidence: medium) — Jeff: 'I mean, I guess I really haven't played much in the last year or so...why should I even bother with Pinball Arcade anymore when I can just play this [Visual Pinball]?' Bonzo: 'I hadn't played a lot of Pinball Arcade for months because somehow I just lost the spirit. But the tournament of the month really was loads of fun' - **[technology_signal]** Pinball Arcade fundamentally lacks ball spin mechanics and variable kickout behavior, making gameplay predictable and unrealistic compared to physical machines (confidence: high) — Jared identifies ball spin as primary missing feature; hosts document inability to execute caught-ball shots possible on real tables; Bonzo notes predictable Funhouse kickout behavior that tournament players instantly recognize --- ## Transcript The probe has discovered big points, sir. Captain, something strange is happening. Battlestation! Broadcasting from around the globe, three continents to be exact, this is the Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. Joining us today is Jeff Strong. Howdy ho, neighbor. The wonderful Bonzo from Germany. Guten Tag. Down under, we have Jared Morgs. I'm here. And over there under the giant arch, I'm assuming, in St. Louis, that would be Sean Don Carlos. Greetings, Earthlings. Welcome to the Enterprise. Captain, I believe they have evil intentions. Suggestions? Readings indicate nothing, sir. Shall we negotiate? Hold on tight. This could get rough. Fantastic. So, here we are once again, and it seems like there are some happenings in TPA. Go figure. We've had the release of Adam's Family, which was, you know, I guess a mildly requested table. I don't know. There might have been some people asking for it here and there, but that came out. There was some news that we'll talk to Jeff a little bit more about, but about DX11 finally maybe dropping along with difficulty settings. And, most importantly, the advent of the blockade, tournament of the month, and table of the week. Ta-da! Anyway, we'll get on to all of that a little bit later. But what's on your boys' minds? Anything special? Yeah. Yeah So I've been doing some things I've been ruffling some feathers And doing some things I think I've been ruffling some feathers anyhow I haven't really got a lot of feedback But I made an Android user's guide For TPA The reason why I made an Android user's guide Was because I've heard On a number of different Occasions and different Mediums I guess you could say that the users of the Android app aren't having a great user experience. They needed some guidance, right? They usually need some guidance. And, dear listeners, you might be aware that I'm a technical writer in my day job when I'm not being a superhero podcaster by night. So I thought, well, I might as well use my skills to write a user guide, you know, for free, because I do things for free when I'm passionate about something, and I'm still passionate about TPA. and pinball in general. So I thought, okay, well, let's do this. Some of the content of the guide was made by FAQs compiled by me on the site, but the problem with the FAQs is they're buried in the site, and they're not really that easily contributed to because, of course, I created them. So if anyone has any tips, they have to sort of put a post in, and then I have to update them, and, you know, that's far too asynchronous for me. so I decided to there's your $10 word for the podcast asynchronous for me so I said right I'm going to do this in github so I've used a writing language called Ascii Doctor sorry Ascii Doc which is a text based writing language and that's really easy for people to write in if they want to contribute or if they don't want to actually write directly they can just raise bugs against the guide and make it their own So the idea is that while I wrote it, it's everybody's guide. So everyone has a right to update it or improve it or look at things that are wrong in it and fix them up. And there's things like... A couple of things I heard recently was Don and Jeff from the Pinball Podcast, they were doing something online, live, which is dangerous. They were trying to use the Pinball Arcade live and they went to a table with a launch button and it was all the way up the very top of the screen. And they were going, yeah, it's really silly how it's all the way up the top of the screen. I was screaming as I was riding home on my scooter going, there's a menu for that, there's a menu for that. So anyhow, I contacted them after the show and I said, you know, you can actually change that. And they went, I hope we had no idea you could even do that. So that was case number one. case number two was um customers which i found really was the motivation for writing the guide is um google play games on android the way it's been implemented is you've got to manually create a save game and keep maintaining your save games on your device otherwise if you do have a catastrophic failure of your android device and you need to reinstall the app if you haven't created one of these backups, you lose all of your local database on your device, and your local database is where it stores your real-time achievements. So I think what's happened here is that when FastSight was implementing Google Play Games, they had two choices. They could completely rewrite the way goals were detected in the app and do away with the save games database. Or... Yeah, that's right. That's non-trivial. So what they decided to do was, well, we'll just sort of tack Google Play Games on the top of the save game database and then let people use the save and load function to sort of manage the database on their device. But the problem is, until the guide existed, that wasn't really something a user was thinking they'd have to do. when they see Google Play Games integration on an app, they think, oh, Google Play Games equals cloud equals I don't need to do anything. And there was nowhere in the app, because of the UI limitations, that suggested that they actually really did need to do something about that, like really, really for real. So hopefully the user guide spells it out a bit better for them now. Anyhow, there are just a couple of highlights from the guide. Where can they find the user guide, Gerard? okay so the user guide is on my my github pages account which is jaredmorgs.github.io forward slash the android users guide but we'll give you the link to that in the podcast show notes there's also a thread in the android subform on pinball arcade fans with the link to it and a bit of an explanation so yeah go and have a hunt around in there if you want to have a look at it and I know for sure one other place if you would follow on Twitter, Jared, at Jared Morgz. He posted it to his Twitter account, too. That's right. I've broadcast it fairly wide on social media just to sort of get the word out there. Hopefully people will find it useful. And it seems to have sparked a bit of a movement in Pinball Arcade fans because with the arrival of Zachariah Pinball on Android, there are a few problems with setting up the custom cams on that game. It's a very, very configurable app, Zachariah, and if you haven't checked it out yet on Android, you really, really, really should. It's really good, and it's free to play if you don't want to spend any money. Although I do recommend forking out $30 and getting the gold pack because you won't regret it. It's very good. Anyhow, there were some problems configuring cameras in that game. It didn't really seem that intuitive unless you did something very important first. So what one of our forum members did, Baron Rubik created a rough and ready guide that explained how to get the most out of the camera settings. And then one of our other forum members, Knight, decided to do one about tuning because you can actually tune all the physics in this game as well to your liking. And he's had a fair bit of experience with tuning as well. So there's two more user guides just created in the last couple of weeks. So I don't know whether it was related to the work I did on the Android thing or whether it's just coincidental, but it's great to see users contributing this sort of information because it makes people's user experience better and it also drives the app forward as well. So, yeah, good news all around, really. Awesome. Prepare for maximum acceleration. Cruising at warp factor of nine. Nicely done. Readings indicate an extra fall, sir. Brilliant. Now, Jeff, you did a little bit like a tease there, a little bit of rabble-rousing yourself. See, Jeff was on the verge of giving up on Farsight, weren't you, buddy? Yeah, I mean, I guess I really haven't played much in the last year or so for various reasons. But then I started playing again with the table of the week. And at first, when we played Genie, I was like, oh, this is really fun. But then we moved on to like Attack from Mars. And I was like, oh, man, this reminds me of what I don't like about Pivot Arcade. You know, these games that keep going and going and just the grinding nature of it. And then I decided, you know, why don't I go and check out Visual Pinball and see how it's doing these days. Heretic had posted a thread on the forum, you know, what tables were the best these days and whatnot. So I hadn't updated my Visual Pinball in quite a while. So I did that and I was like, man, it's come a long way in the last year or so. The physics and the tables themselves, you know, playing really well. So I started playing that again. I was like, man, why should I even bother with Pinball Arcade anymore when I can just play this? You know, the physics are way more realistic. Game times are much shorter the way I like it. So I figured, you know, it's kind of a one last hope kind of thing. I emailed Bobby. People were asking about DX11, you know, and they were like, Jeff, ask Bobby again about it on the forum, you know. So I emailed them about that and I figured, well, what the heck, I might as well ask and see if there's any chance, you know, any slim chance that maybe they're going to still add some kind of, you know, because we've been asking about this for. Oh, two years at least. Multiple occasions we had asked about it in the interviews and the questions, you know, we're always, you know, what's up with these tournament settings that you had promised us, you know, with their own leaderboards. We'd like to. Yeah, oh, yeah, it's something we'd like to do. It's planned, but that's all the part of it ever went. So it was something that was kind of just like a pipe dream, basically. So I figured one last chance I'd ask, because what had really inspired me to ask it was I saw that for the Addams Family, they had added a separate leaderboard for the Gold Edition. Oh, right. So I was like, if they're able to add another leaderboard for that, why can't they add another leaderboard, at least in the pro menu for some kind of tournament ROM setting or something like that? If they're able to do it for the Gold ROM, then maybe that's a possibility that they could do it for other things. So that's kind of what sparked my question. And what was the response? The response was fairly positive, actually really positive. Bobby said that that was actually the reason why they had done the gold separate leaderboard was kind of a test to do it for the tournament setting. So that's really promising. And he's like, yeah, we're actually going to ask you guys to do a poll, and we'll vote on eight tables. and we'll take those eight tables and we'll tweak them, you know, not only the ROMs for tournament difficulty settings, but also, you know, adjust the outlanes, adjust, turn the nudge down, the nudge strength down, and crank up the tilt sensitivity and do all kinds of sorts of physical things too to make it more of a tournament style, you know. I hope to hell one of those is Twilight Zone. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's got to be. It really needs this desperately, so. So got him. And my understanding with what you had asked him was that this isn't going to be something that's hidden in, you know, a pro table or whatever. This is going to be across the board. If you own the table, it'll be available to you. Exactly, because that's kind of one of the things I asked right away was, you know, is this going to be limited to those tables that just have a pro menu? And he's like, no, no, we want this to be, you know, available eventually for every single table. It's just in the meantime they have to kind of attack it slowly because it's, as he said, a bit of a workload to just get the leaderboard up for the gold ROM on TAF, correct? Yeah, it's a time-consuming process just to go in and adjust each table, set it up. Not only the ROMs, but the physical adjustments as well. So it's going to take time. So that's why they're going to start with eight tables. I'm sure it's going to be a hit because I mean even new players are eventually going to get to the point where it's going to become a grind as their skills progress it's kind of like I had said on the forum a couple weeks ago, it's kind of like when you start playing Mario Kart, you know you start at 50cc, the easiest setting and at first that's a challenge if you're new to the game but eventually you're going to be whipping up on the AI and it's going to be alright there's got to be something else, that's why they add in the 100cc and then the 150 CC. So this is something you could think of in terms of another advanced setting to challenge your skills, so to speak. So I think it's a really good thing for the game. I mean, for the community in general, I think it's going to be really positive. Sounds great. Great news to me. Yeah. Well, way to go, Haslingham. I'll be able to play Twilight Zone again. if I had had that a week ago for No Good Gophers, I wouldn't have aged three years in about five minutes. Let's let Bonzo tell the story. We've been running the table of the week and we just recently had No Good Gophers as that table. I hear Bonzo just about had a conniption fit over it. Please, tell us what went down there. Say goodbye, dear balls! Well, for me it was a bit like what Jeff said. I hadn't played a lot of Pinball Arcade for months because somehow I just lost the spirit. But the tourney of the month really was loads of fun, so I thought I should give the table of the week a try. And I played the game of No Good Gophers with my previous record being about 60 million or something. I ended up playing two and a half hours straight was at around 600 million still on ball one still on ball one around the 50th hole I guess a good dozen or four in one shot and I looked at the clock and thought to myself maybe you should go to bed now because it got really late and I thought I should should maybe look for Heretic in the chat room to break a little, so I all tapped out of the game. Heretic wasn't there, so I clicked on the pinball arcade icon in my taskbar, and the game crashed. Oh. And that was that. Oh. Oh, man. It's hard not to laugh at that, but I can late at night after having spent two and a half hours, yeah. I would have thrown something I'm not that patient controller, iPad something would have gone airborne I really didn't have the power to do that because else I would my pad and my screen would not be there anymore but I really couldn't I didn't say there would be side effects I was totally not able to do anything apart from staring at the screen At that point his wrists were just jelly So he couldn't even have the strength to throw anything He was just Just melted into the couch at that point Well I'll tell you what At least on the iPad After about 30 minutes in a game It really hurts your wrists Yeah Especially playing in portrait mode I find Holding it up like that I've got one of those I don't know if they're really military grade But that's what they call them The big heavy from six feet and it won't break type of thing. Which is good, because I have dropped it and it hasn't broke, so it's doing its job. But it makes the thing really heavy. And yeah, after about 30 minutes it's just like, I don't want to play anymore. My arms hurt. I mean, that's obviously not something that Farsight can do anything about. It's just one of those things. And the funny thing is that you'd think I'd play on PC more and I don't. And I don't really know why. Because it's easier? easier? That's the problem. You know, I was watching some of the Papa tournament from this weekend in Louisville. They were playing Funhaus, and the commentators were talking how $26 million was a good score in this tournament, and I was just like, oh my god, that's like... $26 million is awesome on Funhaus, usually. If you don't get $26 million in the pinball arcade on ball one, you, like, restart and start over. It's like, you know... It's a travesty, man. They played Funhaus in the finals, too. I just saw that a few hours ago and two of the four players which were the four best players in the world right now scored I think one was close to 60 million and one was about 65 million and watching these games what they did was just incredible so you can put up these numbers in TPA I think quite easily but not on a table in a Papa tournament and I would love that difficulty for TPA so much. Have Papa Mode and TPA. That'd sort them in for the boys. Yeah, why don't they get... To have the official sponsor, I mean, that would be so awesome to incorporate it like that with Papa. Yeah. I think you're also dealing, though, with just that there's not obviously with a real physical machine and the infinite points of contact and ball spin and rubber... All the lovely quantum physics. Exactly, all those variables you just can't program into a video game. I mean, I do think that the biggest thing that Farsight could work on to improve that would be putting in ball spin. That would, in and of itself, change up so much in that game, because no longer would everything be on rails. That and the, I don't need huge randomization, but just vary the kickouts, even just a little bit. That's what kills a lot of the tables. You can basically, when the ball comes out, you can choose which flipper you want it on, and it goes there 100% of the time. The fun house they were playing at Papa, if you were to hold the right flipper up on the right kick-out, it would bounce straight off of it and go right down the middle of the drain every time. So that was something that they all learned the first game, because everybody did it, and it drained on them all right away. So they're like, okay, that's the way this kick-out's going to be. So you pretty much had to... That's cruel. Well, somebody had to have their tech adjusted to do that. Yeah. Of course, if you're in Papa Finals, you should assume that things are all going to be evil bastards at that point. Oh, yeah. But in terms of ball spin, I mean, that's one thing about visual pinball and also time shock. Flipper physics. Yeah, and the flipper physics. It really adds a ton to the variety, the randomness. And it really keeps you on your toes, and that's something that TPA just doesn't have. Well, you know where I realized that it was an issue was when we were playing Attack from Mars for the Table of the Week. And I'd never really sat down and played that table to try and do well on it. It was just always one of those tables that I just kind of batted around and went, hey. It never thrilled me that much. But so as I trying to accomplish wizard goals and I trying to nail the right ramp from the left flipper I realized that there was nothing I could do from a caught ball to make that shot It was absolutely impossible I mean, I tried every single inclement variation of where the ball was on the flipper before flipping it, and I started asking around to some other people, and they all said the same thing. They go, yeah, you cannot make that shot from a caught ball, which is just asinine to me. I mean, it's a ramp not all the way to the side or anything. it should be more than attackable from a thing. Instead, I learn how to do it always from a rolling ball. But that's the kind of thing where it's like, you know what? It was just off whatever degree when they did the tuning, and it was probably one of those things where it was either we sacrificed the shot here in favor of some other shot, or we sacrificed that shot. It's kind of like maybe this either-or. I don't know. I'm trying to think if I've ever done it on a real table, though. Of course, Attack from Mars, I usually just, because that table has so much flow, I usually just let it, you know, I don't play that one in a trap style. I usually just let the thing go as fast as it wants. I'll have to try that the next time I'm at a real one, because I don't, I mean, I'm sure you can. I don't know why you would be unable to. Right. The only thing I can think of is you've got the stroke of luck shot right there, and you've got the right orbit right there. and maybe just because those three shots are going to be really close together on the flipper because they're almost the same angle, maybe it can't tell. Although that's the thing, though. You'd think you'd have a harder problem on a rolling ball because it's moving faster. You'd think it'd be easiest for it to tell the difference from a caught ball because it'd be moving the slowest once you finally let go of the flipper to take the shot. So, yeah, I don't get that at all. It should be easier from a caught ball. So that's the kind of thing that's where it's like there are certain physics in TBA that just derive you off a wall where you're just like, oh, come on. This shouldn't happen. My favorite are the ramps in TZ and Medieval Madness where they're visibly accelerating. Like there's a gravity warp there. Oh, I was going to say, my favorite is in Medieval Madness when you get the ball, do a slow roller near the catapult and it magically gets sucked in. That's always my favorite one. I was like, wait a second. And we're now just going to put the ball here. Because we feel like it. That's what you're aiming for, right? You can also really see it in Centaur. When it goes out the out lane, it's going to do the little bounce to maybe go into the in lane and also just magically go over and you're like, wow! Oh, balls off? Well, that, I think, is because there's gates there. Because they program the gates so that the balls don't get stuck in them. Have you seen that same behavior on Black Hole? Because Firepower will do it, too. Yeah, Black Hole, too. If you have a look at Black Hole, if you do a soft plunge, it just makes it up to the top rollovers. It goes, whoop, and it just flies through there. It's like it's got an accelerator magnet underneath there. It's pretty noticeable. Speaking of rollovers... Yeah, that's deliberate. That's another thing about visual pinball, the rollovers, that the ball actually bounces around in the rollovers and kind of jiggles around like it does on a real pinball machine. That's something you don't see in TPA. It just kind of selects a lane and goes down it, especially like on EMs if you play an EM with those top rollovers. In real life, it'll bounce around, and then once it goes in the lane, it'll kind of jiggle down, and then it doesn't just suck down through it. So that's another thing that visual pinball really gets right. But if they have a setting for the rubber in terms of, like, are all their rubbers set to the same elasticity and bounce? Or is it adjusted? Because, I mean, there again, on a real pinball table, you know, just the little donuts that go around certain posts, you've got your thicker rubber compared to your thinner rubber, and it's going to cause a different kind of bounce. Like rubber. Whatever you want to call it, buddy. I didn't say there was Trojans on the table. I had to. You were right. I know. I know. I was dangling it out there in front of you. A number of times you've said off-color things to me. I have to, you know, catch up. Speaking of off-color things, I think it's time for us to get lost in the zone with Sean. Are you ready to battle? That's not awkward. Says you What have you got for us this time, Sean? Alright, we've got two things for you We'll do the smaller one first Color DMD Which is a company that, like its name Makes LED multicolored displays For pinball machines Just announced their 18th title Whoever's doing the coloring for them Has been really busy lately And it happens to be ACDC Which I own so of course I get the because I bought the one for the Twilight Zone so I get their emails now I'm on their list and so they they send me things like hey ACDC it's like oh great I own an ACDC now do I part with the 400 bucks for the thing or not so I did it's supposed to get here next week but these things you'd think okay big deal it's a DMD in color, and we had the discussion last time about how most of us when we're playing, we're not even really looking at the DMD that much. Right. Yeah, this is kind of a thing where it's more for the audience than for the player itself, but CP Pinball, a lot of their machines now have color DMD displays in it, and it really... Once you've seen the machine with it in there, like every other machine that doesn't have one, you're like, I can't play this anymore. This is too blah. This orange is making me ill. done pretty much pretty much all of the major tables they've they added stern support not too long ago and so a lot of the white star and sam machines which previously were not compatible with the thing you can put them in now and so they've done they've added the simpsons pinball party and lord of the rings which looks bloody awesome man that would be so sweet a lot of the stern machines really take to it well, because the thing with the Stern machines is they like to play video, like little animation clips and stuff, more than the old machines did. And when all you've got is four different shades of orange, it's really hard to see what's going on, but now that you've got all this different color that you can play with, it's like, oh, I never, you know, I never knew it was doing that, because it just looked like an orange blob whenever I looked at it. Yeah. But, uh, just was going to talk about them for just a little bit. Basically, These things are, like, super easy to install. It's actually, from what I understand, it's actually a laptop screen. Because when you get it out of the box, it actually looks like one. The displays are much bigger than the actual DMD is vertically. You know, a DMD is mostly horizontal, and it's much narrower in the vertical direction. These things are actually, like, 17-inch laptop displays, and they just don't use the top and bottom part on most of the tables. But, yeah, you literally unplug the old DMD, you disconnect the cables, you put the new one in, you hook the new cables. The other thing is it's low voltage, so you don't have to worry about connecting it to your driver board and all the different various voltages that the different pinball manufacturers used for their displays. You just connect it to your 5 or 12-volt power supply, and off you go. Literally, I put the one in Twilight Zone in about 10 minutes, and that's because I was being really careful about it and kind of looking at it because my Twilight Zone's modded all to hell. Just because there's a wire there and it says it's this doesn't mean that that's really what it does anymore. But yeah, they've done 18 games now. Everything from Scared Stiff to Monster Bash to Medieval Madness. They got some Stern titles in there. And even some kind of second tier ones. They put Judge Dredd in not too long ago. Which isn't one of my favorites. You want to know what the deal is with that? Because one of the guys that is one of the co-owners of ColorDMD, Chris Enright, he is the guy that runs our pinball league that I'm in. Oh, it is a small world. So we get previews of ColorDMD all the time. It's like if somebody owns that machine and they've just finished the coding for it, it's going to be at our pinball league, and they're like, Oh, check it out. What do you guys think? And we'll give every guest a comment on it, and then they can tweak it, whatever. if they need to. But I overheard the conversation one time when somebody was asking, how do you decide which machines to do and which to not? And it was basically, well, if somebody wants to take the time to figure out the colors for all the animation, and they want to take it on as their own little project, then we let them. Because it's like, I mean, it is labor intensive. They basically can do like 85%, 90% of the animation in X period of time. That remaining 15% to 10% of the animation coloring takes the exact same amount of time. Yeah, that's any development. 80% of it will take 20% of the time. 20% of it will take 80% of the time. So they have tables that they themselves have every intention of doing, knowing that they'll probably be able to sell enough for that particular table. But then they'll get people that are requesting for other tables, and it's like, well, hey, if you want to have a crack at it, then these are obviously people that they know and trust. Right. But I think that would explain why you get something like Judge Dredd being done by them. Well, and they actually did Pinball Magazine, that Dutch outfit that I haven't really heard much from lately. I hope he's still publishing, because it was really an awesome magazine. They had an article about Color DMD in their first issue, and their question came up was, hey, why aren't you doing Twilight Zone? Because this was when they were still doing all Williams machines. Right. And they actually discovered when they were trying to do Twilight Zone that, unlike the other games of that era, Twilight Zone layers things on top of each other. It's like when you hit the rocket, the little rocket animation goes off in front of whatever it was doing before. Oh, okay. So it doesn't send full frames to the DMD to do that. It does it by layers. That screws with however the processor determines what color things should be. Oh. And so that's why they haven't come up with... Because everyone's asking, it's like, you've done all the other major tables, where the hell is TZ? Because, you know, that's another table that would take to the treatment really well. And it's a technical problem, because TZs doesn't work the same way as everything else. Mostly because of that rocket. There's a few other where it does it, but, yeah, it's kind of... Now, I got mine just set to white. That's the other nice thing with these displays, is even if you've got a game that's not supported, They have a thing called Sigma, which is basically like your universal ROM, and it's still single color, but you can change the color to any one of, I think, I think it was 49 or 50. They upgrade it every so often and add more colors. But you can make it, I mean, you can make my TZs black and white like the old television show was, and you can see that on my blog in the forum. There's a picture of it next to ACDC. the other thing is and this is, I mean they've done this for a while now but let's say you buy a Addams Family one and for some reason you decide to sell your Addams Family and get something else like I say Medieval Madness, you don't have to buy a new display, you just flash the ROM so actually when you buy the displays they don't actually have the code for their game loaded on them They all are that basic universal ROM. And then you just download the display ROM from their website, flash it in, off you go. It's literally just like flashing a machine. It's the same things thing. Plug it in, hit load, off it goes. That's cool. And this was not a paid advertisement. If you do have a pinball machine and you want to jazz it up a bit, like I said, I've got one for TZ. I'm getting one for ACDC, and CP Pinball has a whole bunch of them. It's a nice, high-quality product. I don't think I've ever seen one break yet. So if you're in the market. Good question. How do they compare to a gas plasma display in cost? Are they double or about the same? Colored DMDs are $400. How much is a gas plasma? Plasma is about $150, $200. Okay. One of the reasons for that, I think a lot of it's to kind of recapture the time. Yeah, totally. Spend the coloring process. As far as brightness and stuff, they're not quite as bright as plasma. They don't have that kind of neon-y glow that a plasma does, but they're certainly bright enough. I mean, I've never had anybody complain that they can't see one. It could arguably be a feature, though. because then you wouldn't have so much play field glare, right? They are adjustable. There's three or four different brightness levels. Obviously, it kind of depends, too, on what color it's displaying at the moment. If it's white, it's going to be its full output. If it's some dark blue or something, it's going to be a lot dimmer. Yeah. But, yeah, they've got some other features there. You can let it do dots. You can do scan lines like the old-school television did. You can have it do this interpolation thing where it kind of fills in the spaces between the dots. Which works really well on the Simpsons table. Yeah, I think I don't care for it. I like my dots being dots, but I know a lot of people who think it's great. There's like two or three other modes to it. They add new features to this thing all the time, most of which are backwards compatible. Not all of them, but most of them the old devices will do. and the other thing that I thought was neat was you know how I said that before they had the extra top and bottom parts of the display that they're not using that is not entirely true because if you replace an Adams family the lamp board for the thing lamps is actually attached to the DMD take that out and if you tell it it's an Adams family it will look for the lamp board signals and put little yellow squares back behind the inserts for the thing letters. And so it's still, you don't have to sacrifice your thing letters, because the board is big enough that you can't physically have the original lamp board and the color DMD at the same time. So imagine things like any of that era game that has that sort of array of lamps down the bottom. If it does get a color DMD mod down the track, you can expect that same behavior. Yeah. Dracula and I think it's Dracula and Doctor Who. They wouldn't because they have flashes, aren't they? Yeah, and somebody's actually developed a mod that you can do to the board to let the color DMD fit in there, but it's kind of kludgy. And it's an irreversible change, so you're potentially affecting the resale value of the machine at that point. But yeah, Adam's family is really the only one that is so far. The only other Most of the machines that have that are like Earthshaker and Whirlwind, or they have the jackpot values down there. Yeah, true. They got away with that once they got the DMD, generally, because you could put that information on the string. You could save your seven lamps and the wiring and all those other wonderful manufacturing costs. Yeah, true. They'll take that $50. Well, it's probably closer to $10, honestly, but when you're making it. At that time, they were making 20,000 units, so that's $200,000. Yeah, try. Non-trivial. Non-trivial money. The other thing we're going to do, which probably a lot of people are a lot more interested in, the table in depth for this time is Big... No, not Big Shot. Adam's Family. It's going nuts. I mean, you're nuts. I can't play that table. I can't help you with that at all. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to scream now. So obviously we've been waiting for this for three years, and I think some people probably started asking for it before the game was even out. Yes, it really is the Adams family. Really, everyone's worried about the Fester head. He looks fine. If you really stare at it side by side, you can see it. Other than that, who cares? If you're looking at that area of the table, you're trying to make sure the ball's not going between the flippers is what you're doing, at least what you should be doing, not worrying about what his eyes look like. Or his wrinkles. Who cares? Or his wrinkles, yeah. It's not like he got replaced with Julia Roberts or something. That would be more scary. It really would be. It is fester enough that you're not going to be questioning that it's not fester. I think they did a really good job with the look of it. It's Uncle Lester. Uncle Lester. I almost think it's almost the same thing with on Taxi with the difference between having a Marilyn and having a Lola. Yeah. I mean, you know. It doesn't really matter. No, not in the least. So just in general, they got it mostly correct. It is. They definitely did better with it than they did Twilight Zone because I wasn't worried. because it's kind of the same era table Lawler style and it's just like please please don't let this be as easy as Twilight Zone because then I might have to go and cry in a room for days and weep for the future if you mean that or something they did capture its cruelty the real Admiral's Family is not exactly a friendly table it doesn't have a ball save and it is really prone to throwing things in the out lane just because it feels like it it's a lot of people are like, oh, Adam's family, I've heard all about this table. And they're like, this thing's evil. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty tough. That being said, there's two main areas on the table where things are probably a little too easy. The train wreck shot. It's not that it's hard to make. And it isn't hard to make on the real table. That's why the jackpot's there and not the super jackpot. The problem is, on a real table, that's kind of meant to be a sucker shot. what it's supposed to do is it'll come back down from that usually bounce somewhere in between the upper right flipper and the swamp and then go into the center drain on TPA it does the first part of that and then it lands pretty much on the right flipper all the time I don't know if they deliberately tuned it that way or if that's just how the physics came out But I just remember, because we have lots of Adams families on location here, and they're all kind of different, which we'll get into that later. But almost all of them, that train wreck shot, as soon as you realize it's hit that, you're like, okay, okay, nudge, nudge, nudge. It's like you know where that thing is going to try to go, and you just don't have that sense of danger and TPA. So that's a little, you know, that's a minor issue. So the vault shot, though, hitting the vault on a real table is really tough. It likes to hit the post on the side of the ramp. It likes to hit the little posts on the vault itself. It likes to hit the bookcase. You have to have really a lined-up shot for it to go in there. It a threading shot Yeah and it has to be fairly high too because that vault holds almost to the back of the table It not like you can just kind of like laze it up there You've got to put some oomph in it. It's pretty hard to do from a caught ball, just because you don't really have the momentum to get up there. TPA, you can pretty much hit the vault whenever you damn well feel like it. Now, the other thing I've noticed, and I don't know if this is the collision detection or if this is a side effect of the vault being made easier but you get a lot of dirty pool a lot of dirty pool which thankfully the ROM does understand and it will start the multiple process up they got that part in so they're using the right ROM but the I've done that once on a real table and that's one of my favorite machines So pretty much any time I'm at CP Pinball, I'm usually playing at least a couple games while I'm there. It's one of those things that wasn't even intended to be in the game. It's just they happened to do it during testing, and everybody thought, this is really cool. We should have a sound bite for it. And I guess when they went through the lines of the movie, they heard the dirty pool line, like, oh, this is awesome. It works perfectly. It shouldn't be doing that at all. So if you're getting dirty pool and TPA, don't expect to be doing that on the real one. do you think that's where they got the dirty pool idea for Attack from Mars where you have a trap ball in the the saucer zone and you tap it in yes that's where it came from oh there you go yeah it's a tribute to the Addams Family one nice Sean what about the the electric chair shot because for me whenever I played the real one that always seemed like the sucker shot you go for that and you're almost guaranteeing yourself a center drain, yet in TPA, it's off the left flipper, you can pretty much nail it at will. Do you feel that on the real machine that that shot is much more dangerous? If you've got the big Papa-style posts there, yes. On a normal machine, the right flipper to the electric chair, yes, that's a death shot. The left flipper from the electric chair should be extremely easy. Okay. In fact, that's... We're going to talk about that later. That is how you grind out toward the mansion if you need to do so, and you can't take any risks getting there. But, yeah, the left flipper to electric chair is literally straight up and down, and it's not far at all. Honestly, that's probably the safest shot at the table. Yeah. Yeah. Now, if you miss it from the left flipper somehow, if you hit it right or if you hit it left and it happens to either graze that bumper that's there or if it lands on the slingshot bad things can happen but the actual shot itself isn't deadly so just getting back to just the general state of the real tables now some of you readers at this point are readers, I keep thinking about listeners, unless you're one of those strange people who can see sounds and hear colors and type of that. If you're one of those people... Blockade podcast for your transcripts for the Braille edition. Yes. Well, we don't want to exclude anyone here. But the... Because for some reason a blind person can't listen to the podcast. Yeah. We got all your bases covered. Anyway. You should expect this one, now, mate. I do, but not in the middle of Litz. Litz is usually the most orderly section. I guess you're trying to invade. You should bombard it. You should invade. I get it. We have to derail you at some point, right? So anyway, the Adams family is the real tables. Some tables, I mean, obviously if you've got a flipper coil going out or the thing's covered in two inches of mud or something like that, it's not going to play the same. So most tables, there's going to be some minor differences based on maintenance and cleanliness and all that kind of stuff. Adam's family changes character completely. If your flippers are even slightly weak, you're going to have trouble with those ramps and the vault shot, just because they're such huge distances. They're about the same distance as Twilight Zone's ramp shots are. So you're talking pretty much the entire length of the cabinet. If your table isn't clean, what's going to happen is you're going to start getting, especially near that upper right flipper, any kind of disturbance in the levelness of the surface there is going to really change the character of the jackpot in the left ramp shots, or excuse me, the train wreck in the left ramp shots, to the point where you can, you know, if you've learned the timing on one table and you move to a different one, it may be completely different, especially if you're doing the four-way combo where the ball just came screaming up through the bumpers and around. That can get really ugly at times because you're used to it arriving at a certain time and it arrives quite a bit later or earlier, usually later. So at that point, your flipper's coming back down, the ball shoots through, and it goes straight in the center drain, which is another shot not to take on a real Adams family. I don't care how brightly the advanced X insert is shining through the bumpers. You will not take that shot because it will go screaming through much faster than it does in TPA. And usually what happens if you hit it late, you will catch it just on the tip of the flipper. You will actually shoot it down to the left, straight into the left out lane from the upper right flipper. I can't tell you how many times I've done that because I was greedy and went for it just hold your right flipper out let it bounce safely it will usually either hit cousin it or just descend to the lower left flipper where you can trap it now if you're in Papa A do what you want but for me the results will vary it's too fast of a shot now part of it might be I'm not good at upper flipper shots in general, Funhouse, Whirlwind, Adam's Family, they all have that upper flipper to some ramp or trapdoor or something. And I, for whatever reason, just am not the greatest at hitting those. The Piano is a little different in Twilight Zone because it's a lot shorter shot. There's a conveniently... A lot shorter flipper. It's a lot slower, too, especially if the magnet up there has grabbed the ball. but you don't have things screaming through like you do in the other ones. But yeah, just expect that if you're going up to an unfamiliar Addams Family, expect that it might play completely different than the one you're used to, especially if yours was completely shopped out and maintained meticulously and this one's suffered some neglect. It's going to change a lot on you. So now that you're playing the Addams Family, what are you going to go for? There's basically two schools of thought, and Bowen does a good job in covering this as well in his PAPA tutorial. So if you want a visual demonstration, go there. He actually plays two separate games and covers each strategy separately. You basically have two things to do on an Addams Family. You can go for multiball or you can go for the mansion. The modes really, I mean, they're there for entertainment purposes. They don't really add enough to the score to matter. Some of them can be kind of interesting. We'll cover them. But really, you're going to go for either the bookcase or the electric chair 90% of the time. Multiball has the advantage that you can do it more often. It's much faster to get the five hits on the bookcase and the three locks than it is to actually go through the mansion rooms. the other thing is multiball doesn't get locked out at the end of each successful tour of the mansion so you don't necessarily have to build up a huge stockpile of extra balls to do it the downside of this is the shot to make the jackpot is one of Lawler's trademark upper flipper to left ramp disasters and the power is running um the power being those three magnets that are underneath the table um that are actually on a little uh on a little kind of frame and they the rom fires them at alternating um alternating times it's supposed to from what i understand it's supposed to give the impression that the magnet's on a wheel and it's spinning around It doesn't actually do that. There's nothing moving under there. It just is three magnets, and it pulses them at different times to kind of create the illusion of a spinning magnet. The power in TPA is quite strong. It is possible to find real machines with the power that strong. Usually it is not. The only time I've ever encountered a power quite that evil on a real machine is when somebody had really high line voltage. again it's kind of like power field where the strength of the higher your line voltage coming into the machine the more powerful the magnets get so if your power is anemic you might want to check your voltage coming in because you may have an issue there somewhere in the power distribution boards so basically what you do with the multiball hit your bookcase you can do it from either flipper the right flipper one's kind of an interesting shot because that slingshot tip is kind of in the way on a real machine if the ball's coming down and has some spin on it you can sometimes get it to kind of curve back up there I don't know if you could really do it on TPA I usually just shoot from the left the other thing you can do on a real machine is if it's angled right and the right upper flipper is sharp you can actually hit the bookcase from the upper flipper you can either just barely graze it because it's not actually a target if you look at the bookcase itself there's actually an opto under there the bookcase kind of leans out a bit and there's an overhang it's actually detecting whether the ball is blocking the light going down underneath that bookcase. So you don't actually have to hit anything. You just have to get the ball to travel there. So you can kind of just barely graze it by with the right upper flipper, or if you like to live dangerously, you can smash the ball into Cousin It as hard as you can and hope that it bounces back into the bookcase. I don't recommend that because if you miss, again, you might be heading for the left out lane or otherwise just have a general out-of-control Paul. But you do have options for that. Lower left flipper shots are pretty safe. Obviously, pay attention to what it's doing. You may have to make a nudge, but usually it's not too much of a deal to get the bookcase open. The first choice of the electric chair thing or the vault gopher thing, he's the easiest thing to hit. just shoot it up that little mini ramp where the extra ball is located and do it that way. The second time, you can either do a good thinking by putting it in the swamp by just soft plunging, or you can try for the skill shot and the thing will pick it up again for you. Whether you do the skill shot kind of depends on whether you found the skill shot on a real table. It's a little more variable than it is in TPA. again depending on the strength of your plunger and the cleanliness of the plunging track and all that fun stuff once you find it though it doesn't tend to move so and then the third one I usually just get a trap on the left flipper and shoot it up into the electric chair the second and later multi-balls you have to do it in the vault so again that which strategy you go for kind of depends on how you feel about that vault shot if it's one where you know you can make it multiball becomes more attractive. If the vault is being impossible to hit, you may want to look at the mansion. Actually playing the multiball, really, it's like a Lawler thing. Get the balls up to the upper flipper and pray. And there's more prayer than usual because you might think that the ball is below, or, oh, it's going to land on my flipper, and then the power will take it and throw it somewhere else. It really is dicey. the ideal thing is to get some trapped on the left flipper. However, with the power running there and the, uh, the inlanes are usually pretty fast on Adam's family. So you can't just like trap up and expect it to stay on the flipper. Cause it usually doesn't usually will roll off the edge. It's, I wish I had better advice for you there, but you can even watch Bowen when he's doing it. And it's, it's one step below sheer chaos. It's quite fun. I love the table for that, but trying to actually get lots of jackpots is kind of tricky. If you do get the first jackpot, either the train wreck one or the actual double jackpot on the left, you have to start shooting into the vault while the power is running. The best way I found to do this is generally you sacrifice the third ball somewhere so that it doesn't get in your way. try to keep one on the right flipper trapped, wait for the other one to come down on the left, try to trap it too, and hold your flippers up for 10 seconds. Whenever the power is running, if you hold the flippers up for 10 seconds, the power will shut off. I believe the reason for this is so that the magnets don't overheat or otherwise do untoward things. But it will actually shut off the power until you hit a switch again. so you can use this when multiball is starting when you're trying to do the release shot you can use this during seance, you can do this during multiball itself and actually seance's timer will even stop for you while the status report is going on so you don't even have to worry about losing time really so try it when you have your next Addams Family experience and you might find yourself getting a lot farther than you used to really that's about it for the multiball just keep hitting that bookcase, keep hitting that left ramp and do what you can about the power. The mansion which is the way I usually play because again I suck at the vault and the left ramp shots, really just involves getting the ball trapped on the left flipper, shoot it up into the electric chair, get it back down on the flipper shoot it up the bear kick ramp, either trap it on the right and do a post-pass. Post-passing is really easy on Adam's family. The slingshots are pretty close together. Or somehow use some safe method of getting it back to your left flipper. The bear kick ramp will have relit the electric chair. Repeat 12 times. 13 if you're on a gold. It sounds boring as hell, but it's kind of like Lyman's Lament and Monster Bash. If you really want to get there, you just kind of grind it out. you don't generally play the modes. Seance you definitely don't play because the power is running, and that's really dangerous. Momushka and Cousin It, there's a school of thought there that says, you know, take the right orbit shot and see if you can drop it into the bumpers and get lots of points. The bumpers aren't quite as bad as they are on Twilight Zone, but they do have a habit of that lowest one. There's a group of five bumpers for the graveyard, which is the only table I know of that has a group of five instead of a group of three. But the lowest one, if it gets hit just on the right section, has a nasty habit of kicking it off into the right out lane. So you want to keep an eye out for that and nudge if you need to. I think ultimately with touring the mansion, the thing is it's you score the window whether you complete the mode or not, and it's not nearly as I think he refined it when it came time for Ripley's where he's actually scoring the points, well no, but I mean actually scoring the points winds up being of benefit as it adds up the bonus of the supercontinent jackpot. Right, for the supercontinent. And there is no supercontinent. It's just, hey, here's your $50 million for doing the tour of the mansion. So, I mean, I don't know. To me, the tour of the mansion is more just, well, yeah, let's just fill up the windows, but I don't, so many things are risky about it. It's more to me about just surviving it. Well, I mean, the other thing that happens during, I mean, there's some modes that you can't get to otherwise. The two multiballs are in there, the thing multiball and the quick multiball. which can be good value. Again, it's shooting the vault, so it depends on how you feel about that on your particular table. The thing I think I like about it, though, is you're taking a safe shot most of the time. You're either shooting the electric chair from the left flipper, which is about as safe as you're going to get, or you're shooting the bear kick ramp, again, from the left flipper. you can basically trap the ball on the right and either post pass it or give it a little nudge just a tiny little nudge in the bottom right of the cabinet will usually get it to hop over to left i would not play this way for fun but for a tournament yeah i'd be playing that way i would definitely be playing that way um and have um usually can manage 80 to 100 million without too much fuss that way. Which, I mean, yeah, it's not going to win me the... If I'm playing against the A division, it's not going to win me it, but I'm not going to come in last. Where you come in last in competition, Adam's family, is somebody who tried to get the multiball going and either failed or didn't get any jackpots while he was in there. And then he's left with the whole mansion on ball three and he doesn't have an alternate strategy for getting it. Or, you know, somebody who's playing modes they shouldn't be playing, like Seance or Tunnel Hunt I don't care for either because you have to shoot the swamp, which looks safe. And the machine kind of dupes you into thinking it's safe because the ball tends to fly in there on its own a lot just from bouncing off slingshots and other things. It can be that the problem is if you miss it too low, you're going on the right out lane and if you miss it too high you're going to hit one of the swamp millions targets and I can't really tell you where the ball is going to go after that again it's that side to side motion that's so deadly on pinball machines you're taking basically a horizontal shot and you really shouldn't be doing that you should be you know it's just risk reward and again everybody you know has their different ways of playing i know people who make that shot all day long i know people who do well with the multiball um it's really just a matter of finding what works for you um kind of one of the nice things about adam's family is you it does at least give you a choice it not something like um well the extreme example is a bride of pinbot where there the billion shot and that your game And certain other games where everything is yeah there might be other stuff on the table but you know there really only one true strategy for getting a high score Addams Family, at least you got options, which I think is why I like the table. If I feel like multiball and chaos, I can do that. If I feel like playing a slower game with the mansion, I can do that, too. So kind of moving along here because I know I'm rambling on. Oh, we did. It's Adam's family. It deserves a big one. We've only waited three years for this. Just so long as your explanation doesn't take three years. No. We're almost at the end, actually. The thing multiball, there was actually a discussion on this in the forum. basically with when the thing multiball starts there's a countdown the hurry up that goes off at that thing the fastest way of getting him there, well I mean if you spotted it from bare kick your ball is going to be at the right flipper already so just take the damn shot and pour your mustache at Glee that you're going to play a vault multiball for $15 million if it's coming out of the electric chair normally just a very fine nudge it's not any force you barely are aware that you're even hitting the machine. Right as the ball makes contact with the lower flipper, we'll make it bounce over, trap, aim, shoot. Depending on how fast you can do the aim and shoot part, you can pretty easily get high 13 millions on it, which means your ensuing multiball will be, the vault will be lit for 13 million. It's something you need to practice a little bit, but once you get the hang of it, there's no reason why you should ever settle for a thing multiball under $13 million. Mamushka and Cousin It, if multiball is about to go, and you see that the door panel is lit, take your door panel, then go into multiball. Obviously all those switch hits will be great for your Mamushka and Cousin It. That's pretty much it. The gold table, if you should be so happy to find one where it's publicly playable, most of the gold tables obviously went to collectors but if you should happen to find one on location it really doesn't change how you play basically you're going to have super seance instead of seance about half the time which it's still risky I know it's an extra 5 million a shot but I still think it's too risky to really worry about all the stuff with the cousin it's hideout is all random so there's really nothing you can do about it. The only thing that it does do for you is it does kind of tilt the multiball or mansion equation a little further toward the mansion side just because there's going to be some extra points there. And the $3 million, instead of being linked with the $6 million award, actually becomes a separate thing, and in addition to the $3 million, it gives you a random other room, which it can give you a random other room that you have already done, which on one hand sucks because it makes you farther from the mansion on the other hand if it gives you something like cousin it again or one of the multi balls again that can be really nice because it's basically here have some points have some more points have lots of points it will not give you the extra ball twice so don't hold out thinking it's going to do that any other questions now that I have exhaustively covered the Adams family probably I've put my readers I keep thinking this is the just ignore me I'm in a different apparently in a different plane of existence right now it's because you're lost in the zone I am apparently quite good at this I can't find my way back out I don't think we have any other questions because you pretty much have exhausted absolutely every facet of this table I tried it that was pretty comprehensive I think the biggest takeaway for me was being able to disable the power when you want. You have the power over the power. Yep, that is nice. Yeah, it's cool. And it does it fast enough that you can't be dinged in tournament play for delay of game, because it disables in 10 seconds and you get 30. That being said, in a casual game, if you're doing that every shot and it's a multiplayer game, people are going to get a little pissed at you, so consider your audience. Well, I think with that, we are going to wind up shutting the door and as usual, we'd like Jared to close us out. Jared, this time I would like you to be a drunken farmer preventing the guys from touching his daughter as he wants them to shut the door. Oh, man. Okay. So, drunken farmer stopping the guys from touching his daughter. Yes, he doesn't want them to touch his daughter. Okay. Okay. Oh, dear. Hey there If you don't touch my door I'm in the door You get on out Is that about right? I don't know I think that's as close as a city boy in Australia Is going to get to a drunken farmer We'll take it An American farmer by the way Yeah a drunken American farmer As usual putting Jared on the spot I love it I'm up for the challenge I love making myself look like a tool on the podcast you know it's what I do so uh Blockade had its first tournament of the month and uh I think everybody had a relatively good time except for Sean who couldn't be bothered to join um yeah what's up with that man yeah Sean why didn't you play huh I mean Jared you know he's in Australia at Funky Irish for when the tournament was running he played and Anna played. Anna still played. Bonzo played. You're too busy playing ACDC and Twilight Zone. Well, no, ACDC. The Twilight Zone is still in pieces. Oh, that's right. Although it's never going to be put back together, unfortunately. I may have to call a pinball doctor. So anyway, we had our tournament of the month. We had I believe 28 players that played. Good time was had by all. We are having it once again this coming month. end of March, March 28th. It'll be from the hours of 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, so do the math, figure it out yourselves. If you would like to join in on the tournament, you may do so by signing up on March, on a Wednesday, which would be the 25th. That's when sign-ups will open. If, for some reason, you don't happen to sign up in time, but you realize it on Saturday, you're like, oh, I want to play in this, you may go ahead and post your scores. What we'll be doing is we'll be taking those scores as alternates because what happened this last time was some people that signed up didn't wind up actually playing, and that kind of screwed up the groupings that we had for scoring purposes. So if you want to do that, we will go ahead and fill in the blanks where needed so you can feel like you joined in. Depending on how many people do additional scoring, we might be able to squeeze more people in. We will see what's up with that. So we'll call that wall cards, right? Yeah, wall cards, alternates. Waiting list. Yeah, yeah. Because what we're doing is we are doing this as a... Each month, you're going to be scoring points. Those points are cumulative. They will add up for the entire season. Our season is going to be six months in length, at which point we will start up a new season. But we'll keep on going with the tables of the week. We're not going to start repeating any tables of the week until we've actually gone through them all. So that being said, our winners for this past tournament. So do I have to start calling you Commissioner now? No. He's the Commish. Not so much. Because I'm actually, I don't know if the Commissioner plays himself or not. Hey, didn't the Commish have a shaved head too? Yes, the Commish did have Michael Chiglis, yes. Now we have to call him that. The Commish. so coming in first place on our recent tournament was Viking Eric in second place was Janos Kiss and in third place was Elder of Suburbia they won some groovy avatars they have proudly posted on the fan page one was in gold which looked really nice by the way see it makes everybody jealous and there will be a new because there is actually say February 2015, because that's what the date of that tournament was. So there will be new ones for the month of March, so you can win your own also. They do look pretty groovy. I was happy with them. The tournament has its own dedicated sub-form now, too. Yes, and that was the other thing to point out. So it is all organized. The tournament info, everything you need to know, is under the Table of the Week's Tournament form. That is where everything is listed, and if you have any questions about how the actual tournament or table of the week run, there is a thread called Everything You Need to Know About Blockade's table of the week and tournament of the month. I've tried to answer every possible question you can think of. It will be edited as new questions are announced or whatever. The main thing to know about that is we have permanent links to the sign-up sheet and to the scoring page that you log into to log in your scores. Those will not change. They will stay the same month to month. We close them until such time as they are open, and then once the tournament is over, they get closed again. So you can't just, you know. If you went and checked them out right now, they would say that they are closed. But like I said, on those dates, on that Wednesday and then on the Saturday, the sign-ups and the scoring sheet will be open. Also of note is one of the forum members from Pinball Arcade fans by the name of Joe Kuhl is living up to his very name. He was a Kickstarter funder. He got extra Adam's Family tables. He wants to donate one of those to our tournament. So if you sign up for the tournament and you so choose to, There is a box that we're saying if you want to participate or not, we'll be doing a random drawing, and you will win at a family table for a platform of your choice, and Joe Cool will be the one that will let Farsight know your email address and give that to you. So that is very, very cool of him. We totally appreciate that. If anybody else decides that, hey, this is a cool thing that you would like to donate a table to the cause, please get a hold of us PM myself or you can talk to us on Twitter whatever let us know and we can make arrangements we'll even let you decide how you want to give it out as a prize if you so choose so those are all reasons why you want to get your butt over to the Femoycade fans play table of the week join in on the tournament of the month have a good time everybody did really have a good time we're this next tournament eliminating extra balls so that we can get rid of even some more of the grinding that might take place. We tried doing that with just eliminating you to having only two plays. But as our top three winners showed, they could go a long time, even with only two tries on a table. You're just lucky it didn't pick Twilight Zone or Scared Stiff. They'd still be playing. No, because they only have 12 hours. That's right. We do have a limit on these things. I was on the chat room, and the chat room actually totally picked up during the tournament. People were coming in because they wanted to talk about what was going on. So make sure you check out the chat room while the tournament is going on, because it was active. One of our players... Players Lounge. Yeah, it was basically a Players Lounge. V Palmer was in there and he was he was playing on some table for, I don't know which one it was probably Attack from Mars, going for some god awful point and he paused the game and went into the chat room and was like, I should probably quit playing this table and squeeze in the others because he only had like an hour left before the door was shut so I think I went right up to the wire with my AFM as well, I was like, oh it's the weekend, I got things but I gotta do it, I can set the time, man it was close Yeah, so anyway, it's totally worth it. Everybody had, I mean, like I said, we got nothing but positive feedback. Everybody was having a good time doing it. Nobody was being jerks and cheating and anything of that nature. So I totally encourage everybody to join in, even Sean. Yeah, Sean. Okay. You know what, Sean? You're not entirely the only one that hosed us like that because... Hosed you? Yes, yes, hosed us because we needed players. No, two of the guys from Farsight, they signed up and they didn't play either. So Flippy Floppy and Mike Lindsey, yeah. You guys, next time you sign up, you better play. Just saying. Calling you out. I at least didn't sign up. I didn't mislead you. I was in the same group as Flippy Floppy on three tables. So thank you very much, Flippy. Free plates. Nice one. Oh, I don't know if there's much else we can discuss here other than I've got jury duty this week. Anybody know how I can convince them not to put me on a jury? Well, here in Australia, we just get our employer to write a letter to you and say, no, you're critical to the business, and you get out of it. Yeah, that doesn't work so much for a freelancer like myself. have a doctor write you a note that you're not mentally capable or something like that you know well you know well that's no that's your excuses for getting out of it um california is they've man have they buckled down on that they don't let hardly any excuse fly anymore um i was supposed to actually go a couple months ago and i kind of completely blanked on it and i accepted work for that day, and while I was at work, it was like, don't! I was supposed to be a jury today. I was like, well, yeah, as if I was going to go earn my $15 as opposed to earn my full rate for a day of working on a film crew. So this time I don't have any excuse. I have to go in there, but I'm trying to figure out do I just call you into the jury box to see if you want to be on the jury, or do I pull the... Wear an offensive T-shirt. They won't even let you in the courtroom if you're wearing a t-shirt. You've got to be, I believe, a colored shirt. Wow. Wear an offensive colored shirt. I know certain colors that would... I really don't want to be held in contempt. Pop those colors. Salmon. Go with salmon. That's offensive to damn near any animal. I don't have the excuse of not speaking the language. The last time I went to jury duty, there was a gal there that was doing that, and it was so clearly obvious that she did speak the language, but she was just playing stupid. Hang on, you have to wear a suit. Is that what you have to wear to jury? No, no. It just has to be a shirt with color and long pants. Something that respects the dignity of the court. Exactly. So not your birthday suit. No. You'll be in court for a different reason then. That's right. The best one that I ever did was, I've only been actually, usually when I've gone in for jury duty, I never even make it out of the waiting room. Like, my name never gets called, and then they go, thank you for serving, and I go home for the day. It's like, woo-hoo! And then the last time I went, I actually did get called into the court, and I never got to leave. So I got put on a jury. Which wound up being a hung jury, so I'm hoping that if that's the case, I can say, oh yeah, our last one was a hung jury. We couldn't make any heads or tails of anything, and that'll discourage them from putting me on. Well, with your luck, you'll probably end up on an OJ case or something and be tied up for like six months. Maybe I could write a book out of it. Yeah. My favorite, though, instance of doing jury duty was I'd gone in, so not only was I doing jury duty, but I also had to do traffic school, and so I was doing online traffic school while serving jury duty. I'm surprised they let you bring in an internet enabled device into the courtroom no this was in the waiting room oh I thought you were like in the jury box I can't just I can't see that flying I'm sorry he's over there on his smartphone playing doodle jump or something you know I have seen that what was that I'm sorry I'm on an epic game of of you know pinball arcade here, so... And then you suddenly stand up in your seat going, Oh! All of a sudden the thing unmutes itself and the little guy from Cactus Canyon goes, Lock is lit! And so am I! It's Bailiff! Oh, so that's what I have to look forward to. Oh, yeah, not. You can you could just use movie quotes all the time with giving the quote and then saying what movie from what year. I think we should be sorted out. You have to answer all your questions in the form of a celebrity quote. Clearly he's unsuitable, Your Honor. He thinks he's all these movie stars. He has a split personality. good advice all of it I will take it all to heart and see what I can throw down I'll help you to read the appropriate papers to see if you're at the police blotter yeah we don't want you to end up in a straitjacket in the psych ward or something it's hard to run a tournament from a psych ward like I said I've seen some of the other people that get questioned you have to go pretty far down the rabbit hole in order to get getting there. Well, this is California, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, hey guys, I think we can close the podcast here this time around. Again, you may follow us on Twitter. I am at ShutYourTraps. Jared is at JaredMorgz. Monzo is at DrexClown. The rest of them are not. I don't do that either. don't play tournaments, don't do Twitter sorry otherwise check the Bumble Arcade fans website, you can always find us there we are the mods, typically and I'm not Bonzo is not the mods Bonzo is not the mods no we'll make you an honorary mod, how's that sound? aw aw, not nice poor Jeff Strong Bonso, Jerdmarg, Shondon, Carlos I'm Shut Your Traps This has been the Blockade Podcast Goodbye Earthlings Get ready to drop the needle And carve us some wax Retro Podcast Now in glorious analog sound You must shoot your bass to out Go find us Now available in your favorite record store in the bargain bed wedged under that wobbly table buy one get five free _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v1)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 2bb11c8b-413d-487d-88f8-8ebb2df48b6d*