# Total Nuclear Annihilation (Spooky) - Part 1

**Source:** Don't Panic Flip  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2019-10-19  
**Duration:** 93m 50s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLKxI7lmwAs

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## Analysis

Don't Panic Flip streams gameplay of Spooky Pinball's Total Nuclear Annihilation, a debut title by solo designer/developer Matt Scott Denisey. The host demonstrates the game's deceptively simple rule set combined with escalating difficulty, emphasizing the importance of multiball play. Commentary focuses on the game's music, visuals, code quality, and the achievement of a one-person creation becoming Spooky's best-selling title.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Total Nuclear Annihilation was designed, built, coded, and had its music created entirely by one person: Matt Scott Denisey — _Host (Don't Panic Flip) explicitly states this multiple times throughout the stream, emphasizing it as remarkable_
- [HIGH] Total Nuclear Annihilation is Spooky Pinball's best-selling game of all time — _Host states: 'it is Spooky Pinball's bestseller of all time'_
- [HIGH] Matt Scott Denisey is working on his second game with Spooky Pinball — _Host: 'Matt Scott Denisey, who's working on his second game with Spooky Pinball right now'_
- [HIGH] The game's rule set is 'super easy' but the game is 'difficult AF' due to challenge rather than complexity — _Host's direct commentary on game design philosophy_
- [HIGH] Total Nuclear Annihilation uses an auxiliary cable to connect sound system to computer, which causes intermittent audio connection issues — _Host identifies and troubleshoots this issue during stream: 'they're just using an auxiliary cable... makes poor connections'_
- [MEDIUM] The game is currently running firmware version 1.4 beta which reset all scores on the machine — _Host mentions 'version 4. What, the beta for 1.4?' and notes score reset_
- [MEDIUM] Spooky Pinball machines have 'extra bouncy' flippers compared to other manufacturers, requiring adjustment time — _Host's personal observation: 'on a Spooky Pinball machine, I feel like they're extra bouncy, and it takes me a little while to adjust'_
- [HIGH] The host's previous high score on Total Nuclear Annihilation is reaching the seventh reactor — _Host: 'Our top so far is seventh reactor... I haven't beaten the seventh reactor'_

### Notable Quotes

> "This game should actually be called Always Be Multiballing"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~11:45
> _Captures the core strategic philosophy of Total Nuclear Annihilation's gameplay_

> "This is as close as you'll see to one person making their dream pin... he personally went through, wrote the software, designed, built the game, and then made the music"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~1:12:00
> _Emphasizes the exceptional nature of Matt Scott Denisey's solo creation and its significance in pinball culture_

> "Every time I play this, I think, here's a person who... turned their way possible dream. There's so many people who make pinball machines who never do anything with it. It never really goes anywhere, but he did it"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~1:12:45
> _Reflects on the rarity of solo creators achieving commercial success in pinball manufacturing_

> "This game nails difficulty with simplicity. The rule set is really simple, but it gets progressively harder and harder. The achievement is so difficult yet obtainable, there's something, it creates that just one more game vibe"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~1:16:30
> _Articulates the core design philosophy that makes TNA successful as both casual and competitive game_

> "It feels to me this came right out of a William Gibson novel"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~1:16:50
> _Describes the aesthetic and thematic cohesion of the game's cyberpunk/synthwave presentation_

> "I gotta disagree with some of the choices Spooky Pinball made with the hardware they use, because they're just using an auxiliary cable to connect their sound system to the computer"
> — **Don't Panic Flip (Host)**, ~1:06:00
> _Identifies a technical design flaw affecting audio quality on a high-end pinball machine_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Total Nuclear Annihilation | game | Spooky Pinball game designed, coded, and with music created by Matt Scott Denisey; synthwave-themed; single-person creation that became Spooky's best-seller |
| Matt Scott Denisey | person | Designer, developer, and composer of Total Nuclear Annihilation; working on second game with Spooky Pinball; solo creator of debut title |
| Spooky Pinball | company | Manufacturer of Total Nuclear Annihilation; boutique pinball manufacturer |
| Don't Panic Flip | person | Host of stream; content creator playing and analyzing Total Nuclear Annihilation; discusses pinball equipment and streaming setup |
| Faye | person | Streamer mentioned as guest/host; interested in pinball, arcade, and retro gaming content; also mentioned as 'Mouthme' bot account |
| Pinsomniac | person | Pinball streamer; developing Roboctopus streaming tool; streams code development on Wednesdays; working on C# projects |
| Mystery Pinball Theater | person | Content creator (MBT3K/I Rod) who produces video guides on filming pinball; referenced for camera/shutter speed recommendations |
| Pinball Jones | organization | Pinball arcade venue with two locations (main and college location); owned by Mark Kim and others; hosts ~70 machines between locations |
| Deadflip | organization | Twitch streaming channel; mentioned in context of Roboctopus streaming tool adoption |
| Roboctopus | product | Streaming tool in development by Pinsomniac; goal to deploy on Azure as collection of Azure functions; aims to simplify broadcaster setup |
| New Belgium Brewing | company | Brewery; producing Peach Kick (slightly sour peach ale) consumed during stream |
| William Gibson | person | Cited as literary reference for Total Nuclear Annihilation's cyberpunk aesthetic |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Total Nuclear Annihilation gameplay and rule set, Solo creator/designer achievement in commercial pinball, Spooky Pinball hardware and firmware quality, Difficulty-through-simplicity game design philosophy
- **Secondary:** Pinball streaming and content creation, Spooky Pinball flipper feel vs other manufacturers, Live streaming equipment and camera settings, Pinball scoring and multiball strategy

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — Host is enthusiastic and complimentary about Total Nuclear Annihilation's design, music, and creative achievement. Criticism is constructive and focused on specific hardware choices (auxiliary cable audio connection) rather than the game design itself. Strong admiration for Matt Scott Denisey's solo creation.

### Signals

- **[community_signal]** Streaming code development (Roboctopus) as educational content with community participation and feedback integration (confidence: medium) — Pinsomniac discussion: 'anytime I work on Roboctopus, I'm going to try and do it on stream' and 'I can also ask questions or people can make recommendations'
- **[community_signal]** Solo creator's vision achieving commercial success and becoming Spooky's best-selling title, validating grassroots design philosophy (confidence: high) — Host: 'it is Spooky Pinball's bestseller of all time' and 'There's so many people who make pinball machines who never do anything with it... but he did it'
- **[competitive_signal]** Multiball is the primary strategic focus for skilled play on Total Nuclear Annihilation; scoring multipliers tied to number of balls in play (confidence: high) — Host repeatedly emphasizes multiball focus: 'if you're not just going for reactor, every ball on the table is a multiplier to your score'
- **[design_philosophy]** Total Nuclear Annihilation's musical and visual design intentionally creates cyberpunk/synthwave aesthetic aligned with game theme and narrative (confidence: high) — Host: 'synthwave look and feel, synthwave music, graphics' and 'It feels to me this came right out of a William Gibson novel'
- **[design_philosophy]** Total Nuclear Annihilation achieves difficulty through simplicity rather than complex rule depth; progressive challenge without multi-layered unlocks or wizard mode requirements (confidence: high) — Host explicitly contrasts it with 2010+ pinball complexity model: 'It's not that it has depth... where you have to do these three things... It's just difficult AF'
- **[product_concern]** Firmware version 1.4 beta reset all high scores on Total Nuclear Annihilation, affecting player progression tracking (confidence: medium) — Host mentions score reset after firmware update and notes being on 'version 4. What, the beta for 1.4?'
- **[technology_signal]** Spooky Pinball using auxiliary cable for sound connection causing intermittent audio quality issues and dropout (confidence: high) — Host identifies hardware flaw: 'they're just using an auxiliary cable... makes poor connections... the distortion you're hearing around the music is because the auxiliary cable is coming loose'

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## Transcript

 Thank you very much. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Hello. Host notification, I think, is on repeat. I hope it stops. And DICE! Alright. I'm not sure why that host is constantly on repeat. We're just gonna switch to that for a second, and then go back to chat. There we go. DICE, welcome to the stream! Faye, welcome to the stream! and thank you very much for that host. Hats off. And let's see. Tonight we are drinking Peach Kick from New Belgium. This is a slightly sour peach ale. It's actually really tasty. I think this is in response to their Pump Kick. I'm guessing it is a version of their Pump Kick that is... I don't know if this is still seasonal or if they're going to do this one all the time. If New Belgium was on here, they could answer that question. but it's tasty it's super tasty and I had a really hard time figuring out how and where to set everything up tonight so the chat is over here but the camera is over here which really shouldn't happen the camera should be here so I can just look down at the chat and then back up to the camera it's going to be really irritating but yes it looks great though Faye thank you very much man It, uh, oh, that's what I was going to do. Hold on. Yeah, we don't have enough of the blur. Give me a sec. I just, like, I was setting everything up about 45 minutes ago, and I thought to myself, self, let's get everything all set up early. It's going to be great. And there we go. now that cool so I'm in focus but everything else is even more out of focus in the background I think that was the that was the goal and uh I can't get White Claws in Utah went out to get one to try one night I keep hearing about White Claws and how it is supposed to be an amazing drink um oh we just opened up the aperture. That's why it got so bright. That's also why I'm a bit washed out. Darn it. Hold on. Going back. Gotta drop that ISO. Figuring out all of these cool terms. Right? To get the picture just right. I gotta start taking some classes. All right. They're not quite as washed out. Although, jeez, I am really white. Uh, okay, cool. So won't be long here maybe half hour killing time before my movie starts dice what movie are you going to go see i'm uh i'm really curious are you going to go see joker are you going to go see something else and exclamation point color oh wow return 404 so it's color space the the the color that you want you can put in a name or uh a hex code with a hashtag start uh or you can do exclamation point colors, uh, C-O-L-O-R-S, in order to get a link to the list. Now, that darkened it up quite a bit. That's awesome. I actually like that. It looks nice. The J and Silent Bob, oh, that's already out. I didn't know that. Uh, already saw Joker. It was really good. Joker got an A- from me. Okay, cool. I, I, I want to see it. I'm gonna go see it at some point. I don't know exactly when. We've got to line up a babysitter. Honestly, Joker might be a home rental. I think I might be willing to wait for that. But the Jay and Silent Bob reboot, we might have to sneak out and go see that one. Pretty big fan of Kevin Smith. We've seen him a few times live. Anyway, so without further ado, what are we doing tonight? We are playing Total Nuclear Annihilation. And Pinsomniac, welcome to the stream let's see i saw dead flip is using dead flip was not using riboctopus at least not yet once we get it to a point where i can hand out agents like candy maybe uh maybe then uh other streamers would be interested in using it right now i have to kind of one-off it uh in order to get it to function properly but that's what we started streaming recently so we just started streaming code development. Had our first stream the other night. And going forward, I think anytime I work on Roboctopus, I'm going to try and do it on stream. And our first goal is going to be to put that up on Azure as a collection of Azure functions. There's a rave. Awesome. And you think you figured out your NVIDIA issue, Pinsomniac. That's great, man. uh good luck i can't wait to see what that stream looks like once you're uh once you're finally got it all set to go and it's uh and and it just looks awesome you have all of the equipment for you have an amazing new laptop and uh and i think you said something about picking up some more hardware so yeah i'm looking forward to seeing that and if you guys haven't checked out oh who do we got on we got fey and the pinsomniac fey amazing streamer a little bit of everything pinball new arcade games retro arcade games check out fey who hosted us earlier uh and then pinsomniac uh a new pinball streamer pinsomniac has been on this channel a ton you guys know him uh and he's streaming on wednesday nights i think right now pinsomniac are you planning on expanding that schedule at all i think i had to right click and agree to settings okay and that would be really cool to watch might learn a thing or two from my coding classes yeah dice it's it's interesting I'm less efficient, for sure, because I'm answering questions and stuff, but it's chatty. Like, lots of people asking questions. Well, why did you do this over there? And on the flip side of that, ha, flip, because pinball, I feel like I can also ask questions or people can make recommendations, and I can, in return, ask, well, why not do it this way? And hopefully it helps me get better with the craft as well. At least that's my hope with it. Should be once a week on location, too. Awesome. And right now, just Wednesdays until I get the on-location more. Great. Okay, guys. TNA relatively simple pin. The rule set on this is super easy. I'm going to go ahead and start this up because the music is also amazing. We've got a synthwave look and feel, synthwave music, graphics. There's a story behind this which has to do with a hacker who is trying to, I guess she's trying to blow up the world by destroying nine nuclear reactors. I don't know. It seems like a really depressing story. I'm not sure what that's all about. Wolfman, welcome to the stream. Can you restack the beer in your basement? Welcome to the future. All right, so hopefully the music isn't too loud, but I want you to be able to hear it because this soundtrack, the layout of the game, and the code were all done by one person, and that's Scott Denisey, who's working on his second game with Spooky right now. This, I feel like, is a masterpiece of both simplicity in terms of rule set, a real simple design, but wow, is this game difficult. And it's not that it has depth, I think, in the typical sense that we use today with, like, 2010-plus pinball machines, where it's Deadpool, where you have to do these three things, and that unlocks this. And once you do that, you have to do these two things, which gets you to this other mode. Once you complete that mode, you have to go back and do these things, which gets harder, which unlocks this multiball wizard mode, which you have to complete in order to get to the final battle. And there's a whole bunch of stuff. It's not that kind of deep. It's just difficult AF. And I'm going to shorten that to AF because we try not to swear on this stream. Midheart, welcome to the stream. And you haven't been down in a bit, have you? I was, I drank it all again. If this is, and LordHowardHurts, yes, we've got beep gape. Definitely. There's, I don't know that I'm a fan of the beep, honestly. I'm so excited. I'm also really excited for the next game, Faye. And yeah, it's deceptively simple. I love how simple and awesome TNA is. I like the speculation on Twip about Scott's new game. I, I'm also, I'm really looking forward to see what it is. I wouldn't be surprised if they told us from the start it was Haunted House Party, and it really is haunted house party. And you should... You definitely dropped a lot of F-bombs and swear bombs and stuff like that. But you know that going into your stream that that's how it's going to be. So, you know, it's cool. Joe Soap, welcome to the stream. And Joe Soap, thank you very much, man. You know, I've been working out and I shaved the head recently. Got it, uh, no more, no more with the hair, nothing like that. I, uh, I'm assuming that's what you were talking about, and not the quality of the stream, which honestly sounds a lot more likely. TNA 2.0 equals TNA with ramps, yes. Alright guys, here we go. Uh, so I am on the first reactor. and I've got a ball save timer that normally you want to use to do some damage up top there and we did we kind of got it color wild strawberry uh mid-heart that is an awesome color I really like that uh it's noticeable both are good thank you Joseph yeah man we upgraded the the camera that's on me we figured out some new settings on the play field to try and grab uh better imagery it turned it turns out you can adjust the shutter speed on the 405 camcorder uh so i've got that now set to a shutter speed which is supposed to be consistent with a 60 frames per second output uh we've got better lighting um and at some point we'll have a better computer that doesn't stutter at all. That's the hope. Okay, so what I need to do first is complete this grid pad. And you can see we've got pink shots, a blue shot, and then a blank shot. The blue shot means if I hit that stand-up target, it's going to turn to pink, and the next one above it is going to become blue. Then if I hit that target again, that last one will turn from blue to pink. I'm looking there as opposed to there and uh and now the pad is complete you're ready to start your reactor you start your reactor on that scoop the problem is actually very similar to uh star wars except this game is way better than star wars in my opinion uh and it's that uh that pad often leads to center straight down the middle drains or bounces off and hits the side and if you played this game you know how crazy can get. Like, you want control at all times. So, if you can't handle control, if you can't do control, do multiball instead. That is the name of this game, always be multiballing. So what I'm going to do is lock a ball, short plunge another one of these, try to get control again. Here we go, we got control. I'm going to try and lock another ball. And let's see if we can do this a third time. nope one moment that's it so i need to get better about my live catches there because with a live catch or even a good drop catch to maybe a pass or something like that i wouldn't have dropped the ball but i'm ready to go into multiball which is awesome and uh and i feel like it's dangerous without some sort of a ball save to take shots uh at the middle here because i'm afraid of the draining. So, let's do this again. Alright, now we've got three seconds of ball save. I'm going to let that time out as I described. I just need to hit this drop target. That's going to put me into multiball, and my focus initially is going to be to hit that drop target two times. Let's catch up and chat. I've got a good feeling this is going to be the game where we do it all in one ball. Wolfman, I am not under a fry cooker. I think we've got wild strawberry on the lights right now. And what shutter speed is that, if you don't mind me asking? Just pulled out my DSLR. So Faye, I was recommended to watch some videos that MPT3K and his group, I think it's his job job, does putting out videos on how to take videos and camera stuff on, what is it? It's on YouTube. and I don't know what his station is off the top of my head but when mpt3k comes in at some point we've got to ask him and I watched a video on there and they were suggesting to be at a shutter speed of like 125 I think is the standard uh if you're trying to output at 60 frames per second so uh and you'll notice that the the further you increase the shutter speed the darker the image gets so after 120 I guess you can kind of use that as a way whoa that is so white slime is apparently not a color and I was looking right into that light. Well, that was a good one. So anyway, 125 or greater. Now, I have not hit this shot even once. All right, so we got an entire multiball to hit that shot twice, but now we're ready to start the reactor, and we do that by hitting that scoop. Get a nice little light show, and the next thing we have to do is overheat the reactor by getting the ball into this area here. You'll see that this little display starts at zero. So it's at zero right now, and the more things bounce around or the more I hit spinners, and you also get a little bonus for hitting the rollover targets, that's going to go up. And got it. Okay, at the end, dude, fake, keep asking the questions. I am very happy to talk about all of the equipment that we use here. In fact, MPT3K and I have done some streams on how to stream pinball. All right. So we got the ball up there. It bounced around all crazy. And now we've gotten to the point where we've got a police light up at the top of TNA that's spinning around. And we've lit randomly one of the destroy targets. Possible destroys are the D, the A, or the R in RAD. The destroy on the left, which is currently flashing. The destroy on the right, which isn't. And then there's two potential destroys here on the pop bumper. So because it's our first reactor, I only have to hit one destroy on the first reactor. Which I missed. Let's try that again, shall we? Nope. Alright, alright, we're cool. We're trying. There we go. And what's really cool... Bladespace, level two. Awesome. So we've got our first reactor destroyed. We're on ball two. That's not great. And we're raving all at the same time. I love it. We've got lots of colors in there right now. Okay. We've got reactor one done. We're on to reactor two. What do we do now? Well, we said the name of this game should actually be called Always Be Multiballing, so that's what we should be working on right now, is to try and get back into multiball. The problem is that these stand-up targets are standing up right now. We've got to work our way back by knocking them down, and there's a scoop all the way in the back that we have to get. We hit that scoop, it relights the locks, then we can shoot for locks. so i gave myself a ball save there and i don't feel like i can describe that without stopping so let me trap up and then i'll describe what we did there beautiful this you can kind of see it It says save across the inlanes and outlanes. S-A-V-E. Now, as I flip, you'll notice the white light is moving. Normally, and this is just for level one, those are not lit. So every time I go down an unlit lane, it turns red until we get three reds, at which point those three reds become a white. and if I get the ball to go down an in lane or an out lane that is lit white, it will give me a 10 second ball saver, meaning a ball that is going out on the E or the S in the outlanes that I have lit white, well, I'm going to get that ball back. So now that I have that, be wary and let me know if I forget and I need to move that to an out lane really quick. Alright, so we've got one more drop target. Oops, somebody did something. Mouth me with the host. Thank you very much. That's a hats off for you. Okay, we're ready. Now we got all of the drop targets down We got a scoop in the back Oh and somebody Mouthme just followed Mouthme thank you a host and a follow that is a double if I could have my other hand I would take two hats off but I holding the ball thank you very much, and welcome to the stream. Let's see here, where are we? Good, we're all caught up on chat, we're just doing colors and stuff, and here we go, so I'm going to go in there, it hit the scoop. Wow, that... That came out very lazily. I haven't seen that happen. Normally it comes out a lot faster. Hits the left flipper and bounces safely over to the right. That did not happen. All right, but we've got locks lit. Look at that. Beautiful green lights there. I have to hit this grid up front a bunch in order to unlock it. So what am I going to do? Going for some locks. Hold on, hold on. Here we go. Nice and safe. Nice and safe. There's another ball lock. One more and we get ourselves the multiball. Oops, somebody did something. What is that light for? That was just flashing like crazy for no reason. All right, multiball coming up. One more shot to unlock the grid. Got it. All right, we successfully unlocked the grid. Now we need... Oh, we got seven seconds of ball save. All right, we've got the reactor started. All right, here we go. We've got two shots now lit for destroy. We've got this guy and this guy. We've got... Oh, wow, that is so bright white. This is my bot account, Faye. Almost a... This is... Wait, were you telling Faye that, or this is Faye's bot account? Oh, this is Faye. Almost a Lazarus. Got it. Yeah, I know. It almost popped back out. Well, Mouthme. That, I feel like, changes, I guess, what Mouthme is. That's a very cool name. All right, can we backhand the destroy? I'm not going to go for it. I'm actually going to try a move that we've called Chatsing the Bed, which I did by accidentally trying to shat but missing and found out it's somewhat consistently, I'm going to say like maybe 48% of the time, if you hit this corner right here instead of shatzing, it will bounce right into the destroy over here. So we're going to call that shatzing the bed. Let's see if we can do it. Nope. I'm going to go three times here. Wow, that was just really bad. Alright, well... Not what you want to do. But at least we have a break now so we can sip a beer. Forgot about that account. Yeah. There's one. And the next question is, can you backhand the destroy? Well, no reason, apparently, to backhand that destroy. so, we got a lock shot there. Every time you die and come back, it relights your locks for you. That was an unclean lock there, but let's keep it going. Nice and easy here. Once again, I'm not going to unlock the grid manually. Instead, I'm going to go into a multiball. There we go. Got one shot. I need two more here. One more. One more. Come on, game. So close! Slap the sign. Slap the devil out of it, Bob Ross would say. Missed it. Alright, whatever. We got it. Enough. There we go. We got an extra ball because we were playing by ourselves. And we just unlocked our third reactor, which is great. Woo! Nice little second to cool down. Dry the hands off. Gotta catch that ball. needed to get that over there much much quicker complete completely shat that exactly and thank you Pinsomniac for throwing out backhand to destroy Alright, there goes game number one. Uh, for me, I feel like, uh, I usually feel pretty decent if I, uh, if I can get to the fifth reactor. Our top so far is seventh reactor, uh, to start. I haven't, I haven't beaten the seventh reactor. Uh, so what are we doing? We got Mouth Me, a.k.a. Fae. Okay. Apparently I need two hands to do this. mouth me you got up there for something and we got a free game look at that All right. Game number two. All right, less instructions, I feel like, in this one, more playing. If you guys have questions, feel free to throw them out. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. Just using that ball save. Here we go. Going to get the lock shot. Go and lock again. Oops. Alright, here we go. Lock number two. You know what? Screw it. Let's full plunge. Yeah, that felt good. One more to finish unlocking that. That worked out really well. Here we go. Let's start that reactor. All right, we're out of multiball, but we are ready to overheat the reactor. Reactor. Looks like we get another shot at this, at shatting the destroy. Reactor destroyed. I mean, that is not even a little bit similar to what I was describing. But it worked? Uh, that was not intentional. So, do we go for multiball? Yes, we go for multiball. Uh, thanks for the follow, Lord Hertz. If you're here, awesome! And... Two... Three... There we go. And a ball lock. Here we go, here we go. And a ball lock. That sucked. We're gonna keep going. Another ball lock here. Although we're wasting our ball saver. And... Jenga. Uh-oh, I feel like somebody just did something. Okay. Tried to air defense that one. That's fine. what let's just give that a second apparently we are dangering up a storm right now and matt the cutter thank you very much for that follow that is appreciated uh we've got a mystery my guess is that mystery is going to give us another tilt warning uh let's see i'll take it if it is yes extra tilt warning here we go let's overheat them reactors Let's try that again. There we go. Got the ball. Got the ball. Save. I will take it. Here we go. Alright. And while we had the ball saved, we went ahead and took another shot on the grid. What do we got here? If you're on double danger, mystery will always be extra tilt warning. Great. And hi from Denver. Thanks for... Matt the Cutter. I'm in Fort Collins. So hi from Fort Collins. It's a small world. And thank you very much for watching. All right. We'll get there. We'll get there. so the the tough part i feel like about switching to a spooky machine is how different the flippers and the game feels from every other pinball machine you play in the same way that like um the really good bally williams games have a certain feel about the flippers uh like a like an original attack from mars i feel like is one of the best it in my mind it it just feels amazing when you're playing it uh the same thing with uh what was the other the other one i feel like is iconic. Oh, Twilight Zone is another one where the game and the flippers just feel a certain way, and as opposed to all of the new recent sterns are another one where I feel like you have so much flipper control. You can do just about anything with the flippers. Well, on a spooky machine, I feel like they're extra bouncy, and it takes me a little while to adjust. I don't know if other people have that same issue with them, but it takes a little bit. So we've got another lane save, which is great. And what is the name of this game? It's called Always the Multibomb. I'll take the ball save. All right, one more. Let's full plunge it. One more on the grid. Oh, my God. Just give me, give me, give me. I shouldn't have done that, but I did it And we're ready to start reactor 3 Which is going to give us an extra ball Are we on ball 3? Wow, man, these have been going so quick today The question is, do I go for it? I don't think I do I think I work towards my multiball Wow, that was mean. Alright, here we go. First lock. Boom. We got it. Need to get there again. Pinball Jones X2. So good. It is, man. We love Pinball Jones. I'm in the league there. I just love that place. The owner, Kim Jones, is amazing. The other owners, Kim, Karen, and I think it's Mike, for the college location, are also awesome. Both locations are great. They've got, I swear, it's got to be like 70 games between the two locations. I will take that Lazarus! The double Lazarus! Here. Ah! Give me that back. Give me that back. Full save. Alright, here we go. Right orbit. Alright, here we go. Left orbit. We're at 99. Really? There it goes. This is just the third reactor. This isn't even that big of a deal. All right, here we go. multiball locking it up. The audio is... Oh, yeah, the audio on the game is cutting out. Hopefully my audio isn't cutting out. All right. So the... I gotta disagree with some of the choices Spooky made with the hardware they use, because they're just using an auxiliary cable to connect their sound system to the computer. And that auxiliary cable is doing the same thing, I imagine, auxiliary cables do in everybody's cars over time. They make poor connections. Alright, we gotta hit that destroy. There it is. There we go. So we can keep working on this pad here. That's great. All right. I guess not quite everybody out of the pool, but pretty close. Is that the extra ball, too? It is the game. Okay. And what do we got here? Matt the Cutter. Yeah, we got new firmware in here. This is version 4. What, the beta for 1.4? I kind of forgot to mention that. So I think it reset all of the scores on it. And what do we got here? Oh, sorry. Last person was Matt the Cutter. Let's put you in here. That was the long way around, apparently. I'm not going to get Matt the Cutter. I really went the slow way there. There. We'll go Matt Cut. So both welcome to the stream, and now you're on the pin. I guess until the next version of Burnware comes out. What do we got going on here? So we're still lined up okay. Great. Camera's still sort of focused correctly. I'm going to... Boom. Do one of those. And... Let's keep it going. Ah, one more sip. So if you're just joining us, we're playing TNA. We're drinking some beer right now. I've got some peach kick from New Belgium Brewing. a light, they describe it as a slightly sour peach ale. I think it's great. And let's do it. Always be multiballing. And you might be saying, George, what are you doing? Well, I had a ball saved. So I went ahead and used the ball save instead of going for my multiball because I'm smart, see? I feel like if you can ever quote Boondock Saints, you should always quote Boondock Saints. Alright, here we go. Another lock. Woo! And Jenga! Jenga! Grr you Grrr Grrr Alright. And, sweet, been wondering about this game's hype. I'm seeing it more with skilled play. Oh, Matt, this game is, in fact, we started off kind of chatting about it. This game is amazing. What it really nails is difficulty with simplicity. The rule set is really simple, but it gets progressively harder and harder. And the achievement is so difficult yet obtainable, there's something, it creates that just one more game vibe. and add to it the amazing music, the amazing visuals, the fact that this, it feels to me this came right out of a William Gibson novel. All right, we got three more seconds. Get in there. There it is. oh gotta get that top section over a hundred there it goes now we've got reactor one set we just have to hit that destroy right here so quick kind of synopsis of what you have to do a complete the grid that's really dangerous you want to be in multiball when you do it then you have to start the reactor which you do by hitting that scoop then you have to overheat the reactor by getting it to bounce around a bunch up top, and then after that, it's going to light a random destroy that increases the number of random destroys you have to complete for each reactor you start completing. The goal of the game is to destroy all nine reactors. That's it. That is the whole game. I love how this pin came to be. This is as close as you'll see to one person making their dream pin. LordHowardHurts, I couldn't agree more, man. This is like a... Like, every time I play this, I think, here's a person who... I don't know what Scott was doing beforehand. I wish I knew what his job was beforehand. But he personally went through, wrote the software, designed, built the game, and then made the music because he's also really, really into music and an amazing musician and made it all happen. And it doesn't get any cooler than that. Here's someone who turned their way possible dream. There's so many people who make pinball machines who never do anything with it It never really goes anywhere, but he did it, and it is Spooky's bestseller of all time. Anyway, I kind of forgot what I'm doing right now. Oh, I gotta hit this destroy. Again, come on. Give it to me the way you're supposed to give it to me. There we go. Now, can you backhand the destroy? Not like that. Oh! Oh! Here we go. And destroy. All right, we've still got six seconds. Let's hit this. Now that that's gone, we've got to start working back towards multiball. That is the three drop targets up there, which I missed. Fine, now we've got better control. There's one. No! Ah! All right. Hymer, welcome to the stream. and lock the balls, then destroy it 3x. Exactly. Yeah, sorry. So when it comes to points, if you're not just going for reactor, every ball on the table is a multiplier to your score. So if you're looking for points, you want to be in a multiball when you destroy your reactor and get that bonus because it will be multiplied by the number of balls on the table at that time. Oh, I didn't go for the pad. I should have gone for the pad. Hold on. Hold on. Nothing? Yep, that was just poorly played. All right. Well, it all comes down to ball three. All right, let's do this. Well, we got one more free shot. Jenga! Jenga! Nice That worked out really well We kept the ball up there While we were working on trying to Complete the reactor Ah pinball live welcome to the stream and hello that could have gone better i think the audio cable is slipping out i'm gonna push it back in here just a little bit hold on Let's hope that helps. I don't know if it will, but the distortion you're hearing in the music is because the auxiliary cable is coming loose, which is really frustrating. Let's see what we can do. All right, so while we still have a ball save, All right, I deserve that. I definitely deserve that. That was a lot of hits all at the same time. Alright, come on Let's get a lock going here There we go Nope And wow, we messed up that audio even worse. Let's hope that does it. It sucks because I hot glued it, but this game has not only amazing bass, right, But it also has a shaker motor that at its lowest setting, I feel like rivals any stern shaker. So it vibrates a lot. And apparently it has vibrated off all of the hot glue that we put on the connection between the amplifier and the auxiliary cable. We put there to hold it in place. Because it is definitely not doing that anymore. Alright, let's just go for the lock. Not even going to mess around. Take that again. Ball saved. Alright, here we go. Let's get into another multiball. So we're trying to hit that last shot on the grid. Got it! Got it! Alright, still need to hit that reactor shot. All right, that was a weird way to do a post-separation, but we're in. And, all right, let's go right side. Missed it. Left side is a lot easier, for whatever reason, at least for me. All right, we've got that reactor started, which is great. We're going to get ourselves a mystery here. and we've got one destroy over there. That's going to give us a three-second ball saver once we complete it. So now we need to start working towards our multiball again. Yeah, that was just poor. Ball three. Ugh, we're on Reactor 2. Nice and easy. We'll get ourselves back into a multiball here. We can complete the grid and clean up on Reactor 2. All right, one more shot on the grid. All right, we've got the reactor unlocked. Now we need to get the ball in the scoop. Let's try that. Nice and easy. Easy. All right. Now we need... Oh, that sucked. All right, a little under and over. Here we go, left orbit. Not going to chance it. It's fine. I can just catch it. Do it, over. Well... Alright, we've got Mystery lit. And we're up and around. There we go, we've got Reactor 2 started. I'd love to get a lane save out of this. Not going to happen. Ooh, you know what would be even better? Relight locks. Ah, hey, cool. I got the lane save. All right, now we've got two shots for destroy. That one. Awesome. It's okay. We'll just do it on the next one. Ugh. So... This game has that feeling that... Just one more. I think I can get further. I think I can progress further. Or I think I've got it now. I've got the feel of the game. Let's keep it going. And it's also got that... I kind of got screwed. But you know what? It's pinball. So no matter what, you're playing pinball. You're not working or doing something else. Which is still amazing. and every once in a while you just gotta take a step back and be like, I'm playing pinball and drinking beer. Does it get much better? And that's the one thing I love about it. Faye, I agree, man. This, this, you keep switching between accounts and it's messing with me now. Super fun to try and get all nine dead. Exactly. There is an achievable goal. I can make it far enough to know that I just have to get better at pinball in order to progress. So it's interesting. I think that Pinsomniac has said a few times that, or maybe it was tie or titanics that uh that this game is an excellent gauge on how far you've come as a pinball player uh because there's there's no there's no messing around there there's it's very difficult to luck into anything on this game because it requires such consistency and accuracy and the rules are so simple i feel like anybody who's who's spent you know four or five games on this really understands probably the majority of the ins and the outs maybe you don't really get the how to light mystery or how the lane saves work, and that might take another four or five games to really get a feel for that. Or you just get it in one game. The rule set on it is really, really simple. So now that we have listened to this soundtrack, uh, Pinsomniac, am I still, are we still having issues? Everything good? Okay. and give me a second here I'm going to throw on some other music and we're going to turn this down so volume down keep it at something to where we can kind of hear the sounds you know it'd be really nice as in a firmware update for this if we could turn the music down kind of like on sterns you can uh up the attenuation of music versus the call out so I want the call outs to be nice and loud but I want to turn the music off. And it's not that I dislike the music. I think the music is amazing. I've just put about, I don't know, my guess is about 400 to 500 games on this machine. And every once in a while, I want to try something different, man. Just want to switch up the music. So we're in the basement. I'm going to hit browse, Apple Music. And let's throw on our Amazeballs playlist, which is a lot of my favorite music. And that has not turned this direction. Hold on a sec. Oh, it is turning this direction. We're good. All right, next game. I think it sounds all right, but the pin gets kind of odd. It does, man it starts getting crackly and that's that loose connection i i really think it was a bad idea to use an auxiliary cable to connect the computer to the amplifier um i would have liked to have seen i don't know something soldered something a little bit better uh that said i just need to buy like a 10 foot auxiliary cable and replace it i should do that tonight All right. There's a lock. A little too hard. And are we going to get lock number two? We got lock number two. I can hear that audio already. Nice. Alright, let's see if we can finish up this grid. Reactor is started. That's fine. Reactor. All right, now let's overheat this guy. Get in there. Get, get. We're going to get a mystery here. What are we going to get? Super spinners. All right, reactor started. That sucks. Looks like it is the destroy. Wow. That cable got so much worse. All right, let's see if we can shats this. this is the that shats that bed move where we don't quite shats we fail on the shats but we hit the target all right yeah we're gonna get another attempt so the goal is to hit this little corner right here and get it to ricochet into that But at least we can turn the sound down, because that is awful. I've got the sound turned all the way down. There we go. Just unplug that auxiliary cable, because that is really bad. And... Got it. And there's a lock. We're getting right back into it. Laser Los, welcome to the stream. And Pinsomniacs, yes. I feel like we should just... I don't want to do it on stream. We did a fix last night. By the way, if you were on last night's stream and you saw that the Deadpool scoop wasn't working and we tried to play around it, here's what it was. There is a normally open and a normally... It's a... Sorry, it's a relay with two connectors on it. One of them is normally open, one of them is normally closed. And the normally open one, which is the one that we were connected to, apparently snapped off. But unbeknownst to us, because it just looked like it was a relay with one option, with one little connector coming off it. We went ahead and reconnected the cable, which just had some tape around it, to the normally closed one. And suddenly after that, the pin just thinks that there's always a ball in there until you depress it. So it took me a good maybe 20 or 30 minutes today to figure out what was going on. And then I look closer, and sure enough, on that relay, the little piece of metal that comes off it for the normally open connection, I could see where it had cracked off. And I just needed to look at other relays in order to figure that out. This is the time. I work with those all day as an automation engineer. Right. So I had to order... Well, instead of ordering one, anytime I order anything for pinball, I always order more than one. Wow, this game without any sound is actually really difficult. Alright, we are out of ball save. We've just got to hit this one shot. Grr, I really want to hit it. There it is. But am I going to drain because I wanted to hit it? Well, that was fortuitous there. We going to get the mystery and the reactor start Al Anonymous micro switch Yeah it is the Vuck Cherry Switch I think was the one specifically that I took a picture of and then found on Marcos. And Al Anonymous, welcome to the stream. Okay, I'll take that. That was a beautiful backhand. Obviously done intentionally. I guess let's go locks. Because that's the name of this game. Always be multiballing. And then I can try and plunge up top. There we go. Let's try it again. Let's try it again. Oh my... Yes, thank you. Giant tropical centipedes share their territories with tarantulas. Here we go. Despite its impressive length, it's a nimble navigator. There's one. As quick as lightning, just like the tarantula it's turning, the centipede has two curved all-thangs, which eject paralyzing venom. you you you you you you you you you you you Oh Hell yeah. I'm just getting into pinball. Galaxy's just getting in, just playing FX3 on Switch. That's a great place to start, man. Absolutely great. All right. We're on Reactor 4. Wait, I like this. I love this song. I don't know. Actually, I love this band. Did anybody say the name of the band whose name I refuse to remember for some reason? No idea. Yeah. C.N.K., welcome to the stream. Video pinball helps, but playing on a real game is a unique experience. Right. I think it's a great way to get started if you're interested. But if you get the chance, definitely go play real pinball, man. Because it is, it's different. And honestly, the community is such a huge part. And getting to know other people that play pinball who introduce you to new games and walk you through little things they learned. It's just fun. And then, of course, catching streams. If you haven't checked out, who do we got on right now? We've got LaserLos, Alnonymous, and Pinsomniac are all pinball streamers. So if you haven't checked out those guys, you should give them a follow. And then CNK, if you're into Modern Warfare, is another streamer. And I'm trying to think of... Who else? Yeah, there's other streamers. If you guys are streamers and you're on the stream, PinkNinjaMan, I thought I think I saw you. I just assumed PinkNinjaMan is always on. But PinkNinjaMan is another streamer. And if I didn't mention you and you're on the stream, go ahead and throw your name out. I think it's a shout-out command. Maybe exclamation point SO. Or maybe it's the full thing. What do I need? I need to backhand that destroy. Nope. And now I need the D. Wow, that worked. All right, so the D is at the bottom of the rad targets. Can we do this? Do we go for the backflip? Got it! And then I dropped it. But that's fine. Whatever. I just backflipped the D. don't be a child the player obviously needs the d in the word on tna or deadpool seriously oh a shout out okay cool yeah exactly pinsomniac that was exactly what i was looking for uh-oh somebody did something and the lights love it laser lows thank you very much for that bit you're amazing hats off bs game all right i guess we work back into multiball some legends are told is all it would say. Go down in history. Remember me for centuries. Alright, here we go. Ball lock number one. Remember me for centuries. All the time I've seen in dreams. Now it's nothing wrong with me. The kids of the world, the boys of the world. We're just gonna give that the full... The full minute. I had all the time in the world to see... Oh, come on! Game! Game! Ugh! Laser Los with that bit! Laser, you're getting on here. I can't believe that tilted me! I got this tilt way too tight. Ugh. Flos, you're on here, man. Keep it in the same zip code. Well, I got what I deserved. I moved that way too much. I am just about to watch 300 fitting songs. Yes. How'd we do? Yeah, that's kind of perfect, right? I think we're centered again. All right. Let's take a look at that thing. I need to figure out. So my issue right now is we've upgraded the camera. so we've got this camera that's outputting at uh at 1080p at 60 frames per second and it's amazing i love this camera and i'd like i'm starting to get better about taking pictures now i feel like it was a fun investment but uh the problem is is that i was already maxing out the usb uh like how much data i can handle across usb like i had already downgraded that video from 1080 to 720 so that way I could add a little 300x400 fourth camera of the tilt bob. I'm going to stand over here so that you guys can hear me. So, I kind of forgot where I was. Oh, but now that I'm outputting at 1080p, I can't even get a really small image of the tilt bob going because I would love to show off the tilt bob again. So I've got to figure that out. I'm concerned that the only thing that's going to take care of it is either if I drop from 1080p down to 720 on this camera, which I love and I'm probably not going to do, or just get a better computer. And I think I'm going to have to get a better computer. CNK, I like that color. It's like it's trying to be brown, but it seems like it's a little bit red. I looked into the color directly for some reason, and it's messing up every other color I'm seeing right now. All right. Can you downgrade the input just on that channel? The tilt-bop? Yeah, so I did. I am already down to outputting, like, I swear I'm down to, like, 250 pixels by 300 pixels. That image can't really get much smaller. And if you've seen when I do a tilt-bob, I've already got that image. Like, it's this tiny little box at the bottom right corner. If I make it any smaller, it's going to be useless. So I'm already outputting very, very little there. So I'm concerned at this point. I think there's two physical USB controllers, meaning I have the ability to do bandwidth across two controllers. And this laptop is from 2014. It's the Razer Pro 17, which was great in 2014. But I'm looking at the new MSI laptop, which has three physical controllers on the one that I'm looking at, on a 17-inch, and I think that would get around it. Or most of the other ones now have two physical USB controllers and then a Thunderbolt controller, which is also separate and can handle its own bandwidth. So I think it's just that the computer's old. So you really need a dedicated PC with extra cards to future-proof. Yes! In fact, so we're going to switch here. So I've been looking at desktops. In fact, it was the... Hold on. Gotta turn that down just a hair. So, um, I occasionally stream with MPT3K, who, by the way, if you haven't checked out MPT3K, another awesome pinball streamer. And every, it's like once a month, in fact, it's next Sunday, we're going to do episode four of Second String, which is an hour-long stream about how to stream pinball. having done this for a little while and gone through, it was fun the second episode was dedicated to the four different setups I've gone through to get to here and we just talk about all the different technologies, where to go to buy or to find the transitions and how to set up OBS in fact the next one is going to be all about, Sunday's episode is going to be focused entirely on setting all of your settings in Streamlabs, assuming you're in OBS Streamlabs, in order to maximize performance and reduce overhead on your CPU, which would be like offloading a bunch of stuff to your GPU. So in doing that, in our last episode, somebody brought up, well, what if you got a portable desktop, like the new Legion series, which has a handle? And that got me thinking, because if you wanted to future-proof it, Just like you said, Joseph, the way to do it would be to do a desktop and have the flexibility to swap out parts as opposed to a laptop. So that thought entered my head. The only issue is moving around a desktop if you want to go stream on location somewhere. And there's ways around that, but I'm not completely sold on the laptop. There's just an MSI series laptop that kind of hits all the marks relatively inexpensive. It's only a couple hundred more than going a desktop route. But you're paying a premium to get a desktop at a much smaller form factor. Let's see here. Yeah, good idea for a stream. It's been fun. I just like chatting, and we've got a lot of questions. And MPT3K has a YouTube channel that he posts everything to afterwards. And I think his day job is video editing. so he makes it look really, really good. But, getting back in here, I'm going to go turn the music back up. Apparently, yeah, I like to chat, by the way, which is why I stream pinball, is just to get to be able to chat with people, because my wife and kid are both sleeping. kid goes to bed at 8, wife goes to bed around 10 I get off of work right around 10 which gives me about a half hour to get set up for pinball streaming and then chat about pinball till 12.30 with other people who geek out about pinball as well so this is my opportunity to get kind of out of the house without physically getting out of the house because I've been working from home now for close to about I think it's 4 or 5 years Fine, I didn't want that ball. I wanted this ball. And I wanted that ball to stay locked, so that way I could really get this ball. Really? I'll take it. I'll take it. I don't know what that double flip was, but it worked. So I need one more shot on the grid. Got it. Now I'm going to try and plunge up there. That did not work. Wow. That was uncool, game. Uncool. Now, a really interesting thing I found, at least personally, and this might be different for other people, but I have found that it's a lot easier to backhand this scoop than it is to hit it from a forehand. I have also found it's a lot easier to backhand the lock shots, like really easy to do that, and it's really easy to forehand the left orbit, whereas it's really difficult from the right to forehand the left orbit, whereas it's really difficult to forehand the right orbit from the left. And it is possible, you can backhand the left orbit from the left side. All right. There we go. All right. All right. Yeah. Ah! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Unfortunately, I'm probably going to tilt on the next game for all of the wiggling we did there. Okay.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 2c58fc66-cf76-42fc-b2c6-06f8306fbfb4*