# BDYETP 82: Looney Tunes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, GTF Signature Edition and the 007 Cheaters Club **Source:** Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2023-12-10 **Duration:** 92m 57s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/buffalo-pinball/episodes/BDYETP-82-Looney-Tunes--Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre--GTF-Signature-Edition-and-the-007-Cheaters-Club-e2d201q --- ## Analysis Nick and Kevin of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball discuss Spooky Pinball's dual announcements of Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre pinball machines, alongside coverage of Stern's Insider Connected app launch and market observations about cooling FOMO/hype cycles. The hosts critique Spooky's reliability and code depth while acknowledging strong visual design and layout, noting the broader market shift toward wait-and-see purchasing strategies over pre-order FOMO. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Spooky is limiting Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre production to 888 units each (1,776 total combined), less than Scooby-Doo's ~1,963 units — _Kevin states: 'they're limiting each of the two units to 888 Looney units each so you get 888 each so was it 1700 ish total um which it puts it a little less than scooby scooby was at 1900 something 1963 or 64 or something like that'_ - [HIGH] Market FOMO has cooled significantly for pinball machines; people now wait to play games before purchasing — _Kevin: 'i think the like fomo and and hype train has cooled off significantly when it comes to pinball i think you have the opportunity to play some of these games before you run out and buy them which is a good thing'_ - [HIGH] Eric Kripke is coding Looney Tunes and Ben Heck is coding Texas Chainsaw Massacre — _Kevin: 'they have two different coders on the two different machines so with Halloween and Ultraman they were more parallel in development I think they had the same team working on both machines and on this one they have Eric Kripke working on Looney Tunes and Ben Heck is doing code for the other one Texas Chainsaw Massacre'_ - [HIGH] Looney Tunes standard edition priced at $8,300; Bloodsucker at $9,000; Collector's Edition at $9,700 — _Kevin: 'The pricing on these, a standard edition is $8,300. bloodsucker is 9 000 and the collector's edition is 9 700'_ - [MEDIUM] Spooky's butter cabinet upgrade costs $1,500 extra and does not hold resale value — _Kevin: 'he ever get that price back when you sell it like people reseller or people who are buying a used game don't care if it's butter or not'_ - [MEDIUM] Scooby-Doo standard edition (lowest tier) has only six owners on Pinside — _Nick: 'When I look at the standard edition for Scooby-Doo, Six people on Pinside have that in their collection. Just like nobody seems to be in the market for that standard edition'_ - [MEDIUM] Looney Tunes ramps are powder-coated with clear coat, raising durability concerns about wear patterns — _Kevin: 'the ramps are really orange and i at first i thought they were plastic but they're actually powder coated with a clear coat over them which i that seems concerning to me like you're smashing those ramps all the time'_ - [MEDIUM] Rick and Morty sold only 750 units and sold out immediately; held resale value due to strong license and wide appeal — _Nick: 'that's one that held its value because they sold only 750 of those. And those sold out immediately. And it's a really strong license and it has wide appeal'_ ### Notable Quotes > "I tried to put on a brave face in the beginning of this episode and say it was good, but really this was in the background the whole time and it wasn't as good as it could be." > — **Kevin**, ~4:30 > _Reference to Hall & Oates lawsuit, thematic callback to their podcast branding; shows personal investment in their brand identity_ > "if your spooky machine is broken all the time, you're not going to wear out your ramps. That's true. You know, maybe they're thinking ahead. They're playing to their audience and their strengths." > — **Nick**, ~15:45 > _Humorous jab at Spooky's reliability issues; meta-commentary on manufacturer's audience expectations_ > "Usually they fall apart in terms of quality, no pun intended and uh the code doesn't reach the depth that i think that you and i look for but undeniably uh game is visually appealing" > — **Kevin**, ~26:00 > _Explicit criticism of Spooky's reliability/code track record; frames their quality concerns as systematic_ > "I would recommend taking a wait-and-see approach because I do like Like, Walking Dead is one of my favorite games of all time, right? And that's a horror theme, and it's an ugly machine. But the rules are really good" > — **Nick**, ~42:30 > _Establishes framework for evaluating pinball quality: gameplay/rules > aesthetics; Walking Dead as counterexample to Spooky quality concerns_ > "They're obviously passionate about it...this is where they shine, right? This is their bread and butter." > — **Kevin**, ~38:00 > _Acknowledges Spooky's niche strength in unconventional licenses; frames their competitive advantage vs. larger manufacturers_ > "They want to be able to brag about having a low-priced option. But I agree. I remember when Rick and Morty came out, they sold like five of the low-end version." > — **Kevin**, ~24:45 > _Marketing strategy insight: three-tier pricing as anchoring tactic despite low actual sales of entry tier_ > "if I was a horror fanatic or whatever, and Spooky is just knocking on the park constantly making themes that I like, Like, I'd have a bias that comes in play where I'd want to root for them" > — **Kevin**, ~34:15 > _Meta-acknowledgment of how licensing/theme appeal biases community perception of Spooky's quality issues_ > "the fomo and and hype train has cooled off significantly when it comes to pinball i think you have the opportunity to play some of these games before you run out and buy them which is a good thing" > — **Kevin**, ~12:30 > _Key market observation: shift from FOMO-driven purchasing to informed consumer behavior; positive for players, negative for manufacturers' sales velocity_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer announcing Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre; recognized for strong visual design but criticized for reliability and code depth | | Looney Tunes | game | Spooky Pinball's dual announcement; priced $8,300-$9,700; 888 unit production cap; features powder-coated ramps, Taz spinner, Acme Crate lock, dual upper flippers | | Texas Chainsaw Massacre | game | Spooky Pinball's second dual announcement; 888 unit production cap; player assumes role of murderer; meat grinder mechanic; deep red aesthetic; coded by Ben Heck | | Kevin Manning | person | Co-host of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball; based in Buffalo; critical analytical perspective on game design and manufacturer quality | | Nick Lane | person | Co-host of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball; based in Buffalo; collaborative analyst with Kevin on game evaluation | | Eric Kripke | person | Coder for Looney Tunes pinball at Spooky | | Ben Heck | person | Designer/coder for Texas Chainsaw Massacre at Spooky; noted as on-again/off-again collaborator with Spooky team | | Bug | person | Spooky Pinball representative/creative director; enthusiastically discussed gameplay mechanics on Texas Chainsaw Massacre | | Stern Pinball | company | Launched iOS and Android app for Insider Connected; experienced server overload at launch; app mirrors website interface | | Scooby-Doo | game | Previous Spooky release (~1,963 units produced); standard edition has minimal adoption; resale market pricing below original | | Rick and Morty | game | Spooky game with 750-unit production cap; sold out immediately; strong license and wide appeal; held resale value | | Walking Dead | game | Reference game for quality evaluation; described as 'one of my favorite games of all time' by Nick; visually unattractive but strong rules/gameplay | | Flippin' Out Pinball | company | Sponsor/partner providing giveaways (Bond Premium Translite, Jurassic Park player mat) | | Zach Minney | person | Owner of Flippin' Out Pinball; providing dual giveaways to show | | Hall & Oates | entity | Music duo whose legal dispute (Darryl Hall suing John Oates over business partnership) is used metaphorically to frame Kevin and Nick's podcast branding crisis | | Total Nuclear Annihilation | game | Mentioned as thematically appealing to Kevin (sci-fi preference); influenced his interest level in Spooky offerings | | Ultraman | game | Previous Spooky dual announcement game (alongside Halloween); had parallel development with same team; used as comparison for current dual-game strategy | | Halloween | game | Spooky game released with Ultraman; hosts accessed for streaming/evaluation; mentioned as quality reference point | | Penn Stadium Lights | company | Sponsor; app-controlled lighting kits for pinball machines; coupon code BUFFALO for 10% off | | Insider Connected | product | Stern Pinball's loyalty/points system; recently launched iOS/Android app after server issues at launch | ### Topics - **Primary:** Spooky Pinball manufacturing and design philosophy, Pinball market cooling: FOMO decline and wait-and-see purchasing, Game reliability, code quality, and technical depth as quality metrics, Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre announcements and specifications - **Secondary:** Three-tier pricing strategy (Pro/Standard/Premium/LE) and consumer adoption patterns, Spooky's competitive positioning vs. Stern and other manufacturers, Visual design and aesthetics as purchasing driver - **Mentioned:** Stern Insider Connected app launch and platform evolution ### Sentiment **Mixed** (0.35) — Hosts acknowledge Spooky's strong visual design and thematic passion but express significant reservations about reliability, code quality, and market sustainability. Critical but balanced tone; respect for Spooky's niche positioning tempered by skepticism about technical execution. Broader market sentiment reflects pessimism about FOMO-driven sales and sustainability of premium pricing models. ### Signals - **[competitive_signal]** Hosts note Spooky occupies unique niche in unconventional licensed IP (horror, adult animation) that Stern avoids; creates theme-biased audience loyalty that masks underlying quality concerns (confidence: medium) — Kevin: 'Spooky is just knocking on the park constantly making themes that I like, Like, I'd have a bias that comes in play where I'd want to root for them'; notes Spooky focus on licenses 'no none of these other pinball manufacturers are going to do' - **[product_concern]** Powder-coated ramps on Looney Tunes may face durability issues under sustained ball impact and cleaning wear; hosts express uncertainty about long-term viability (confidence: medium) — Kevin: 'they're actually powder coated with a clear coat over them which i that seems concerning to me like you're smashing those ramps all the time and is that really going to hold up'; Nick confirms same concern after zooming in on photos - **[design_philosophy]** Design impression suggests Texas Chainsaw Massacre was primary playfield, Looney Tunes adapted from it; thematic fit concerns (e.g., rocket ball launch less coherent than meat grinder for TCM) (confidence: medium) — Kevin: 'it feels to me like they designed the Texas chainsaw massacre and then adapted the loony tunes around that versus vice versa. Cause I'm the Texas chainsaw mass here. This is the meat grinder over there. and that makes a lot more sense than like a rocket' - **[market_signal]** Spooky's dual-announcement strategy (two games simultaneously) becoming regular pattern (Halloween/Ultraman, now Looney Tunes/Texas Chainsaw Massacre); different creative/coding teams per game (confidence: medium) — Kevin: 'Remember back when Halloween came out and they were like, Oh, it's Halloween, but we're also doing Ultraman. Well, they're doing it again'; Eric Kripke on Looney Tunes, Ben Heck on TCM (vs. shared team on previous pair) - **[market_signal]** Stern Insider Connected app launched with significant server overload issues at release; app functionality mirrors website with minimal innovation; users finding workarounds (Apple Wallet QR codes) more convenient (confidence: high) — Kevin: 'They got overloaded at the beginning'; Nick: 'I just pull up the QR code in my Apple wallet and I scan it and then I play. I don't find myself needing to use the app now that I have the card in my Apple wallet' - **[personnel_signal]** Ben Heck returned to Spooky for Texas Chainsaw Massacre coding after previous tensions; characterized as 'on again, off again' collaboration style (confidence: medium) — Kevin: 'Ben Heck is doing code for the other one Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ben Heck is doing it? Yeah, he's doing it. I thought he wasn't BFF of those guys. Well, they're BFFs again. They're hanging out together. On again, off again.' - **[market_signal]** Standard edition pricing anchor strategy ineffective; minimal market adoption suggests three-tier model may not sustain as manufacturers continue Premium/LE focus at $9k+ price points (confidence: medium) — Nick: 'only six people on Pinside have that in their collection. Just like nobody seems to be in the market for that standard edition'; Kevin notes Scooby-Doo adoption pattern repeating with new Spooky releases - **[announcement]** Spooky announces Looney Tunes (888 units, $8,300-$9,700) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (888 units, same pricing structure) simultaneously; lower production cap than Scooby-Doo (~1,963 units) (confidence: high) — Official Spooky announcement with trailer; Kevin confirms: '888 Looney units each so you get 888 each so was it 1700 ish total um which it puts it a little less than scooby' - **[product_strategy]** Spooky employs strategic multi-tier pricing anchored to entry-level option despite minimal actual adoption of lower tiers; butter cabinet upgrade ($1,500) lacks resale value retention (confidence: high) — Kevin: 'Rick and Morty came out, they sold like five of the low-end version'; Nick: only 6 Scooby-Doo standard editions on Pinside; butter upgrade offers no ROI on resale - **[product_concern]** Systematic pattern of Spooky machines experiencing reliability degradation and insufficient code depth despite strong visual presentation; hosts maintain critical distance from theme-biased fandom (confidence: high) — Kevin: 'Usually they fall apart in terms of quality, no pun intended and uh the code doesn't reach the depth that i think that you and i look for'; hosts note limited adoption of standard tiers suggests premium upsell strategy over actual value differentiation - **[sentiment_shift]** Market FOMO has cooled significantly; customers now wait to play machines before purchasing, enabling secondary market deals below MSRP (confidence: high) — Kevin: 'the like fomo and and hype train has cooled off significantly when it comes to pinball i think you have the opportunity to play some of these games before you run out and buy them'; Nick notes Scooby-Doo sellers taking losses on pre-order spots --- ## Transcript Coming up on this episode of Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball, we've got new pinball machines from Spooky Pinball, we're going to talk about that. We've got also, everybody is clamoring for this, GTF Galactic Tank Force Signature Edition and the 007 Cheaters Club. All that and more coming right up. I need a ramp. I need a loop. I want targets I can hit. I need the scoop. I need a double super jackpot in my life. That's right. And now, the Hall & Oates of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. what's going on everybody welcome to episode 82 of brody even talk pinball for uh december 9th 2023 i'm kevin that's nick hi i'm nick hey hi it's your boy nick uh smash like and subscribe do all the things right we got to say that stuff leave a comment down below yeah i think we did it how was your thanksgiving nick oh it was absolutely wonderful thank you for asking kevin Absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving Yeah, get to spend time with the family I love eating food I think that's important that people know that about me It's really the best holiday If you think about it, it's like Let's just get together and eat a bunch Okay? Sounds good No other pretense, just eating That's right Now for the small talk, let's jump into it Alright, yeah So we got some Partners to thank And we got some giveaways to give away So why don't I do the partners, and then you can talk about the giveaways. You want to do it that way? Oh, yeah. All right. So kicking it off, thank you to our sponsors. PinStadium Lights, our premier partner, PennStadium.com. Use coupon code BUFFALO to save 10% on their incredible lighting kits that make your pinball machines look great with their app-controlled lighting system using your iOS or Android app. A bunch of different products. Find the ones that fit your needs the best over at PennStadium.com. led lights at comet pinball you if you want to buy a pinball machine go to flip and out pinball.com that'll take care of you if you're looking for a cool pinball charity as a sport check out spinnerspinball.org our friend joe saeed over at pinball edu uh runs a cool arcade inclusive arcade in maryland titan pinball titanpinball.com save 10 with coupon code buffalo on all your competition rings over there throw the standard rubber rings in the trash and get yourself some titan pinball competition rings pinside.com the place to go to find all your cheating uh methods for your pinball machines you can share the ways that you cheat with your friends over at pinside.com and multimorphic and jersey jack pinball uh thank y'all for your support uh nick why don't you talk about our giveaways. Happy to do so. We want to give a shout out and thanks to Flip N Out Pinball who are going to be doing not one but two giveaways for this episode. Everybody who's watching live has a chance to win that. Kevin will tell you how after I'm done announcing what we have to give away. Zach from Flip N Out Pinball, the good guy he is, he's giving away a Bond Premium Translite. If you're international, you can still win this. You just got to cover the international shipping so zach will work on you with that and then we're also giving away from stern a jurassic park player mat so uh kevin how can they win these fantastic prizes so our uh our twitch viewers are eligible so if you're watching on youtube jump over to the twitch chat and type hashtag win in the chat and then we will uh pick a winner later in the show uh one winner for the Jurassic Park mat and the other for the 007 Premium Edition Translate. It's the You Only Live Twice version. So if you want to turn your Dr. No into a You Only Live Twice, you can go ahead and do that by winning this 007 Premium Translate thanks to flipping out a pinball. You don't have that game? Hang it on the wall, frame it, make it look nice, turn it into a little backbox for your game room. Yeah, like those ones over there. Somehow that player mat is valued at $90 from Stern, which seems egregious, but that's a great giveaway from Zach. So he's not coming up with the pricing on this. We really appreciate what he's doing. I asked for one giveaway. He gave two. So there you go. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah to everybody. In the spirit of the holidays, Zach is giving. He's giving. All right. It's time for some news. Let's have our friend Tim introduce us. Here's to Tim. It's the latest pinball news. So hot, it's on fire! All right, coming in hot with spooky pinballs. Hold on, Kevin. Hold on. What? Before we get to that, we've got to address the elephant in the room. What's that? Some devastating news came in the day before Thanksgiving, and that was that we learned that Hall had filed a lawsuit against Oates. It's true. Okay? So just an update on that from a couple days ago. This really hit home for me and Kevin, who are the brand ourselves as the Hall & Oates of pinball podcasting. Because if these two guys can't make it and get along together, what chance do we have, Kevin? I'm shaking up. Apparently, Darryl Hall is suing John Oates and arguing an arbitration that he can't sell his share of Hall & Oates' business partnership without Hall's permission. So we always knew that Oates maybe was on a short leash from Darryl Hall. It looks like he broke loose a little bit. Apparently, Hall has accused Oates of blindsiding him and betraying him. This is from the AP News. Betraying him, saying their relationship and his trust in Oates have deteriorated. This is after they're more than half a century together. Oates has said he is deeply hurt that Hall is making, quote, inflammatory outlandish and inaccurate statements about him. So it's just, yeah, it's a tough pill to swallow. So you ask how my Thanksgiving was. I tried to put on a brave face in the beginning of this episode and say it was good, but really this was in the background the whole time and it wasn't as good as it could be. I understand. You were the first person I thought of when the news broke, and I'm sure you heard it from a lot of people. I had a lot of people reach out to me, so I appreciate the concern. And here's my method of engaging the audience. I didn't have the Flip N Out Pinball giveaway live, so now you all have to type win again. and our engagement metrics are going to go way up. So in the Twitch chat, type hashtag win and then you'll win. See, we have zero entries right now. There you go. You got those keyboards warmed up before. Alright, there they go. There we go. Look at that. Oh my god. Look at all that engagement. Alright, you guys are doing it. Alright. Now we can get to the news. And we're going to kick it off with Spooky Pinball. They announced two... pinball machines at once. So two things at once, like Travis Kelsey and his, his ad that he runs during the football games that Nick never sees. He does two things at once. I don't know who that person is. Exactly. I wanted to make that joke to pinball people, but I figured they wouldn't understand what it was. So I told my wife cause she watches football. Spooky pinball dropped trailers for their next game. So remember back when Halloween came out and they were like, Oh, it's Halloween, but we're also doing Ultraman. Well, they're doing it again, except this time it's Looney Tunes and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don't think you can pick two more different themes to go with each other, but that was the big news this week. So we'll start off, I guess, by taking a look at the trailer for Looney Tunes. The pricing on these, a standard edition is $8,300. bloodsucker is 9 000 and the collector's edition is 9 700 so those are roughly in line with what scooby-doo was um so i'll go ahead and we can take a look at this um so we're looking at looney tunes uh the first thing i noticed when i looked at this game was that the man those ramps are really orange and i at first i thought they were plastic but they're actually powder coated with a clear coat over them which i that seems concerning to me like you're smashing those ramps all the time and is that really going to hold up but i guess we'll see has anybody else done that do you know dude i'm glad you said that kevin because that is also the first thing that i i mean the first thing i thought is that looks it's a very visually appealing game right like they they do a good job of that, but then I zoomed in on the ramps and thought the same exact thing. It just looks like they're asking for trouble. Looks good, but I mean, I know people like the habit trails, right, or the wire form return ramps, people are always powder coating them and powder coating, and that seems to hold up. That's fine. But, you know, when you look at ramps and you clean a pinball machine, especially a A lot of, like, dirt, grime, and wear kind of builds up on the steel ramps, like maybe the first inch or two of when the ball enters there, more so than any place, and plus it can have, like, a ball line. But just go look at your ramps on a game that's been played on a steel metal ramp, and you'll notice that. So I don't know what that's going to do over time. I mean, I imagine it's going to wear through the clear powder coat, and then it's going to wear through that. Like, it's just – I don't know, right? I think what you're saying is there's concern, right? I'd be like, hmm, what's going to happen? I have a counterpoint. I'm going to play devil's advocate and say, if your spooky machine is broken all the time, you're not going to wear out your ramps. That's true. You know, maybe they're thinking ahead. They're playing to their audience and their strengths. We'll make it look great. You're not going to play it, so it'll look great. There you go. Maybe that's what they're banking on. In chat, Rubble Guitar says, Scooby has them, but they're mostly hidden under the upper play field. That seems weird. Like, why would you, first off, that's good to know. Second off, why would you spend the time, effort, and money to powder coat a ramp that's under an upper playfield? That seems like a dumb decision. Doesn't seem very smart to me. All right, moving on. Let's check out some of these other features. What else do we got? We got, actually, if I scroll, okay, there you go. Anvil loading space rocket ball launch. So you shoot the left ramp and it loads into a lock over by the rocket. That's pretty cool. And again, you can see it pop in there. And so to me, like comparing, and we'll, we'll look at these a little bit more side by side, but it feels to me like they designed the Texas chainsaw massacre and then adapted the loony tunes around that versus vice versa. Cause I'm the Texas chainsaw mass here. This is the meat grinder over there. and that makes a lot more sense than like a rocket why would a rocket like grind up the ball and you can kind of see that happen here um i i'm not saying it doesn't fit but it just to me it's like you have to start somewhere and it definitely feels to me like they started with texas chainsaw massacre um the the overall layout i think looks good there's a it's a good flowy layout. The ramps and shots seem repeatable. Two upper clippers. There's another the Taz here that spins around and the Acme Crate opens and closes and your ball can lock in there, which is pretty cool. Hashtag some cool mechs. The spinning Taz reminds me of the 90s when everybody was obsessed with the Tasmanian Devil for some reason. and dummies were getting Tasmanian Devil tattoos and stuff. I was going to say, you can bust out a Tasmanian Devil 90s sweatshirt, you know? Exactly. Or a Tweedies Bird shirt, you know? Yeah, that was all the hype in the 90s. Not for me personally, but I know it was, yes. Yep. And then in the back, there's a lock in the back, too, above the spinning Taz. A lot of the folks in comments that I've seen are complaining, you would never imagine that folks might be complaining but they were complaining about the audio saying those are not the right sound effects for Looney Tunes and it's hard to know if these are the sounds that will be in the game because we haven't seen gameplay of it we've only seen these trailers and sometimes you have to kind of modify audio when you upload things to YouTube so there's no saying these are necessarily the sound effects that are going to be in there but the ones that are in there are not authentic Looney Tunes there's the lock in the bag So I think they did a good job taking that other play field and making it feel like Looney Tunes. Obviously, it's a very attractive game. Like you said, that's always been one of Spooky's strong points, I think, is making real good-looking games, which helps people click that buy button. One thing I heard is that the person who did the art for Turner Pinball's Ninja Eclipse also did Looney Tunes. so okay the art is good on Ninja Eclipse I would say and I think it's good on Looney Tunes too so to be entrusted with such an iconic license is there's something to be said for that so that's Looney Tunes so they're limiting each of the two units to 888 Looney units each so you get 888 each so was it 1700 ish total um which it puts it a little less than scooby scooby was at 1900 something 1963 or 64 or something like that um and they didn't sell out of that and they have not sold out of either one of these either so i think the like fomo and and hype train has cooled off significantly when it comes to pinball i think you have the opportunity to play some of these games before you run out and buy them which is a good thing like uh so here's yeah here's the pricing 888 units um and if you want to upgrade to the butter cabinet it's another 1500 so i saw some people saying that's the great greatest way to waste 1500 ever because you never get that price back when you sell it like people reseller or people who are buying a used game don't care if it's butter or not. It's just, if you, if this is your dream theme and you're going to have it in a showcase spot in your game room, then go ahead and pay the extra money. But don't, don't expect to get that back when you, when you sell it. Yeah. The interesting thing is like they have a standard edition, which is not much scroll up Kevin, which is the standard editions, 82 99. The blood sucker edition is 89 99. So I'm looking at like Scooby-Doo Scooby-Doo has like a, like the same kind of thing, three models. When I look at the standard edition for Scooby-Doo, Six people on Pinside have that in their collection. Just like nobody seems to be in the market for that standard edition. They're just happy to pay that extra $700, $800, whatever. So it's interesting that they even offer that. Yeah, I think it's like – So close in pricing. It could be a marketing tactic, right? You always offer three pricing options, and then most people pick the middle one. You know what I mean? So maybe that's why. Got it. Maybe they just want to have the ability to say, hey, we have a pinball machine. Our pinball machines are only $8,300 or whatever. They want to be able to brag about having a low-priced option. But I agree. I remember when Rick and Morty came out, they sold like five of the low-end version. And then the other thing they do is they prioritize build of the more expensive version. So if you want it sooner, you buy the more expensive one. Got it. That's another reason to kind of upsell it a little bit. So, yeah, we'll take a look at some photos here. They have a new thing they're doing is a magnetic speaker panel, which seems kind of weird. But I guess the only reason you would do that is if you were planning on selling other options to stick on there. So maybe like future mod options. Seems like a bad idea for a location. You can just get snagged off of the machine unless they have some way to kind of secure it on there. but that's something else new they're offering. What else? Anything else we want to talk about? There's two buttons on the right and one action button. Again, we haven't seen gameplay of this so we don't know exactly how all of these things are going to be integrated but I kind of like the drop targets and then there's a scoop behind the drop targets here. That's cool. I mean, of the two licenses, this would be the one I'd be more interested in. I'm not a horror movie fan at all but I did watch Looney Tunes growing up so we'll see what's interesting too is that they have two different coders on the two different machines so with Halloween and Ultraman they were more parallel in development I think they had the same team working on both machines and on this one they have Eric Kripke working on Looney Tunes and Ben Heck is doing code for the other one Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ben Heck is doing it? Yeah, he's doing it. I thought he wasn't BFF of those guys. Well, they're BFFs again. They're hanging out together. On again, off again. They're like Hall and Oates, really, if you think about it. What else? Anything else you want to say about Looney Tunes? What do you think? I share your sentiments. I mean, again, I think one thing that Spooky does very, very well is that they make visually appealing games. When you look at it, you're like, art looks great. The stuff on the play field, everything's vibrant. There's stuff going on. They know what they're doing in that sense. They know how to sell a machine. They go out and they pick a licensed game that they can daily sell enough units. I'd love to really spend some time with these games so I can really dig into them. Usually they fall apart in terms of quality. no pun intended and uh the code doesn't reach the depth that i think that you and i look for but undeniably uh game is visually appealing and the layout looks solid too looks like a pretty solid flowy good layout like they're not trying to come up with like things that are different but don't necessarily work right you know yeah it's more of a maybe a safe play but yeah probably the way to go. Yeah, but also doing some neat stuff along the way. I agree. I like this little under-flipper post-trap thing. There's some interesting thought in the layout here. Yeah, definitely not phoned in, right? So you can see the effort. Yeah, it's not just like two ramps, two orbits, and a theme, right? They put some thought into this, and there's some cool mechanics. Like you said, the issues we've seen with Spooky are reliability and code and can they keep that can they kind of rise to that next level when it comes to that. Yeah and I don't know how they can unless they just make some radical changes in like staffing right and who they bring on to work on that so I think we'll see more of the same which is great for their audience and people who like spooky games and the folks who typically veer away from spooky games for the reason that you and I typically do like this is not going to win them over. Right. It's my guess, but it remains to be seen, right? Right, and with the market the way it is right now, there's not as many people who are just going to go and drop money. They're going to kind of wait and see, because most of the time you can buy it used for less. We saw that with Scooby-Doo. People were selling their pre-order spots for less than what they paid for, so they were taking a loss right off the start. I mean, that's good from a consumer perspective in that we get to play these games before we drop money on them, But from a pinball manufacturer's standpoint, it's not as good where, you know, you could instantly drop a game and sell it out because people were just sitting around at home doing nothing and buying pinball machines. So it'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out across all the manufacturers, not just Spooky. So there's Looney Tunes. Let's take a look at Texas Pinball Massacre. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not Texas Pinball Festival. Texas Pinball Festival Chainsaw Massacre. That's going to be their next game. So are you a Texas Pinball, Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan? Have you seen the movie or anything like that? I have not. I probably should see the movie, right? It's like a horror classic at this point. There was just a video game that came out, I think, over the summer that's kind of like a Dead by Daylight clone, but it's just on that movie alone. So, yeah, I kind of totally want to watch maybe next, like, around Halloween time. That's like a 4K purchase, and I watch it. But, yeah, I'm not... People, like, absolutely love horror, and they can't get enough horror. Like, I don't seek it out. I'd watch it. But this kind of does nothing for me. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. Both these themes do nothing to me, by the way. So, like, my joke is, like, two more themes marked safe, right? or my dream themes are marked safe once again. Spooky's not going to get their hands on things that I like. Yeah. I mean, I like that there's a company taking a chance on licenses like this because I don't think this is something that Stern would ever do. And they're obviously passionate about it. If you watch the longer feature video that Straight Down the Middle did, this is where they shine, right? This is their bread and butter. so yeah and i think i think this is like if you're a fan of spooky right then they're they're making all these licenses that you know no none of these other pinball manufacturers are going to do um and if you like these themes then you're you're going to super root for spooky right you're going to give them a pass you're going to defend them you're going to get mad when people like you and i criticize spooky i think like you and i come from it like as objectively as possible because we not getting pulled or drawn in by themes So we look at what there in terms of quality We judging it based on code versus what other manufacturers are doing And I think that's where we butt heads with everybody else. So I get it. If I was a horror fanatic or whatever, and Spooky is just knocking on the park constantly making themes that I like, Like, I'd have a bias that comes in play where I'd want to root for them. I'd want to try to give them a pass. And I think this is just where we differ here. Yeah. Like, you and I differ from, like, the spooky fans. Yeah, the spooky supporters. Yeah, for sure. And, like, something more like Rick and Morty is more up my alley. So that's something that appeals to me more than a horror theme like this. And that's why I'm more interested in that game than most of the spooky games. That and Total Nuclear Annihilation, that's sort of my alley, too. But, you know, it's not enough to get me to buy because I've still not I don't own any of either of those. Yeah. My concerns about reliability and especially now with Rick and Morty on the resale market, that's one that held its value because they sold only 750 of those. And those sold out immediately. And it's a really strong license and it has wide appeal. So it's it's kind of held its own. But, you know, I think maybe eventually those will be available for sale. But let's talk a little bit more about Texas Chainsaw Massacre and specific that, you know, obviously the mechs and the layout are all the same. So a lot of what we said about the Looney Tunes layout applies here. But I think what we saw, what I my impression is that they designed this game, this play field for this game and theme, and then they adapted it to the other. I could be wrong, but that's just the impression I get. But the other thing that was a little disturbing watching Bug talk about this game and he's like, in this game, you're the murderer and you're trying to kill everybody. It's like, all right, buddy. OK, that's your thing. That's cool. But you get a little too excited about some cannibalism there. So apparently that so most like horror games, you would be like trying to escape from this bad guy. But like, no, you're like, that's that's your bro in this game. Like, he's your buddy. you're trying to feed people to him so he can chop them up and turn them into meat or whatever and throw them into the meat grinder which is over here on the left um so yeah i i guess that's not what i look for when i step up to a pinball machine i was thinking about it earlier today is that if i uh if i had to pick like one genre of themes that appeal to me most in pinball it's probably probably sci-fi stuff like you know final resistance and tron and alien those kind of themes are what appeal to me the most so those are kind of the ones that i would be more biased towards uh not so much like you know hacking and murdering people isn't at the top of my list of things i like to do in my casual time so that's not something i'm looking to to bring into my pinball experience i guess so um yeah i mean visually the ramps here are more of a blood red a lot of a lot of like deep reds in this like you would expect on a on a horror theme reminds me kind of like at first glance of a walking dead overall you know if you're thinking just general aesthetics of a game it's kind of got that uh overall look i think a little more bling with the powder-coated out ramps and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, the art is good. The entire package is good. If this is your dream theme, you're probably already in on it. If you're like the rest of us and the gameplay and rules and everything like that are what it comes down to, then, yeah, I would recommend taking a wait-and-see approach because I do like Like, Walking Dead is one of my favorite games of all time, right? And that's a horror theme, and it's an ugly machine. But the rules are really good, and the gameplay's fun, and the layout's cool. So, like, that overcomes that for me. So something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be something like that for me. Nick, what do you think of Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yeah, same, same. I mean, look, to your comment about being, like, the murderer, I mean, that's, to me, that's fine. That's whatever. They're offering something different. Like, I used to play a lot of Dead by Daylight. you know you can be the survivors or you can be the person who's hunting them down and you know it's it can be fun both ways uh but yeah i mean like i'm glad that people who like horror i mean it's cool i'm i always like when people get their their dream theme and their theme so like i'm i'm happy that uh they're scratching an itch for for this crowd and uh i'm curious i have not been following along on scooby-doo right obviously we talked a lot about that earlier in the year As usual, we upset people. I've played only a couple games on location, so I can't really talk much about it. But I am curious if any of these fellow operators are listening to this podcast, if you operate on location, what your experience has been from earnings, from reliability. So feel free to share that experience with us, because I don't think we're really going to get a good chance to ever – we never really get a good chance to dive into these games. As you know, we had a friend who was buying Spooky. We got to do Halloween. We did a stream on it. He's been burned by Spooky, so he's in the Never Again Spooky Club, which, again... Yeah, although he just bought a TNA, so... Of course he did. So, yeah, a lot of people say Never Again, and then a new machine comes out and they buy it anyway. All right, well, okay. All right. Well, maybe we'll get to play this game. Exactly. I think we will eventually. Is James getting it? I don't know. I think Christy and Scott might end up getting it. All right. Maybe we'll stream it. Okay. Okay. All right. They're big horror movie fans. All right. Let's move on. There you go. Okay. So those are the two big announcements for the day, for the month. We got some other news to share, though. Stern Pinball finally launched their app for Insider Connected. Nick, did you download the app? Dude, I did when it was launched, and it wasn't logging in, and then I instantly forgot about the fact that the app exists after wanting the app for so long. So I should try to see if I can log in again. I don't know if it's a me problem or they were just having problems with their server. Yeah, it was a problem everybody was having. They got overloaded at the beginning. If only they could have predicted how many people might do this based on the number of people who have been using their app. But, yeah, they finally launched an iOS and Android app for Insider Connected. Promptly, like, crashed and people couldn't log in. Had a bunch of problems. I didn't even get to the point you got to. I just thought people were having so many problems that I didn't even bother downloading the app. And then I totally forgot. So, it doesn't really, like, I don't end up navigating through the website much when I do Insider Connected. I just pull up the QR code in my Apple wallet and I scan it and then I play. I don't find myself needing to use the app now that I have the card in my Apple wallet. I don't know. Maybe once I download it, I'll see the advantages to digging through there because you could probably go through and track your achievements in theory. That's what I would want to do, like see if there's things I can go for, maybe check leaderboards, things like that, make it a little easier. But from what I've heard, it's just like an app-based interface for their website, which was never that great to me. So, yeah, Insider Connector. It's getting better, but it's still got ways to go, I think. Okay, yeah, I'm looking at it now. It looks very familiar to the website, so it's probably the same thing. Good to finally have that. I'll add that to my home screen on my phone, but there we go. Nothing radically different. If you've logged into the website on your phone, it's basically the same thing. I obviously prefer the app, though, because it's just less steps, right? Right. And then it's just loaded on your phone, and you can just pop in real quick. In theory, pop in real quick and do what you need to do and get out. And hopefully, one of the issues with the website is that I always had to log in when I went back to it. It never kept me logged in. So hopefully, this will at least keep you logged in on your phone and make it easier to get to your QR code or whatever. One can hope. Are we ready to talk Galactic Tank Force? As ready as one can be for this exciting topic. It's a puzzling topic. Yeah, this came a little bit out of nowhere. Can I preface? Can I just set the table? Let's set the table. Okay, so if you're a loyal listener and following along, then you're up to speed on Galactic Tank Force, and I'm not really going to recount too much here, But this is a game made by American Pinball, which came out around the year, and it got much derision from the community and much confusion from the community. I'm looking on Pinside, and how many – so they've got – how many fucking models? They have an LE and DE on here, which I guess Deluxe Edition, Limited Edition, like, you know. In and of itself, you can't really even figure out what the difference is. But, Kevin, how many games – if I add both up, How many games do you think have been self-reported as sold by collectors? 75. That's a really good guess. It's 68. Oh, I was a little over. That is... A little over. For anybody wondering, that's fucking terrible. Okay? That is fucking terrible. Like, let me say it one more time. Fucking terrible. Like, you've failed when you have self-reported 68 games. And I... All right. Let me just look at some other things for you guys. So put everything in perspective. Scooby-Doo came out this year. Their collector's edition, 483 self-reported. 68 to 483. Yeah, I would put Spooky and American kind of parallel in terms of size of production capability and things like that. All right, let's see what else came. Yeah, they're there. But American Pinball is bigger than Spooky. Spooky is like a boutique. American Pinball is like one notch higher than that, like a notch lower than Stern or Jersey Jack, right? Yeah, somebody go to Jersey Jack next. They should be like really fucking them up. All right, we're going to look at all the games that came out right there. Like I said before, Godfather has not been doing great, so let's look at that. By the way, if you're interested in Godfather, I'd say reach out to Zach and see if he's got any deals for you on a new one. Oh, shoot. Let's see. I don't know if he does, but that's what I would do. All right. Godfather LE. Let's see what that is. Godfather LE, 103. Not good. Nope. Not great. Not great. How many collector's editions? 224. Not great, but again, better. Much better than 68. Okay? So over 300. Losing to Scooby-Doo, which is a sad fucking day. Really sad day all around. And then we'll look at the other one would be Foo Fighters. Which is probably crushing all of them Because Stern's kind of got to figure it out On the price point So Foo Fighters Pro 320 Foo Fighters Premium Which is going to be even more I'm guessing 443 And then the LE 365 So over a thousand Over a thousand Foo Fighters Versus 60 fucking 8 Black Tic Tac Force Okay now we can go with the story because that was a very important thing for everybody to just think about. Yep, yep. So kind of a few weeks ago, what was the date on this? November 21st, American Pinball reveals special features for Galactic Tank 4 Signature Edition machines. So this is coming from Nap Arcade, a few of our stories we've shown today. Shout out to Nap Arcade for staying on top of things. He says, well, we have known about the Signature Edition of American Pinball's latest game of Galactic Tangs Force since it was launched. We never really knew all the special features that were to be included in that version of the game. An hour or so ago, AP launched a trailer for the GTF Signature Edition. So here's a quote from... Well, I'm not going to quote it. I'm going to play this video for you because why not hear directly from the source? So let me jump over here and then I'm going to switch the audio so Nick can hear too. And then y'all can enjoy. So he's going to get this one. So you should be able to hear it now. Okay, so American Pinball presents Okay, we're in a kitchen. There's a kid with a rocket ship and then Duke Kaboom shows up. Wowee! Indeed, Bobby. Hello, I'm Major Duke Moonwalker, here from the future to tell you about a great offer from American Pinball today. The top-of-the-line exclusive release of the Galactic Tank Force Signature Edition. I got to put you over here. Tank Force Signature Edition. Bobby, who are you talking to? The Spaceman. So Bobby's in the kitchen talking to the Spaceman. The Spaceman comes with all the action, all the gameplay, and all the interactive entertainment you've come to enjoy. Plus, exclusive new features, including... Exclusive new features. Okay, all right. Well, all right, all right. So we're going to stop right there. nick what do you what do you think of the exclusive features of uh this 3d printed toy that's been painted it's like uh that was the same put lipstick on a pig yeah that's it so they that all those 3d printed ships that uh everybody was like those are terrible now they they put a little paint on them all right back to it that change with playfield lighting oh they change with playfield lighting how wait hang on let's let's look at let's go back okay painted glow tech toys that change with playfield lighting so so the the light from the side reflects off of the top of that that's how it changes with the playfield lighting is that what they're claiming there i think that's what they're claiming oh my goodness all right so all right that's one thing so we've got that exclusive oh this this this might be my favorite let's let's let's get back Let's make sure we get that whole thing. Exclusive radiant rubber reactive bands from Titan throughout the game. Jeepers. They put glow-in-the-dark Titan rings on it. So it's like $5 worth of Titan rings on the machine. All right. I don't have the audio anymore, Kevin, but I don't want you to break anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't do that. So, yes. So something you could do yourself for a few dollars. they're they're claiming that as one of the one of the top of the line achievements of this signature edition which will we'll get to the price later because the price is insane um but okay there's that priceless signature edition apron decal priceless signature edition apron decals well that's right who cares it has they fixed the signature on there so that makes it priceless right who who cares about like all their this this team is super proud of this game that is appealing to such an extremely small niche audience. It's super bizarre. They're doing the bare minimum level of investment in this thing to give the illusion of value when there's really no added value. And you're going to see that over and over throughout this video. Signed by actual members of the GTF design team with official hologram. It comes with an official hologram, they say, which is literally like they went to one of these online sticker mules or something, and they got a sticker made with a holographic foil finish, and they slapped it on the apron, and they're calling it an exclusive hologram. It's like the worst possible – this is like kindergarten-level marketing stuff going on here. Hey, howdy. Retro green powder coat solid metal legs. retro green uh powder coated solid bills and lockdown bar exclusive only on this one-of-a-kind signature collector's edition it's exclusive only on this one-of-a-kind edition collector's edition machine which you could just go get done yourself if you really like that color like if you had one of the other versions and you like that color you could just go get your own armor powder coded okay oh geez evolutionary design fold and fight gtf tank turret dreamed up by dennis nordman holy yeah so we've we've railed on this before it's like yeah that looks awesome that's really cool looking but like how often do you fold down the backbox on your pinball machine like if you're like me you bring your pinball machine home you set it up and then you leave the back so why would This is a waste of building materials. Waste of time. Waste of engineering. It's stupid. Nobody wants this. This is not selling shit. Yeah, obviously, because it hasn't sold anything yet. So here we go. Keep going. Also including mesmerizing, motion-activated, three-dimension back glass. Okay, that's kind of cool. Like the 3D lenticular back glass. You know, I have one on my Tron. I really like it. It's exclusive to this version. Okay, I'll give him credit there. I dig that. I agree. I agree. It's fitting for this theme. retro sci-fi diamond coated playfield retro sci-fi diamond coated playfield okay what is what is retro sci-fi about the finish on the playfield what the fuck does that even mean they they they we've been clear everyone clear coats their playfields these days what does that mean yeah i don't know i don't know did they i think they're trying to like say we brought back diamond coat but you know it's that's not what they did it's got lead in it thank you hsh from the chat good good uh good call got some good comments going here i appreciate this uh it's got the dumb tank treads on there which you can get on the one of the other versions of deluxe right gee whiz who cares did they make the leds on the tank treads better or no they're just the same bullshit i was just gonna mention that the best part of that is once people got these and set them up there you have to like plug the led tank tread lights in separately so they're like they went to amazon and they bought some strips of leds and they they stuck them on the sides and then you just plug them in and they they're kind of they're not integrated with the game at all so they do you have to when you're done do you have to unplug it separately there's is there an on and off switch for the leds like you turn the game out but the leds are still i don't i don't even care to know i just who gives a shit but there's like there's extra like wires and stuff that you have to have underneath your machine to plug those things in. You get a lunchbox. Okay, the lunchbox is cool. I like the lunchbox. Is it worth $16,000 to upgrade to my Galactic Tank Force Signature Edition? Oh, I spoiled the price. I would argue no. Yeah, but this thing doesn't move. Like, having a lunchbox was a waste of time and energy production. You got to ship it. Like, this doesn't sell the game. You know what I mean? Like, you need to sell games. This is not selling. It's like, oh, we're missing a lunchbox. We had a lunchbox. We're just going to sell these 100 more games. Like, no. It's not moving the needle. If they wanted to do a lunchbox, they should have just sold it separately and be like, if you want a lunchbox, here's a lunchbox. For all 10 of you that own this game, maybe one of you wants a lunchbox. Right. Lunchbox with working thermos. It comes with a thermos. Just like they use on the moon of Lumina. I want one. Collector's edition. Pause right there, Kevin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is... I'm pulling the lead and I can't... This is the kind of stuff you do and make when you have a highly successful game. Right? Like, you have a game that so many people bought and so many people want and love that they're going to buy accessories they're going to buy or they want the ultimate edition of this. Right? Like, that's what you do. Not on a failing game. Like, all this... Like, they have a game that is a fucking turd. Like, it is, like... It is... It is a disaster. Okay? I'm sorry. Like, you shoot the messenger here. You can go ahead and hate me for it, but, like, I just went over the numbers on Pinside. This is an abject failure. So why – when you release, like, this signature or even more special edition, this is what a company does with, like, an Alvira, like a really successful game to generate more sales on a successful game than somebody wants. This is what you do, like, on Jurassic Park, which sold a ton. Right? Like, you don't do this on a game that's failed that nobody wants. You don't come out with an edition that's worth even more money. Like, the thinking behind this is just super crazy. And this, like, marketing video is pretty good. Like, I'm not, like, the marketing things that they're trying to do to sell it aren't. But, like, I'll give them credit. Like, this is a fine video. But, like, the time and effort put into this is just, like, a real, real head scratcher. I just don't understand what's going on. I couldn't even try to get into this level of thinking if I tried. yeah i like the uh the comment in chat working thermos is a pair is as opposed to a non-working thermos i hate my thermos doesn't work it's a selling point the fact that it works so this uh this next part and somebody said um uh i want to give credit uh somebody somebody said they're gonna oh james draws said they're gonna uh offer this for the lunchbox for sale separately so it's not exclusive To which I would also point out the fact that neither is the pint glass. If you really want a pint glass, you could just buy a pint glass. They're going to talk about some of this other stuff. All of this is on their website. Amazing. What a fail, dude. What? Jesus Christ. Yeah, so. Galactic Tank Force pint glass. I need one for my dad. One giant five-foot Captain Cayenne vinyl show banner. Get a banner. Too swell. Two full-color, frame-ready Galactic Tank Force pinball posters. They're frame-ready Galactic Tank Force posters. All of the above. All of the above. Artwork by famous pinball artist Christopher Franchi. Wait, wait, wait. We're getting to it, so. Likely to be worth even more in the future. There it is. All of it contains priceless art by Christopher Franchi, likely to be worth even more in the future So they selling this as an investment They like you need to buy this because it probably going to go up in value because it got famous pinball art on it Like what could go wrong? Definitely buy that. And again, all those, those things that they just showed, uh, the posters, the banner, the mug, or the, the glass, you can just buy that stuff. If you like it, the posters are 30 bucks each. The pint glass is 20 and the banner is a hundred bucks if you really want it. So again, Just go buy those things separately. There's no reason to buy this Signature Edition machine. Kevin, how many of these machines are they going to sell? Like five. I bet they'll sell like five of these. My number in my head before I asked that was 10, which seems very generous. It does. It does. I must be in a good mood this morning. You're feeling good. Well, I was generous on the overall sales of the other version. Okay, there you go. And is that good if they sell 10? Is that like they find 10 people or five people? is that a win? I don't even know. I don't know. Super bizarre. These are supposed to be limited to 200, so I would guess if that's their goal and they sell 10, that's a fail in my book. You know what I mean? Oh, God. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in this company. I would just love to hear the thinking that goes on. It works, Bobby. It's beyond me. You'll have the biggest score of your life by investing in a galactic tank. There was a good part. Here we go. Life by investing in a galactic tank for signature edition today, investing in a galactic tank for signature edition, investing. It's not an investment. Pinball is not an investment by the pinball machines. You like to play. You're probably going to lose money. Sometimes you'll make a little money. That's nice. When it happens, don't put your money into this as an investment. Don't miss out. Don't miss out. Don't miss out. Bye. Now we don't miss out times. You don't open up your wallet. Get your credit cards out and buy it immediately. Wait, so how does time travel work? That's not important, Bobby. What is important is that you call your distributor today. Hurry. Only 200 available. Only 200 available. So will one day I be a pinball expert and have a big black mustache? It's a fucking meme. Bobby! here comes mom out to flirt with uh duke kaboom over here so i feel like there was another investment thing in here somewhere that might have been it okay oh yeah contact your distributor invest in the future invest buy now don't miss out there's really really trying hard to get the fomo going here and i think i failed another another fail and i thought we were done i thought they were just ready to move on and just take the L. But now, this came out of nowhere, and here we are talking about it again. I thought we were done, Kevin. Thought we could move on. Joystick Jedi in chat says we're taking this too seriously. I think it's important to call out when there's nonsense like this. This, to me, it reminded me of the NFT thing. Everybody's going to get in on this. We all love it. You've got to buy now you got to be the you you got it don't want to be the the the late adopter you want to be the early adopter and come out ahead you know it had that it really struck me as gross when i watched this video i was like this is disgusting the the investment angle of it i was like i just cannot i cannot and then the fact so it's like okay if you're going to play that angle give something of value and the fact that there is nothing of value because you can buy all this stuff separately there's there's no there's no reason to buy this it's like so we haven't officially talked pricing but the pricing is like it's one of those call for pricing schemes and we've seen that with the elvira super special edition they did last year beatles was this way um i think uh it wasn't bond 60th was also a call for pricing thing and from what i've read online the people who have called for pricing that they're asking around $16,000 for this machine, which is insane. Do not buy this for $16,000. Yeah, and I think we can kind of take this seriously because, I mean, it's kind of interesting, but Kevin and I both have a kind of communication, sales, marketing background between the two of us and spend a lot of time. So we think about this stuff, and we really lock on it, and we try to understand the decision making and we're kind of we're just just absolutely bewildered so this is fascinating to us and we love to kind of talk about it and break it down and you know it's not all bad when somebody does something good we're happy to say oh this is we think this is a good move and here's why we think it's a good move and it will do well and this is just so many bewildering things with galactic tank force uh it's it's remarkable yeah as contrast i think uh the uh barrels of fun guys they did a great job. They did it the way you would want. They built machines. They had a good license. They manufactured them. Then they put them up for sale. People can play them immediately. You know, they kind of checked all the boxes. So, you know, it's not just, you know, we're not looking to just like put people on blast all the time, but when something's ridiculous, we'll do it. Yeah. If you haven't, if you missed that episode and you'll listen to our remarks on that and how we contrast contrast what they did and how we analyze that versus this right you know there's logic behind it right there you go there you go you guys can talk amongst yourselves in chat on that we're going to move on to some other we got a few other updates for you uh and on the multi-morphic front we had a few uh smaller releases the bird watcher add-on game from ian harroware games is a 150 game you can grab for your p3 it works on all the modules now I did the official launch stream with Ian he was kind enough to come from his home country of Canada all the way over here to Buffalo and he joined me on stream to show off Birdwatcher we also did some of the first testing on the Final Resistance playfield so you can see some gameplay of that in action on our YouTube channel if you're looking for just a chill game to play after you get your butt kicked on Final Resistance, Birdwatcher's a great one. It reminds me of Pokemon Snap in pinball form, so if you're a 90s kid and you played Pokemon Snap on your Nintendo 64, you kind of got an idea of what to expect with a game like this. You're looking to take pictures of all the birds and fill up your bird book, and Ian did it cool. So he's the first one, so there have been other P3 games that have worked on all the playfield modules, but this is the first one that customizes the game to the playfield module you're playing on so when you play on the final resistance playfield you get cool like futuristic looking backgrounds and stuff and when you play on heist you're in a city and uh all those sorts of things so super cool integration he's a one-man team he brought this game to market all on his own uh from you know concept to implementation marketing and uh getting it getting it out there so uh huge kudos to uh Ian and crew and crew, which is only him who, uh, who brought this to life. I mean, it's awesome to see yet another third party, uh, a game on the P3 and Nick, Nick got to play a little birdwatcher. You like this one, right? It's very relaxing. Yeah. Yeah. It's got super chill music. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So there you go. Birdwatcher. Um, also, uh, weird Al got a big update. Um, so right. Uh, I think this was actually on Thanksgiving. They dropped this. um i'll just show you on screen there's a massive change log of all the things that are new uh but you know here's the graphic kind of sums it all up uh so they enhanced mode squashed bugs uh improved accessibility uh so i think for for colorblind folks the germs mode was challenging because it was hard to tell the good from the bad germ so they they fixed some of the graphics on that for folks who are colorblind um some nicer rules some meaner rules uh and same delicious baloney flavor one of the things they changed it was the you make me winner mini wizard mode i haven't had a chance to dig into that yet because i've been playing final resistance so much but when i drop weird l back in i'm looking for it that's one of the things i'm looking forward to it to get into and trying out is uh i from what i've read or what i remember i may be remembering wrong but it's like an edible mode now which sounds pretty cool so um check that out if you got a weird ale um and this was cool nick did you see this this uh this papa video that was going around i did not know okay so this will be news to you it's coming and it's got like jaws-ish sounding in 2024 stay tuned what what what do you think that is i don't know though i mean it could be anything i know it could be streaming again exactly so so i was trying to like like what game is that that we see here that's an oldie it's an oldie that's like a early sunset game or an em i don't like this stuff like just fucking say you know make it clear that it's either the tournament's coming or it's streaming Yeah, but like Doug Polka shared this on Facebook And Elizabeth shared it Don't do this to me Doug and Elizabeth Don't get my hopes up If it's not Papa coming back Papa we know and love We need Pimberg back I'm on the edge already Hopefully for those of y'all who are into tournaments Or just awesome pinball experiences That's what this is Yeah I hope so I'm pretty excited We'll keep an eye on that and let you all know when we know more. All right. Coming back to our, you know, a couple months ago, we had the Dump Inside Post of the Month, and this one found its way to Nick and I. And it kind of hits on two of the themes we've touched on in the past, both of cheater ramps and dump inside posts. So let's take you over to there, to the 007 James Bond Cheaters Club. And this is something people are embracing. So this person on Pinside said, I became an honorable member of the Cheaters Club. I appreciate that, though. I appreciate that he knows he's in the Cheaters Club. Did we coin the Cheaters Club? No, we coined Cheater Ramps. Cheater Ramps, okay. But this is definitely a Cheater Ramp. The 007 Cheaters Club is a subset of that, I think. so uh he glued a bunch of stuff to his game which is cool you know oh there it is that's it so this is so if you've played james bond 007 by stern on the left there's a scoop that the ball goes into and it holds it and then it kicks it out like at random back into the middle of the playfield people have taken that scoop and turned it into a vertical up kicker which safely returns it to the wire for him instead of kicking it back out onto the play field. So instead of this randomization that you would get of the machine that legendary George Gomez designed, they're taking this and turning it into a safe little, like, boop, pops it right back onto the ramp, and then you can have a safe shot to take another shot from the left. So there you go. That's our latest installment of 007 The Cheaters Club. the latest in the cheater ramp controversy nick what do you what do you think about this latest cheater i i've i'm really concerned and i my heart goes out to all of the uh bond fan owners like this is what this is their their their cope i mean they're really it's been rough for them code wise and dealing with things that they have to glue like all the shit in the world to their game and make cheater ramps like this these fans have been traumatized significantly with this game it's it's hard to it's hard to see and watch and i feel i really feel for them i feel that this is like this is what it's come to that they got to do um you're all cheaters and i think that maybe uh i don't know man maybe just give the game up and move on this game like no amount of ramps or anything's going to make you happy with this game and no amount of cope and sunk costs. And I feel for you. I'm not being a dick. I feel for you. But yeah, it's weird, Kevin. I mean, even three years ago, were cheater ramps a thing in games and modifying games? This is unthinkable. What's going on? I don't know. What is happening? What's the bigger picture? I think we talk about a mental health crisis in America, and I think this is pinball really showing of a cheater ramps the evidence is creeping in i don't know yeah like you said we need to get better help as a sponsor as a buffalo pinball so we can i know we have at least one psychologist like a couple psychologists that uh watch the show so if you want to ping me and try to explain what's going on um happy to happy to inform our our viewers and listeners listen having good fun with the cheaters kevin i say you but you buy it you buy something do whatever you want um that's that's your prerogative our prerogative is the shit on cheater ramps so uh no baby games no cheater ramps here buffalo pinball yep i'm gonna jump back to a troller a troll uh comment in chat from joystick jedi says it blows me away that they piss on gtf and fawn over the p3 i love buffalo pinball man well we love you too and i'll also draw some some differentials between the the two uh stories that we just had so galactic tank force signature edition a sixteen thousand dollar game versus the uh uh bird watcher which is a hundred and fifty dollar add-on game okay these are these are not anywhere near comparable you also have a one-man team bringing it to market versus this whole crew over here at american pinball and their marketing approaches are vastly different ian is donating a portion of the sales of his uh of his game a bird watcher to charity to a nature charity. Let me see. He's got it here. The Nature Conservancy of Canada. I'm going to guess that your sales of Galactic Tank Force Signature Edition, none of that is going to charity. So, you know, there's a little bit of difference here. And I am unabashedly like, not only are multi-morphic partners of ours, we disclose that every month, but I'm a big fan. That's why I support them. That's why I choose to bring them in and elevate what they do because I'm a big fan of what they do. So I tend to support the companies that I like. They do the things I like. Those are the things that I kind of go with. Yeah, so Kid Pinball says you guys need to give Bond another try. It has really come around. So listen, I'm happy to play it more and see the updates. I always liked how Bond shoots. right like i there's something about that game and the design of the game that makes me want to play it right i i feel pulled in by it like um but from what i heard from people that i trust is that the game's just still a mess like they've added a bunch of shit in there but it's kind of like they've had a lot of like modes and stuff but it's just nothing really comes together there's a lot of stuff but it's just like everything's the same just like shoot the shot like this you can see a game like Godzilla that really comes together with rules or rush and I just have no faith in Lonnie D. Ropp in creating a game other than like shoot the shot a million times like my buddy Matt was over our friend Matt was talking to me he's a huge Bond fan buys the game and he's complaining about the game they've added a bunch of stuff but it's like you know in the queue mode you gotta shoot in that stupid scoop like seven times and it's gotta shoot it up and you're stuck in it like that's the kind of shit like yes you've added more to it, but does the stuff that you add to it, does that make it any better? Just because there's more stuff to it doesn't necessarily make it better. So, happy to play, happy to give it a shot. I'm rooting for the game. Like I said, I like the design of it. I love the fact that there's a dong in it. That's fantastic. But I think this game's just kind of a mess, unfortunately. And that's too bad, because I would've liked a Bond game. I think Bond's a cool theme. Yeah, to the point of Galactic Tank Force, when that got announced, Right here on this very podcast, I said I was interested in the theme, and I like a Deadness and Ordeman game, and I was considering it, but then it came out and I played it, and we saw it having all sorts of issues at Pinbrew when we went, and I watched people trying to fix the stand-up target with 3D-printed supports and things like that. I'm like, I don't need that in my life. You couldn't plunge the ball because the shooter rod was weird. and just there's so many red flags on that game and the code had all sorts of issues. The reveal stream that they did, like the balls just kept getting stuck. It's like, there's nothing there that was like, all right, I'm going to take a shot on this game. Maybe down the line, if it's a game that, you know, takes a hit in value and I can get secondhand and it turns into a fun game, I would give it a second look. But what's there right now? And it's also the way they're marketing that signature edition was just so bad. Such a red flag to me. So back to Bond. Look, I read what the chat says, and I don't dismiss that, right? A lot of people are saying they like it. There's a lot more. Again, I'm happy to play it. That game's probably come down to value so much for the pro that if I had room, I would probably buy it just to really spend a lot of time if I didn't talk about it intelligently. I do want to spend more time. I think the funny thing is, it's so much better They added smart bombs, new modes, mode stacking. It's like, dude, yeah, of course it's better when it launched because it was a shell of a game. So psychologically, every time they add something, you're going to be happy. It's going to feel better. You know, we're finally getting to the point where you can almost judge it by what the game really is right now. But, you know, you guys were so traumatized that every update you're salivating for, and they put a little thing in. It's like, oh, my God, it's so much better. It's better. Yeah, of course it's better than when it first came out. how does it stack up to other games that are out? How does it stack up to Foo Fighters? How does it stack up to Venom? How does it stack up to I don't know the last few games that got released. Rush. For what it's worth, if somebody said Nick, would you rather have a Venom Pro or a Bond Pro, I would pick Bond Pro. So there's that. If you could say, would you rather have a Foo Fighters Pro or a Bond Pro, So I'd be, honestly, I'd be tempted to say Bond Pro even. That doesn't mean that the game's good or doesn't have problems or I'm not going to dunk on it. But, like I said, I am drawn a little bit to the game because I like how it shoots. And it's a game that I want to like. But I just think it's kind of a mess. I think it's kind of a mess. I do wonder, like, to your point about, like, the code updates and, like, how bare bones it was when it came out. Stern has definitely flipped the script on its perception as, like, with code support. And I wonder if it would behoove other manufacturers to, like, launch games with less code, even if they have it, like, ready to go. And then just over the course of, like, the next six months, just, like, release a code update every month. And then the Pinside community would be like, oh, look at this amazing code support. We've got new code every month, even though all along it's been finished. And they could just, like, manipulate the public into thinking they have this amazing code support, even though the end product would be anyways either way. so i don't listen i'm listening to you guys in chat there's a lot of people i respect and and uh i'm happy i yeah but uh almost the prices are going up on it people want i'm looking on pin side 6700 for bond pro oof so i don't know what's funny too is like it always comes down to these are objective opinions they're subjective opinions and and people think their opinion is objective like no uh this game is way better than that other game and if you don't agree with me you're so dumb no everybody likes different things we've talked about this before not everybody likes the same movies not everybody likes the same video games not everybody likes the same thing in pinball it's okay when i when i when i can spend time on no but i i like listen i i i like when the chat tells me hey this but you should look at again like i did that with uh uh led zeppelin so so you know did with led zeppelin at black knight um so again i uh i hope i get to spend some meaningful time on it because you know yeah i really dig into the both games both venom and that i don't know when i'm gonna get a chance to but maybe in a few months yeah i actually kind of like venom and a lot of people don't so i haven't played it a ton and maybe at home it would lose its luster but i i enjoy playing that game so i don't know it seems okay what's uh i mean what's like the venom pro is that like just i haven't played away from that the pro is probably a thinker but i like premium in le those are fun they have some cool max tm yeah all right you you let's take a trip uh and take a look back through the through the year there i i figured you know at the end of the year we'll do it take it take it take a breath take a look back and what what did we get in 2023 um so i went on pin side and i i loaded up the old uh list of games and technically scooby came out this year it was launched in december of 22 but we didn't actually get them until 23 so i'll include scooby in there we got scooby and then in january we got 007 60th edition the twenty thousand dollar um single level game we got that then foo fighters uh cornerstone from stern so they got their cornerstone out uh final resistance release we came out for multimorphic a full playfield module from them uh we got a jersey jack uh godfather pulp fiction got announced but they haven't shipped any yet uh those are still kind just hanging out there. Allegedly, they have a production model built or whatever we reported last month, but we're still waiting on those to hit full production Galactic Tank Force we talked about that Plenty of those to go you buy now because you don want to miss out on those Ninja Eclipse it's a prototype so they're production planned if you want a full priced game for what looks like a home edition pinball machine Ninja Eclipse might be for you oh and also it doesn't take money, you have to use an app so that's going to do great I bet we got Punny Factory, finally we got Punny Factory they made like three of them and then they fell apart and the playfields disintegrated so good for them funny oh this says they made 12 games or they limited the engraved edition to 12 uh okay space hunt got announced remember that we already forgot about space hunt that got announced centaur haggis is gonna make centaur eventually apparently man venom we got venom we talked about that jurassic park 30th edition that got announced a couple mini add-on games for the p3 dungeon door defender drained bite size labyrinth came out hot that that's uh out on location and and hitting locations got a new version of alien elton john we got our second jjp in uh in one year one calendar year uh two in one year there. And we got another rerun of Error's House of Horrors and most recently Birdwatcher for the P3. Nick, what are your thoughts on 2023? That seemed like a lot. Great year, yeah. We need to stop and think about it. That's a lot of pinball. Great year. That's my thought. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot. Not everything's great in it, but a lot of pinball. A lot of pinball. It made me wonder how. Godfather Game of the Year for me. What's your Game of the Year? We haven't played them all, so that's not fair. but a lot of these things I haven't played Puny Factory but something tells me that it would not be my game of the year it might be the joke of the year we can have a category for pinball joke of the year we've got a bunch of those that would just be duking it out yeah I mean as of the games I've played I'd agree Godfather I haven't played Elton John yet I'd be curious to try that yeah that's true we'll see Venom and Solid and yeah maybe Puny Factory will do it I mean Pulp Fiction is really good too but I don't know if we can actually count that as a game this year do you know if like the awards it seems like you shouldn't you should wait until it's actually shipping although a lot of people have played that at shows so I don't know Pulp Fiction is really fun so yeah Solid Year it makes me wonder if that's this level of pinball is sustainable especially in the current market like do you think in 2024 we're gonna see this many releases uh i'd be surprised if we did so black belt master is a question who seemed to come in hot and then maybe level off popularity wise what do you guys think about it um yeah i think that's a fair assessment like i when i saw it i was like i like music pins and when i first saw the stream it's like maybe i'll grab that and then i saw godfather in like 10 minutes of that i was like nope, I'm going to switch and buy that game. So Foo, again, I think the layout's kind of interesting. It just doesn't do much for me. It's not a game I want. I think it's an okay game. I think it's an okay game. Nothing amazing. Certainly not bad. So coming in hot and leveling off makes sense. I think there's excitement for it, and it's just like, ah, it's not bad. Yeah. It's not going to have that level of passion that something like a Godzilla would get. anytime somebody's like should i buy x y y or z game or godzilla everybody always says just get godzilla you know what i mean like that's like everybody loves that game so uh i think foo fighters was it's like a fun for a while kind of game but people got over it and you know that's true of most releases though too like games come out people lose their minds and then six months later something else comes out and they sell it to get that you know what i mean so i think some games like there's like there's just something special about this game yeah and when you're especially for me and kevin who are buying games and collectors you know there's games that are fun to play we can see them out in location and play them and then fine but like game has has something special and foo fighters doesn't feel like oh there's something really special about it right that that's that's the best way you can describe it for me yeah yeah that doesn't have good things not that doesn't have clever things it's just not it's just nothing that puts it in that category for me agree yeah it takes a lot to be like a top tier game yeah and it's just yeah not every game is gonna gonna do that yeah um it does some interesting things it does some cool things but yeah it's just not it's not it's not godzilla level you know what i mean um all right uh i thought this would be fun to show too so uh if you've seen spotify rap they do it for for podcasters too so um just and at the end of the year i thought this would be fun to kind of look back at what we've achieved with the with the with the podcast and this is only from spotify this obviously doesn't include youtube or anything like that so our top episode of the year was uh number 79 where we talked about the reveal of venom uh that was kind of surprising to me i thought maybe the one where we were in uh was it may when all the machines came out at once i thought maybe that would be our top uh show but the top episode was it was number 79 from a couple months ago it was streamed 333 percent more than our average episode uh we got a bunch of new fans a lot of this is like you have to take it in context too because we didn't like i think people are starting to listen to more podcasts on spotify in general so it says 51 of our listeners discovered us in 2023 but i think maybe maybe just more people started listening to the show over here instead of somewhere else uh the so number 76 though at the new pinball machine release episode was the one that, uh, got a lot of listeners over, but it wasn't our most popular episode of the year. Uh, it's countries around the globe where we've been streamed, uh, 15 countries. Let's see where it gives you the top ones. U S no surprise there, Australia. Yep. There's a large, uh, large pinball scene in Australia, Sweden and Germany. Uh, Shout out to our folks over there for tuning in. Thanks for checking us out. So I think it shows other things they listen to. Oh, these are the genres that listeners of our show listen to. So they listen to leisure, sports, and comedy. Not really a surprise there. Well, I guess sports is kind of a surprise. Makes a big sports, guys. This I thought was interesting. So the people that listen to a pinball podcast. Also, when they're listening to music, they like rock, number one. So that checks out. Pop, I guess that makes sense. And then rap is number three. So there you go. So everybody's who's clamoring for a hip-hop-themed pinball machine. Maybe it'll make sense. It's in the top three of genres. So this is, like, people who share the podcast. 49% use the direct link. And 38% use text. And 13% use Facebook. So thank you for sharing our podcast. Continue to tell your friends about it. Bro, do you even talk pinball? 76. That was the one that got shared the most. I guess that makes sense because they said that was the one that brought the most new people over. So that all checks out. Thank you, Spotify. 4.6%. God damn it. Who ranked us less than a five? We're coming after you. Spooky fans. Spooky. Aw, it's all the spooky fans. Sons of bitches. And the Galactic Tank Force owners. They downloaded us. All two of them. Well, both of them came in. Both of them came in hot. they only get one vote though so sorry uh 4.6 is still solid though so we'll appreciate that we appreciate that uh yeah so this is like based on polls on spotify you can put publish polls after you uh um after you post an episode so i posted four this year got 22 votes i just i think a lot of people aren't doing this all right pop quiz time here we go uh which episode got the most audience engagement number 76 the new pinball machine extravaganza number 78 the wizarding world of total totally chaotic space hunting or number 80 jjpt's certain vaults etc nick which one do you 76 76 i mean come on they kind of just told us that i know exactly yeah oh we did it how do we ever how do you pull that out yeah we get we get a five from joyce the jedi all right i like it we turn the camera out yeah we do this was actually great because the um spotify allows you to upload video and since we already do this as video I just started doing that and then they automatically turn it into audio so it made my life easier so y'all get if you want you can watch us in video form on Spotify too we were in the top 10% of most viewed podcasts on Spotify I think probably because just because not a lot of people do video so thank you are you a gardener we saw some nice growth 28% growth in listeners 47% in streams and 43% in followers yeah i appreciate that joystick jedi for the uh the p3 comment because yeah i know it gets overlooked a lot so that's why uh that's why i like to include it we're a top 10 podcast for 118 fans top 5 for 59 and i think it's like 12 for for we're number one yeah shout out to our top 12 fans all right thanks y'all basically it's a way of saying thanks uh but before we go we have we have some prizes to give away uh so if you haven't yet hit hashtag win in chat in the twitch chat type hashtag win we'll give you another minute or two uh while i just give you a kind of an end of the year i wanted to give an end of the year channel update so i posted this in discord uh i know not everybody is in there uh but uh for the twitch channel in the year ahead we're shifting things up a little bit uh i will not be doing every monday night on twitch anymore uh it's been like nick and i've been doing this for eight plus years uh when i stopped and i looked back i was putting this message together i was like i wonder how many views we've gotten we've gotten over 3 million views between Twitch and YouTube, which is pretty insane. That doesn't include all the downloads and listens to the podcast either. So we've done a lot. I've just gotten to the point personally where I don't feel like I need to be out there every Monday. But the plan is – so that's changing. We're also ending the extended stream team. So, like, we were the first pinball channel to do a team thing, And, uh, we brought in tuna and Austin and Rudy and skip and everybody over the years and, and STP small town is still with us through the end of the year. Uh, we're, we're wrapping that up at the end of the year. Uh, the podcast will go on though. And so we'll be here every month, you know, life, life in, uh, you know, family and time and work allowing. Um, where I will still stream occasionally. Like if I get a new pinball machine, there's new P three to stuff, stuff to show off. I'll be doing that, but just not every week. And we're still going to do bro shows, kind of on the same schedule we have for the past year or so, where, you know, when we have something new to show, we'll get together, we'll play it for you, and then we'll stream it, and then we'll put it on YouTube. Nick, any thoughts on all that? I mean, what Kevin's trying to say is that he hates all of you, and he's sick and tired of dancing like a monkey on Mondays for your amusement. So there you go. Boom. There you go. Nick wrapped it up. No, it always, like, I talked to Tuna last year because Tuna was, in theory, going to stream with us this past year, and he only ended up doing it a couple times. And I was like, you know, the support is still there. I still enjoy doing it. I'll do it another year. This was at the end of 2022, and we'll see how it goes. And, you know, you do something long enough, and it's like, you know, I think we've done what we've set out to prove in this area. We've had a lot of success, and we're going to keep doing it, just not to the insane schedule that we had been doing it. No, I mean, at the end of the day, I think we've always been quality over quantity. Yeah. And I never want to show up for a stream or a podcast and not be, like, totally engaged and loving what I do because who the hell wants to watch that? So I think we're crushing on the podcast, and I saw a lot of, like, nice things in chat, so I appreciate that. But I love the – there's two hosts in Buffalo Pinball, but then there's a guest as the third person or entity, and that's certainly the chat. And I read everything as much as I can. I love the engagement, try to address the questions. So you guys absolutely crush it. I love this show in this format, and I love what we do live with the chat and engaging with it. I think we got something special. So 110%, which is totally math, committed to the podcast. Like Kevin said, just to reiterate, the Bro Show doesn't go away. We've done every pinball machine in existence. I'm kind of like, that's not true, but we've done a ton of them. So we'll try to always bring new ones, and we'll try to bring the energy to making high-quality, good shows. So that will continue. Yep. The other thing, we were eight years younger when this started, and our lives were in different places. Like my son's getting ready to go to college and we're looking at universities and going, you know, he's playing soccer every weekend because he wants to play soccer in college. And like, we got new jobs and Nick's traveling a lot more. So it was just like life, life changes. And you know, the stream and the podcast is going to change along with it. And, uh, we're still planning on being there and, uh, and sharing our, our, cause at the end of the day, this is our hobby, right? We love doing this and we love sharing it with you guys. So yeah, We're going to keep bringing that. So I see a nice, you know, I saw somebody said, I'd love to see more game reviews. I love it. I'm with you, man. It kind of sucks that we've not been able to put out as many game reviews, but I think Kevin and I definitely care about the quality of the game reviews, and it's just like we've done impressions on games, but we haven't played enough of the new games to really do a legit review. So we could do a legit review when we buy a game, but the games that we just bought were like Godfather. I could do a killer review on Godfather but we don't review JJP games because they're a sponsor and it's weird to review a sponsor's game, right? I'd love to review Venom but I have not spent enough time to do it justice and I know that our reviews are people place some stock into it so I don't want to just do a review. Do a review, I know it will generate views and stuff. So I don't know what the answer to that is. But, you know, when we do feel like we've spent enough time, we will do a review, even though it might be later. So maybe one day we can do a great review of Venom. We've spent at least several hours on it. I feel like we really understand it. But, yes, noted. I appreciate the feedback. You're absolutely right. Hopefully we can do that. But we at least always do impressions and breakdowns, which I think it's something. I think impressions are important. And I think Kevin and I at least have enough experience that we can spend a minimum amount of time on a game and kind of do a pretty decent job in guiding people. And there's no better endorsement for a game than a game that Kevin and I own or have in our collection. Yeah, because it's like those are the top tier games, the games that really connect with us. and you know i i think our audience is smart enough to know like obviously i like the p3 and we like jjp and it's like so you you're you have an air bias no matter who you are right you know what i mean like i love tron so i'm never gonna sell my tron machine you know what i mean uh if if you know whatever next game comes out as a dream theme i'm probably gonna buy it and i'm gonna be biased towards it because that's something i really connect with you know if uh they make a Goonies machine or whatever. You know what I mean? That something that I have this nostalgia for is going to be a pull. And, but the, the, the good thing is that we have a very intelligent audience that kind of look at the, the, you know, the eight years we've been doing this, you've been along with us for the ride, you know, where we land on things. If you're on one side or the other, you can draw your conclusions based on, on the angles we approach things from. And I think, I think you guys do a good job of that. So, um, all right, ready to pick some winners. Let's do this. So, again, we're giving away a Bond Translight courtesy of Flip N Out Pinball, Zach Menne. The only place I would ever consider buying a pinball machine from. All right. So the first one is going to be for the Jurassic Park player mat. Oh, the player mat. Okay. Gray Bear Rules. Gray Bear Rules, are you in chat? Do you accept? You accept a $90 mat from Stern. $100 mad for free. If you're in the U.S., shipping is included and everything. Hopefully they're here. We'll go ahead and draw the second one. We'll give Bear Rules a moment, and let's draw the next one, all right? Yeah. Mr. Mike Mann, I know he's around. He's another fellow P3 enthusiast. Mr. Mike Mann wins the Stern Pinball 007 Translate so I'll reach out to them for their winning entries and then if for some reason I have Mr. Mike Mann, he's good if for some reason Gray Bear says he doesn't want it then we can rerun that on another show but I'm guessing he's going to be good with that. So, all right, y'all, the Rexer Show, if you're watching on YouTube, you've got to jump in the Twitch chat for these, unfortunately. I don't have a way to pull in winners from YouTube yet, but maybe we'll get there. That brings us to another year of Brody Even Talk Pinball. Any parting words for everybody, Nick? Absolutely. Don't cheat in pinball, whether that's doing nefarious things during a game or just putting cheater ramps in. Don't cheat. Buffalo Pinball is anti-cheating. Thank you guys as always. Again, what makes this really fun is the chat interaction for this. We all get to come together and talk pinball and have some fun and joke around and hopefully help each other. So love it. Hope you guys have a good holiday. And we'll catch you next time. Kevin, anything from you? Yes, we have an episode of Topper Talk coming. Oh my God. Christmas has arrived early. It's a holiday miracle. I thought you had an issue with Goran, though. I do. I'm about to say. So we got another episode of Topper Talk. So you know what Topper Talk? He says, Nick and Kevin, give me three to five minutes to talk about toppers. This episode is two and a half minutes. It's not even three minutes, Nick and Goran. We said three to five minutes. Is that the least you could do is three minutes? Okay. That's all we ask. Is he phoning it in? I think he might be phoning it in. He's big time in us. All right. Well, he did tell us at IAPA he was getting recognized as the Topper Talk guy. So we've brought in that level of recognition into Goran's life. If you see Goran, give him a high five. Tell him thank you for all the years of Topper Talk. Keep him coming. We have two in the bank here. So this one, you're guaranteed another Topper Talk next month. If you see Goran in the wild, get a picture of him and send it to us. We love seeing that. Yeah, Topper Talks with Gorin photos. If it's framed, even better. Happy holidays. Thank you for all the kind words in chat. We appreciate it. And we'll see you in the new year. Bye, y'all. It's Topper Talk with Gorin right now. Let's all have some fun. This is about plastic on top of your pin. Go and buy one now. There's a topper here and a topper there. Here a topper, there a topper, everywhere a topper. It's critical to the gameplay experience. You must buy one now. It's your monthly fill of toppers right now. Topper Talk with Gorin. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Topper Talk with Gorin. The part of the podcast where Kevin and Nick give me about three to five minutes to talk about everything happening in the very active and profitable topper community. Today we'll be talking about the topper for the brand new Labyrinth Pinball Machine from the brand new pinball company, Barrels of Fun. So let's head into the office and talk about that now. Okay, so here we are in the office, so let's dive right into this topper. We're looking at the animated goblin topper for the Labyrinth Pinball Machine from Barrels of Fun. Now, for those who need a refresher, Barrels of Fun was the mystery pinball company that came out of nowhere and made a big splash with their fantastic-looking Labyrinth Pinball Machine. Now, not only did they release the pinball machine, they also announced multiple accessories for the game, including this topper, which is available for pre-order right now and will ship in January. So if we look at this topper, it features three of the goblins from Labyrinth, and I think it's so well done. The sculpts look great. The hair looks great. It's something different from the toppers that we typically see. This truly breaks the mold, I think, for toppers currently. their heads move there's interactive lighting it fully integrates with the game we have a video down below that we can check out briefly for what it does um it just looks great on top of the game it flows really well with the overall art package the movement looks great the light up eyes look great i wish the mouths moved but that's okay um the the lights flash in sync with the audio. And from a price standpoint, it's $950, which don't get me wrong. I mean, that's expensive for any pinball accessory. But when you look at the overall topper pricing nowadays, that's a reasonable price for something that's truly different and I think looks really great on top of the game. So job well done all around to the Barrels of Fun team. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Topper Talk. Tune in to the next podcast for another episode. And as always, get out there and buy a topper. Thank you for coming to my Topper Talk. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 405d60d6-2228-4765-b5c0-94d30af0a35b*