# Episode 23 - Pin Designers, Ultimate Stern, Playstation Experience, and More Overwatch!

**Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2016-12-05  
**Duration:** 72m 59s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-23

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## Analysis

Tony and Dennis discuss the Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament (Round 2-3), the controversial Ultimate Stern Fan Contest voting system plagued by ballot-stuffing concerns, and various personal gaming/reading updates. The designers debate reveals Dennis Nordman narrowly beating John Papaduke while Pat Lawler dominated Brian Eddy (79.4%). They announce an upcoming wide-body pinball tournament featuring 64+ machines. The Stern contest uses a problematic anonymous IP-based voting system (5 votes/day) that allows circumvention via VPN/multi-network access, creating negative publicity around ballot-stuffing instead of celebrating photo creativity.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Dennis Nordman beat John Papaduke 55.9% to 44.1% in Round 2 of the Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament — _Dennis won the matchup and this was described as the closest matchup of Round 2_
- [HIGH] Pat Lawler defeated Brian Eddy 79.4% to 20.6% in Round 2, the most lopsided matchup — _Tony states this directly as Round 2 results_
- [HIGH] Steve Ritchie beat John Trudeau 70.6% to 29.4% in Round 2 — _Dennis reports Round 2 results explicitly_
- [HIGH] George Gomez defeated Mark Ritchie 67.6% to 32.4% in Round 2 — _Dennis announces Round 2 matchup result_
- [HIGH] Stern's Ultimate Stern Fan Contest voting system allows 5 votes per day per IP address, but can be circumvented via VPN or accessing from multiple networks — _Dennis discusses the voting system and notes that people are bypassing limits by using work, home, and cellular networks simultaneously_
- [HIGH] There are over 80 solid-state era wide-body pinball machines that qualify for the planned tournament — _Dennis conducted preliminary research and found this number according to the internet pinball database_
- [HIGH] Steve Ritchie designed the 1979 Superman pinball machine, which is a wide body and one of his earliest designs — _Dennis identifies Superman as a Steve Ritchie design while discussing his new acquisition_

### Notable Quotes

> "I just don't see how pat lawler loses to dennis and i just don't see how steve richie loses to george i just don't see it i just don't see it"
> — **Tony**
> _Predicts strong confidence in Lawler and Ritchie advancing to finals based on designer track records_

> "the answer is Paragon and then nothing"
> — **Dennis**
> _Humorous assessment of wide-body pinball quality, suggesting Paragon is the only truly great wide-body_

> "Whatever exposure the company gets by the self-promotion that these 20 people have to engage in is going to be completely overshadowed by the sense that some people exploited the nature of the voting system"
> — **Dennis**
> _Critiques Stern's tournament design for creating negative publicity around ballot-stuffing rather than celebrating photo creativity_

> "I don't understand why they didn't just determine it in-house or bring in some outside judges if they wanted an air of legitimacy"
> — **Dennis**
> _Suggests Stern should have used expert judging instead of public voting to avoid gaming and bias concerns_

> "It may fit the rules, but I don't know if it fits the spirit"
> — **Dennis**
> _Commentary on the ethical distinction between following technical rules vs. intended spirit of voting system_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Dennis Nordman | person | Pinball designer; advanced to Round 3 semifinals by defeating John Papaduke 55.9%-44.1% in Modern Era Designer Tournament |
| Pat Lawler | person | Pinball designer; won Round 2 decisively over Brian Eddy 79.4%-20.6%; predicted finalist by both hosts |
| Steve Ritchie | person | Legendary pinball designer; designed 1979 Superman; advanced to semifinals by beating John Trudeau 70.6%-29.4% |
| George Gomez | person | Modern pinball designer; defeated Mark Ritchie 67.6%-32.4% in Round 2; advancing to semifinals |
| John Papaduke | person | Pinball designer; lost to Dennis Nordman 44.1%-55.9% in Round 2 of designer tournament |
| Brian Eddy | person | Pinball designer; lost decisively to Pat Lawler 20.6%-79.4% in Round 2 |
| John Trudeau | person | Pinball designer; lost to Steve Ritchie 29.4%-70.6% in Round 2 |
| Mark Ritchie | person | Pinball designer; lost to George Gomez 32.4%-67.6% in Round 2 |
| Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; organizes Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament; critical analyst of Stern's contest strategy |
| Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; discusses pinball tournament predictions and gaming interests |
| Ron | person | Donated a 1979 Atari Superman pinball machine to Dennis without charge; machine needs significant restoration |
| Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer; running the Ultimate Stern Fan Contest with controversial voting system design |
| Medieval Madness | game | Classic Bally/Williams pinball game; designed by Pat Lawler; frequently ranked in top-5 games on Pinside |
| Attack from Mars | game | Classic Williams game; designed by Pat Lawler; frequently ranked in top-5 games |
| Twilight Zone | game | Wide-body pinball machine; Pat Lawler design; likely to be #1 seed in upcoming wide-body tournament |
| Superman | game | 1979 Atari pinball machine; Steve Ritchie early design; wide-body format; recently acquired by Dennis |
| Paragon | game | Solid-state era wide-body pinball machine; cited as the best (and only truly great) wide-body by Dennis |
| The Walking Dead | game | Stern pinball machine; referenced in context of Ultimate Stern Fan Contest creative photo submissions with zombie costumes |
| Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament | event | Community voting tournament featuring 10 classic pinball designers; Dennis hosts; currently in semifinals with Nordman vs Lawler and Ritchie vs Gomez |
| Ultimate Stern Fan Contest | event | Stern-run contest launched January 2016 with hashtag photo submissions; controversial voting system with 5 votes/day per IP; winners determined by public vote circumvented via VPN/multi-network access |
| Flip Off Hunger Kansas City | event | Pin golf format pinball tournament attended by Tony a few weeks prior; Tony placed higher than expected despite poor individual game performance |
| Wide-Body Era Pinball Tournament | event | Upcoming tournament planned by Dennis featuring 64+ solid-state era wide-body machines; will use Pinside rankings and production run criteria for seeding |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament (Round 2-3 results), Stern's Ultimate Stern Fan Contest voting system design flaws, Ballot-stuffing and contest integrity concerns
- **Secondary:** Planned wide-body pinball machine tournament, Pinball machine restoration (1979 Superman acquisition), Contest legal compliance and state gaming law requirements, Pinball designer legacy and game rankings
- **Mentioned:** Personal gaming/reading updates

### Sentiment

**Negative** (-0.65) — Regarding Stern's contest execution: strong criticism of voting system design, concern about ballot-stuffing, frustration with negative publicity overshadowing creative intent. Regarding designer tournament: positive/neutral tone with enthusiastic discussion of designer merits. Mixed overall due to balance between enjoyable tournament segment and critical contest analysis.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Stern's contest execution demonstrates poor judgment in choosing public voting over internal/expert judging, resulting in negative community sentiment about ballot-stuffing rather than positive exposure (confidence: high) — Dennis states: 'I don't understand why they didn't just determine it in-house or bring in some outside judges if they wanted an air of legitimacy that they weren't just picking their biggest customers'
- **[event_signal]** Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament progressing through semifinals with four designers advancing: Dennis Nordman, Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie, George Gomez (confidence: high) — Dennis announces Round 2 results and Round 3 semifinal matchups explicitly
- **[sentiment_shift]** Facebook pinball collector groups showing negative sentiment with repeated posts begging for votes; users discussing methods to exploit voting system via VPN and multi-network access (confidence: high) — Dennis notes seeing 'posts begging for votes coming up again and again' on Facebook pinball groups and explicitly states people discussing how to bypass the 5-vote limit using work, home, and cellular networks
- **[design_philosophy]** Stern's Ultimate Stern Fan Contest design creates negative publicity around ballot-stuffing rather than celebrating photo creativity; anonymous IP-based voting with inadequate safeguards enables gaming of system (confidence: high) — Dennis states: 'Whatever exposure the company gets by the self-promotion that these 20 people have to engage in is going to be completely overshadowed by the sense that some people exploited the nature of the voting system'
- **[event_signal]** Dennis planning large-scale wide-body pinball machine tournament with 64+ machines from solid-state era, primarily featuring Gottlieb and Atari designs with some modern entries like Twilight Zone and Jersey Jack titles (confidence: high) — Dennis states: 'there are over 80 pins according to the internet pinball database that would qualify for this criteria' and mentions narrowing down to 64+ based on production runs and Pinside rankings
- **[market_signal]** Discussion of Ultimate Stern Fan Contest outcome creating social friction based on contestant collection size; scrutiny of whether established collectors with large new-in-box Stern collections 'need' free machines more than collectors with limited used game collections (confidence: medium) — Dennis notes community discussion: 'why is the person who owns 12 new in-box Stern machines need a free machine? They apparently have no problem affording them' vs collectors with only used Ballys
- **[product_strategy]** Community recognition that Pat Lawler's relatively small design portfolio (primarily Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, Twilight Zone) carries disproportionate weight in designer rankings due to exceptional game quality (confidence: medium) — Tony notes 'Lawler's games are all so good' and that Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness are 'typically top five games' while Dennis acknowledges Lawler has fewer games overall than Mark Ritchie or Steve Ritchie

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## Transcript

 Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is Sunday, December 4th. This is episode 23, the Tabletop We Don't Need No Stinking Tabletop Edition. I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk to you guys about pinball and video games and, well, no stinking tabletop this time around. Nope, no tables. We don't believe in them anymore. They have fallen. Their legs are missing, and they have fallen. They've fallen behind us. But I guess we should go ahead and start with our intros anyway and act as if the tables were still standing. So, Tony, what's going on? Life's been pretty normal. The Thanksgiving holiday went pretty well for me, all in all. I made the classic mistake of overeating and I picked up Master of Orion Conqueror West of the Stars on the Black Friday sale on Steam which is the new remake from Wargaming who are the people who do World of Tanks and World of Warships and World of Warplanes of the Master of Orion franchise and I've been playing lots and lots and lots of it I'll talk about it more during the video game section. I've managed to maintain caught up on my podcast, and I have also been reading slash listening to audiobooks. I've gone through two since our last episode. I went all the way through The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I highly recommend. It is a I don't want to say it's high fantasy It's more low fantasy really But the Premise Is basically Ocean's Eleven in a fantasy setting It's The Gentleman Bastard Series is what it is I've read it before And I've read the second book in the series before Red Seas Under Red Skies but I haven't read any more in the series and there's at least two more out since then. The author is Scott Lynch and it's a pretty good series. Like I said, it is centered on a group of con men slash thieves that call themselves the Gentleman Bastards and they set up really, really complicated con games and steal money from people. And it's pretty fun all in all. Okay, I don't typically read low fantasy, so that's quite a bit different than what I'm used to. Yeah, it's, like I said, there's, I mean, I consider it low fantasy because, you know, there's no elves, there's no, there's nothing but humans, and there's a, there is some magic, but it's rare, and there's a lot of like interesting things in the world and in the lore building. Like there's all sorts of things that exist that nobody can make. Like there's whole buildings and cities made out of stuff that nobody can make. They call it elder glass that was around before people were around and it's just always been there and it can't be made or destroyed or anything. So you just kind of build around it and use it. and they do also do a lot of like alchemical stuff like they have ways they've got all sorts of little alchemical they use alchemical lights that are basically hey we don't have electricity but we've got lights that don't require flame and alchemical cookstops which are these like slabs that when you pour water on them they get hot so they've got ways around doing it so it's kind of a modern-ish setting while still being fantasy. Oh, okay, I get it. I think. Yeah, it makes sense in context. But, I mean, because when I think high fantasy, I think, you know, different races and lots of, you know, magic and this and that. And while this has some magic and some stuff like that, there's not a lot of it. I consider, well, I consider Song of Ice and Fire is pretty much low fantasy as far as I consider it. and that's because there's not much in the way of magic and stuff and what there is. It's not common. It's not everyday stuff. But I've also just finished this morning another book that I've read before that is in the Valduken series. As you can tell, I like to read a lot of series of books, But the Valduken series is about holy weapons. And thereby the author is Seth Skorkowski. And it's a series of books. And so far there's three books out. I've only read two of them. And each book is named for a specific holy weapon. Like the first one is named Damoran. Demorin, and it's about that specific holy weapon and its wielder. And the second one's named about a specific holy weapon and its wielder and so on. And they deal specifically with each story centers around the wielder of that weapon as they hunt demons and stuff. Oh, okay. I'm not familiar with that series, but I'm familiar with the style. Yeah. It's basically, and it's modern day. It's a modern day setting. So it's not like it's an old fantasy thing, but it's like a modern setting with the just, yes, you know, demons are real and this and that are real and such. I think I've seen an anime that did that as a theme. Yeah, there's been several of those. I mean, it's kind of, I don't want to say it's a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-ish, but it's similar to that type of thing where, hey, all these things, demons are real and all this stuff's real and people just don't know about them because they don't, because they hide and they stay to the shadows type stuff and such. and there's groups of demon hunters who've been going around for centuries and centuries and centuries killing them so those were both really enjoyable reads slash listens and the one series, the Valduken book they were read by R.C. Bray who is a narrator who I like a lot he's the narrator who did The Martian and The Martian I'm sure I've mentioned here in the past is a book that I fell in love with I bought the book in hardcover and did it cover to cover in like a day and a half and after that I did I bought it in digital form and I bought it in audible form just because I love that series so much or that book so much that I read it again and again and again and again. I mean, I bought the movie the day it came out. I went and saw the movie in theaters the day it came out, and I've read the book at least four times and listened to it twice on audiobooks since it came out. So it's one of those things that kind of messed with me. It was a good book. I borrowed your hard copy and read well before the movie came out. Yeah, but that's about all I've been doing lately besides that. And like I said, I've been playing a lot of Master of Orion. I haven't gotten in much Overwatch or much of anything else because of it. Well, that's okay. Diversity is always a good thing. Well, let me see here. I have to open with a correction. So a listener wrote in and pointed out that in the last episode, I kept saying Dennis Nordham instead of Dennis Nordman. I guess I wasn't looking at my notes very closely and was just dropping the M off of his name, as I am prone to do with words. So my apologies to the other Dennis for screwing that up. Let's see what else. I also had a comment, a complaint, I should say, that the last episode's intro was way too long, over 15 minutes. So I will try and keep this one shorter, though. I will say that one wasn't really on me. Yeah, yeah, that one wasn't on you. That was me. And I stretched this one already. We're already at nine minutes on this one. Well, but maybe we'll be a little bit less after editing. It might be eight minutes and 50 seconds if I'm really clever with my cuts. But let's see. I bought a number of games on a Black Friday sales. And I've only started one called Dangerous Golf. And we'll hit on that when we get to the video game segment. Participated in a couple of pinball tournaments. Did Flip Off Hunger Kansas City, which was a couple weeks ago. I did not do very well. I actually ended up placing higher than I thought I did, given how badly I was doing. It was a pin golf format, and I just kept getting the worst score on game after game after game, so it just felt like a total disaster. I was not playing well. And then 4.03 regular monthly was yesterday, and I did win one of my game setups. I took everything to three, so anytime I don't just go two and out, I'm always pretty pleased, because I'm pretty novice in skill compared to pretty much everyone else who is at that event. So anyway, when I get a win, I'm always at least a little happy. So I had that. And then the only other main thing is also yesterday, I went and I picked up a new pinball project, an Atari 1979 Superman. So while I highly doubt that the owner listens to the podcast, if he does, I say thank you once again to Ron for letting me have the machine. He just gave it to me. He didn't sell it. And he said it needed a lot of work. He contacted my dad because we – I'm trying to tell this story really, really fast so we don't have a long intro. But a couple of years ago, my dad and I worked on a virtual pinball project together where we built a virtual machine from scratch. And when we were done, he wrote up the process and stuff in his retiree newsletter. and in that I guess he noted that we had gotten some machines that I was picking up machines and we had jointly done some restorations to get them to work and this guy wrote to him and said oh I have a pinball machine and I don't want it anymore and it needs a lot of work so you guys just does Dennis just want to take it I was like uh sure so went over picked it up um it does boot so um it's not as much of a project as I feared. The art's in pretty decent shape. The plastics look good. It is behaving a little squirrely, and it does need a lot of cleanup. So I've had to order, oh, new legs. And I went through and figured out which pop bumpers weren't working, and they're all broken in different ways. So at least so far, almost every part that I know I need to replace, I can get. They're generic. But some of the other things might be a little more difficult, like the lockdown bar, which has some issues. So anyway, not normally a sort of game I would pursue because it is a wide body, and we all know what I think about wide bodies. But at the price, I couldn't really turn it down. And it is a Steve Ritchie design, as it turns out, one of his earliest. So it might actually be fun to shoot when I finally get it functional. But it's too squirrely to play right now. But that's pretty much it. Look at that, three minutes. You're so much better than me. Well, I talk really, really fast, as I tend to do. And since we're going at such a great pace, we're going to segue right now before we hit the 13-minute mark into the pinball segment formally. And we'll open with what we've been opening with, which is the 2016 Modern Era Pinball Designer Tournament. We're ready to get going with round three, but we're not quite ready. Because before we can talk about round three, we have to talk about round two, where I get to properly say Dennis Nordman's name. So round two results. It was actually not as close as I thought on any of these. So I was quite surprised. In the case of Dennis Nordman, he did beat John Papadiuk. And this was the closest matchup. Dennis got 55.9% of the vote. And if I recall from the last episode, I predicted that Papaduke was going to win this one. So, oops, I gobbled that one wrong. and let's see next matchup was pat lawler against Brian Eddy we knew that one was going to be a tough we thought it was going to be a tough one this one was actually the most lopsided one pat lawler won it which i don't think was surprising they got 79.4 percent of the votes that came in yeah i did not expect it to be that big of a blowout i i figured that it would be a win for Lawler, but I mean, that's out. Yeah, I guess it's just, I don't know what to guess. I just didn't think it would be that lopsided. It's got to be just the sheer number of games, and Lawler's games are all so good. Yeah, but so are, I mean, Eddie doesn't have the stable of games, but with Shadow being his worst rated one, and it's one of the most respected, affordable Williams games. I just was, you know, Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars are typically top five games, and Pat Lawler's only game up there, to my knowledge, is Twilight Zone. But, hey, I voted for Pat, so I mean, I helped. Well, then we canceled each other out, because I went with Eddie. Yeah, I could. I thought about it, and then I thought, no, I put Pat Lawler in my top five. It wouldn't make any sense for me to put Eddie in as my pick. Matchup three was Steve Ritchie versus John Trudeau. I thought that Trudeau would give a respectable showing he did better than Brian Eddy did but steve won with 70.6 of the vote so it was still quite lopsided yeah that one did that one did not just surprise me as much no uh i and i guess i'm just sort of surprised that that one was closer than the eddie lawler one i i don't know i guess i didn't put enough thought into where the percentages were gonna land it's just trudeau he has a really long pedigree of games as well as Steve Ritchie. So he didn't have that weirdness with Brian Eddy. So maybe that's why it's a little tighter. He's got a lot of really loved games and he's been in it for a long time. So that could be it. The last matchup that we had for round two was George Gomez up against Mark Ritchie. And George did win and he had 67.6% of the vote. I wasn't surprised that George Gomez won. I was surprised it was by this much. That one actually is probably the least surprising of them to me Really? Why? Well, Mark Ritchie has a lot of good games But George Gomez has a lot of good modern games And Gomez's games have gotten a lot more play recently And I think it just puts him into a zone where a lot of people When they think of really modern George Gomez is one of the go-to people That's a good point, and that may be why it pushed over. The reason why I thought – I wasn't surprised George won, but the reason why I thought it would be closer is I wasn't sure if anyone had a Mark Ritchie game that they thought was a really bad design. And I know there are some that people hate that George Gomez worked on. So I thought maybe it would be the weight of the negatives would pull him down more, but that apparently did not happen. So anyway, all quite lopsided. We only had everyone was well over 60 percent with their wins, except for the Nordman John Papadiuk matchup. So let's go ahead and hit the round three matchups, which are the semifinals now. So we only had 10 designers to start with. And so they're only going to be two matchups. It's going to be Dennis Nordman versus Pat Lawler and Steve Ritchie versus George Gomez. So do you want to make any predictions, Tony, about what's going to happen? I want to make predictions. Okay. I'm going to, let's just say if I was going to put money on this in Vegas, I wouldn't be making very much because I'm going to go with Lawler and Richie. I would go so far as to say that Vegas would refuse to take money on these bets because I just, no misnamed, stated name earlier, correction aside, you know stills might say i mean no offense but i just don't see how pat lawler loses to dennis and i just don't see how Steve Ritchie loses to george i just don't see it i just don't see it so i don't either but you know uh i've been wrong on a number of these other call outs as well but at this point i mean on the plus side i think we're going to get the epic matchup that people were hoping they would see with this sort of tournament and which wasn't a guarantee because how we randomized the brackets. It could have been, we could have seen a Lawler-Ritchie scenario early on. I was worried about that, that's what we were going to end up seeing would have been Ritchie and Lawler, you know, round one or round two. Yeah, it would have been frustrating, but I wouldn't have re-rolled the bracket, because I don believe in that But it would have been unfortunate but we would have just made do with it And in this case I think a lot of people will agree that it a very fair matchup to see at the end And I think it's going to be a really tight vote. And I don't know what way it's going to shake out yet, but I would be counting my chickens too soon if I were to say what that matchup would be quite yet. So we're going to have to wait about two weeks, and then we'll find out for sure who's going to be in the finals. I do want to go ahead and say, though, before we move on from the designer bracket tournament that I have already been working on what I want the next tournament to be. And this was before I went and picked up Superman. But what I decided would be fun because I make fun of them all the time is I want a best solid state era wide body tournament because I want to know what you all out there actually think are the best wide bodies. Because as far as I know, the answer is Paragon and then nothing. but maybe that's not true. Maybe there are some great ones. There are some I've had some fun with but I've always been somewhat frustrated by the layouts and I've already done the preliminary research. There are over 80 pins according to the internet pinball database that would qualify for this criteria. I think ultimately we need to at least get it down to 64 and I'm already down to the low 70s if I drop anything that didn't have a production run of at least announced production run of at least 100 units. so I've got a little more whittling to do because I may have some other prototypes that didn't have production numbers on them and beyond that I'll just drop the lowest ranked stuff off of Pennside and then we'll just seed it based off of where the Pennside ranks are I won't discriminate by manufacturer, I can't because like half of that list is Gottlieb they they has three segments of it it's like Gottlieb in the 80s was all wide body, that's what it looks like when I read the list It's so it's so overwhelmingly. I mean, Gottlieb was wide body crazy. And then the only other one really was Atari. Everything Atari made was wide body. But Atari did not produce very many pinball machines before they were like, hey, we're making way more money on the 2600. Let's just do this. so but beyond that there are there are a few exceptions and they're in the modern era you started to see like 90s and beyond you started to see more like star trek the next generation very famous wide body twilight zone perhaps the most popular wide body on the pin side list i imagine it will be the number one seed but we'll see when i ultimately calculate it out jersey jack dialed in aside they've been doing wide bodies so it'll be there'll be a good there'll be a good blend of era and there'll be a good blend of manufacturer but it's not clean enough of a blend for us to do like we did with our first tournament where i can take enough wide bodies from like bally and actually get 16 of them it's just not going to happen so we'll just have to do it this way but anyway that's what i'm planning to do probably won't do as big of a delay between this tournament and that one because this one is going so fast because we only ultimately we're only going I need four rounds to get through this entire thing. And that's fine. So that's it regarding the tournaments. But we do have one more pinball thing that I wanted to hit on. It got brought up indirectly, not written. Someone contacted me, not the podcast, but contacted me on Facebook regarding the Ultimate Stern Fan Contest. And, Tony, I don't know if you've ever been following it. It's something we've never talked about. I've not followed it. I heard about it listening to another podcast, and that was the first time I'd even heard of it. So that shows how much attention I pay. Well, in a nutshell for any of our listeners who haven't been following along with it, back in, I believe, some point in January, so way at the start of the year, Stern announced a contest where people could submit photos and they'd hashtag it about, like, hashtag ultimate Stern fan. and that was a way to enter to win a pinball machine from Stern. And they were going to do it year round. And so people would go and they'd take photos with their collection of pins and they were encouraged to be creative. And, you know, just I guess thousands and thousands of photos were done with these sort of hashtags. And some of them are very interesting. I mean, really well done photos where people like got in makeup and dressed up like zombies to be with their Walking Dead machines and things like some really cool stuff. But it wasn't something I was ever following. I was only just sort of aware of it. I never, I never, I was gonna say I never entered, I guess technically maybe my joke video with the three little pinball, the little pins I have on YouTube. I think I did hashtag it with that, but that was just to be mean. Um, it wasn't an actual submission. It wasn't a photo. Obviously it was video, but anyway, so that closed and what, But the way that they're doing the next stage of the contest is confusing slash controversial. And it's Stern Pinball, so of course they had to be controversial. They couldn't just do something in a way that kept people quiet. Of course, that's how they do it. I mean, there's the easy way, there's the normal way that 90% of people or companies would do it, and then there's the really complicated way that doesn't necessarily turn out very good. So that's how Stern's going to go. So there are two elements to this that were brought up with me. And the first was in the rules of the submission, it indicated how the entries would go for the contest. It was only a one-minute online sign-up period. And so there was some discussion, well, why is it only a minute? What is this? Is this some way to get around the gaming laws or how is it? And as near as I could tell, it was sort of a research request. I'm not doing a lot of research on this. It's a legalese thing, and those rules vary state by state. It's very confusing. The short answer is yes. I'm sure it was done to comply with a contest provisions in the state that they're organizing the contest in. I think the reason why it's so weird that they're doing the one-minute thing was the way they really wanted to do this is they were gathering. They were tracking all the photos with their hashtag, and then they chose the ones that they thought were best, and they submitted them through this system. The reason why it's just one minute was to try and prevent anyone outside of that process from submitting. Now, the way to do it was always advertised to do the hashtag thing. So this was to comply with the way they had outlined the contest. But because it's a drawing, I don't know if you've ever seen things like with GameStun Quick and they'll let you have an entry to win a Game Boy or whatever when you donate a certain amount of money. Because those are drawings, though, technically they have to let you have a way to do it without paying. And so they do. But it's almost always a you must send a self-addressed envelope with this thing to a postage address and then they'll give you one entry. That's the normal way people comply with the free provision of the drawings. In this case, I don't think it was a question of the free thing. Submitting the hashtag photos was already free. This was just they wanted to pick the 20 finalists. But technically, because it's a drawing, there had to be a way for anyone to enter who I guess wasn't hashtagging. So that's my assumption is what they did. Just the one minute thing was to control that. And they got their 20 submissions in during the one minute. Well, of course. So I don't find that aspect particularly interesting other than as near. I did some searching. I couldn't find any other contest that has ever done a one minute. Yeah, that's kind of weird. It's hard to search the legalese on that. Most of the time, anytime I'm trying to find things like that, it was contests where people were being asked to make one minute videos. So it was very tedious to try and dig into that. But yeah, it was a weird curiosity. This is the more interesting thing, though, is the voting system they're doing. So they have these finalists, and as I note, I believe it's 20, and they are encouraging the public to vote, and the top three will be moved forward for the ultimate decision. I don't know how the ultimate decision is being made on who wins the machine. And they're doing it with anonymous Internet voting. It looks like it's supposed to be five votes per day per IP address. I guess that's how it's supposed to work. But there are forum discussions going on where people were saying how you could mask the IPs, which isn't, you know, it's not very hard to do. You do VPN tricks. There's also they're not really even tricks. They're just straightforward things. And people were finding that they cleared out their cash and did things with their cookies. They could get more than the five votes a day. And so as is any system, this reminds me of the All-Star League when they vote for the baseball All-Star stuff. This was a big thing last year because here we are in Kansas City, the Royals. There was a lot of ballot stuffing going on. And I mean, our news broadcasts were advertising how to do it. And we were trying to get every single position to be filled by a royal in the All-Star game. And it didn't get all of them, but almost the whole starting team was royals. And it was because they allowed like 20 votes a day by IP per their rules. And so you ended up with these games where people are just, I mean, it's ballot stuffing is what it is. It's something that could happen with our designer contest because I don't require you to sign in with Google to do the vote. just no one wins anything so who cares on our contest you're not getting there's not a prize so there's not really an incentive to do a bunch of ballot stuffing that's why i do it in the more open way of i don't want to deal with making people have to have a gmail account but this this decision to let the public vote turned what i think was supposed to be an idea of hey let's have people pick what are the best photos to well of these 20 people who are the most popular yeah that's a concern because i noticed when i finally heard about this and was looking at it i saw who how many people were in it that were um well known and such well and beyond that i'm on a number of facebook groups that are like pinball and arcade collectors to you know watch for projects and things like that and these posts begging for votes are coming up again and again And I'm just ignoring them because I get it. I get why they're doing that. It's for a machine, a whole pinball machine, thousands of dollars. I understand why they want to win it. It's not any fun to read people begging, though, and that's what they've had to resort to doing. And so I think this was a huge blunder on the part of Stern. Whatever exposure the company gets by the self-promotion that these 20 people have to engage in is going to be completely overshadowed by the sense that some people exploited the nature of the voting system and encouraged people to use maybe dubious methods in order to get past that. that if the limit's supposed to be five votes a day per person, they didn't actually obtain that when you have people saying, well, don't worry, I did my five votes a day by IP. So I voted on you five times at work, five times at home, and five times on my cellular network. So I had 15 votes. Yay, me. I'm such a great person. I mean, it may fit the rules, but I don't know if it fits the spirit. But it's on Stern for choosing to go that route. And what this discussion is, it's all negative. There's no, this is a great thing. Look at how great all these photos are. We're not talking about that. We're talking about who has the better network, who has the better begging system. And then you end up with people who are scrutinizing the photos, criticizing like, well, why is the person who owns 12 new in-box Stern machines need a free machine? They apparently have no problem affording them sort of thing. That's a separate discussion. But, you know, it's a – because then you have people like, well, I only have one machine, and the rest were all used ballys and sort of things like that. And, you know, that's a whole separate thing which could have been completely avoided if they had just their own judging panel. I don't understand why they didn't just determine it in-house or bring in some outside judges if they wanted an air of legitimacy that they weren't just picking their biggest customers. You know, that people who had collections of it didn't your collection in theory didn't have to be all Stern. I mean, ideally, you needed to have a Stern pinball machine because how else are you the ultimate Stern fan if you don't own any Sterns? But but that aside, you know, this is a question of the creativity of the photo is what people thought was supposed to be the encouraging factor. The other thing is because of that phrasing, it's interesting that it's not the photographer who's up for the prize. It's the person in the photo, which I think everyone went into knowing. It's just in a way it's interesting because some of these photos are staged in such a way that the creative credit must belong belongs to someone. And maybe it's the person in the photo, but maybe it was the photographer. And in that case, you know, what's the art here? We're judging the art. It's the photographer's art, not not the subject. But but anyway, that's the controversy. I have not voted for anyone on any of these. I thought it might have been fun to take the bottom three people and do my own IP shenanigans and try and drive them into the top three positions just for the fun of it. That could have been humorous. It could have, but I'm too tired and busy. I hadn't heard about this until just recently, and I've not looked into it. I did not realize this whole shenanigans in the background going on this thing. So that's interesting. Because I know there's a lot of places in a lot of states where you have to kind of jump through hoops for giveaways and stuff, where you can't have giveaways. You have like a trivia contest, and then you give a prize to the winner type thing or, you know, silly things like that. But, yeah, no, that's interesting. Right. The thing is on there for the sign up, most of the time, most of those rules are to prevent secret – like it's gambling laws. So that's where – like my games done quick example where money is changing hands. Most of the time, if you're going to run a contest where people can participate for free and you're going to give them something, a lot of that stuff usually doesn't apply. Now, sometimes it does. But a lot of times, like, you know, for example, when we did our, if you did iTunes votes and we just went and looked at everyone who did iTunes votes, it gave them the opportunity to fill out a form for free to be entered in to win a shirt. There was no barrier to, you didn't have to buy anything. You didn't have to send us money. You didn't have to send iTunes money. The form was freely accessible. We even went back and we honored anyone who had already done reviews. the there was no there's no gambling there because no that no one can if they're addicted to gambling they couldn't lose any money playing our game sort of thing but and stern is in the same boat you didn't have to you didn't have to buy a pinball machine to be in the ultimate stern fan contest you could have posed at an operator place or whatever so i think that was just to deal with the that they probably had to have some sort of open sign up period or it had to do with the software that they're using to run the voting was set up to have that sort of submission period because they're using some third party provider to track the voting that they're doing the shenanigan voting shenanigans that's all i had for pinball did you have anything for pinball beyond that i didn't have anything for pinball beyond that excellent we will move to segment number two and this time our final segment which will be video games i wanted to go ahead and open with something I wasn't originally planning on doing, but it got brought up yesterday. And so I figured we should go ahead and hit briefly on the PlayStation experience. A bit difficult for us because neither you nor I have a modern PlayStation. We don't have PlayStation 4s. But there was an event called PlayStation Experience. It's kind of like a mini E3 that Sony does for their products. And there were just a few announcements that came out of that. So I wanted to go ahead and get them out there as news for folks that are interested in them. So I'm not going to hit all of them, but a few of the highlights would be The Last of Us Part 2 has been confirmed. I know The Last of Us was, in the view of a lot of people, the greatest game of the last generation. I don't know. I know one person who played it, and he hasn't even finished it. But that's just one person. I like how they put it as Last of Us Part 2. like they're trying to keep it from becoming this whole thing where it's like the never ending story which had like five more stories and then was over and it's the last of us part 27 as they start to keep building on oh yeah or like Final Fantasy 15 when will the fantasy be final we don't know we never know as much delay as they have between their releases it almost is final well I think they came close on the Final Fantasy front this time though I've been hearing really, really good things about Final Fantasy XV. I'll have to keep my eye out. When I did the demo, I wasn't impressed. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't impressed. But that is not discussed in this, or it will not be discussed in this by me. Another item that I thought was much more interesting to me is Marvel vs. Capcom 4. It's official. It's something I thought they should have done for quite a while now. The actual name will be Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, And I guess that's because the Infinity Gems that were used in the first game, I don't know if they were used in the second game. They weren't in the third. Anyway, they're back. So that's going to be in it. I guess it's going to be more of a 2v2 format rather than the 3v3 of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Marvel vs Capcom 3 has been a mainstay in competitive fighting game tournaments for years now But the player base has really been dropping off because there no support from Capcom anymore And so there are balance issues that have never been addressed and people are starting to lose interest in watching it. But it still draws pretty good Twitch audiences at events like Evo and such because it's so fast-paced compared to most other games. It's just an apocalypse on the screen. It's a big mess. So anyway, that actually won't just be out on PlayStation 4. It will be available on PC and on Xbox as well. But anyway, fighting game fans, take note of that. Let's see. PlayStation Experience also indicated that they had a futuristic racing series called Wipeout, and that will be coming back. I guess it's going to be remastered. Akuma, he has not been in Street Fighter V yet. He is going to get onto the Street Fighter V gaming roster as of December 20th. That game still struggles to come out. I guess it still doesn't even have an arcade mode. I've heard that it's getting better, but it's not there yet. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I think that was all rushed because they wanted to have it all year for that Capcom Cup thing, which just wrapped up, and congratulations. I believe it was two Americans were the only Americans in top eight. Everyone else was from Japan, and those Americans took number one and number two in the tournament. Wow. Number one, I think, won $230,000. It's not League of Legends, but it's getting up there. Man, that's amazing. Wow. I remember back in the day when you'd be standing at the arcade playing and just watching people get decimated by somebody, and then the turnaround, and now those people could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars for playing. That's impressive. And the only other game I wanted to go ahead and hit on is one that I thought you might be interested in, Ace Combat 7 will be coming. So the dogfighting series is back. It's been a while since we've seen Ace Combat. Now here's the important question. Is it back like the last couple, like Assault Horizon was, where they've decided to set it in the modern real world? Or is it going back to the whole made-up universe of superweapons and craziness? Because that was half the fun. I didn't like Assault Horizon because it's all in the modern world with none of the same levels of pure insanity that was available on the older Ace Combats? Because, I mean, I played a lot of Ace Combats. Well, I have not watched any of the trailers, so I cannot comment on whether or not it is more like the old style or like that newest version. But I would speculate it adheres more to the old format, given that they've numbered it seven. and that one was good the new one in the modern era was given a different name i think to help distance it from taking place in that pretend grace maria is if that's was that it grace maria yeah yeah for grace maria yeah and all those little things i had um i played so much ace combat but i had a i got ace combat skies of deception on the psp i had a psp that i got just to play that game. Oh, wow. I played that game like non-stop forever. I mean, that was when my youngest was born, or my oldest was born. I was playing that game, you know, while we were waiting in the build-up and stuff. I played that game. That's what I did while we were sitting in the hospital room waiting. I think the only one I played besides the Horizon one was Ace Combat 6 because I remember I had to fly through a giant gun turret and I just kept getting really mad because I kept crashing into the sides and I kept saying, why am I in here? This doesn't make any sense but for Grace Maria, I had to do it Yeah, I've played so many Ace Combat games I mean, I love them They're my favorite I just love the whole super arcade-y aircraft play style that the 80s combat games had, and the sheer insanity that the older ones got to the point where it's like, well, I'm flying this weird-looking airplane that launches like 30 missiles at a time, and all the other, oh, man, that's some good times right there. That's a reason to buy a PlayStation right there. well it might be coming out on more things not everything was exclusive that was at the PlayStation Experience but like I noted I have not looked so usually at the end of the trailer they would note that's how I found out about the Marvel vs. Capcom 4 because they are remastering another of the older Marvels and that's just for PlayStation but anyway so PlayStation Experience, a bunch of trailers you can go online and check them out I think Polygon has a pretty comprehensive article hitting on all of the main points if anyone wants to read anything, I don't have it linked in the show notes I've only linked the next round of the designer tournament because I didn't care enough because I don't own the console. But there you go. There's some news. Now let's talk about some news that affects both of us and to fit with our true nature, which is that we are actually the eclectic pinball and Overwatch tabletop podcast. Except no tabletop this time. So we got to talk about Overwatch because there's more news. Overwatch has to have more news. First off, congratulations, Overwatch, for winning the Game of the Year award at the... What's the name of that video game awards that was just on? It's the Game Awards? The Game Awards. It's the Game Awards, yeah. No, just the Game Awards. I don't... It's the Game Awards. The Game Awards. Forget about it. Anyway. It's the Game Awards. Yeah, that's right. And they did. They won a few, actually, like Best Multiplayer and things like that. But also, overall, they did win, which I was surprised because it seemed like that Naughty Dog title, the Uncharted one, Drake's final one or whatever. I don't know. I don't play that. But it kept winning a lot of stuff. So I was sort of surprised that Overwatch won. But having played it, I'm not surprised. Yeah. I mean, Overwatch winning it wasn't a surprise to me. I did not watch the Game Awards because I was asleep because I was going into work way early this week. but I did see the important clips and parts. So I was pretty impressed with most of it. There was multiple things from the Game Awards worth mentioning, besides just the fact that the glory of Overwatch's best game of the year was there were some pretty good trailers that got dropped during the Game Awards. And one that is just kind of like destroys your head. I don't really know what's up with Kojima and his whole death stranding thing. Because I'm more confused every time he drops a trailer. It's like, what exactly is this thing supposed to be? I mean, I agree. But as is the case where, and this always seemed to be something to me that especially Japanese development studios lean towards, which is they do a lot of teaser stuff early on where it's just cinematic. So I have no context as to what even the gameplay is. I don't know if it's a first-person shooter. I don't know if it is a strategy game. I mean, he's associated with Metal Gear Solid. Is this going to be a stealth thing where you have to avoid these slime monster things? Who knows? Is it Resident Evil-esque? I don't know. So, yeah, it looks really, really weird. Daryl's crying a lot. That's all I know. Daryl from Walking Dead. I'm pretty certain. Isn't Mads Mikkelsen in it also? I don't know. Yeah, Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen. So, wow. Yep, it's pretty weird. But anyway, we're not really going to spend a lot of time on the awards themselves. People can go back and catch the feed on YouTube if they want to. It clicked with me because we need to talk about the developer update going on regarding Overwatch. Specifically, Symmetra's redesigns that are being experimented on on the test servers now. Which, I don't play on the test servers. But I do read what has been coming out from them, and we had noted a couple episodes ago that there were a lot of changes to a number of characters in their last main update, but Symmetra hadn't been touched, which I thought was a travesty because she is so unworkable in some situations. It's just you can't. She's a sometimes character, and that's fine, but she was a sometimes sometimes character, which was not fine. And they are trying out a whole lot of different things with her. Oh, yeah, they are. I mean, I was surprised when I saw the list of everything they were doing because it is less a buff and tweak like we've seen throughout, and it's pretty much a complete redesign of Symmetra as far as I can tell. Yeah, do you want to go ahead and just start running down the list of everything that you've been able to keep track of that they're doing with her? Yeah, from what I've seen of the stuff is they're keeping her general theme and some of her things have been boosted. They increased the primary fire mode, range of the primary fire mode of her, little beam gun, her little proton pack type shot. It is a bit limiting. Yeah, and it's a good weapon. It's good especially for dealing with tracers and stuff with the lock on. But the big thing there that could be considered just a tweak is instead of only letting you put up three turrets and have to wait through the cooldowns you can put all you you can put up six turrets uh without having to wait through cooldowns and the cooldown times have been reduced those are both i think huge it was i don't play a lot of symmetra but it was very annoying for the fact that she can have six turrets out but even if you ran with a lucio to the first defense point like let's say you're on Hanamura and you're going to defense point A, you still, even if you got there at speed, could not get all six out before the attack wave actually begins. Yeah, that was really annoying. That was one of the things I hated. I think those two things alone would have been a massive change for Symmetra. But then they went ahead and upped the anti more. They realized that her shield ability was completely useless because it was so little. So little. I mean, especially after the buffs to Trornborn, Yorn, Yorn, Gorn, Born, Gorn. It's Thor-Bjorn. Thor-Bjorn, Born, Bjorns. Thor-Bjorn. It's High Noon. But they got rid of that ability, and they replaced it with an item that they're calling the Photon Barrier that is basically a moving version of Dixie Reinhardt's shield, where she pops it and a little robot puts the shield up and it just moves forward. I've been watching some videos and I've been reading some stuff about it that apparently there are some things it will do, like the little robot that's in the middle of the shield will eat your shots or it will block Roadhog's hook. if you try and hook somebody from behind it and you catch it, it'll block it. But otherwise it acts just like Dixie Reinhardt's shield, but it just keeps moving forward at a steady pace. So that's something I think could be really useful, and it could be interesting to do for, especially against somebody like Mercy, when she pops her ult and you throw a shield straight in her face and she can't move, so she kills herself by detonating all her rockets against the shield you just threw in her face. oh do you mean Farah? oh yeah Farah who did I say Mercy? I'm taking care of you I suddenly have rockets I have rockets now that would be a Mercy worthy of Mordor that'd be a Mercy kill oh that's good that's good I mean stuff like that it seems interesting and it helps seeing as she still doesn't have you know like an ability to create she's not a healer but being support, it gives her a lot more options in the support zone. And even against anybody with an explosive, you throw it in their face, they're going to have to worry about hurting themselves. And even just for pushing and creating farther blocks up, getting in people's way, it's going to be a pretty useful thing. Yeah, I think it's got some good potential, especially if you're on a team that has some teamwork going on. What's that? Yeah, I know. I'm trying to get more. Sometimes I get a couple other people. I'll have half a team that can do teamwork. All right, I'm firing the quasi Dixie Reinhardt. I haven't decided what I'm going to name it yet. Firing the quasi Dixie Reinhardt. Get behind it and march forward. Because I still think she will be. I mean, she has support. So technically, she should be attractive on offense or defense. And I'm thinking that that shield addition is actually more for people to consider taking her on the offensive team. whereas currently I treat her like she's a totally defensive character. Yeah, and that's pretty much how I treat her too. But I think for all those changes, I think the biggest change is the fact that they're talking about she is going to have two ultimates that you get to choose between. The first ultimate is the ultimate she has now, which is the teleporter, but the second ultimate is a shield generator that anytime you're within range of that generator and it goes and from what i've heard it goes through walls and stuff so you can hide it doesn't have to be out in the open anytime you're within range of that you have a shield up so it's like her shield but her old shield but it actually you know is useful and you can keep it up So if you're defending a point, it can be hidden near the point and keep everybody in the point with shields up and this and that. And I know they're also the shield generator and the teleporter are supposed to, if you can stop somebody from killing them, they are going to slowly heal themselves back up so they don't get just wiped out instantly. Right, because that was another issue with her stuff. She had no way to fix it. Torbjorn gets to repair his turret if it's damaged because he has a hammer, but Symmetra does not have a repair tool. So that passive repair, I think, is very, very useful. I think the addition of the shield generator is huge, and I agree with you. It is the biggest change. It has to be the biggest change for her because the problem was, again, we have a support character. Let's talk again using Hanamura, a good example, defensive use of her. She's great with that teleport on point A of Hanamura. there's no point in having her teleport at point B. It might save you one second. It's just, she's not, it's not useful enough to be a worthy ult at that point. It makes more sense for the player to change to a different character. But having a shield generator on that really tight point, where point B is so close to the defensive spawn, that could be huge. Yeah, because, I mean, depending upon the range of the shield generator, if you can tuck it back, not somewhere where it's harder to get to and still have the shield affect you on the point, that's going to be super useful. And, I mean, it's just overall, if you can drop that shield generator on top of a payload, and so everybody you've got running the payload, besides having the passive healing you get from being within escort range of the payload, plus any healing you have from a Lucio or whatever, then you'll also have shields off of that that moves with the payload. I mean, that right there is just another extra layer of survivability during your escort. So anyway, I'm pretty excited about what I'm hearing coming out of PTR. So I want to try her once these actually come out. I just don't play her much currently. I don't play her much currently, and I don't like to play games on PTRs. I used to play on PTR a lot, like when I was playing World of Tanks a lot. By a lot, I mean I was playing World of Tanks like at least one, maybe two hours a day, every day of the week. I used to get on the PTR and try out the changes and stuff all the time, and it just got to a point where it's like, well, I like this. Oh, well, they pulled that out after the PTR and this and that. I just stopped. I figure once it's balanced and ready to go and they put it out, I will play it. until then okay yeah no i think that makes a lot of sense well speaking of what you're playing let's go ahead and move to our final video game segment which is just for us to talk about games we've been playing because both of us are playing something we haven't been talking about before yeah um why don't you go ahead and go first oh how how magnanimous of you so i shall i try okay uh my game is dangerous golf i picked up several i think i bought four games on black friday so but this is the only one i've started so far and i did check because i was sure we had briefly discussed it on the podcast and we had all the way back on episode two wow that was a long time ago it was it an indie studio that made it but the people that formed that studio they were the people that were behind the old racing game Burnout and the Crash Breaker mode You remember surely you remember Crash Breaker It's the best part of those games. It was the reason to play those games. Exactly. Exactly. So what Dangerous Golf is, basically it's the Crash Breaker mode, but it's with golf ball. So you're a little golf ball. you're usually teed up somewhere in a building or something there are things to attack or hit or break break really so microwaves it could be a kitchen could be a dining room with fine china an art museum all that sort of stuff and if you do enough damage then much like in those burnout games you can activate a they call it a smash breaker in this game but then you can fire that off and then you get this unrealistic sort of physical control over your ball as it's exploding so you can hit other things it's on fire it's more powerful it can you know ignite gasoline things like that at that point so it's 100 stages i think i am roughly 60 to 70 percent through the stages and this is one of those games where it started easy and it's gotten progressively harder to reach the target scores. And you can always move on as long as you earn a bronze medal. But it was one of those where I started playing the game and I was like, oh, I'm getting platinums. I'm not going to move on until I get a platinum. And then I compromised my standards and said, well, no, I'll settle for a gold. I can do gold. And I just do bronze now. I kind of transitioned. I briefly was at the silver stage and I was like, I think I could keep getting silver. And no, no, no, no. It didn't. I mean, there's even, I got to a new area and I got a couple of platinums in a row. So it's not like all of a sudden all I get are bronzes, but I kind of want to see all of these and then I'll go back and start trying to figure out the best way to up my score because they're very, very quick. I mean, most of the time you spend on a single stage is under a minute unless you start replaying it. So it's just it's nice. It's got little bite sized chunks. It's not as deep as I would have hoped it would be. But I mean, in the sense of like, what do I mean by that? I wouldn't expect a story or anything. It's just even though there are 100 stages, a lot of times the layout of the stages are pretty much the same. They just change the objectives a little bit. So when you see the 100, you think there's more variety than there really is. But for a game that I got on sale, I think it's great. So I've been having a lot of fun with it. I just sort of play it when I need some downtime or if no one else is on wanting to play Battlefield or Overwatch with me. It's like, yeah, I'll go in and I'll just start shooting at that. I have a soft spot for platformers as well, where I'll go along and I'll be like, oh, I'll do this platformer. And then I, at least with the platformers, I always end up feeling like I got in over my head. Thanks, Super Meat Boy. But, and this might end up like that, though. I highly doubt the difficulty curve to at least get bronzes is going to be as bad as some of those, like Explosion Man. And Meat Boy, of course, is a great example of just where it just got ridiculously hard. but anyway that is my new game that I have been playing and I have been having quite a bit of fun with what have you been working on? well real quick what do you think of it? yes! does it have the same kind of hooks that the old crash modes had where we would lose you know half of a night playing crash mode and screaming at the TV and stuff does it have that same kind of hook or is it or not so much it's hard for me to say i think it wants to it actually has a competitive tour mode where you just pass the controller on to the next person and they have to play in your wrecked field so really yes i haven't tried that yet i've just i've read about it uh you know that we could have tried that last night i didn't think about i didn't think about it I'm foolish. I've fallen and failed you. And I'm sorry. Well, maybe for the next... I'm going to host the next game night where we have people over, and that'll be in January. That'll probably be one that I go ahead and just fire up and we can do that. But yeah, no, it's got the thing where you... There are a lot where I have, even when I gave up and didn't end up getting a platinum, where I just kept going back to it because I'm like, I know what I want to do. I'm just not executing it. Because just like with Crash Breaker mode, when you're doing burnout, it's sort of hard to control that car once it's an exploded flaming wreck. It's the same with the golf ball. It's bouncing. You have some rudimentary control over the height of its bounce and you can move it, but it's all timed before you run out of smash breaker energy, unless it's a stage that allows you to recharge it by doing certain things. Another interesting aspect that's different than the old burnout one is after you've done the damage with the ball there's still a flag in a hole that you want to hit and there are a lot of bonus points for you to do ricochets and such but if you miss that hole you lose half the score you accumulated in damage really yes so let's sink the shot if you ever want a good medal because i i don't know if it's totally impossible but it would be virtually impossible to get a platinum if you can't sink your shot and in some ways it would be hard to get a platinum without actually banking the shot like off of four things and getting a quadruple bonus because there's not some of the stages there's just not enough stuff to damage that does sound interesting yeah they've added some some new stuff so i don't want to give that a try it's i can't say i like it as much as crash breaker but compared to there was like a top-down isometric burnout that some other developers made that was just a crash breaker mode. This is way better than that was. So this, yeah, I think it's fun. I like to break stuff, though. You like to break stuff. Smash, smash, Hulk smash. Well, I've also been playing a game. As I said earlier, I picked up Master of Orion Conquest of the Galaxy, or Conquer the Galaxy, which is the Wargaming's new, version of Master of Orion that has been put out. They bought the rights off of Atari when Atari sold everything off. Man, how many years? That was a while ago. Long, long, long. You know, I actually looked up Atari today because I was doing research because of that Superman pin, and it's just like, oh gosh, they've changed hands so many times. I don't know. All I know is Atari in some form still exists. That's all I know. Yeah, in some for them, but the Master of Orion series of games was a bunch of games that came out. Let's see, Master of Orion came out in 93, and Master of Orion 2, which is the one that I spent all of my time playing, because Master of Orion 3 was total crap, and came out in 96. and it is a 4X game that much like the Civilization series of games became kind of the yardstick that games of that type are based upon space based 4X games are always compared to Master of Orion 2 and non space based ones are almost always compared to the Civilization series. Right. And I remember you put in some yeoman's work into MUTU back in the day. Oh, yeah. I mean, I probably put in 40-plus hours into MUTU last year and the year before just because I got a version of it that worked on my computer I got from Steam or GOG or one of those sites. but it was a game that I it was my go-to game for 4X style stuff that I played all the time because of the ship design ability and the tactical combat and everything else it hit everything if not perfectly it was good enough and had enough stuff that was perfect that you could just lock in and play and it's still fun to play to this day so when I'd heard that there was a new version coming out and it went into my much hated early access model is what they went into last February. And I stayed away from it like the plague because I, I've been burned on early access too many times that I just barely followed it. And I didn't actually pick it up until Black Friday came out. And I played between Black Friday and December 1st. I played two full games. It was fun. It was okay. I mean, it wasn't great. I don't think it was as good as MUTU, but at the same time, MUTU has this whole thing for me now. It's kind of become like a Paragon game. but on the 1st of December they released DLC that has three more races and they made a major free update that spliced in a lot of changes to the game and it actually made the game so it was less like the original Master of Orion and more like Master of Orion 2 and they added a lot of stuff and I've been playing that since the 1st and it has been, it's still got a couple of bugs here and there, which is going to happen, but it's even more fun than it was. I mean, I have put, let me call up my Steam client real quick. Since I picked this game up, I have already put 33 hours in it. So, and I was literally playing this game up until we started recording the podcast. I shut down to record the podcast. That was nice of you. Yeah, I know. I thought, it's like, man, you know, this game is slow enough based. I could probably play this game in the background. But I decided that would probably take a little too much. It would be the mouse clicks they would give you away. Yeah, there's enough mouse clicks and stuff already because I already go all over the place and look at all sorts of stuff. But, yeah, I have to say I've been pretty excited for it. I don't know even if it was as good or even better than MUTU. I don't know if I'd ever actually feel that way because MUTU has become that kind of special place in my heart. But I have to say I've been pretty happy with it so far. It's got issues, and some of its issues, interestingly enough, are like issues that the old Master of Orion games had, specifically against the computer, where properly designed ships that are played properly pretty much guarantees a win every time, even if you're horribly outmatched. So it's not as bad as it got to be in Master of Orion 2, where the right design was basically, it's like, okay, I can use one ship and wipe out 100 ships and not take any damage ever. I just have to play it right type stuff. But I have to say, it's been pretty enjoyable. And for the price I got it at, it definitely, I've made my money's worth. Because I got it for like $17. And I put three hours into it, and I'm going to be putting a lot more into it. So, I mean, what am I down to? I'm down to like 50 cents an hour or something like that. 51 cents an hour. That's affordable entertainment right there. That's affordable entertainment as far as that goes. So I've been pretty happy with it. It's a game that I'm going to keep playing a little bit longer. I'm real bad about playing a game hardcore for a while, like several weeks, and then not touching it for six or eight months and playing other stuff. So we'll see how it works out. Well, that is what we had to talk about in the video game segment. I know for the next episode we were talking about doing a year-end recap or something. and I might have started one of these other sale games by then and so maybe I'll have a new I don't know yet if I'll have a new one to talk about next time or not but there have been a number of things that I think back that we've been playing over the whole year that we could probably touch back upon. I don't know what the listeners want us to do actually for the next episode it will be the last episode of 2016 Yeah, well I don't know well they can let us know, we're available in all sorts of places, we're available on Twitter and Instagram as Eclectic underscore Gamers. That's true. But we're also available on Facebook at Facebook.com slash Eclectic Gamers Podcast, or we can be reached by email at Eclectic Gamers Podcast at gmail.com. So those are all great ways to reach out to us and let us know if you want us to talk about anything in particular, or maybe if you don't want us to talk about something, like please have an episode where you don't talk about Overwatch at all. I mean, that could be like a challenge. I don't know if we pass that challenge You don't have a massively long intro And for those of you who are Missing the tabletop discussion We are not getting rid of the tabletop Discussion it's just I have literally not played any tabletop games In a month and I didn't do any looking And I haven't done I had nothing to talk about because I didn't really look online To find anything this time So I failed so we just let it Kind of slide because sometimes There's just not that much going on Being the end of the year, there's not that much going on with a lot of these stuff. Nobody's, no big video game announcements. Well, except for PlayStation just had a bunch. Well, you know, even that is, I mean, you can say, well, there's some confirmations, but everything was just trailers, and most of those trailers weren't probably not particularly substantive in terms of gameplay. The bottom line being, none of that stuff's about to come out. So, it's just, it's a lull. You know, you have that E3 period leading up to the holiday season. and now almost all the holiday games, video games, are out because people have to buy them for Christmas. Yeah. So you've just got this window until it starts moving towards spring where you'll start to get the actual meaningful announcements of games that are about to come out. So that's a frustration. Of course, pinball is always slow on manufacturing news because it's so niche, and I'm going to guess Stern Pinball will be the next big announcement, and it will probably be January at the earliest, I imagine. So we're waiting on that. And so all we can do is poke holes in their contests and stuff. So that's just slim pickings there. And I don't know what the cycle is on tabletop. I guess it's just whatever the cycle on Kickstarter is. Yeah, it's pretty much just, yeah, however people are kicking things out on the Kickstarter and how the companies are. I mean, the big companies put stuff out pretty much continuously throughout the year, but a lot of it's just iterations and add-ons to already existing games. But given that we have all three of those categories, we will always have at least something that we can discuss. If it's not a new upcoming thing, then it can be an old has-been thing that we just played. So that's always the exciting thing. Hey, pinball lived like that for years, where there was next to no manufacturing. That's very true. I mean, what was the newest game? You were at the 403 monthly yesterday with me as well. What was the newest game you played while you were there? oh the newest game that was there the newest game that i actually play newest one that you actually played the newest game that was there was hobbit but i say the newest game that i actually played would have been iron man but i had i had terrible draws i mean i i i played the number three player in the state and the number one player in the state i just got i got smashed i put a after my first round i there was a i put a post up on the instagram and facebook uh talking about it but Yeah, I got smashed. I only played four total games last night. I played Iron Man, Mustang, Party Zone, and Elvira and the Party Monsters. And I pretty much got hammered in the ground on all of them. I did get to play a competitive game on Ghostbusters, so that was pretty new. And then everything else was before 2000, I believe. I had a couple of games on Corvette, a couple of games on Champion Pub, a game on Party Zone. Oh, I did have a game on Mustang also. Oh, that game is fast. Mustang is one of those games, you know, the more I play it, it's like, you know, I kind of like the game, but at the same time, there's stuff in the game that just makes me want to scream at it. So I'm learning it. It doesn't anger me as much as Indy 500. No, no. I'm not a huge fan of any of the car games that I've played. Mustang, I think, I like the rules, and I think the layout's pretty good, but the way it's tuned, it's just too fast. It's too fast for me. It's like F14. I can't track the ball fast enough. My eyes are too old. Do you consider the high-speed games car games? Yes, I do, but it's been a while. I have not put hardly any time on high-speed one, so it's difficult for me. I've only played some high-speed one. A lot of high-speed two. High Speed 2 is one of my favorite games. But that's a good point. I do like The Getaway. I do like it. Oh, interesting aside, as I was looking up the info to learn what is up with the Superman game, the programming, a guy who did Superman did High Speed. Really? Interesting. Yep. Well, that's it for this episode. So thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Until then, I am Dennis, and I'll say so long. I'm Tony. and if you've got any other ideas or things you want us to talk about or look information up, contact us on the Facebook or Twitter or the Instagram.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 483f400d-c313-4131-93a8-aeaeafa6042a*