# Episode 35 - NieRly Time for P3

**Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2017-05-22  
**Duration:** 94m 37s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-35

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## Analysis

Eclectic Gamers hosts discuss Skip B bankruptcy proceedings (Kathy's hearing extension to June 2nd/8th), Dutch Pinball's crisis with Aura contract and Nivoji Group's 51% equity takeover offer, and upcoming Total Nuclear Annihilation (Spooky Pinball) translight artwork reveal. Legal cases progressing faster than expected; Dutch faces financial pressure and reputational damage; community divided on takeover wisdom.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Kathy (Kevin Kulik's mother) granted extension to June 2nd to submit written responses to trustee questions; hearing rescheduled for June 8th — _Dennis discussing Skip B legal proceedings; direct reference to hearing audio (16 minutes long) available in show notes_
- [HIGH] Nivoji Group (parent company of Aura) offering 51% equity stake to resolve Dutch Pinball manufacturing impasse — _Dennis: 'The Nivoji Group... They are offering a way out to Dutch Pinball... They will allow Aura to resume manufacturing... In exchange, they want 51% of the company'_
- [MEDIUM] Dutch Pinball cannot afford refunds to early adopters, suggesting cash flow crisis — _Dennis: 'if people... have asked Dutch for refunds per the refund policy, and they are told they cannot have refunds at this point... The only reason for that to happen would be that there is no money for refunds'_
- [HIGH] Big Lebowski retail price is $10,000; early achievers paid approximately $8,500 — _Dennis: 'It's $10,000 is my understanding... early achievers were more around $8,500'_
- [HIGH] Aura manager/supervisor was terminated after Texas Pinball Festival, but contract disputes with Dutch remain unresolved — _Dennis discussing Aura personnel change and subsequent lack of progress on manufacturing agreement_
- [HIGH] Ray Tanzer is the designer of Hoops (Gottlieb); John Trudeau and John Norris both worked on Deadly Weapon design — _Dennis correction: 'Ray Tanzer is the designer of Hoops... Deadly Weapon... had Trudeau and John Norris both working on design'_
- [MEDIUM] Eclectic Gamers Podcast is listed as the only podcast sponsor of Project Pinball Charity — _Dennis: 'I think we're the only podcast, though, that's actually listed' among Project Pinball sponsors_
- [HIGH] Spooky Pinball revealed high-resolution translight artwork for Total Nuclear Annihilation on stream, followed by official release — _Dennis: 'They revealed on the stream, and then the next day, Spooky released a high-res version of what the Translight is going to be'_

### Notable Quotes

> "I don't know what's going on. I'm just a mom. I take care of the grandkids."
> — **Kathy (Kevin Kulik's mother, paraphrased)**, ~25:00
> _Defense strategy in bankruptcy hearing; contrasts with Kevin's claims she held legal/accounting roles in Skip B_

> "With the increased costs that surprised them that came from ARA. But let's remember, people were getting really upset with Dutch Pinball as of Texas Pinball Festival."
> — **Tony**, ~50:00
> _Context for Dutch's financial and reputational crisis; ties manufacturing cost overruns to community sentiment shifts_

> "I don't think Dutch Pinball has the money to finish this job at this point."
> — **Dennis**, ~45:00
> _Core assessment of Dutch's financial viability; supports conclusion that Nivoji offer is necessity, not choice_

> "The only reason for that to happen would be that there is no money for refunds. That would be my thought."
> — **Dennis**, ~55:00
> _Logical inference about Dutch's cash position based on refund policy enforcement_

> "51% is all about control."
> — **Tony**, ~52:00
> _Technical analysis of takeover structure; explains why 51% is non-negotiable threshold_

> "I think this is probably a blessing to them. I think it's their best chance to get anything out of this and not just go away."
> — **Tony**, ~47:00
> _Assessment that Nivoji offer represents Dutch's viable path forward_

> "It's been in the works for a while. I think we're just at the stage now where all the delay part, the delay part sort of in the past."
> — **Tony**, ~38:00
> _Meta-commentary on Skip B case timeline; podcast entered story at resolution phase_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Kevin Kulik | person | Skip B founder; bankrupt; central figure in ongoing legal proceedings over asset transfers (trailer, house) |
| Kathy Kulik | person | Kevin's mother; received trailer allegedly funded by Predator pinball money; involved in Skip B formally (legal/accounting roles claimed); defending against clawback in bankruptcy |
| Amanda Kulik | person | Kevin's wife; received house via property transfer; hired as contractor to photograph Predator; claims grandmother's money deposited to Skip B account to preserve Medicaid eligibility |
| Skip B | company | Pinball machine manufacturer (Predator); founder Kevin Kulik in bankruptcy; assets being clawed back by trustee |
| Dutch Pinball | company | Big Lebowski pinball manufacturer; in manufacturing crisis with Aura; facing Nivoji Group takeover offer for 51% equity; reputation damaged by deception and delayed delivery |
| Nivoji Group | company | Parent company to Aura and other manufacturers; offering to purchase 51% of Dutch Pinball equity in exchange for resuming Big Lebowski manufacturing; Netherlands-based electronics/manufacturing firm |
| Aura | company | Contract manufacturer handling Big Lebowski production; contract dispute with Dutch over per-unit costs; previously had supervisor/manager terminated after Texas Pinball Festival |
| Spooky Pinball | company | Manufacturer of Total Nuclear Annihilation; released high-res translight artwork on stream |
| Scott DeNossi | person | Game designer; evolved gameplay for Total Nuclear Annihilation (Spooky Pinball); appeared on Deadflip stream |
| Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; provides business/strategic analysis on Dutch Pinball situation |
| Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; covers legal cases (Skip B), manufacturer news; corrects own factual error about Hoops designer |
| Project Pinball Charity | organization | Places pinball machines in children's hospitals and Ronald McDonald houses; Eclectic Gamers Podcast is sponsor (only podcast sponsor listed) |
| Internet Pinball Database | organization | Reference database for pinball machine information; sponsor of Project Pinball Charity |
| Ray Tanzer | person | Designer of Gottlieb Hoops pinball machine |
| John Trudeau | person | Pinball designer; worked on Deadly Weapon with John Norris at Gottlieb |
| John Norris | person | Pinball designer; worked on Deadly Weapon with John Trudeau at Gottlieb |
| Bowen Kerins | person | Guest on previous Eclectic Gamers episode; received positive feedback from listeners |
| Steve | person | Skilled pinball tournament player; ran three-strike tournament at Tap Kade North Kansas City |
| Triela | person | Tony's daughter; completed second 5K race in 34:44, 1:07 faster than previous time |
| Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer; sponsor of Project Pinball Charity |
| CoinTaker | company | Distributor/retailer selling Big Lebowski pinball at $10,000 |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Skip B bankruptcy proceedings and asset clawback litigation, Dutch Pinball manufacturing crisis and Nivoji Group takeover offer
- **Secondary:** Total Nuclear Annihilation (Spooky) translight artwork reveal, Pinball designer history and Gottlieb machine corrections, Eclectic Gamers sponsorships (Project Pinball Charity, CantCon), Aura contract manufacturing and supervisor termination
- **Mentioned:** Bride of Pinbot 25th anniversary marketing and pricing criticism, Pinball tournament activity in Kansas City area (Pizza West, Tap Kade North)

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.35) — Negative outlook on Skip B situation (ongoing legal mess, slow resolution despite acceleration) and Dutch Pinball crisis (reputation damage, financial distress, loss of creative control via takeover). Moderately positive on Nivoji offer as pragmatic solution and Total Nuclear Annihilation artwork reveal. Positive personal notes on podcast sponsorships and local tournament growth.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Dutch Pinball appears insolvent or severely cash-constrained; unable to offer refunds to early adopters despite contractual refund policy, suggesting capital depletion (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'The only reason for that to happen would be that there is no money for refunds' + refusal to refund early achievers who paid $8,500 vs current $10,000 retail
- **[business_signal]** Nivoji Group offering 51% equity acquisition of Dutch Pinball to resolve manufacturing impasse; represents major ownership/control transfer (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'The Nivoji Group... offering a way out to Dutch Pinball... In exchange, they want 51% of the company' + Dutch hiring business consultant to evaluate pros/cons
- **[community_signal]** Eclectic Gamers Podcast listed as sole podcast sponsor of Project Pinball Charity; indicates media platform integration with pinball community advocacy (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'I think we're the only podcast, though, that's actually listed' among Project Pinball Charity sponsors
- **[design_philosophy]** Spooky Pinball/Scott DeNossi Total Nuclear Annihilation translight artwork revealed on stream; design process shared publicly with community (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'Deadflip had another stream... They revealed on the stream... Spooky released a high-res version of what the Translight is going to be'
- **[regulatory_signal]** Skip B bankruptcy trustee pursuing aggressive asset clawback strategy against multiple recipients of Kevin Kulik funds; Kathy's hearing extended for written responses (confidence: high) — Dennis detailing June 2/8 hearing dates, supplemental brief on wife Amanda's house, trustee strategy to reclaim trailer and house as fraudulently transferred assets
- **[market_signal]** Big Lebowski early adopter refund policy being enforced against customers; likely predicting supply chain failure or extended delays (confidence: medium) — Dennis discussing refund denials + discussion of bridge manufacturer plan for Bride of Pinbot 25 delaying Big Lebowski production further
- **[community_signal]** Scott DeNossi credited as designer/developer of Total Nuclear Annihilation gameplay evolution for Spooky Pinball; public involvement in stream presentation (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'Scott DeNossi [who] evolved [the] gameplay... Spooky Pinball is going to be manufacturing the machine... revealed on the stream'
- **[product_concern]** Bride of Pinbot 25th anniversary artwork quality criticized as poor; pricing seen as desperation play similar to J-POP's Raza/Alice strategy (confidence: medium) — Tony: 'the only thing that looked worse than the art, well, no, nothing did... It didn't make any sense. It seemed like a desperation play'
- **[sentiment_shift]** Dutch Pinball community sentiment shifted from optimism (post-Aura manager termination) back to pessimism; manager departure did not resolve contract disputes (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'After Texas Pinball Festival, a lot of people got optimistic... the manager wasn't the problem I don't think... it's been months, so that's not it'
- **[competitive_signal]** Kansas City pinball tournament infrastructure expanding with new location-based events (Tap Kade North Kansas City); drawing new players with proximity-based accessibility (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'there were i think five people i didn't recognize... at least four of them were new... shows that if you have locations in proximity to people... they are willing to come out'

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## Transcript

 Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, May 21st. It is episode 35. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk to you about pinball and video games, and that's about it today. But it's plenty. It is indeed plenty. So let's go ahead and get our intros out of the way. Tony, it's been two weeks. What's going on? It's been an awful busy two weeks. I've been the early guy at work, so that means I've been waking up at like 3.30 in the morning. But I've gotten a lot of stuff done, even though I've been going to bed a little earlier than normal just to make everything work together. and on top of that being the disappointed May, I mean the girls are just getting out of school so there's been a lot of school functions going on also Triela just ran her second 5k yesterday so we were up at Arrowhead while she ran that yesterday How'd she do? She did good, she did 34 minutes and 44 seconds which is a minute and 7 seconds faster than last time so she's definitely getting even faster there's no way i could run 5k in 34 minutes maybe on a bicycle okay definitely on a bicycle but it sounds exhausting yeah i'm not i'm not a runner as my physique can show i don't have the knees for it i i tore my knees up in wrestling so i just don't have the knees for it my knees hurt anytime i run or do anything like that my knees just kill me Too much damage from high school. Paying the price. Paying the price. But that's what glory costs. I don't know if I ever had that much glory to make it worthwhile. All right. Anything else, then? No, and I haven't really had anything else big going on. Playing some games and stuff that we'll talk about later, but nothing fancy. It's mainly been school stuff and stuff with the girls. Yeah, I haven't had a whole lot besides work. It was audit time this last week. So I had to work with the auditors. We have an audit every year. So it went well, but it's just a lot of actual research work that I can't do until they're out in the field. So that, and we had a new hire at work. So I've been doing a lot of training on how to do the financial aspects of that particular job. And it, again, went fine. It's just, it's time consuming. So outside of that, I haven't actually even played my pins since before the last episode we recorded. they are just sitting there turned off you and i went to the pizza west tournament yesterday so i had that and then the week before we had a new location open up in on the missouri side uh tap kade north kansas city and so i went out uh one of our area uh skilled players steve was running the tournament out there and they did a three strike and it went really well there were uh there were i think five people i didn't recognize who were there i and i think i'd heard confirmation and at least four of them were new, totally new. So it did get some new people. So I think it goes to show that if you have locations in proximity to people so they don't have to drive too far, they are willing to come out and give it a shot. Not everybody's willing to drive a half hour to go to a tournament like we are. Well, yeah, no, exactly. But, I mean, we're a good case in point. We didn't go to 403 until we had done Pizza West, which is a lot closer for us. so it's you know i probably wouldn't have gone 30 minutes for my very first tournament now i'd be i'm more willing because i enjoy it but anyway so there's that and then speaking of my pins and the not playing since the last episode i have to do a correction regarding the last episode yay corrections uh and this one was not reported in this is one i caught myself shortly after we released the episode that was the episode where we had bowen on which uh feedback was extremely positive so I'm glad people really did like it I've had some people write me privately and even some people who listen who are in the area who play pinball obviously in particular since he's such a known entity in the pinball scene saying that they really enjoyed the episode so I'm glad people liked it but there was a mistake a me mistake and my mistake was when we were having that discussion about Silver Slugger and Hoops and I mentioned that I thought Hoops was a game that, like Silver Slugger, had John Trudeau on design, but then, in the case of Hoops, Jon Norris took over on the project because Trudeau left. That was wrong. It's Ray Tanzer is the designer of Hoops. The street-level Gottlieb I was thinking of, which had Trudeau and Jon Norris both working on design, is a game called Deadly Weapon. So there was one. I just forgot which one it was, which is so unfortunate because actually my favorite part about pinball is all that baseball card type stuff where you learn the stats and all the things. It's kind of where I geek out on it. Anyway, my mistake. So Ray Tanzer is the designer of hoops. I don't really know much about his portfolio, so I can't really say anything else. But correction, now corrected. All right. And isn't Deadly Weapon, isn't that one of those kung fu-themed ones? I actually have no idea what it looks like. Well, we'll have a correction next time for what Deadly Weapon. well you you you merely asked it as a question so we haven't committed to that so we don't actually have to fix it but if you want to go to uh internet pinball database and look at it uh you can always report back exactly what the theme is on the next episode but speaking of the internet pinball database um do want to note a couple of sponsorships uh us doing sponsorships not us receiving sponsorships uh we are now listed uh project pinball charity has listed us on their website as one of their sponsors. Internet Pinball Database is a sponsor. They actually have a lot of sponsors. That, for those that don't recall, and we've done an interview with Project Pinball before, and we do promote them on our Facebook page in particular when they're running events, and they're always running events. But they place pinball machines in children's hospitals. They've also expanded to Ronald McDonald houses. And their mission is to introduce therapeutic benefits through pinball to children. And so we here at the podcast are happy to offer what support we can. They get a lot of sponsorship support from the pinball community, ranging from entities as big as Stern Pinball to groups like Measel Mods are sponsors, Marco's Specialties and Comet Pinball, which obviously supply parts for pinball machines. I think we're the only podcast, though, that's actually listed. But anyway, we're pleased to do it. and separate from that, we are also sponsoring CantCon, which Tony has brought up several times since we've started airing these episodes. It's an area, Kansas City area, tabletop convention. We go for the RPG fix, and that's going to run July 14th through 16th this year in Overland Park, which is in the suburbs of Kansas City. So we've gone ahead, and we've provided a sponsorship to that entity. Tony and I are both going to be there at least part of the time. We're not going to be all three days, but we're going to be there some of the time. Yeah, at least I'm planning on Friday and Saturday is my plan. We'll see if the plan works out, but that's the plan. It's mine as well, and I have put in the request to have the Friday off. I'm pretty confident the Friday is going to work well. The only thing I haven't decided yet on Saturday is if I want to stay as long as I did last year or we've got the Pizza West monthly pinball tournament the same day. Since I have some other people who like to go to that, I'm wondering if I want to try and maybe compress the schedule and get out of there in time to actually make that. I'm not sure yet. I'm thinking about it. But I am planning on both days, but not Sunday. So that's it for me and updates. So I think we need to move on into the silver ball itself. Talking of the silver ball, I went ahead and looked up Deadly Weapon, and it looks like a bad 80s lethal weapon Yakuza ripoff. So it sounds like your sort of game. Yeah, actually, I don't think it's that horrible. but I mean it look it it the uh feel is very kind of Yakuza buddy cop type how's the layout look it looks okay I mean it's it's got it's got a trio of pops up top and a couple drop targets and three flippers actually there's more drop targets there on the right side The pops are bright yellow, and they've got the big Gottlieb G on top, so they look like they're sponsored by Gatorade. Well, if the game plays as good as Gatorade tastes, it's going to be awful. I like Gatorade. Yeah, there are a few of you out there that are messed up. I can't fix that. I can only solve so much. I only have so much power here. And it's got a weird pop down on the lower left, like blocking the out lane and in lane on the left side. Hmm. Okay. I'd have to take a look. I mean, I know that was pretty common on wide bodies, but none of the street levels are wide, so. Let's see. Here, I'll send you a link and you can. I'll judge it. I'll be real harsh. Well, while we're judging, I'd say let's go ahead and hit the first topic then within pinball, deadly weapon aside, of course, and that would be Skit-B. We have more legal updates. I know everyone's really, really thrilled. Actually, legal updates. Yeah. Oh, yes. If only we had the actual Law & Order sound drop, I could insert right there, but I'm not going to. Your interpretation is close enough. There were a couple of items. The main one I want to note is there was a hearing since our last episode for the mom, Kevin Kulik's mom, Kathy. so the issue for those that don't remember the summary is kevin purportedly allegedly bought kathy a trailer with predator pinball money so that's why she's involved and the hearing was really short it's about 16 minutes long and we do have a link in the show notes so people can go and listen to the audio what happens during the hearing is she asks for the ability and is granted the ability to write her responses to a list of questions ahead of time citing health issues that she has that make it difficult for her to respond verbally. So the judge has given her until June 2nd to submit her written responses to the questions, and then she will still have to attend a hearing so she can respond to any follow-up questions or clarifications and such. And that's scheduled to be June 8th, which I imagine there will be a recording of once that happens. So we're a few weeks off from that. The only other item, though, regarding the SCIT-B that happened recently was there's a supplemental brief that the trustee filed and that is not regarding the mom that's regarding kevin's wife uh to try and reclaim the house we talked about that extensively a couple episodes ago i believe uh so there's a document if anyone wants to read it but it pretty much mirrors what we covered in that prior episode so feel free to go back if you haven't heard and you want to listen to the our summary of what happened in the hearing with amanda where she wants to try and keep the house and she knows how it looks uh given the transfers and such so okay so that's uh the thing is she on thanked her on facebook was the rumor coming around or what was heard which would not help her case in any way shape or form to my knowledge the the the mom kathy regarding the trailer again the hearing's so short she's not she wasn't really launching a proper defense she She complained a lot about the audio. She didn't want the audio getting out. She made some claims about violation of privacy, which is not true. And the judge told her that it's open court. These are public documents. People like me are allowed to share the audio of these sort of hearings because it's an open event. But she complained about that. She complained about some of the stuff going on on the Internet, which isn't really relevant, but to her. and she citing, I think COPD said that she was just having a lot of trouble breathing and it's very difficult for her to answer and she just wanted a little bit of time to be able to write her responses. The issue is, my understanding is the screen grabs from when Predator was running and they had their website cited Kathy, the mom who has the trailer as the legal person for Skit B. Now, I don't know if she actually has any legal training or legal background, But she was cited as doing several roles for Skit B. So in her brief hearing, she does mention that she's just a mom. That's kind of, I guess, if you want to say it's the defense, the defense she presented at the short hearing. I don't know what's going on. I'm just a mom. I'm just a mom. I take care of the grandkids. That's her story that she's presenting. However, Kevin, at least on his website, back when this was going on and they were trying to get money to build Predators, was saying, no, you're actually involved in the company. You do legal. I think she's also listed as the accountant. And we've obviously in past episodes discussed the nature of how good the accounting was with Skit-B. So the mom, in regards to her involvement with the company, there is, again, there's sort of a paper trail that says that she was heavily involved. Now, whether she was heavily involved for real or he just claimed that to make the company seem bigger than it really was, I don't know. and that's separate from the wife Amanda the wife Amanda who has the house which his name was taken off of before they signed the final paperwork that we've talked about far more extensively than we ever have the trailer she took photos that's her claim is that she was basically hired as a contractor to take photos of the predator machine I'm not aware if she was ever listed as actually being a part of skit B I don't think so so there's that regarding wanting to figure out the value of the camera equipment and her wanting to keep the house but knowing it looks really bad about the transfers. That's where, in the prior episode where we discussed that, she's the one where she said she had money from her grandmother and they were putting it in the Skit B account. And prior, I guess, prior depositions or something along those lines indicated that they were doing that to hide the money so they could stay with Medicaid. So there's that. It gets weird. You've got Kathy and you have Amanda. They both have received money from Kevin, or that's the trustee's claim. And so he's trying in both cases to claw back these purchases, the trailer in Kathy's case and the house in Amanda's case, to the estate because if they are bought with money that was obtained via fraud, then that stuff belongs to the estate. They can't keep it. It's the same idea in both cases, but the stories as to what happened are very different. I don't know what Kathy's claim is regarding the trailer. based off of what I've heard so far it would probably be she doesn't know where the money for the trailer came from or she's going to say he didn't buy it and she bought it instead but that obviously will open up the issue of her thanking him on Facebook for buying the trailer so but that'll have to come out in another hearing this was just a hearing that gave her an extension to another hearing but there was a little bit of talk so there might be something interesting and answerable coming out of this case in the next five to 30 years. It's moving faster than I think people will stereotype the U.S. legal system as moving. But, you know, it can be frustrating when you're like, oh, here's another hearing to extend the hearing. All I can say is it's moving faster than the Zidware cases are with J-POP. So, yeah. That's the only silver lining I can provide the trustees office to stay in on it. They're pushing so and there's a lot of documentation that i think uh that they do that they do have they claim to have so whether or not they'll ultimately be successful we will see but no i actually think we'll get some more stuff here over the summer would be my expectation so probably some decisions like we may know if some of these claims like the virtual pin claims and stuff if they're going to have to pay anything back or not i think that'll be resolved in pretty short order the house and stuff might take a little longer i'm not sure but but i think we'll have the hearings, then I don't think they're going to be able to get a lot of extensions because most of these people aren't really working through lawyers. So they're not constantly having a lawyer file a motion for extension after extension. These are basically lay people trying to defend themselves, and they're not going out and asking for a bunch of extensions. Even Kathy didn't just come out and say, I need an extension. She just wanted to know she could write her responses to the questions up front, and the judge volunteered the extension to give her the time to do that. But he only gave her a couple of weeks. So in all honesty, it's actually moving pretty quickly compared to the way the legal system tends to run. Well, it's been it's been in the works for a while. I think we're just at the stage now where all the delay part, the delay part sort of in the past. And, you know, Skit-B was one of the last ones we started to follow as a podcast. So we skipped we kind of skipped the line and jumped ahead of a lot of that time where it was investigation and delay and dealing with that whole part where Kevin was asking. for bankruptcy. We came right at the end just before he voluntarily withdrew his option to take bankruptcy. So we skipped ahead. I think that process has gone on for a couple of years. So there's already been a big amount of time invested. We just didn't pay attention to all of that. We're here now that we're at the juicy part. Nothing but the good stuff all the way to the end. Flamin' on for everyone. Okay, so that's Skit-B. Next topic, newsy topic. Dutch Pinball. As we noted, Dutch has been doing pretty consistent weekly updates now. Dutch Pinball is the makers of the Big Lebowski pinball machine. Anyway, what's been going on now is they have said, they being Dutch, has said that the, and I'm going to say this wrong, the Nivoge Group, it's N-I-V-O-G-E, and the N-V and G are all capitalized, so I don't know. I'm going to call it Nivoji. The Nivoji Group, which is the parent company to Aura and I believe a second company as well. So it's a company that owns Aura. They are offering a way out to Dutch Pinball regarding the impasse between Dutch and Aura. They will allow Aura to resume manufacturing of the Big Lebowskis. In exchange, they want 51% of the company. Really? Yes. I mean, that's like a full-on takeover, like hostile takeover level. It is a takeover. Hostile or not, I suppose we could say that depends on intentions. But given they aren't actually buying up shares, it's merely an option. So what Dutch indicated, it was a real short update. They said that was the offer and that Dutch is speaking with the business consultant they've now hired on the pros and cons of allowing that sort of takeover to happen to determine whether or not it's an acceptable course for them. But yeah, it would be obviously with 51%, they would, Nivoji would have decision-making authority. It's obviously spawned a lot of discussion online. Opinions are mixed on whether or not this is a smart move. but let's go ahead and talk about this because it's not just going to go down a legal path. Obviously, this is a choice, so it's not like Skit B at all. So in terms of discussion here, Tony, what do you think of this offer? Obviously, you're kind of getting it sprung on you. This only came out Friday, but what do you think? What do you think Dutch should do? With what Dutch has coming up and what they've laid out as their future and how badly they've been hurt and how badly they've damaged their player base with everything that's happened, which could be Dutch's fault, could be ours fault, but it all comes down to the matter. Dutch lied for six months or more about what the actual problem was. I think this is probably a blessing to them. I think it's their best chance to get anything out of this and not just go away. I agree with you that I think this is the best solution for most parties involved, probably all parties involved. I see why some would be reluctant. I see why Dutch could be reluctant because there could be a concern about giving up creative control in the future. because if 51% of that, of Nivoji, I should say 51% of Dutch is controlled by Nivoji and not controlled by the two current owners of Dutch Pinball, you know, if Nivoji didn't like a particular theme or didn't like a particular course of action and they were at, you know, they were at loggerheads between them and original Dutch, Nivoji wins because they have that. And I'm sure that's why the condition is 51% and not 50% or 49%. And it's very – I mean, obviously, they didn't do the math and say this works out to the number of big Lebowski's that need to be made has a monetary value. You don't have the money available, so we'll take it in equity in the company instead. And that mathed out perfectly to 51%. 51% is all about control. But I think – and again, this is not confirmed by Dutch. And there are people who are defending and saying Dutch has more options here that they are probably financially OK. I am suspicious of that claim. I do not know, obviously. However, based off the behavior of what's been going on, I do not think Dutch Pinball has the money to finish this job at this point. With the increased costs that surprised them that came from ARA. But let's remember, people were getting really upset with Dutch Pinball as of Texas Pinball Festival. You, of course, remember the abomination that was Bride of Pinball 25th anniversary. Oh, yeah, that was terrible. And how it looked. And the only thing that looked worse than the art, well, no, nothing did. But if anything did, it would have been the price that they wanted for what ended up being a, you know, people initially thought that was going to be like a 25-unit run. And then we were hearing it was more like 120. It didn't make any sense. It seemed like a desperation play to try and get in new cash, kind of like what people accused J-Pop of doing with Raza and Alice to try and finish off the Magic Girl run. So, of course, people were very negative to that. After Texas Pinball Festival, a lot of people got optimistic because that was when Ara terminated that supervisor or manager when we covered that in a prior episode. And so there was a lot of people who thought, oh, well, that was the guy, and I believe it was, who was sort of overseeing that contract. He probably oversaw a lot of things. Maybe there was just an assumption that maybe, and I think maybe became in a lot of people's minds, probably he was terminated because he was treating Dutch Pinball poorly. I think given how much time has passed since then I mean after his departure Ara and Dutch began to talk again and whether or not that happened because the guy was gone or not I could see why people would tie it together The fact that nothing was hammered out and production didn resume I think has, to me, demonstrably proven that it wasn't the manager abusing the contract that's the problem. Aura still thinks that they deserve whatever that manager was saying they deserved. And Dutch doesn't agree or can't agree. They either don't agree that that's what the contract says, which is what they've kind of presented publicly as their stance and is a reasonable – I mean I could believe that. Or they just can't afford to do what the contract says, so they're desperately trying to get it clawed back to what they originally kind of budgeted. But Aura doesn't seem to be budging on that. So the manager wasn't the problem I don't think. Like, at this point, if it was that clear that there was a manager at ARA who has gone rogue and doing who knows what, skimming money or just being mean, that should have been resolved by now. It's been months, so that's not it. Yeah, no, it's definitely deeper than that. I mean, whatever reason he was released for, it was not because of this or solely because of this, because they've not made any changes to the way they are acting. And all this talk about having another manufacturer that they were going to turn to, we have to remember that other manufacturer was always going to have to build the Bride of Pinbot 25 first. that was their plan and then after that they could finish off the big lebowski runs which doesn't satisfy a lot of people who bought you know the big lebowski was sold first why do they have to wait to be second sort of thing i there's no nothing that they've presented that would give me any assurance that dutch pinball is sitting on a pile of money still and they're just being really frugal about it these early adopters or pre-orderers or however whatever term you want to use, early achievers, I think is the official name that they were given by Dutch, who paid the company in full. My understanding is people have asked Dutch for refunds per the refund Ryan Policky, and they are told they cannot have refunds at this point. And the only reason for that to happen would be that there is no money for refunds. That would be my thought. I can't think of any other reason. I mean, if people, because a lot of those early achievers paid less than what the machine now lists for. I believe if you wanted to get in, if you were to go to CoinTaker and say, I want to buy a big Lebowski, what's the grand total going to be? It's $10,000 is my understanding. But I think early achievers were more around $8,500. So from a company standpoint, if cash for refunds isn't a problem, why not refund an early achiever? And then when you get this thing sorted out, you still have your 300 units or whatever you're planning to make. Sell it for $2,500 more bucks or $1,500. Well, that would make sense if they actually had any money to repay those people and if they weren't deathly afraid that them leaving one person getting a refund would start a stampede for all those people leaving them with money that they don't have. Right. So I'm not going to say that Dutch Pinball is broke, but I don't think they have the capital available to switch to another manufacturer or to satisfy what ARA wants in terms of money per unit at this point. Otherwise, I think they would have just gone ahead and done it. I mean, I could see them refusing ARA still if the issue is that they'll lose money on each machine. It just ended up getting too high of a cost. But then under either scenario, I think this is your only way out because now the parent company, it gets to make money on both ends. Basically, they'll get 51 percent of each sale of these remaining machines that Dutch needs to move. And they'll get their whatever their ownership share stake in ARA is on the construction side of it. And, you know, they are had to gear up to do all this pinball manufacturer. Nivo G. May, I could see them thinking, you know what, being into the games business could be useful. We could maybe grow this over time. And it gives us a good hope of Aura continuing to actually be able to use what investments they had to make into the equipment that is necessary for building pinball. Because that wasn't, well, they're a contract manufacturer. They weren't a pinball contract manufacturer. That's a new thing for them. Right, and that could be a very good thing for them as they step forward as a large international company. Everything I found on them when I was looking for them is all in Dutch. I think it's Dutch. Probably. They're in the Netherlands. I had to rely on Google Translate. So it looks like them and the other company they're part of are both electronics and manufacturing and stuff like that. I mean, I'm not going to say it's the only option. I think it's the most feasible option, and I also think that the 51% ask is reasonable. I think that, unfortunately, Dutch Pinball, and you mentioned the deception that was undertaken earlier, late last year. As a business entity, I think they're going to have a lot of trouble recovering their reputation from how this has gone. It's just been so shaky that this could go a long way to helping with that. So if they actually want to do more than just the Big Lebowski, I think this gives them the path. And I think the only thing they have to trade at this point of any value is their equity. And I can completely understand why they would be reluctant to want to give up controlling share in the company, but they just don't have anything else to trade. And I think if anything else, they need to just try and finish the Big Lebowski run. and if that means they're done with it afterwards and they just walk away or just walk away and keep 49% of whatever Nivogi can do with it you know what? You can always form a new company later. Yeah, I think it would be in their best interest but I'm not a businessman so we will see what they actually decide to do but I think this is probably their absolute best chance. Oh, and I have looked at that link you sent on to me regarding Deadly Weapon. My favorite part is the guy with the gun near the lower right slingshot. I have always wanted to wear a shirt that was made out of a picnic tablecloth. And so I hope to someday find that shirt and wear it proudly. Speaking of artistic design, though, you may not be a businessman, so we'll have to turn to your artistic prowess instead to discuss Total Nuclear Annihilation. There was a stream, Deadflip, had another stream of Total Nuclear Annihilation, well, now Total Nuclear Annihilation, with the gameplay as it's been evolved by Scott DeNossi. I hope I'm saying that right. Which, as we've noted, Spooky Pinball is going to be manufacturing the machine. They revealed on the stream, and then the next day, Spooky released a high-res version of what the Translight is going to be. And we have the Translight up on our Facebook page, so if anyone wants to take a look at it, you can. It's got a lot of purple involved. It gives what I consider a very 80s vibe. There are a lot of Easter eggs. The upper left area has a woman with a green visor and a messenger bag with a nuclear explosion even further upper left from her head. Nuclear barrels to her lower left side. And then off on the right, you see some guys with guns and lasers pew-pewing around with a tank and such. And then in the middle, it says, total nuclear annihilation. And a little pinball below it. Well, that's a wonderful description. Thank you. I like it. I don't think it's, I mean, it screams kind of like cheesy 80s to me, and I don't actually have a problem with that. I did notice it's got a guy who looks a little like M. Bison on it. A little picture on that camera screen. But I like it. I love this game, so the fact that the art is kind of humorous and fun-looking, it works for me. I can't say I ever had anything particular in mind because it was a whitewood when we saw it. The only thing I suppose is I thought maybe they'd keep the logo kind of as it was carved in the backbox version and they've gone with a different font style than that. But other than that, there was never anything to really compare the backbox that we'd been seeing, like at Texas, to what was here now. I think it fits with the theme as I understood the gameplay to be described. But I, you know, I thought, yeah, it's neat. I think it's got the 80s feel. Once I understood that's what it was going for, I was like, okay, yeah, makes sense to me. I like the little Crystal Cola up at the top, not-so-veiled reference to Crystal Pepsi. Crystal Pepsi, how we do not miss you. Yeah, no, I like it. It reminds me of something that wants to be overly 80s, kind of in that night begins to shine sort of way, Teen Titans style. yeah that was I love that song it's so totally cheesy 80s it is and it makes everything perfect you've got to embrace it that's what I always think of for those that don't know there was a Teen Titans episode that has this song this total cheeseball 80s and it's about how inspirational songs motivate you to be to do your best and be strong and all that and the artistic style taken in a lot of the episode is in the 80s style that we were familiar with. So anyway, it's kind of fun. Okay, well, that was really it for Total Nuclear Annihilation. I believe Spooky's indicated no more art reveals until the whole thing is done, or at least the whole art package is done. So we probably won't see any more sneak peeks until, well, no more sneaks, just real peeks when they're ready. Another piece of pinball news, however, Stern Pinball. No, this is not the long-awaited for Star Wars announcement. You will have to wait longer yet. this is the Encore Edition, which is functioning as a Vault Edition for another, because it's rumored that Steve Ritchie is doing the Star Wars game, another Steve Ritchie game, ACDC, the granddaddy music pin of them all, except, of course, for all the older music pins like Elvis and Guns N' Roses and Rolling Stones, but it's noteworthy because I think for a lot of people, ACDC sort of marked the beginning of the big stern resurgence of having a whole lot of really successful tables. And it remains extremely popular. The Encore Edition will be for both the Pro and the Premium. The art for the Pro has been revealed. It's similar to the original. They've made some slight modifications, some band member changes. The Angus face that was on the covering where the lower playfield would be on the Premium version has been changed. That was the most criticized aspect, so that's not surprising that that got moved around. Otherwise, it looks very, very much the same. I believe the Pro runs with what the latter Pro versions did of the original run, so it doesn't have the stationary bell. It does have a swinging bell, which the stationary bell was a big complaint on the Pros. LED light package. It is running the SAM system. They didn't convert to Spike, and that's consistent with what they've done with other Vault editions. Premium is not yet shown. They've just noted it will be an alternate premium, slightly different than the original premium art package. And I believe, I've not read my own confirmation, but I've seen people have indicated that Stern has said they are not planning to do a Vault edition of the Lucy, the Lucy model. So anyway, thoughts on ACDC, Tony? I like ACDC. It's a good table. there was a Lucy at 503 or 503, 403 for a while and I enjoyed it I like the Lucy art package, I'm sad that there's not going to be another chance to get one without finding one in the wild that somebody's selling to get, but I think that the playfield that we've seen does look better than the original pro playfield, it is an obvious game to be vaulted or on-cored but it is a popular game, I mean Everybody I know who's played it really likes it. Even the people who don't like it don't hate it. It's better than a lot of the other music fans. So I think it's got a special place, and it makes a lot of sense to have it as the next level of Vault. Yeah, I think it was a pretty obvious pick. I was a bit surprised at the time of the announcement, just because obviously the rumor mill has been swirling like mad about Star Wars. that Star Wars wasn't announced on Star Wars Day made people think that it will be released sooner rather than later. And I guess it could raise some questions about whether or not there's concern that this would cannibalize Aerosmith sales. There's been speculation about whether or not Star Wars would cannibalize Aerosmith sales and they wanted Aerosmith to kind of bake longer. Price point-wise, though, again, I've only seen the retail price listing. And with Sterns, you have to math in that it's different when you contact the distributors. But my takeaway was that this is probably moving at the same price as Aerosmith is. I'm not thinking this is back down to what 2015 prices were for dot matrix SAM systems. So I don't know regarding that. But as something to release because there's demand, it makes sense to me that Stern watches the used market. I think this and Tron were the two most obvious SAM system pins that would warrant vaults. And beyond that, I'd have to say the only other thing I would think of is if you wanted to go back all the way to White Star board sets and say we're remaking Lord of the Rings. Those are the three that command a price that you would be able to sell new at basically what they're selling used for. My original guess for the next vault would have been Tron, but ACDC makes sense. So we'll see. I wouldn't be amazed if we didn't get a Tron in the next couple of years as a VE, unless they don't feel there's the desire for it that there seems to be from everyone I've talked to and everything I've seen. But they'll definitely not do any price changes. they'll be what vaults are going for now. Only one final pinball topic today. I have an interview that I previously recorded with Gerry Stellenberg. He's the founder of Multimorphic Incorporated, which manufactures the P3 pinball platform. So we're going to drop that in here and give you guys some learning on what the P3 is because Tony and I have always tried to summarize it, but it is so complex that I don't think we keep doing a great job. Yeah, we did a pretty bad job about it, I think. Well, it's so complicated. They've got so many features that are just an evolution to what we're used to on physical pinball. So we're going to let Jerry come in here and explain exactly what this piece of machinery can do for you. So here it is. Enjoy. Hello, everyone. This is Dennis with the Eclectic Gamers Podcast, and I'm here with Gerry Stellenberg, the founder of Multimorphic Incorporated. Jerry, thanks so much for coming on the show and taking some time out to talk with me. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Dennis. All right. Well, first I want to say congratulations on getting to the production phase for the P3 pinball platform. Thank you. It's been a process. It's good to get to this stage. I know. Well, it's really exciting. I mean, I've done what I can somewhat poorly to try and follow what all goes into this because your technology is so far in advance of what we're used to seeing with traditional pinball machines. Well, yes. I'm a technology guy, and I got kind of bored with what was going on in the industry, the games I had in my house. So I came up with all these ideas to do new things, to be able to add innovations and new gameplay styles and new features to the machine. And they say pinball's hard, making pinball's hard. That's what they're saying. I don't actually find making traditional pinball hard. What I find hard is bringing new ideas and new things into pinball because it's such a traditional hobby. People like what they know. Oh, sure, sure. I think we see a lot of that in discussions on pinball forums, for example, where you see talk about even things as much as, and one of the things you went with, the traditional flipper layout. People don't like it when you mess around with the flippers. And even that was a struggle because ours looked different, and they are different. We can't drill holes through the play field because our play field isn't a piece of wood. It's a dynamic 1080p LCD display. So you drill holes through that, it doesn't like it. So we had to come up with new ideas to mount the flippers, and they work identically, traditional flippers. They have the same length linkages. They have the same angular pulls. Everything's pretty much identical except for the fact that it's mounted above instead of below, and then you can see the linkages, and it looks different. Therefore, people think it plays different because your mind lies to you when you see things differently. In terms of the P3 Pinball platform, the most we've ever really done is try and describe some of the games. So I was wondering if you could, much like you've just done with the screen that you're sort of playing on, could you sort of walk through an explanation of what the P3 Pinball platform is and how it, in other ways, that it also differs from traditional pinball machines in some ways that it's the same as traditional pinball? You want me to talk about my product? Just a little bit. It's a slight promotional opportunity, which incidentally for the listeners, we will have a link to Multimorphic in the show notes where people can go if they want to submit to reserve a P3 or read more about the company. But I'm assuming they like to consume things via audio if they're actually listening to me prattle on every other week. So there you go. The floor is yours. Yes. So you described it as the P3 pinball platform. And that word platform is a fairly new concept to the pinball industry. So it but it's very I mean, it's not a new term in terms of consumer electronics and video game consoles and computers. Those are all called platforms, video game platforms, computer platforms, your mobile phone platform, because these are devices, your video game console or your mobile phone. They're devices that can run any number of applications on them. So we've done that with the physical pinball machine. We've taken this traditional pinball, basically the same traditional pinball machine that you see all the other manufacturers making. It's about the same size. It's got the same flipper layout, as you mentioned. It's got physical shots, real ball, real bumpers, real ramps, real loops, all those things. But we turned it into a platform in the sense that we can change the software, we can change the hardware, we can change the physical shot layout so that we give the people who own the machine the ability to enjoy lots of different games and lots of different gameplay styles. The way we do that is by two things. One, we made the machine very modular. But when I say modular, I mean physically modular. So we can easily slide in and out new flipper assemblies, or we can slide in and out new physical shot layouts. The back third portion of the playfield, which a playfield is traditionally just an almost four foot long by about two feet wide piece of wood with stuff mounted to it. In our machine, the back third is a separate construction from the front two thirds. The back third is more or less traditional in the sense that it's a piece of wood with physical things mounted to it. Our first game, Lexi Lightspeed, has physical ball locks and ramps and loops and pop bumpers and all those things. And the front two-thirds of the game is, like I said earlier, a touchscreen. It's basically a touchscreen LCD monitor. It's not actually a touchscreen. It's really just a display. But over top of that, we built touchscreen technology so that that physical pinball that you're batting around the play field with the flippers, the system can track the position of that ball and it can interact with graphics on the screen just like your finger would on an iPad or a mobile phone or whatever. so we've taken concepts that consumers are comfortable with you know a physical device interacting with virtual devices like i said like an ipad or a mobile phone or something like that and then we've taken that physical pinball concept which is what we all know and love about pinball which is a physical pinball rolling around and hitting targets and going up ramps and going through shots and gates and hitting spinners and all those things and we merge those two together into this weird combination of physical pinball, virtual interactions, multiple game capabilities, and essentially it's a physical pinball platform. Right, and as you pointed out, you have a lot of flexibility in terms of the variety of games that you're able to offer because of that back-thirds modularity. I was wondering if you could maybe go through some of the other features beyond the screen itself that you can do via the integrated technology that you have embedded into the platform. So, for example, one of the things that I learned about fairly recently, a little bit after the latest Texas Pinball Festival, was you have an Internet-enabled pinball game, to my knowledge, the first physical pinball game that's actually Internet-enabled for competitive play. And so you have something obviously integrated in there to be able to allow that to communicate on the Internet, but part and parcel with that are things like your sophisticated cheat detection features. So those sort of elements that are sort of newer to people that maybe have only really gotten experience with physical pinball. Yeah, good point. So there's core technology, and then there are things that that core technology enables. There is a standard, basically an off-the-shelf motherboard, Intel motherboard, and that big display we have in the play field. Those are standard computer pieces of technology. That motherboard, we have a Wi-Fi card in it so we can talk over the network. That touchscreen display I was telling you about can track the position of the ball. These are things that most machines have these days. Some machines have embedded controller systems. Other machines have off-the-shelf motherboard style of computers. They're all just computers. They're all processors running code that somebody writes. In our case, because we have this standard computer, we have access to community standard tools, such as the game engine we're using to develop our games, which is the Unity 3D game engine We have access to networking libraries We have access to all these high things that programs are comfortable with And the fact that we a platform and we can change the software on the system means we can start experimenting with a whole breadth of functions and features that traditional pinball companies don want to risk doing because they're putting a lot of effort into creating a single game on a single machine. So some of the things you mentioned, this network competitive gameplay thing is something we can experiment with because it's just another game on our system that uses the core technology that we have. So this game you're speaking about specifically is called Heads Up, and we showed it at TPF this year. It basically connects two machines together, and those machines can be sitting next to each other in the same room, or they can be across the world from each other because they're talking across that Wi-Fi connection. And so somebody playing on one machine can interact with somebody playing on a completely different machine. And I think you're right. I don't think anyone's done that before. That cheat detection you're talking about, I showed it off in a demo at Pinball Expo a couple years ago because I was using my hand to demonstrate some of the features in Lexi and I was hitting the targets with my hand. And when I did that, it would bring up this message on the screen and it would sound this siren and play the audio for a siren saying that I'm a cheater. Yeah, it was very judgmental. Well, because we're using that touchscreen technology to track the position of the ball, the system knows if you're shooting a shot from the flipper all the way up the play field to those targets. So it doesn't matter if you have the glass on or off. You can play an honest game using the flippers and the ball with the glass off. So just detecting if the glass were off doesn't mean you can't cheat or you can cheat. You don't have to cheat with the glass off. But by tracking that ball as it goes up the play field, one, we can detect when you hit the flipper. Two, we can detect if the ball was on the flipper when you hit it. Three, we can detect the speed and the direction of that ball as it's moving up the play field. Four, we can detect, because of the speed, when it should hit things. And if all those things don't make sense, they don't follow logical rules of physics, then we know something was weird, and we can detect cheating. When we detect cheating, we can do it for a lot of different reasons, but we can disable entry into the high score. We can even disable modes. We can say you can't get to the finale or the wizard mode if you don't play through it honestly. Forget that. You buy a game and you play it for a while and you're like, I want to see what the wizard mode is. Then you pull the glass off and start hitting switches around until you can progressively – we can detect that and we can disable it if we want to. Make them go watch Bowen's video of it instead. Yeah, right? But combine those two things. Combine the cheat detection with competitive Internet gameplay, and you can finally have a somewhat fair system where two people not in the same location, not on the same machine can play against each other. And you can detect all the unfair advantages that one person has, and you can potentially invalidate the score. You can handicap the score so the other player gets more points or whatever you want. Right. Right. It really does expand options there, options that we've seen on the computer side. When we talked about heads up on the show, I know that was Tony's big concerns. The first thing he thought of, because he plays a lot of competitive video games, was cheating, online cheating. That was his immediate concern. Like, well, how would we know unless you're recording, you know, live streaming it or something? It's like, oh, well, look, here's a whole video. And it's showing us, in fact, the technology already has that capability, which is very impressive. So, you know, it's all these little things that we can do, and we're playing around with it, and we're still trying to find a home for them. It may or may not make sense for someone to turn on some of these features, but because we have this platform and this core technology, we can enable so much more. So speaking of, you know, finding a home for the technology that's all fully embedded within the platform, I'm curious, what's the vision of Multimorphic regarding the P3 platform? Things like the target end user market, plans for getting additional games developed, like what if someone wants to develop for you, how can they get involved with that? Just sort of all that, but mostly I'm interested in understanding what the broad vision is as a company. Okay, so like I said earlier, I got bored with traditional pinball. I had 11 machines in my house at one point. That's more than some and a lot less than a lot of others in the industry. But I got bored of those games, and I was sitting there watching the market over the last 15 or 20 years, and we've seen it shift from locations to the arcades and bowling alleys and bars and things to consumers. You don't usually go out to play these games anymore unless you're lucky with a location. Usually people are buying them and putting them in their homes now. And in my mind, that traditional pinball machine, which is a single-themed game that takes up a lot of room in your house and is very expensive, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the consumer. So we came up with this multi-game platform model. We came up with these technologies that we could integrate to attract general electronic consumers and game players, both physical pinball game players and hopefully even video game players because of all the video interactions potentially in the games. And we developed this system. and we want to be, I want Multimorphic to be like a Nintendo or like a Sony or a Microsoft with their platforms. Nintendo comes out with this, I used the Wii as an example from a few years back. They come up with a Wii, they develop some games for it. Their original games are mostly proof of concept and then they follow that up with some pretty cool content and cool games for it. And at the same time, they allow other people to take advantage of their installed customer base and create new games for that platform. So Nintendo makes the platform and sells games. They allow other companies like EA Sports, for instance, to make games for the platform and sell games. The companies win. The game developers win because they don't have to go develop their own consoles. They can make use of other people's consoles to sell their content. The manufacturer of the game console wins because now they've created this device and they have lots of other companies filling up the game libraries with content. And, of course, the consumers win because they bought this Wii, and they're not just stuck with what they have. They can go and continually add content, new content, as it's developed. They pay a lot of money for the platform. It's all relative, of course, for a video game console, maybe $300 or $400. And then games on top of that are $20, $30, $40. so they can build up their game library a lot cheaper than they can buying individual machines. And pinball, hopefully, will become the same way with platforms like ours, where you still pay a lot of money for the platform, and you have to, because these are big, complex, mechanical devices that everyone wants them to be super cheap like they were back 30 or 40 years ago, but the reality is it takes a lot of money to design and make these things. But once somebody's paid all that money once, they can add that content that we develop and that other people will develop for the platform and grow their game library for a fraction of the price of buying new machines. So we want to be like Nintendo where we develop this console, we make a game or two a year, and that's a physical game layout, a new play field, one or two times a year. And we've created this open development kit whereby other people can learn how to build games. They can get sample code. They can get access to our electronic specs, to our physical specs, to our cabinet specs, so they can make their own artwork. and they can create content and then the consumers can grow their libraries the same way they would with any of those other platforms. Okay, so you would actually have third-party developers as the plan to create, in addition to your first-party content. Yes. Okay. Obviously, that's quite different from what we're used to on the pinball side and exceedingly common in the video game world. Right. There are all these models in the electronics or in the consumer businesses we don't have to create all those things ourselves we can leverage what we've learned from these other industries and just integrate that into pinball we've seen the video game world go through the same thing right 20 or 30 years ago you might buy a physical machine that has donkey kong or pac-man or whatever and nowadays there's still a few people that do that just because they like collecting them but most people are buying that platform version of those video games so there's precedence for the model, it just hasn't been applied in an acceptable way to pinball yet, and we're trying to do that. Okay, so in terms of the third-party development, is the plan regarding the modules that those would be, they'll all program around those first-party in-house designed modules, or would there be an idea that third-party individuals could actually create that back third layout on their own in some way? Oh, we hope third parties develop their own physical modules. We've put those specs, the electrical interface and the mechanical constraints for those modules in the specs as part of a developer's kit. We will provide people with blank playfields that they can drop in and they can go add their ramps and loops and targets and those things. And we can do that because of our modular control system. I don't know if you know, but Multimorphic way back in the day started developing boards. We developed the P-Rock board, which a lot of people are using to build custom machines these days. And then we followed that P-Rock board up with a modular set of driver boards and switch boards so that you can decide how many boards you need to support the number of features you want in your game. So we built this modular control system into the P3, and we stub off the end of the buses for these controller boards, allowing anybody to buy one driver board, two driver board, one switch board, two switch boards, whatever, put them on their custom playfield modules, attach them to the P3, slide the playfield module in, and you have a whole new game that somebody else developed. Okay, so let's say you've now convinced everyone they want one. They're excited. So let's do some walkthrough here. As I mentioned earlier, there will be a link in the show notes so people can go to the website. But if you could just sort of summarize, basically, what does it cost to get into this, you know, sort of the first time go in, what you get with it in terms of gains, etc. So just sort of from the consumer perspective, what can they expect when the shipping starts? Yeah, sure. It's a good time and it's a bad time to learn about the platform. It's a good time because we just reached production and we are now starting to ship these platforms, which means that very soon people that are interested can sign up and buy a new one and get that shipped relatively soon. Currently, we're in our first production run. we have our second production run full. That we'll be doing in July or August time frame. And then after that, we're not taking orders for after that. What we want to do is build up inventory and sell machines to people as they sign up. So the base platform is a P3. It comes with the game Lexi Lightspeed Escape from Earth, which was designed by Dennis Nordman and sound by David Thiel, a couple of big guys in the industry, developing content for us that hopefully gives some credibility to the fact that you can do traditional style and very cool games on the system but the p3 it costs it's just under ten thousand dollars it's 98.75 it comes with lexi light speed escape from earth and then on top of that you can choose to add things like the cannon lagoon playfield layout you can choose to add any number of mini-games like the game Rocks, the game Barnyard for the little kids. There's a mini-game version of Lexi Lightspeed that is addressing people that just want to play multiball. So it's a game called Lexi Lightspeed Secret Agent Showdown. You can buy that, you can add it to the system and then basically build up your game library. Games with playfield modules, those physical things, they obviously cost more than games that are software only. So a game like Cannon Lagoon, which is a pretty simple shot layout in order just to give people more of a redemption style feel to their gameplay, that's going to cost about $1,500 for the playfield layout with the Cannon Lagoon software and artwork for the cabinet. A new game that we're developing right now is called Cosmic Kart Racing. It's going to have its own cool physical shot layout with ramps and loops and be very high speed flowing game. We predict that's going to be about a $2,500 game. And for that, you would get your Playfield module, the software, and the cabinet artwork for that. If people were to go to the website now, we're not selling the actual machine. But what we will be doing in the next couple of weeks is enabling a signup list so that people can get in a queue, so that once we're in the third production run, we'll email people in the order they signed up and ask them if they want to follow through with a game purchase. How many units are you doing per production run? Well, the first one we're doing 25 just to get our feet wet. The second one is significantly bigger. We're not discussing specific numbers, but the second one is quite a bit bigger. That one's also full and sold out. And then after that, it doesn't even matter. We just want to start building up inventory. Once we build up inventory, people can go to the site, buy a machine, and get it shipped to them within a couple days. instead of now where they pre-ordered and it takes a few months to get their machines. Okay, makes sense. Well, you ran through all the questions I had. Did you have anything else you want to talk about regarding P3? Or have you had any questions for me? I'm more than happy to try and answer them. Well, I think the big thing for people, for me to get out there for people, is that the P3 and this platform concept, the general perception that we get when we talk about it online or talk about it on an audio medium like this one, is they don't quite get it. When they get it is when they get in front of a machine and touch it and play it and realize it's physical pinball with that real ball and real flippers and those kind of things. So I encourage everybody to find a show where there's a P3 and play it. Because when you play it, that's when you understand exactly what it is. It's tactile experience where we can change up the graphics, We can change up the physical things. We'll have a machine with a couple of our customers at a couple shows around the country here shortly. We expect it to get to the Northwest show in Tacoma. We expect it to be at California Extreme. We expect to have one at Pintastic out on the East Coast. So if you're at all interested in the P3, because you can't go to the website and buy one today because we don't have that inventory built up, what you can do is get to a show and play it and experience it. and see what it's all about. Well, Jerry, thanks again for coming on to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. I really appreciate it, and for explaining to the listeners all this depth in terms of the technology that's behind the P3 platform. Of course, Dennis. Thanks for having me. Always happy to talk about the platform. It's been five years. It's still this huge passion of mine, and I'm excited to get it out there, start shipping it, and seeing people play it. Yeah. Well, it's quite an accomplishment that you've executed for so long and that vision is coming true and the production lines are rolling. So it should be a really exciting year. Yeah, we'll start seeing them in customers' homes, and hopefully we'll start seeing lots of videos online surfacing on People Planet. Yeah, you've got to get Jack Danger to do one. He's offered a couple times. We just have to sync up. Oh, yeah. He's all up north in the cold. Yeah, he's in the Chicago area, right? We're down in Austin, Texas. It's so easy for him to get over to Stern or Spooky. Well, anyway, thanks again. I appreciate it. All right, Dennis. Take care. Thank you. Well, that was my interview, and I extend my thanks again to Jerry for coming on to the show and giving us an explanation of P3. And that's it for pinball. So let's roll on into video games. Tony, lead us off. We must be near something meaningful to you. Wow, that was terrible. That was really bad. It was only sort of bad. It was actually okay. I'm sorry. I mean, that awesome segue, Dennis. Thank you. Thank you. That's the sort of respect I kind of need. For the last couple of weeks, and I mentioned it last episode, I've been playing Nier Automata or Automata. I wonder how they want it pronounced. Is it Automata? I don't know. Nier Automata. Let's go with that. And it has been a pretty interesting game. It's a pretty standard hack and slash style game. but what really makes this game glow is this story because the story uh actually makes you care about what is going on and the people uh that you're involved with or at least it did in my case because of how it comes at what it's a fairly standard idea uh because it takes place in the future and you're an android who's who's trying to defeat aliens that have captured earth so humans can return back but you quickly find there's a it's a lot deeper and there's a lot more to the story and it does a really good job both covering the gameplay mechanics in a meta way and covering how you get through the game. But it has an interesting system where it has multiple endings. There's like five endings or something like that. But instead of being a normal game where, oh, you've got the loser path ending and a winner path ending, and then you go through and replay it, and you get a slightly different game ending because you played the new game plus mode. in this game every time you replay when you replay the game you play as a different character so I beat the game as the character they start you as and then my second playthrough I am playing as a character who helped her out but didn't spend the entire game with her and things are different so whenever he was gone I'm playing the parts where he was doing something where the main character from the first playthrough was off doing something else and he fights differently so it does a good job at making it be an actual different game or not just a repeating the exact same thing every time and there's several more playthroughs where you play different characters i'm only on the second by second playthrough currently so it is uh i don't have a feel for the other playthroughs but i've been enjoying it quite a lot how is the the combat in terms of of difficulty i've had i've had mixed hack and slash experiences like some games like the ninja guidance when they got to the hack and slash stage were extremely difficult where the combo memorization patterns of the enemies you if you didn't do that uh didn't know how to play defensively or dodge appropriately you really got owned really fast and i've played other hack and slashes where yeah you might be able to take things out faster if you use the appropriate weapon change-ups and such but by and large it wasn't a particularly grueling experience. I don't think it's a very grueling experience. There are some fights that are very real challenges if you don't utilize all of the tricks at your disposal. But it is definitely not a Ninja Gaidan level of smash you in the face. Okay, well, Ninja is somewhat unfair of me as well, but it is the hardest one I can think of. But it's just a mix. Some hack and slashes seem really about you need to memorize those combos, and others are a little more forgiving. Yeah, this one's more forgiving, especially because I'm just playing on normal. I'm not playing it on super hard or super easy or anything like that. I'm just on a normal play mode. And it's pretty forgiving. You change up the second character you play through. He has the ability to hack machines. so you're doing a lot of hacking and they show hacking as a kind of almost asteroids-like gameplay feature where you're literally a little triangle with some armor on it and a gun that shoots as you circle and try and take out targets in a little almost mini-game type thing. Okay, so they do the hacking mini-game style. Yeah, it's a minigame style, but it's hacking with quotation marks, but it's just like a little shooter. It's kind of like a Smash TV style or an Akara Warrior style two-win stick shooter is how the hacking game is. And it's interesting. I mean, you kill blocks, and oh, there's a sphere. I've got to take it out. Sometimes I have to take other things out before I can take the sphere out because it's got a shield. while not getting taken out by all the stuff it's shooting and throwing at me. It's a fun little game, and it definitely makes the playthrough different and gives him a decent weapon because his actual attack is terrible. Why is it so bad? Well, you just got used to it because your first character is a combat model android and is really powerful, and he is not a combat model. He is a surveillance model, so he's obviously not to the same level of fighting capabilities. for your third playthrough they'll probably have you be the concession stand model who will pour you a beverage yeah that's what i think that's what it is is you are a soda machine and soda drinker pro to a terrible looking game sort of a drinker pro which i have not played but now the now they do interesting some of the like the meta like uh play in the game is uh there is no autosave feature. Ouch. Are there save points? There are save points. And so you can save that way. But the way they cover the saves is basically when you save, it's you're backing your brain up to the cloud. So when you die, they just drop the last backup into a new body and drop you into play. so like if you have you can get these plug-in chips that you can use to modify your abilities. It's kind of like a skill tree thing but you can swap chips on the fly and have multiple pre-set up chipsets so if I need a chipset for defensive if it a really strong enemy that I want to be able to play more defensive I can go to a defensive chipset which will be different than my normal travel chipset or my heavy combat chipset You can adjust between them. If you die in your body drops, any chips that were installed are gone. You can get them back by going and retrieving your body, but you have to remember to activate a different chip set before you go and retrieve your body because otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage. Well, that's a really cool way to integrate it in from an immersion standpoint with the saving and the body thing. I've seen a few games kind of do that. Obviously, Dark Souls kind of did that with the XP, not with the equipment, which I always thought was very strange. but the idea of backing up and dropping into the new bodies relatively unique in my experience yeah it was a pretty unique uh idea and it works pretty well i enjoy it and i think it really helps with the immersion now the one thing i will say and what i from what i've seen has been the uh kind of a wall that some people have not been able to get past from what i've read online I did it with no problem, but the opening chapter of the game is about an hour long, and there are no save points. You cannot save until you finish the opening chapter. Better not mess up. Yeah, and there were a couple points when I was playing where it was a near thing I thought I was going to die. but it is basically the there was a demo for this game and it's basically the demo with a few things added on and the other interesting thing about this game is how it changes from it'll be standard hack and slash and then as you move through the map you go to different places it'll go from being you know a third person over the shoulder kind of hack and slash a game it'll rotate and be a side scroller and then it'll rotate and be a top down uh a top down like shooter hack and slash type game so it kind of changes modes based upon where you are and what's going on yeah it's it's weird but i enjoyed it i'm enjoying it quite a lot it's i would say it's definitely the my favorite game i've played this year oh high praise then yeah it is a seriously i mean the story's interesting the gameplay's uh fun and even though i mean it's a hack and slash so the combat gets a little repetitive it's not terribly repetitive it's not as bad as some hack and slashes i've played where it's literally a a a x a a a x a a a x okay is everything dead yeah it does it's not that bad oh okay you're not getting blisters on your thumb no no not at all it it doesn't and like i said It's got some fun stuff and some good, the good story. It's the story that surprises me because I didn't really expect a story this strong out of a game like this. Well, I'm playing another story driven game, a game that you have played actually quite a ways back. And that is XCOM 2. Yeah, you finally got to it. I finally did. I finished up ReCore. and yeah, my takeaway on ReCore, I guess because I didn't summarize it because we had to get right in with the guest host Bowen last time and didn't want to bore him with ReCore is yeah, I don't recommend it. XCOM 2 though, I do recommend. I've not finished it yet but it's a turn-based strategy game though so you really have to like that format. Outside of Civilization, XCOM is probably what I most think of nowadays when it comes to turn-based strategy. I'm really glad that Firaxis Games has brought it back. I did play the, as did you, XCOM Enemy Unknown, which was the first of their reboot of this franchise. A notable reboot because they kept the turn-based mechanic, which for those that don't know, and I like what they've done with it, but Fallout 1 and 2 were turn-based strategy games, and then they became first-person slash third-person shooters. and this, they actually stuck with the roots and I think they've executed extremely well. From a tactical standpoint, I mean, it's more of a tactical game than Civilization, which is more of a strategy game, but basically the idea is, as it's a sequel from Enemy Unknown, they've had to make a certain ending canon to Enemy Unknown. So the ending is that the aliens won. And so in XCOM 2 you have to start up a very meager rebellion and build it up to a full army to fight against the aliens. So basic enough, they got a whole lot of lore in there and all sorts of stuff to read, just like they did in the first one. But in terms of where I am, I have no context. I should probably look to see how many hours I have put in on this game. But the problem for me with these turn-based strategy games like this where I'm commanding a small squad is I hate losing my veteran units. So it's unlike Nier This has an autosave system An exceedingly generous autosave system But I am also manually saving Usually after every move of my units Oh you save scum Oh You don't have an even Ironman To be fair I have an Ironman XCOM 2 You did the first one It's pretty rough I did the first one Yeah XCOM 2 I have an Ironman It is pretty rough But even then, I don't tend to save scum. I tend to save. I always tried to limit myself to like two saves a mission. Like I'd have a save at the very beginning of the mission. And when I felt like I was about halfway through the mission, I would do a save. And that's about all I did. And even that was hard with XCOM 2. XCOM 2 is a hard game. Yeah. Could you explain what Iron Man is to the listeners? Because they probably don't know. Oh, the Iron Man setting is basically the game auto-saves, and you can't choose when you save, and it only auto-saves the last save, so you can't go, oh, I lost this guy, I'm going to go back to another save. When Bobby dies, the very first thing the game does after Bobby gets shot in the head is save the game, because you're boned. Yep. I've not played Iron Man on XCOM or XCOM 2. uh no i don't load like every time my characters get hurt what i'll do is i'll execute a turn and i'll decide okay do i still think i can complete this mission and if i i feel confident enough okay but yeah if i if i lose my expert ranger i'm like no no no no well i'll let someone else die instead but we're not losing all of we're not losing all of them tony we're not losing all of them so save scumming is that what that's called yeah it's safe scumming if there are some people I have seen people who literally, they would save, they save every time they do anything, and they will save scum if they miss a shot until the shot hits. They will save scum. Yeah, I tried that on a stage, but the problem was is that to get, like, every unit to execute properly, you'd be loading a lot. It's just, you'd be sitting there. It's already bad enough. I mean, the combat is very... My favorite part is actually managing the base and being strategic and choosing those sort of things than the combat. I'm only playing on normal. I got to say, holy cow, I don't remember XCOM Enemy Unknown being this rough. I just feel like I'm barely making it every single time ever since the first few missions. I guess I'm doing okay because I usually don't lose more than half the team. and I'm still just doing four man, I guess in terms of context, because Tony's played it, to give him a sense of where I am, I'm a little bit past getting my shadow chamber built. And it's only within the last couple of missions that I have met berserkers and the bad guys who can generate the shields around their parties. Oh, yeah, I hate those guys. Yeah. Now, XCOM 2 is rougher than XCOM. I'm pretty sure I said that last time we talked about XCOM 2. I think so, too. Yeah, I think so. It is flat rougher than XCOM in every way. And now, I don't know, you don't have the expansions, the Shin's Last Gift. No, I haven't gotten those. Yeah. The expansions are kind of fun because it's Alien Hunters and Shin's Last Gift. Because the alien hunters bring in these regent or royalty version of the different aliens that are basically really super strong versions. But you also get some special weapons that have bonuses that are really strong. But what's terrible is normally, you know, if you play your turns and then the aliens play their turns. Well, these regents, these royals in this DLC, every time you finish a turn with one of your characters, or every time you make a move or do anything with one of your characters, it gets to respond. So for every move you do, it makes a move. That sounds awful. Oh, it is terrible. It is so horrible. And it's so hard. So hard. The options to make this game even harder than how it is on normal are ridiculous. I finally was looking over the achievement list as I've been going along I'm getting some as I play my very first Berserker I actually killed with a melee hit and that was worth a little achievement I was like oh how neat and I looked at the list of achievements and I was like holy cow playing on Ironman and never losing a unit there are some like that not me I played on Ironman and won because it's like you know what hmm, I've got six guys that can go on this mission. I'm going to send two veterans and a whole bunch of meat, and maybe some of the meat will survive while the veterans do most of the actual killing. Yeah, yeah. I guess since we've both played it, what's your favorite character type once they get them past rookie stage? Like, what's your favorite class? Still sniper. Okay. I like the changes they made to sniper. I used to always be a squad site sniper but the changes they made to sniper in XCOM 2 to where they've got the pistol sniper guy who has all sorts of pistol tricks for close range directly changed to the point where every squad that I had, especially in game had a squad site sniper and a pistol sniper and then I built the rest of the team around having those two guys My other people would be just like one of each of the others. Right. Just because I felt that they were the most useful. The sniper's ability, a squad site sniper's ability to back up the other players and pull them out of the fire when something went wrong went a long way towards saving a lot of my people. and some of the moves the pistol guy gets later on are just insane because you can just whip your pistol out and shoot literally every alien in sight and with the right pistol i mean it might not do a ton of damage but it will typically be able to do enough to especially if you've injured aliens it's a good way to finish them off so yeah i'd go snipers were my primary go-to i always carried too okay okay i i've been favoring rangers which are the melee characters rangers are very good uh i did use them a lot especially in the early game in the late game i slackened off on them some just because there's some direct anti-ranger stuff you might eventually find yeah well i mean i guess you might have found it already Against things like Berserkers, I don't really like being close to them. Yeah. Most of the time, I'm comfortable going in with two Rangers, and then I'll either do double sniper or I'll take a sniper, and then I'll take one of them hacker-type guys. They're probably my least favorite, though. I always have at least one Ranger, and especially with some of the really high-level Ranger abilities, give you an amazing ability to wipe out weak enemies where you can run into, it's like, oh, hey, look, here's a bunch of weak enemies that are all bunched up close enough that my one ranger can literally, I can pop this one ability and just run and kill and run and kill and run and kill and run and kill. I can wipe out seven guys. But they're definitely somebody I kept. I just felt like the snipers gave me better overall use. Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I've been, a lot of times I will go in with two, I've even gotten with three snipers before. But in terms of enemies, and I guess maybe not really super unique enemies, in terms of most dislike, for me, I'd say I probably get most frustrated with the robot units. Just because their missiles always seem to ruin everything, especially if I'm using snipers. They just like to drop the roofs. And I'm usually not very well equipped on my squads to deal with armored enemies. So the robots always frustrate me. Yeah, now the best counter to the robots are the hacker guys, because a hacker guy properly set up will destroy even really high-end robots in single shots. So they can be very useful if they've got the right skills. One of the nice things is in one of the DLC, Shin's Last Gift, you get your own robot as a character and a class that you can start making. or these robot classes that don't act like the tanks or the hover tank type things. They act like a character, but they're robots, and they're pretty good. I like them too. But that, again, that's from the Shin's Gift DLC. Okay. Well, anyway, I guess it's safe to say both Tony and I recommend XCOM 2 for people who do enjoy turn-based strategy games. And hard games. I mean, I'm sitting at about 73 hours in. I've got 73 hours into it. I haven't played it in a while, but I've got almost 100 hours or 73, almost 75 hours in. Yeah, I take a lot of breaks from it. I have been playing it for a while now because it's been about a month since I've started it. I usually only do two or three combat missions per sit-down, and then I like to take a break. It's stressful. Yeah, yes, it is. and I'd just be like, oh, great, I made it, or I've lost someone, and it's just like, no, I can win the mission with them dead. They're worth the sacrifice, but I still feel bad because I had them partway up their skill tree, and now it's all undone, but that's XCOM. Well, see, and the nice thing about XCOM, too, is you can create your characters so that they are and save them and have them as a list that just gets automatically pulled in for when you get new recruits, people can come up. So, like, my new recruits were always named after, like, you and my wife and all of our friends and, like, YouTubers that I like and stuff like that. They're all outfitted. And I found a place online where I was able to download some pre-configured people that had their look and their names already, and I did that. So I had everybody in my list is always somebody I've put in. They're always a custom guy, even if I just recruit a new person. Yeah, there really is a lot of flexibility. You can really personalize your experience. So in case you didn't care enough when you lost your well-groomed, well-earned veterans, now you can feel like you lost your family. Yeah. So Battletech, Tony, let's talk about something happy, Battletech. well originally Battletech had been talking about dropping their player beta in March and they ran into some issues in the engine that caused them to do a fair amount of reworking on some of it which made them delay and they now announced a week or so ago their new beta backer launch date is June 1st. I am planning on buying it, or I'm not planning on buying it, I've already bought it, I did it a long time ago, but I'm planning on picking up the beta, and I normally steer away from betas, but as I've talked before, I love Battletech so much, I'm just going to do it, and I'm hoping, if I can get everything working to, at the bare minimum, record some gameplay and put it out. I'm also hoping to stream it, that's going to just depend upon how well my internet is because we're playing the game and recording and streaming and especially if the kids and the wife are all streaming stuff too uh sometimes i get some um lag which causes the video to chunk real bad on streaming so we're just going to have to see how things are going when i do it but the bare minimum i'm going to record some gameplay uh to put out there and talk about. Uh, they also, uh, made an announcement that they have, uh, formed a partnership with Paradox Interactive. Uh, Paradox Interactive is a, uh, very large, uh, strategy game, uh, publisher. Uh, they have put out so many games, like half the games in my Steam library are Paradox interactive games it feels like sometimes um but uh they and now when they made the announcement they explained that the deal boils down to paradox is going to provide the marketing support the localization services and they also are providing extra funding uh not for the creation of the game itself but to let them extend the testing and bring in more professional testers so it gets a a really good set beta run and testing run down before it goes into full release and but harebrained maintains complete creative control so it is still a harebrained game and It's still everything they're doing. So the main thing is that they're going to handle the marketing and sales. And with the size of Paradox and how many games Paradox has put out and how well-received so many of Paradox's games have been, that this should go a long way to making this game have a much larger launch than it would have just as Kickstartered. Without them having to move off extra funding to handle marketing and without them having to move off extra people to handle marketing and sales. Okay. Well, that makes sense. But throughout this whole process, because you've given us several updates, and I've always been under the impression that Harebrain has been doing this probably what we would say the right way. A lot of transparency in their process. always really clear when delays have come up and they seem to be executing a business plan that is designed to make sure the product has as much success as possible so i it sounds very positive and hopefully you will be able to to even if you can't live stream it hopefully you'll be able to put up some footage maybe on the youtube page or something so people can see a little bit of the game that's what i'm hoping for because i again i mean for me and the nice thing i think the reason I'm so interested in is because for the hair brain schemes guys, this is a massive labor of love because they love battle tech. Like I love battle tech and they've released some videos of their, um, um, when they announced the multi, they released a multiplayer gameplay video, which I will include a link for, and they've released several other, uh, clips of just them talking about stuff coming up. so it is going to be interesting. It's going to be fun, I'm hoping. It looks fun. Okay. Well, that's all the game stuff I had to talk about. Do you have anything else you want to go through? One minor thing. I know I've talked in the past about Star Realms in both the tabletop and the digital version of Star Realms, and they have just made their newest major release of Colony Wars. It's their newest major DLC release, and at the same time that they did it, they did a major update to just the overall look and feel of the game. I'm still getting a feel for it. It seems fine to me. I haven't had any big issues with it. I know some people aren't real happy with it. Some people have been having some lag issues. but it's nothing that I've seen as of yet. It does seem to be most of the problems are happening on the Steam version while the phone and tablet versions are fine. So I'm hoping they get those ironed out, whichever, whatever's causing those little issues. But so far it's been pretty good. And Colony Wars is a major expansion that adds a lot of new cards and gives you a lot of new options and a lot of new strategies. Cool. okay well we've reached the end of episode 35 for all of you who have stuck with us and listened i want to say thank you very much and if you want to interact with us there are many ways you can do so if you're a traditionalist and want to email you can email us uh we are at eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com if you are more of social media type facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast is probably our most active area in terms of sharing news stories and such from pinball and video games and tabletop. But there are a couple other social options for you if you want to reach out. We're also available on Twitter and Instagram in both cases. We're at Eclectic underscore Gamers and we are going to hopefully soon be available at Twitch at Eclectic underscore Gamers. I've got the account up, I just haven't really done much with it yet because I haven't had anything really to stream yet. Yeah, but you will once Battletech is ready and hopefully the bandwidth, God's willing, it shall go well. But also as a reminder, folks, if you want to leave us a rating and review with iTunes, it helps with the search algorithms and a lot of the listens do come through that platform. So if you've got it on your system and you don't mind taking a couple seconds and doing that, we would really appreciate it. But until the next episode, I'm going to say good. My name is Dennis and so long. Take it easy, everybody.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 6c777f1c-9946-416d-945e-a36b29bdaa16*