# Episode 60 - Ryan Raps Pinball **Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2018-04-23 **Duration:** 146m 11s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-60 --- ## Analysis Ryan C., co-host of Head to Head Pinball, joins Eclectic Gamers to discuss recent pinball news, including critical feedback on Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle voice acting and the controversial production changes to Jersey Jack Pinball's Pirates of the Caribbean (replacing three spinning disks with one smaller disk and opening the treasure chest lid). The hosts debate whether the Pirates changes were engineering-driven or cost-cutting, with mixed perspectives on how they impact the game's appeal. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle had very little audible content at Texas Pinball Festival and was much quieter than TNA during showcase — _Ryan and Dennis discussed audio capture from Midwest Gaming Classic showing Alice Cooper had minimal call-outs and flat delivery_ - [HIGH] Jersey Jack replaced three concentric spinning disks with a single smaller disk apparatus in Pirates of the Caribbean due to ball reject and reliability issues — _Dennis detailed the announced production changes; Ryan and hosts discussed whether this was engineering-driven or cost-saving_ - [HIGH] Pirates of the Caribbean costs 15,000 Australian dollars, making it unaffordable for Australian collectors compared to US pricing — _Ryan stated he cannot afford to pre-order Pirates at that price point in Australia_ - [HIGH] Eric Meunier (Pirates designer) is on his first major pinball design, having shown the triple-disk feature that community had grown attached to before removal — _Ryan sympathized with Eric's position as first-time designer facing community backlash over feature removal_ - [HIGH] Straight Down The Middle podcast supported Jersey Jack's Pirates changes and raised valid points about the game's remaining features — _Dennis acknowledged their coverage and noted they were 'very supportive of Jersey Jack's decision'_ - [MEDIUM] A Pizza West Tournament operator replaces Stern flipper mechanisms with Williams flipper mechanisms (guts) while keeping Stern brushings and flippers — _Dennis was told this by Eric, the tournament operator, challenging his preference for Stern flipper mechs_ - [HIGH] Pirates of the Caribbean was supposed to ship in Q1 2018 but has not shipped any units as of Ryan's recent factory visit — _Ryan visited the factory a couple weeks prior and saw no machines online; notes the delay suggests cost-cutting happened later_ ### Notable Quotes > "When you lose in that and he goes Khan it sounds like he just was like I feel like a dork and I'm not going to say it really passionately" > — **Dennis**, mid-episode > _Critiques Carl Urban's Khan call-out on Star Trek pinball as one of the worst in pinball history due to flat delivery_ > "I would walk away from the machine if they never took that out. I would never want to play it again." > — **Ryan**, mid-episode > _Strong negative reaction to the little girl screaming sound in Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, citing parental response_ > "There's my line tied up. It's exhausting to hear, to kind of read everything. And it's very hard for me to kind of form an opinion because my opinion now is almost based off everyone's reaction, that people are overreacting." > — **Ryan**, mid-episode > _Expresses fatigue from constant community discourse on Pirates changes and difficulty forming independent opinion_ > "I don't personally see spinning discs as something that's incredibly fun. Maybe the three spinning discs is a little bit more fun than a single spinning disc. but it's probably less fun than Magnus for me." > — **Ryan**, mid-episode > _Provides nuanced take questioning whether disk count actually matters compared to other game features like magnetism_ > "My concern is more that the disc is much smaller. The amount of space which is in contention to be randomized is much smaller now. And I worry that the game will play too long." > — **Dennis**, late-episode > _Articulates specific design concern about reduced randomization impact from smaller disk, echoing prior complaint about Hobbit playing too safe_ > "I think if it was costed out, it would have probably been done earlier. it almost doesn't make sense that it's getting cussed it out now it was meant to be online already Jack kind of earmuffed quarter one of 2018 so they're ready a month and a half and they haven't even shipped one" > — **Ryan**, end-episode > _Argues engineering explanation more credible than cost-cutting based on timing of change (should have happened pre-production if budget-driven)_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Ryan C. | person | Co-host of Head to Head Pinball podcast; guest on this episode; Australian pinball player and content creator | | Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; pinball enthusiast who owns Star Trek Pro and Superman Atari; discussed flipper preferences | | Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; has not played pinball since Texas Pinball Festival; critical of Pirates of the Caribbean theme | | Eric Meunier | person | Designer of Jersey Jack Pinball's Pirates of the Caribbean; first major pinball design; made decision to replace triple disks with single disk | | Charlie Emery | person | Spooky Pinball co-owner who defended Alice Cooper's flat delivery as characteristic of the musician's vocal style | | Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Manufacturer of Pirates of the Caribbean; announced major production changes replacing spinning disk apparatus | | Spooky Pinball | company | Mentioned as manufacturer; Charlie Emery provided context on Alice Cooper voice recording decisions | | Stern Pinball | company | Referenced for flipper mechanics preferences and comparison point for game design philosophy | | Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle | game | Spooky Pinball game shown at Midwest Gaming Classic; criticized for flat voice acting delivery and annoying little girl screaming sound | | Pirates of the Caribbean | game | Jersey Jack Pinball's flagship game; major design change announced replacing three spinning disks with single smaller disk; costs 15,000 AUD | | The Hobbit | game | JJP game that Ryan owns; referenced as comparison point for games that play too safe and too long | | Star Trek | game | Atari game discussed for flipper mechanics; Pro version criticized as 'Peasant's version' for lacking up-kicker | | Iron Maiden | game | Referenced as example of game generating excitement through software/audio rather than hardware complexity | | Straight Down The Middle | organization | Pinball podcast that provided supportive analysis of Pirates production changes and remaining game features | | Head to Head Pinball | organization | Successful pinball podcast co-hosted by Ryan C. and Martin; covers pinball comprehensively | | Eclectic Gamers Podcast | organization | Show hosting this episode; hosted by Dennis and Tony; covers pinball and gaming topics | | Texas Pinball Festival | event | 2018 event where Alice Cooper and Pirates of the Caribbean were showcased; poor audio quality during presentations | | Midwest Gaming Classic | event | Event where Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle received better audio/video coverage than at Texas | | Pizza West Tournament | event | Monthly tournament attended by Dennis; operator Eric mentioned custom flipper mech work | | Pinside | organization | Online pinball forum where community reacted negatively to Pirates disk changes; threads discussed Alice Cooper delivery | | Mrs. Pin | person | New pinball podcaster focused on newcomer perspective; interviewed by Ryan and Martin on Head to Head Pinball | ### Topics - **Primary:** Jersey Jack Pinball Pirates of the Caribbean production changes, Voice acting and audio quality in pinball games, Game design: engineering vs cost-cutting decisions, Spinning disk mechanics and game randomization - **Secondary:** Pinball flipper mechanics and preferences, Game pricing and international market affordability, Pinball podcast content and community coverage - **Mentioned:** Gottlieb manufacturing philosophy and constraints ### Sentiment **Mixed** (0.35) — Episode contains critical discussion of Pirates changes with skepticism about engineering justification, frustration with Alice Cooper audio quality, but also acknowledges valid counterarguments and remaining game qualities. Community sentiment appears negative (disk removal) but hosts present balanced perspective questioning whether changes actually harm game enjoyment. ### Signals - **[industry_signal]** Discussion of flipper mechanics across manufacturers reveals aftermarket customization: operators modifying Stern machines with Williams flipper internals while maintaining Stern external components (confidence: medium) — Pizza West Tournament operator Eric told Dennis he replaces Stern flipper guts with Williams mechanisms; challenges host's flipper preferences - **[community_signal]** Spooky Pinball (Charlie Emery) responding to Pinside community feedback on Alice Cooper voice acting, defending delivery as characteristic of musician's vocal style (confidence: medium) — Charlie's response mentioned defending Alice Cooper's naturally flat delivery; game still in alpha code with potential for changes - **[sentiment_shift]** Ryan expresses fatigue with ongoing community discourse about Pirates changes; indicates difficulty forming independent opinion due to overwhelming negative sentiment (confidence: medium) — Ryan stated 'It's exhausting to hear, to kind of read everything' and 'my opinion now is almost based off everyone's reaction, that people are overreacting' - **[design_philosophy]** Community reacted negatively to Pirates disk reduction; debate ongoing about whether change was engineering-driven (reliability issues) vs cost-cutting (bill of materials savings) (confidence: high) — Multiple hosts discussed community backlash and divided opinion on engineering claim; Ryan sympathized with designer Eric Meunier facing criticism - **[design_philosophy]** Dennis criticizes Pirates design as playing too safe/long without randomization element; disk reduction further exacerbates concern by reducing randomized playfield real estate (confidence: medium) — Dennis expressed concern about smaller disk reducing 'amount of space in contention to be randomized' and game playing even longer - **[personnel_signal]** Eric Meunier confirmed as first-time major pinball designer on Pirates of the Caribbean; initial design included triple-disk feature community had grown attached to before removal (confidence: high) — Ryan sympathized with Eric's position as first designer facing community backlash over mandatory feature removal due to technical issues - **[market_signal]** Jersey Jack game pricing (15,000 AUD for Pirates) creates affordability barriers for international collectors, particularly Australian market (confidence: high) — Ryan unable to pre-order due to Australian pricing; noted currency conversion creates 'raw deal' for Australian buyers - **[product_strategy]** Jersey Jack Pinball announced replacement of three concentric spinning disks with single smaller disk apparatus in Pirates of the Caribbean production model (confidence: high) — Dennis detailed the official announcement; Ryan confirmed attending factory visit where no machines had shipped - **[product_strategy]** Pirates of the Caribbean delayed from Q1 2018 target; no units shipped as of Ryan's factory visit despite being months into production timeline (confidence: high) — Ryan stated 'they're ready a month and a half and they haven't even shipped one' after visiting factory couple weeks prior - **[product_concern]** Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle voice acting delivery criticized as flat and underwhelming; little girl screaming sound flagged as annoying and potentially unusable (confidence: high) — Multiple hosts criticized delivery as lacking inflection; Ryan stated willingness to abandon machine if screaming not removed; Dennis suggested volume adjustment needed --- ## Transcript Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, April 22nd for some of us. This is episode 60 for all of us. And I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis, and the reason why Tony is qualifying ever so carefully regarding this episode is we have a guest. He has, if you have not ever heard, attended the 2018 Texas Pinball Festival. He is a certified expert in the scrotal anatomy of Marcopis Rufus, and is the sober side of the wildly successful podcast Head to Head Pinball. We welcome Ryan C. to the Eclectic Gamers podcast, so welcome, Ryan. G'day, lads. It's nice to be up at 6 a.m. talking to you guys. 6am, whatever do you mean it's after 3pm here it's actually Monday, I'm from the future Sunday night is a good night don't worry, you will sleep well excellent, well we could have gone and made this episode 61 but post-dating episodes and then going back is lame so there's no way that I will ever I will ever permit such chaos to happen on this show how are you guys doing? I thought you guys gave up on life Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, that is a good point. We were suggested to, the straight down the middle gents, when busy not defending JJB constantly, do take the time out of their day to give us a hard time, and we greatly appreciate it. But they are right. We basically modeled our show on that philosophy. Yeah, I don't even play pinball anymore. I just show up for the podcast, and then I go back into a coma until it's time to record the next episode. Are we smack-talking each other, or am I part of the show now? Sure, you're our guest. You may do whatever you want. Any profanity, I have to go back in and beep out. Sure, let me first smack-talk, you know, straight down the middle guys. He likes JGP, but he also likes American Pimble and Houdini. Go to Pinside and look at the stuff for sale. He's currently selling it already. So what does that say? What does that say? Oh, gosh. Either he's a fickle man or he's a filthy flipper. Pick your pick. Whoa. That's almost as brutal as locking in an Iron Man LE and immediately trying to sell it for $2,000 profit. $3,000. $3,000. $2,000 is nothing. Sorry. Here in the Midwest, prices are lower on pins in the Midwest of the U.S. I'm sorry, I forget that East Coast inflation Well, this is our intro period So, I mean, most of the pinball fans probably know your show Because it's wildly successful, as I totally legitimately said in the intro And we'll have a link to it in the show notes for anyone who is not familiar I do highly recommend checking it out Because you and your co-host, Martin, do an excellent job covering pinball but it's anything you want to talk about in the intro it's free to you yeah I don't know how to class a pinball podcast as well be successful because as you know pinball is quite a small hobby and sometimes you are people only listening because it's pinball and it's small and I guess it's only we always say it's a lot of podcasts but you guys venture into the gaming world, I'm guessing there's like a million podcasts for that, and there's so many options, right? Well, you do raise a good point. It's all basically a slice of whatever you look at. So, yeah, you look at pinball, and you, I don't know, if you were to do an iTunes search, for example, for podcasts related to pinball, you'd probably get something on the order of 50, including the defunct ones. Yeah. Whereas on video games, it is very different, because on the pinball side, the news is covered by hobbyists. That would be my fundamental core difference. On the video game side, there are podcasts. They are professionally produced by paid employees, mostly of gaming news sites that are covering all of that. Even the ones that get really fun and are very banter heavy, like Giant Bombcast and Beastcast, those are still paid individuals who are putting out that level of content. On the video game side, there are lots and lots of video game podcasts. They don't tend to circulate around the news so much. Some of them focus on retro. Some of them just focus on their gaming. That's part of the reason why when Tony and I do cover video games on the podcast, which for our video game fans, we are not talking about at all today except during this part. It's why we usually just talk about what we play rather than covering the news because IGN covers the news. Bombcast covers the news. We can't add anything that professional journalists aren't already doing. I can't spend the amount of time They get paid to do in-depth of the news and to read every little thing. I have an actual, yeah. You get paid with the adoration of the pinball community. Don't you feel their love? Not at 6 a.m. Not at 6 a.m. You don't feel our love. Oh, this stings. Well, that's all right. I guess you don't. When you see the figure of how many people are listening, you're like, yeah. How much like Okay Well you gotta do You gotta do the Straight down the middle thing You gotta get Penn Stadium To sponsor your show 14 sponsors Or Pinball Podcast Had nifty LED For forever Forever in a day That's what you Just gotta do You gotta get this Get Pinball Lifter Pinballlifter.com Get them Yeah You're calling Bruce enough You might as well Just formalize it As a sponsorship At this point Yeah, when I went on the... Pinball Crunch, you know, whatever. You just start putting word pinball to something else. Pinball ice cream, pinball... Yeah. Socks. When I went on the Slime Still podcast, we did the rip-off episode. Maybe you can do the rip-off sponsor episode and just make up sponsored companies. Well, we do have a treat for you later on in the show. Inspired by that performance. You guys aren't sponsored by Deep Root, are you? No. No. No. No, we don't have any inside scoop on anything. It was as new to me as it was to everyone else when, and actually I did not tell Tony about this, but I believe yesterday Robert Mueller, who listeners may recall a few episodes ago we did do an interview with, but not during our interview, but since then on Pinside Head mentioned that he already has, I guess, a standing agreement with Warner Brothers that if J.K. Rowling allows Harry Potter to be made, Deep Root has right of first refusal to do it. Yeah. Everyone was like, everyone downvoted that. That was funny. They were like, no, we don't want that. I turned off downvotes because I want Pinside to be a happy place so I don't see downvotes anymore. That's my approach to have a happy world. I considered that, but when you wake up and there's like 300 new posts in the JTP Pirates spinning disk threads, I'm like, how do I read this? I'll just scroll through and look for the red and look for the green, and that should give me an idea of what's going on. Oh, well, that's interesting. Yeah, sort of color-coded threat assessment. Exactly. It's very... If nothing initiated enough response, then you could just ignore it. I'm probably missing out on a lot of good content from people that aren't popular enough to get the upvotes, but I don't want to spend three hours reading about a streaming disc in one day. Yeah, you got to spread that out across the week Okay, well I guess my intro segment stuff Is Mrs. Penn I mentioned her podcast that I knew it was out I heard the interview with Mrs. Penn Ryan, that you and Martin did I thought she was very funny I listened as of episode 10 I like her show, she's new to pinball And I think she's doing her podcast the right way It's focusing on a new person Learning about pinball So I got a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to try out a new podcast that's oriented towards what it's like as someone sort of walking in like a wide-eyed doe into the headlights of this hobby. And the only other thing was Pizza West Tournament. That was one of our monthly tournaments. I was at that yesterday. Did not do very well. But at the start of it, the guy who operates those machines and runs that tournament, Eric, came up to me and mentioned that he heard the episode Tony and I did a couple months back with Taylor James Rees from This Flippin' Podcast. And he heard my remark about how I wasn't a fan of Williams' Flipper Mechs, that I prefer the Stern Flipper Mechs. And he asked me if I based that opinion off of his Stern games, which I do like. And he said because he actually replaces the stern mechs with Williams mechs. Wow. Underneath the flippers. I mean, like the brushings and the flippers are still stern. They have to be. But the underneath, the guts, those are as much as he can get away with making Williams, are Williams. So now I don't know what to think. My whole world view. Your world view has been crushed. I mean, I was waiting for him to tell me that all the wide bodies I thought were wide bodies, He just puts like little fat coats on them and makes them look bloated, but they're really just standard bodies. So my worldview might be shaken here. I don't know. Well, you like a mix. You like a mix. Right. Apparently, yeah, I want a mutt. I want a mixed breed flipper. The only thing I know is I still don't think too fondly of those pointy Gottlieb flippers. Those things go bad, and they're even working. They're not quite the same. I don't know how much of it is just not being used to it. Anyway, anything that annoys you about Gottlieb stuff is just the flippers, not the rules? Oh, the rules. I mean, the rules can be frustrating, but, I mean, the company operated under such interesting constraints. I mean, doing parallel development on the surface is a terrible idea for a quality product, but, you know, that was just what they needed to do to reach their output goals. And, I mean, say what you want about the rules, which I think you can say a lot, very negatively, and I think it's very fair. But you know what? They produce machines. They produce machines better at a higher frequency and volume than practically any other existing manufacturer. So they got something right for a while, too. So once again, quantity is a quality all of its own? That's actually a very good point, yes. There is a, you know, quality over quantity is all well and good, but you've got to have a certain level of quantity or no one will ever know what your quality is. All right, Dennis and Tony, here's a bit of smack talk. When are you guys going to buy some good games? You've been in the hobby long enough. What do you mean? What do you mean? Silver Slugger? Yeah, Silver Slugger, man. You played a bad copy. Yes, I did. That was the problem. That game's got flow for days. Hey, I have a Star Trek. I thought you liked Star Trek. Why do you hate Star Trek? The pro is the Peasant's version. Without the up-kicker, it's just a horrible game. Oh, we got some money. We got a Mr. Moneybags on this show. A VOOC. It adds nothing except it makes you have a slow ball. Say, hey, look, here's this highly predictable VOOC that's going to feed perfectly. That's just what I need, an already relatively safe game to feed even safer. I swear. Superman by Atari come on alright Superman is pretty poor but in my defense that game was free that's why I have it alright that's my trash talking job that's the best I can do that was pretty good Peasants version I'll use that on someone who I hate and they'll be like Dennis you're the cheapest guy in this hobby so it won't work but I'll try it anyway Peasants is a good a good smash ball thing Sorry, a good smartsword thing to say because, you know, it was used kind of back in the day, and no one is really a peasant anymore, right? Like, there's no castles, and we're not in the medieval times. So you can say peasant and get away with it. Well, except maybe in Myanmar, but... Tony, intro, anything? You know, I was joking earlier about not playing pinball anymore, but honestly, I haven't played pinball since Texas. Ouch. I've had something going on every tournament lately, and I just haven't had the chance. I've got lots of Video game stuff coming up In the next several weeks But I've done so little of anything That doesn't involve work or family stuff lately That no I've got nothing You need a new host Dennis This is my resume Yeah I need one that plays more Alright well I'm stuck with living with Tony still as my host For the time being so we're gonna We're just gonna move on I know you can't find anybody prettier but Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this is the constant problem. I am the ugly one, visually and audibly. But I try and make up for it with content. And speaking of content, it's pinball time. Of course, as I mentioned already, it's going to entirely be pinball time today because Ryan is our super special guest. And we're going to open with news like we usually do. And I thought the first thing we should start with is actually Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, because it was at the Midwest Gaming Classic, and there was some very nice audio video capture. I focused on the audio side, because I guess they had a shotgun mic or something. And so, Ryan, I know you sent me the link to the video, because I had trouble finding it. I wasn't searching under NGC. what were your thoughts getting to actually be able to hear Alice Cooper because I don't know about you but I couldn't hear a thing at Texas when I played it yeah no one could really hear what was going on at Texas it was hilarious that they had TNA just so much louder than the new game they're trying to showcase well it does have the better soundtrack yeah and I think that I guess they were not hiding but they didn't want to really try and showcase how little content was in there at the time I guess in that video we saw a couple of, we heard, sorry, a couple of Alice Cooper call-outs, and I guess Pinside being Pinside kind of blew up in his little mini-threads about Alice just kind of reading the lines. Like he'd say, you know, welcome to the castle. And then, of course, Charlie came on and said, that's normal, that's what Alice is like, You haven't done anything yet. He's not going to be all excited when you just kind of enter the castle and you're about to battle a monster. He'll get excited when you actually hurt his friends and do that kind of stuff. But it's interesting, I guess, because I guess Alice fans understand that. People that aren't Alice Cooper fans don't. Okay. Yeah, and when I heard it, it did, to me, remind me of reading off of a card, basically, and not, you know, there wasn't much in the way of inflection. here's an analogy that I know you will get if not appreciate Ryan on Star Trek even the peasant version if you ever you're fighting Khan and I love most of Carl Urban's call outs in Star Trek except when you lose in that and he goes Khan it sounds like he just was like I feel like a dork and I'm not going to say it really passionately and so it just sounds it's like one of the ten worst call outs in pinball I don't understand why no one likes that. I'm like the only person that really likes that call out. Maybe it sounds better on the Ali machine with the premium speaker set and the metallic grill that it's coming out of. I'm thinking it's a reasonable argument, or perhaps you can't really focus on that because you've been blinded by a green laser pointer. and so while your brain is essentially trying to fight off an epileptic spasm from the light show, you don't really focus so much on that really lame call out. Yeah. So, yeah, when I played the Alice Cooper stuff, I thought the lines, I liked the lines, but, yeah, the delivery I thought sounded like, oh, well, we just went with one take. Not amateurish. The recording capture of the sound quality was very good, but I thought he would have sounded at least a little more energetic. I get what Charlie's saying. You know, I guess that is what it is. It's just it wasn't impressive. That's all I can say about that. I still like how it looks. It's not impressive to anyone that doesn't know Alice Cooper, but it's funny because it's kind of like this back and forth, like, hey, we're not going to show you anything at Texas. We'll show you a little bit now. don't get pissed off you've only seen like 10% it's like well like don't show us or show us the full thing and I know it's easier said than done to do it and people are probably really annoying them and saying please show us something because I want to order but there's a fine line between showing them the good stuff or everything or just 5% because that's what it leads to people complain yeah because if you're not If you're not doing just a certain high-quality level tease, all that you're really going to get out of it is something like this that felt flat and leaves people flat. Because you know what I remember from that? I remember some really bad screaming that was annoying. That was the thing that stuck out the most out of that video. That's the other thing. Wow. Yeah, that scream out of the scoop. Yeah. I'm not a horror person, but hearing a little girl scream all the time, it irritates me to no end because I've got two young girls and I have three kids. Yeah, I would walk away from the machine if they never took that out. I would never want to play it again. I know it sounds horrible. No, no, no. Let's try and rank that then. You know, we'll have a little fun. Let's try and rank that. Where does the Alice little girl scream fall in the range of Bubbity Bobo and if any of you know early on the Mustang Code with the constant whinnying horse. I think the scream would be way more annoying because it's kind of fingernails on chalkboard while also, especially if you've got young kids, you hear certain levels of scream and the very first thing you do, even if you can tell instantly it's not your kid, is your head pops up and you're looking around to find out what's wrong and where. Exactly. It sets off a weird parental response for me because I'm still fresh into, you know, I mean, six years into the kid world, which it's, yeah. And there's so many entrances to the subway, I'm not sure if it's every single exit out of the subway. But as I said, we're talking about something that is still in, I guess, alpha codes. But that's what they're showing, and that's their showcase for people to put money down and buy the game. So all this feedback, I guess, is useful to a certain point, but it's not final. and an OIO file can change immediately. Just a click of a button and it's gone. Yeah. We should do that. Yeah, hopefully Charlie will. Well, I'm assuming he'll want to keep the screen, and that's fine just to dial it way back so that it's only used the screens at like a 10 right now and we need it to be about a 3. Okay. There was this hope at that point. Let's just move the screen down to the same level of interest that I'm interviewing you, that Allison has been welcomed to the capsule. Screams at that level of energy will be okay. Gosh. Oh, s***. Good one. Should be a menu option. Annoying scream on. Annoying scream on. Well, you know, they had to do that with Ghostbusters, with that random scream. Yeah. It's still on, though, in every single location Ghostbusters. Yeah, it's not super intuitive for most people to, I guess, figure it out. I don't know what it's labeled as in the menu. I mean, I don't have a Ghostbusters, so I've never looked. I just know that it is possible. Well, yeah, they've got the generic settings, and then they've got the game-specific ones, and in all the modern standards, it's like 120-plus. So, yeah, someone's dialing through the menu individual items 120 times to find it. They're like, I'll just leave it. I'll just deal with this in my life. Well, I think that this screen and trying to fix what's wrong and get it right is a truly excellent transition to something that Ryan already got to talk about almost a week ago on his show, and that will be Jersey Jack Pinball and the production changes announced for Pirates of the Caribbean. This will be our big news item of the news segment, obviously, because we have not yet spoken about it. For those that don't know, Pirates of the Caribbean was slash is the next Jersey Jack game that was revealed back at Expo last year to great fanfare. They sort of stole the show. There were a lot of comparisons about how Stern was focusing on how beer plus pinball equals dollar signs, and Jersey Jack was busy showing off a game by a new designer, Eric Meunier, and a theme that people knew and recognized. and they just late two weeks ago now we're about 12 days out from the, no more like like everything, the big news drops immediately after we drop it dropped on a Friday after the last episode we did so that makes sense, so anyway the announcements were the physical ball lock treasure chest, the lid on the prototypes has been opening and closing and they were going to keep it open because there were some issues with ball rejects and the bigger news, according to the community, which is the three concentric spinning disks. They have been replaced with a one-disk apparatus, much smaller real estate than all three disks took up, and they sort of brought the artwork in. I may be being somewhat generous by saying that they brought the artwork in, but that, in theory, is what's happening. They have acknowledged that the artwork they have shown, because they have streamed this now, with the one disk, that is not yet finalized. But the community's Unity's response has been negative, I would say. And I want to mention ahead of time, because straight down the middle, actually, who we ribbed at the start of the episode, they actually spoke about this at great length and I think raised a lot of valid and interesting points, very supportive of Jersey Jack's decision here and what the game still has to offer. I have a different take But I guess I want to start and just sort of get some Thoughts from you guys And I guess I'll have Tony start first Because we both play Pirates And I think we both acknowledged On our post Texas Pinball Festival episode The discs were our favorite thing About the game Yeah they were So Tony what are your thoughts about these announced changes Well the treasure chest That's nothing it's fine whatever It's no big deal. I don't really care either way. But the discs were actually the only thing about the game that really grabbed me because, A, I think the theme is terrible. I've always thought the theme was terrible. I mean, Pirates of the Caribbean was relevant, what, a decade ago? They had a new movie recently. I understand. They had a new movie. But that doesn't mean they put out a – I mean, at this point, I think a Fast and Furious machine would be a way better deal than a frickin' Pirates machine. That would be pretty cool. And really the only thing that really interested me in the entire thing Is the three spinning discs I thought it was a great idea It looked great It did fun stuff on the field And now that it's gone It's like, oh look It's the Hobbit 2 electric boogaloo Ryan, what are your Now Ryan, as a Hobbit owner What's your response Hobbit 2 electric boogaloo Come on You've got to let that simmer You've got to let that simmer Oh, that's something you'd hear on Slam Tilt all day long I am not giving him points for that crap. Now, Ryan, you're a Hobbit owner. What are your thoughts on pirates? I don't know if that has to do with the Hobbit. Well, obviously, they're both terrible. You may now proceed. Oh, man. I mean, the news is only a week and a bit old, but it feels like we've been simmering on this news for, I don't know, months, because it's just back and forth all the time, and it's exhausting as someone trying to keep up on all the happenings. There's my line tied up. It's exhausting to hear, to kind of read everything. And it's very hard for me to kind of form an opinion because my opinion now is almost based off everyone's reaction, that people are overreacting. And I don't have the Pirates boarded because it's 15,000 US here. Sorry, it's 15,000 Australian dollars here. it's more than whatever the conversion rate is. Got a bit of a raw deal going on. So it's not in... I'm not going to order. It's too much money. So I can't put myself in everyone's shoes and say, I'm upset because they took this out. I don't personally see spinning discs as something that's incredibly fun. Maybe the three spinning discs is a little bit more fun than a single spinning disc. but it's probably less fun than Magnus for me because I can kind of see it moving and the real wow factor for me was going to be when it stopped and awarded you the Mystery Award which it still couldn't do just in a physical form. Brian, I'm in a similar boat in a sense that I'm not in the market for any of these Jersey Jack games because of the price point without an insane conversion rate. I was somewhat looking forward to seeing it on location And we may still, I've not heard that our operators who do have a willingness to actually put JJP out on location, saying they were not going to do it anymore. I have no idea. I don't, as a default rule, have any inherent love for spinning disks. What I liked about the spinning disks with Pirates was it added an element of randomness to a game that I feel plays too safe without them. So, my concern isn't that it went from three discs to one, because I don't know how much of a difference discs that can move in different directions at the same time honestly means to putting English on the ball in a confusing way. These balls are moving so fast, people get confused. This is not like frame-perfect street fighter combat going on here. So, my concern is more that the disc is much smaller. The amount of space which is in contention to be randomized is much smaller now. And I worry that the game will play too long because I felt it already plays a bit too long, which is my big complaint, one of my big complaints with Hobbit, is I think it's just it plays too safe, coupled with its terrible side-to-side action. So in this case, I think Eric's design eliminated a lot of that side-to-side action, which I think is really good. But, yeah, that's my issue with the disc. Also, I thought it interesting that while it's – let me – actually, let me pivot on this. do we accept the claim, which was repeated on the screen by Eric, that this is an engineering issue? They could not get the reliability of these two devices correct, and so they dropped them so they can go into production. Or the counter-argument, which some people still feel, despite this being reiterated, that no, this is a save on the bill of materials. This is not an engineering failure. This is a money-saving move. Tony, you can get this. I'm going to go that I think this was probably an engineering issue. I can see where the issues would be, and I've met enough engineers in my time to know that half the stuff they do is wrong in the first place until it actually gets tried in the field. And, yeah, no, I can full-on see that this is an engineering issue. I just don't like it. I mean, the game didn't have – I mean, it wasn't a terrible game, but this game didn't grab me, and I had no real interest. and that triple spreading disc was the most interesting thing on something that in no way, shape, or form had any interest in it otherwise. And with that gone, it's another machine. I mean, yeah, it's just another machine. Really? It sounds like Ryan disagrees. Yeah. Well, like the straight down the middle guys, you referenced them before. I mean, they kind of went through and listed all the other stuff that the machine has that other machines don't. and I mean that doesn't mean that you like the machine, like more stuff. As we can kind of see with Iron Maiden, people are losing their... I can't spell this podcast. People are losing it over Iron Maiden and there really isn't that much in there hardware-wise. It's all done on a software and like the audio level and that's what gets people excited. So, you know, do you need to throw the kitchen sink at a machine for it to be fun? No, you don't. but for these high-end collectors, that's one of their little checkboxes, you know. It has all this cool stuff in it. It's packed. The bill of materials is very high, so I'm not getting ripped off here. But it doesn't necessarily equal fun to some people. Like, Tony thinks the machine, you know, isn't great anymore. But I guess no one's made it. To be fair, I didn't think it was great before. Yeah. I just did the most interesting thing to me on it. I wasn't a huge fan of it before that. But is it interesting when the ball is spinning and you don't know where it's going to spin out, or is it interesting because you've never seen it before and it's just a thing? Like, hey, there's only one game in the world that has three spinning discs. That's a valid point. I don't know. I hadn't thought about it. For me, it's just the randomization was what was interesting. I didn't care that it was three discs. If it had been magnets, I would have been just as pleased. Yeah, I mean, no one really knows what's going on behind closed doors at Jersey Jack, and I guarantee that they absolutely hate people like us and Pinside speculating if it's getting costed out or if it's an engineering issue because there's probably nothing more painful than what Eric is going through, like designing your first design and everyone cheerleading you and then having to remove something that you've shown and people have fallen in love with. I think if it was costed out, it would have probably been done earlier. it almost doesn't make sense that it's getting cussed it out now it was meant to be online already Jack kind of earmuffed quarter one of 2018 so they're ready a month and a half and they haven't even shipped one I was at the factory a couple of weeks ago and there was nothing online I didn't check every box at the back to see how many parts were ordered and this and that they didn't let you go through and take inventory? No, I mean, there's a lot of parts there, so there's a lot of boxes. But, you know, if it was costed out, then, I don't know, don't you think it... Obviously, this decision wasn't made a day before the announcement, because what they showed in the video of the announcement was the video animation for the three spinning discs stopping and awarding something. And I'm pretty sure, I'm not an animator, or I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen overnight. You know, take at least a couple of days or weeks to do that, right? Right. Well, I mean, here's my take. I don't think it's a costing issue. I don't. I think they're being honest. I think that it has to do with the reliability, that they were unable to get the reliability. And that, I think, is, in a way, I can't say it's more of a problem, but I think it's a more complicated problem for JJP to have because it brings up a whole lot of questions about, I mean, here's the thing with a spinning disc. Taking my opinion about it aside or Tony's aside or Ryan's aside, here is the issue. When you looked at all that list of all that stuff that the collectors are checking to rationalize overpaying this much for a pinball machine, because that's what's going on, that was the unique feature. We've had rocking playfields before. Yeah, I guess you could say, well, this is the first rocking playfield with two flippers in this position. We've had rocking playfields before. It's been done. Williams did it. So the discs were front and center on the playfield, so they're very noticeable. They had all those lights, which are now out of the design, which I don't understand, but it makes it look more barren than it would otherwise would have. Hey, that's their design decision. and they could at least, even if it didn't mean a lot, even if it didn't change the ball as much as any old magnet or one spinning disc would, being able to say concentric spinning discs never, ever, ever been done before. And they marketed with that. It's in the materials. It's still in the materials. So that's why I agree with you, Ryan, that they just made this change decision because there's still so much. I mean, people were complaining because there was another show or event and the prototypes, the old prototypes, were still there being used to sell games. And I have to, this came up on our Discord with one of our Discord participants, and they mentioned, and I completely agree with them, that if it's about making the game more reliable, these changes needed to happen. The reliability needs to be paramount. I see all those people going through the five stages of grief or whatnot, not trying to rationalize and say, well, give me a version or sell us a second one that we can replace if it breaks. No, no, no. The reliability needs to be, you need to prioritize that. So from a solution perspective, I think Jersey Jack is doing the right thing. But I've seen a lot of people defending Eric online. They feel really bad for him. And I kind of do. I don't know, because I don't know exactly who pulled the plug on all of this, but the bottom line was they had something, they revealed it at Expo, they went around selling it, and then the engineering couldn't make it happen. The engineering has failed. So I don't know if they had less time than they thought, or they needed more time than they expected, or they just can't solve it, period. but it looks bad to have to walk back on something that you were saying, look at how revolutionary we've been and then you find out your revolution was a failed coup. There was another podcaster and I can't remember who it was because you sometimes listen to so many and they all merge into one but he was saying, this has never been done before. When was the last time that someone revealed such a cool feature and then removed it? And I guess Stern possibly isn't in that little bracket but what comes to mind is the Judge Dredd's Dead World mod that everyone does that was originally in there when the game was shown, and then a distributor asked Williams to yank it out for reliability And I don think he even knew what the reliability was he just kind of took one look at it and said I not ordering this thing if that not changed to a virtual lock And it was still in the original code and that's why people sell the mods to kind of physically lock balls on the dead world thing and the plastics, and they have to use original code with not as many bug fixes and features as the final code, which doesn't happen then. Yeah, and that's a good analogy. because that was a pretty significant feature. Of course, the main thing to note is times have changed so much, and Jersey Jack doesn't target the operator market, which is all Williams ever cared about, because that's all that really existed in any meaningful size. So now you've got a company that's totally oriented to rich guys who want to buy the most expensive, flashiest toys, and you just took what made them feel like they were getting something special, something better than Stern, and you can still easily argue that there's far more in it than a CERN will give you, but it's less than what you said. And so that's where we're seeing this. Yeah, the ongoing argument on Pinside is why the thread hasn't died down at all because it's people arguing over, you can't show something and make me pay for something and then take a little bit away and not compensate me. And somehow people feel cheers, you know, like, okay, if this is getting taken out and you're putting something else in that's not as good give me something. And I don't know what they can do to I don't think it's a good idea to drop the price that kind of seems a bit weak but how do you add more to a machine that is already loaded? Where else can you fit stuff? I'm not, and of course I didn't participate in any of these how can we, you know, there was a whole thread about how can we fix, how can we save this? What can we do instead? Why? Well, I guess people are going to, I mean, there was someone, it was someone, I think it was his handle, I think it was Crazy Levy, thank you, who on Pinside was just like, you guys are just going through like the denial, anger, and it's like, he's totally right. They are. It's so transparent, and in a way it's very sad to see because most people aren't out anything. You can always just cancel your order, which is what a lot of them are claiming to be doing. Here's where I think it fundamentally comes down to Setting aside Pirates inherently As a game I mean there have been people as extreme as saying Can't Jersey Jack just drop doing Pirates and just move on to the next game Like with no Like that wouldn't just totally shatter the company Look Pinball people may have a lot of money But they don't always have a lot of smarts They're just like any other group of people You got a whole mix They're just getting to the point where they're Almost putting out a game a year almost if nothing else screws up. And purportedly, this is supposed to be a company that is positioning itself to be doing two to three games a year or three to four games a year. I want more successful games per year. This is what the people want. Well, the people want a lot. They're wrong a lot of the time. I'm going to tell you what the people want that they ain't ever going to get. They want Jersey Jack to be Williams 2.0. Never going to happen. Williams has good games That's so mean Here's the thing Williams is dead and people need to let that go There will not be If you are hung up on Williams That you can't move on Then Chicago Gaming has a bunch of remakes Coming down the line And you can buy those games And you can enjoy those And then you can complain that the flipper timing Feels off on Attack from Mars You can do that Ryan you can do that smack talking the public but we just tell it like it is I'm not saying I've been a little harsh on JJP and the reason is because they've only got one game that I enjoy and it's the game that is nothing like any other game they've ever put out because it's dialed in dialed in is their best game what's wrong with Wizard of Oz? everyone hates on Wizard of Oz it just wasn't fun I didn't like any of the shots It's not clunky. It's clunky. It's clunky. It's got too many upper playfields. Have you managed to get like a five-ball multiple? Oh, God, no. No, no, no. Far too much clunky. That's probably not really on the list. I wouldn't know. I don't have very much. I don't have very much. I don't have a lot of Wizard of Oz time. It's my second favorite Jersey Jack game. I have a fair chunk of Hobbit time. I have enough Hobbit time to know that I don't like the Hobbit at all. Okay. game. Yeah, but I don't think, I don't find Hobbit clunky. I just, it's too barren is Hobbit's problem. But, you know, it's got it does really good. Is Attack from Mars barren? Attack from Mars is barren. Attack from Mars is fast. So you don't have time to appreciate the barrenness. Yeah, barren doesn't bother me. I don't have a problem with it. I don't feel I don't need toys everywhere because I consider Attack from Mars the best pinball machine ever. I've never said otherwise. because nothing's changed my mind. We're going to talk a little bit about Hobbit, because Ryan's here, and he's clearly a Hobbit supporter. So I'll explain what my issue, because I don't know if I've ever really explained it very much, other than just to say I don't really care for Hobbit. My problem with Hobbit is I feel it was a mistake to go with a fan layout in a wide body. It's just too open on those sides. I think originally the thought was the pop-ups would interfere with that feeling, and you'd feel like you're always hitting things. And in early code, those pop-ups were up all the time, and it pissed everyone off. So then they reduced the frequency of that, but then you were just sitting there, and any time the ball is moving side to side on a wide body, it just takes longer than it does on a standard, so you're not interacting with the ball. Coupled with a third flipper that you didn't need, and then they had to code in an excuse to have the third flipper to try and rationalize it. I understand the game at one point even had four flippers, but it was like, if they had just made that into a standard body, it would have been a much better game. You didn't have to change anything else. You could have made it a standard body. You could have kept the third flipper. But they... Yeah. Well, you'd have to cut out a lot more because, I mean, if you look at the underside of that machine, you can't see the wood. It's got that much stuff in it. So you probably need to cut out at least two of the beast mechs. But I agree with a lot of issues that people have with the Hobbit. and I'm a supporter. It's almost like the whole thing that's going on with Pirates of the Caribbean. Sometimes you have to support it a little bit because the hate that it gets, I think, is not justified. And maybe it is for every single Hobbit that you've played on site that's set up really shallow, but the game really needs to be set up at a very high pitch, like between 7 and 7.5, and then it doesn't feel slow at all. and there's adjustments for the beast mechs that not come up as often, even more than the beta firmware. So you can kind of adjust the game to your liking, but I guess the problem for me with The Hobbit is that it doesn't have an end yet with the software. So everything that you do, to me, is pointless because it just loops around and even though there's more code in there than any other game, more animations and more modes, they don't lead to anything so you're on this quest for nothing because you get to the third wizard mode and then if you win or you fail, you're just back to the start where you do the first wizard mode the second obviously the shots it's the two easiest shots in pinball those two middle shots and then everything else is hard, hitting those orbits is not the easiest thing hitting the whole, the B UKs not easy either and not very satisfying I guess that's you know Hobbit is the machine that made me learn what I don't like about pinball I never knew I didn't like certain things until I bought the Hobbit like a smooth play field I there's something that I like about the ball rolling and I never knew that existed until I bought the Hobbit and it didn't do that the ball bumps from left to right because of the B-slaps because of the lock rollovers and I was like, ah, it just feels really unsatisfying when the ball's, like, you know, getting propelled forwards or coming back to me, that it's not coming back on the same path. And that's why I don't care too much about, you know, sitting discs and any bumps on the playfields. But I've got mine out on the side at the moment. I got so frustrated with it, the code not progressing forwards, that I didn't want to sell it because I loved so much about it. So I was out on the side making money, and I will bring it back home when the code is done, which is apparently after Pirates of the Caribbean, so who knows when that will be. I know they're still planning to do it. I'm a bit surprised it has been put off. I mean, I got it at first because, you know, Dialed In needed to be taken care of, but Dialed In is done, so I... You always wonder what... Yes, it is what it is. Sorry to jump in once more. You always wonder, like, what they were doing the entire time the code was delayed, because... I mean, The Hobbit was announced, like, was it 2012? A long time ago. Like, the code should be done. Yeah, it was longer than Woz was. Yeah. It took longer for it to come out than it did Wizard of Oz, which is why everyone thought that they were really questioning if Jersey Jack would survive The Hobbit. Obviously, they did. And then they put out Dialed In, which they did so much faster, and now the timeline's slipping again. It slipped, I mean, as you noted, Ryan, quarter one was clearly conveyed for Pirates, and now we're, purportedly, it's going to be quarter two. You know, with this very feeling last-minute announcement on changes to the engineering, it does suggest that they really do want to and need to probably get it online so they can start doing production, but it's not being produced yet, and, you know, it's just not leaving these, I mean, that's the issue. When you're catering to people that are spending between, what, $9,500 and $12,500 U.S. for a game, they're really going to think that they have creative control over how many toys you put in it. So when you start taking stuff away and your only thing that you can say is your new stuff's more reliable, that's why, I mean, they're just people that, they want creme de la creme. They want things that humiliate Stern. and... There are a lot of JJP supporters, I think, that just support JJP because they hate Stern for whatever reason. And there are plenty of reasons you can pick to hate Stern. But it's, you know, maybe not the best emotional reason to be involved in the hobby, in my view. Nonetheless, whatever motivates you. That's an interesting point about the Hobbit code. You know, the same thing I've wondered about with Dutch. It's like, where's your final lizard mode for Big Lebowski? You're not busy building him. I don't think they're, I think they made an announcement a while ago that their coder, this is during their webinar thing, that their coder is kind of not working on the machine at all. Correct. But, you know, but he will once, I guess, like, you know. Yeah, he's super duper promising. Comforting. Yeah. I think that directly translates to once you can find some money to pay me to finish it, I'll come back and finish it. But until then, I have to pay rent and get food. So I'm going to go work on a paying job. Yeah. He has a day job. This is my understanding. Okay. Well, we'll go to the last news item. And, oh, look, I get to make it a news item because I wrote it. Yay. Yeah, Pinball News went ahead and ran an article. Tony has been bugging me about when will the article come out about explaining why wide-body pins are geometrically inferior to standard body. And I'm far too busy to write that article. But I wasn't too busy to write an article about the rise and fall of Atari's pinball division. So there's a link in the show notes if anyone wants to learn about Atari, which, and this is how it ties all into Tony's thoughts, only made wide-body pins. And thus they fail. There you go. That's the article. And anyway, that goes into some of their generational design stuff. I asked a question to Steve Ritchie during the Texas Pinball Festival seminar he held about Atari because I'd been planning to do this for a while, but I wanted more information than what I already had. I finally had enough to sort of hammer it together. The reason why I'm bringing it up here, self-promotion, of course, is Atari's pinball division, they formed it up in 1975. Their machine production was 76 to 79. In that period, they put out seven games. This was a company that totally, I mean, totally failed at pinball. Looking back on it, aside from Superman and the novelty that is Hercules, all their games are turds. They're all terrible. But you look at that date range and you look at the number of machines they put out with a production that was so inefficient that one of their vice presidents acknowledged that what Bally could make in two weeks took Atari four months worth of work. And they still, numerically, production-wise, are better than almost any existing pinball manufacturer in the game right now. So don't y'all be celebrating this. It's the new generation of manufacturers. Yeah, that don't build anything. I'm just saying, we are in a pinball resurgence right now, but let's not think too highly of ourselves here. This production model that we're operating on, this slow trickle and these inevitable, endlessly seeming delays on games, this is not normal for the industry as a whole. This is not how even the bad manufacturers did it back in the day. So, I'm just saying. You level up incompetence. Competence or incompetence. I mean, Atari, I mean, one of the things that Steve noted was they only had two people who knew anything about pinball. They brought in two people from Chicago. Everyone else had never done anything with pinball. Yet still, somehow they muddled through with having more success than apparently most of these companies can do at this point. So, I don't know. Maybe we just were better at assembly lines back then. Maybe they did their own version of quad assembly. I don't know. What's the idea behind Hercules? Like, who... That was their last game? I'm looking at the little table. Yeah, it was... I mean, have you ever seen Hercules? Yeah, I have. And I punched the ball, and before the ball got to the top lanes, I kind of... I knew what the experience was, and I just walked away. Like, there was nothing more to do. Right, it's a novelty. It's not pinball. Yeah. So what was their thinking? Did you find that out in the article? Somebody believed that size does matter. I think, well, I think they were just looking at things that they thought operators would think would make money. And the only interesting, I guess, element that I can tell you about Hercules is that my understanding is within Atari's pinball division, It was a different team that was doing that, and they, I think, took a lot of the part, obviously it's very, very large, but they took a lot of the parts concepts and were trying to sort of mimic some of the stuff Bally was doing with that game. I would say they mimicked it in a very not successful way. But some people will argue that it's, well, it's not great because of some of the issues they faced with the sizing, and, of course, trying to find parts at this point is incredibly difficult. It actually isn't terrible shooting. It's just, if it wasn't large It would be very pedestrian game But So, yeah, I mean that's about all I know They just, yeah, there was some different Is it better than The Hobbit? Is it better than The Hobbit? I've not played Hercules, so I can't tell you Yeah, I can't make a judgment call, I've not played it I've just watched a video of it You could ask me if Superman is better than The Hobbit Is Superman better than The Hobbit? The rules are better But it doesn't shoot as well How did I remember that? Superman, yeah, Superman unfortunately has a lot of wasted space. Hobbit actually uses its space relatively well. It's just unfortunately it's so wide open in that middle area. Superman makes you shoot around the table very, very, very well. But you've got two spinner lanes, and they are, especially the left one, it's super lame. It's so steep that you need a solid hit because it's got to go around, and it just starts doing this S-shaped routing, and you're like, what was Steve thinking? It was only his second game, so I guess he was thinking I had to use as much space as I could on these huge white-body Octaris. Can you link in the show notes? I'll find a link for you. Carl D'Python Anghelo playing his Hobbit at home, and you tell me if it looks like a slow game. He ended up selling a machine. So that tells me everything I need to know. I love the machine. It's just saying that it's slow and floaty. Like, there's bad things about the machine, but slow and floaty, I think, isn't one. Okay. Anyway, that's enough about The Hobbit. Like, The Hobbit is probably done on this show. You've mentioned it so many times. That's fair. Okay, well, we've probably bagged on Hobbit enough, and we do have Ryan here, so we're going to move away from news now, and we're going to do a little segment on collecting. Because, Ryan, you're only our second ever real pinball collector. Our first one was Taylor, who we had a few episodes ago, And his collection approach was, I feel, very different than yours because he started a long time ago. He built it up over time while he was working on movie projects and such. Whereas you have a pretty sizable collection, I think. How many pins are you at at this point? Twenty. If I go on pin side, it's 22. But one of them isn't mine. I'm minding it for a friend. So it's 21. And one of them is. The answer we're looking for is a lot. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot. And we're looking for a lot. Okay. Okay. So you have over 20. I'm not going to make you name them all. That's just weird. So I guess, so what's been sort of your process? Because you acquired a lot of these over a relatively short period of time. I remember when you and Martin started your show up, it sounded like about every 16 hours you were going off and picking up another pen. Yeah, that was a bit of a weird period of my life where all these deals started to come up. and I was in the frame of mind that if I think I can buy a pin and it's a good enough deal that I'm not going to lose on it, I'll buy it and I'll tick it off my list. I guess I've never really had a hobby that I've liked so much in my life. I wasn't the kind of guy that went out in my 20s and spent $200 getting drunk every night. So I guess I felt like I can splash out on this. I finally found the thing in my life that I can go and spend my life's savings on. And we'll make sure your wife gets to hear that part of the conversation. Yeah. So I did buy a lot of Timber machines, but I also have turned over a lot as well. But I finally, I mean, since that point in the podcast, I finally kind of calmed down and I haven't really bought, you know, I think I bought one machine in the last maybe four or five months. So I've slowed down. Well, I was curious, because of that volume, not just of acquisition, but also of release, turnover, what were the challenges? What are the challenges of a collector that is looking to maintain a sizable collection that sees a lot of rotation like what you were seeing? Well, I mean, maintenance-wise, I mean, I would always try and buy machines that were kind of ready to go. You know, they were all kind of the Bally Williams era, like the 90s onwards. and I would kind of make sure that the machines weren't projects because, you know, you've got limited time when you have a family to spend on pinball and I don't want to spend that time fixing machines. I want to spend time playing them. And I guess early on I had a different frame of mind that I've got now and I would buy these Bellyloon games and I would pretty much just play them non-stop until I got to the wizard mode and then I would sell them. I would immediately not want them in my house anymore. Because I guess I came from a video gaming background, and I know video games are a lot different now that you kind of play them forever, they don't have an end. But I've been playing since I was a little kid, and you get a game, you finish it, and I would move on to the next. So that kind of happened until I got Attack from Mars, and it was the very first game that I got to the end, I ruled the universe. I didn't touch anything. I didn't adjust any outlanes. It was the same machine that a whole bunch of Aussies as part of the community had. It was like the high school list. There was like five different people. It was amazing. And I got to the rule of the universe, and I was like, wow, I don't want to sell this game. It was that much fun. And it was the first game that I ever kind of like, okay, how do I make this more fun a second time? So I went into the settings and took extra balls off, and I maxed out the outlanes. and from then I've kind of adopted a different Ryan Policky where games in my collection can be different if I make them different and if I like a game enough, it can survive and I don't have to get a new game in here all the time because I'm running out of titles to choose. And if I like the core game enough, you can modify a game to be harder so that you don't get to the end so easy and it doesn't become boring and mundane. Okay. Well, you know, in terms of running out of titles, there's a whole line of Premiere out there waiting for you. Let's keep it in mind. I'm just saying, just keep it in mind. Titoff is always looking for a new home. So overall, I guess, what do you think, based off of your extensive experience in collecting, where are some good practices for the modern-day collector? And I'm thinking someone looking to actually get started in today's era. because, for example, Taylor had a very unique viewpoint, and it started back before there was the resurgence. I mean, the environment was different. The pricing was different. What was available was different. The inability to get parts was different. But you've come at it much more recently, so I'm curious in terms of good practices because I don't buy enough pins, period, to really tell you what's a good practice or not. But yeah, I guess I've only ever bought two new machines. It was the Wizard of Oz and the Hobbit. Regardless of how many Stearns I have, and I have a lot, I've never bought one new. And I'm not sure why, but I guess everyone is in the hobby for a different reason. So you put the collector tag on me, but I just feel like I'm a guy with a lot of more machines versus a collector. Because when I think of a collector, I mean, there's so many guys I'm friends with here that, like, they have so many more machines than me, and some of them are in better condition, some of them aren't, but they hardly play them at all. They're more like their trophies. You know, they're in their late 50s, for example, and, you know, they've had a successful business, and this is their, instead of buying, like, a half a million dollar car or something, you know, this is their prize, this is their trophy for all the hard work they've done in their life is having all these pinball machines I'm not like that, I like to actually play the machines a lot so I don't mind if the cabinet on the side is completely faded as long as the price reflects it, I just want it to play well, I would rather a faded machine with the head box all dinged up playing beautifully than a fully restored machine that doesn't feel right that has the millisecond for the delay. Oh, those AFMRs. Terrible. Ruined. I'm not sure how to answer the question and give advice or talk about collecting because, as I said, I have a lot of machines and I have a large collection but I don't class myself as someone who has pinball machines just for the sake of having nice pinball machines. Well, yeah, obviously it's not you don't have what I would call a museum collection. You're not a diaper rubber, as some others would describe it as. But let's see. I don't know. What do you define collection as, Tony? I would say if you have over 10 of something, you probably collect. Probably. That might be the answer. Okay, let's change this to something. Some people collect toys, right? And some people leave them in the box, and they've left them in the box for 30 years. To me, that's a collector. someone who has a lot of toys out of the box that they kind of like, you know, when you're a kid, you play with the toys and you have your imagination and stuff like that. That's not really collecting to me. That's just having a lot of stuff that you use. It's the whole minimalist argument. Like, my wife went through this phase as, you know, all wives go through different phases, and she read all the books about minimalism, and she said, like, okay, let's clear out our closet. Like, you haven't worn this pair of jeans in, like, three years, and this and that. And I started to freak out. I'm like, oh my God, what happens when she gets to the pinball room? And she's like, no, no, no, that's not included. Like, you use them all the time, so that's not being minimalistic. Like, being minimalistic means you chuck out stuff or donate them that you don't use. It has no purpose in your life. It doesn't bring you any happiness. So that's how I try and treat my collection. If a pinball machine is sitting there doing nothing, then it has to go. But if it's getting used and it brings joy to either me or someone that enters my pinball room, then I keep it. Okay. I can fully see that. That's a very valid argument. All right. Well, okay. We're going to go ahead and move away from collecting. We're going to move to something that's near and dear to Ryan's heart, and that is data. Data. Yes. Okay. Well, as we were having Ryan on, so naturally I said, okay, Ryan, is there anything? We like to do deep dive segments. We do them quite often here. and I asked, assuming that you would actually have said, no, Dennis, there's nothing I really want because no one ever really asks for, suggests anything for data segments. So instead he's like, actually, I would love to be able to talk about pin side ratings and what the impact of ownership has on that. So I reached out to Robin who owns and operates pin side and he was more than generous enough to give me data extracts because it would have been very tedious to do it manually. So I passed that information on to Tony. I passed it on to Ryan. And what we did based off of Robin's data extracts is we obtained some figures regarding the top 200 games. And so just to lay it out for those listening because, again, it's data and it can be, I think, difficult to consume in an audio medium. So I'm going to try and explain it in a concise way. Here's what we got. We got the top 200 games by current people who say they own it currently, people who say they used to own it, people who have it on their wish list, and then people who rated the game, but it wasn't flagged as being an owner, an ex-owner, or on the wish list. So we call that the no indication category. So out of, and we got the overall, what are the overall top 200? And all this was from April 13th. Now, our overall top 200 data did not match the actual top 200 ranking-wise on Pinside. And the reason for that is the Pinside list that you see when you go to the website, they are applying some filtering for what's referred to as bogus ratings because there have been a lot of complaints that people are deliberately giving games tens and ones, the skew votes, and so certain votes are thrown out. They're not thrown out in our data set, though, so they're included. But the rule about needing 15 votes to qualify still held true. And the way that worked is by category. So the top 200 games by current owners, it required 15 owners who have rated that game. Otherwise, it wasn't eligible to be in the list. Because of that, we don't actually have 200 games from the no indication category. We only have 145, because that's exactly how many games had 15 ratings from people who didn't say they ever owned it or wanted it. okay so that's our methodology those are the parameters so in terms of oh another thing to note is games with multiple versions like pro and premium LE all the ratings are combined they're not segregated out that way so when we were looking let's talk about the top categories first so of the top 10 games of each classification so we have the overall class and then we have the owner ex-owner, wish list, and no indicator. There are eight games that were shared across all five of those top tens. Medieval Madness was on all of them, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Monster Bash, Lord of the Rings, Addams Family, Indiana Jones, the good version, and Metallica. So, the ranks weren't always in the same spot, but most of the, obviously, we've got eight of the top ten, everyone's like, yes, we agree. So, the differences Dialed In. Dialed In is on the overall rating top ten at number nine, on the owner list at ten, and on the ex-owner list at nine, but it's not on the wish list and it's not on the no indicator top ten. Tales of the Arabian Nights is on the overall list at tenth, on the owner list at ninth, and the wish list at sixth. And Star Trek The Next Generation, it's only on the ex-owner list, and that's at tenth. and Circus Voltaire only shows up on the no indicator list, which it sits eighth place. So are there any thoughts on that base data? And I sent you guys graphs of it. And ultimately, I plan to put a post probably in the next couple days on Pinside sharing all this information because that's where it comes from. I would say, first of all, it seems like everybody who wanted a dialed in got a dialed in. I asked for this data. I guess this is my idea, and now I'm just looking at everything, and I'm just so confused. I'm like, wow, I'd hate to do this for a job, because the graphs and the numbers, my brain just dies. It can get for you. And the reason why it's probably more overwhelming to you and Tony than it is to the audience, because they don't see that I did a top 10 graph, a top 41 to 50, and a top 91 to 100. I actually did every 50 up to the 191 to 200. I think the main takeaway regarding the top 10 is that regardless of whether someone has ever owned the game or won the game or not most of those games are agreed upon as being the best games so there's a high degree of conformity regarding that top list when you start to say let's hop over to the top number 41 to 50 you start to see a lot of degradation at that point so for example there's not a single game that exists in all five of those classifications. There are a couple that were in four of the five, like Elvira and the Party Monsters. It's in four of the five. Roadshow is in four of the five as being somewhere between 40 and 50. But no one, no game could make it all the way across. And so unlike what we saw with the top 10. So, and it only deteriorates more as we go further down the ranks, which again, isn't surprising because we're adding in another 50 games as we go along, things are shuffling about quite a bit. What I think maybe is more interesting would be, and what I think you were getting at, Ryan, when you suggested the idea was, is there a notion that maybe owners inflate the rating of their games compared to other classifications? Would that be a fair assumption? Yeah, and it kind of goes back to the whole collecting thing we were talking about. You know, sometimes people just collect because they want to feel special and say, hey, I've got Pirates of the Caribbean that has three spinning discs. Your machine does that. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to give it a 10. And so it makes total sense to me. You could also argue that some owners might inflate their rating so that it's easier to sell the game at a higher markup than what they might otherwise get. All sorts of motivations. So what I did is I took all the games, which because of that top 200 out of all these different categories means I had 234 games. And what I did is just put a little formula together, and it just looked, and it said which owner classification, I'm even counting wish list as an owner, all this I'm thinking of in terms of owner or not, or overall or whatnot, which one had the highest rating for any given game, just to see how many times a particular category had the highest rating. And that breakdown was overall was the highest 17 times, which I don't think is surprising because it's an averaging, that it would be, that's the lowest for anyone who doesn't know. So owner 28 times, ex-owner 27 times, no indication 47 times, and wish list 115 times. It's like 49.9% of the results. Wish list obviously thus leads by a large margin. That is followed by no indication, then owners. So at first I was like, oh, owners isn't the highest. That really surprised me. And then I thought, well, I guess it makes sense. People who really have decided they want a particular game, if they've rated it honestly, they probably are looking at that with rose-colored glasses and are saying, that game is incredible, I must own it. But then they get it, and it's Hobbit, and they're like, oh, revise. Is this episode going to be called The Hobbit Sucks? I was going to try and do an alliteration with your name, Ryan, because that's what I always try and do with people, but I couldn't find a good R word that meant pinball. So, yeah, I think maybe. No, I don't want to offend JJP. We already had that whole segment on pirates. Hey, no, you might be doing him a favor and divert all the bad press that Pirates of the Caribbean is getting towards Hobbit. Or it'll confuse people. They'll show up in their podcatcher and they'll be like, what is this episode from 2015 showing up? So, anyway. So, so, so, so, which was led? I mean, ultimately I thought that made a lot of sense Tony, what was your I was a little surprised at first, but like you once I started thinking about it, it made sense that the wish list was going to leave because more likely than not, it's like, oh I love this game, I'm ranking it high, it's on my wish list, I eventually want one, so no, it makes sense to me, it is interesting to me that on the ex-owners, how Star Trek popped up in the top 10 on ex-owners that sounds like a lot of regret But to me, it sounds like a lot of people are like, I shouldn't have gotten rid of my Star Trek. Yeah. Which Star Trek was that? The next gen. Next gen. Next gen. Okay. Personally, I've always been a bit surprised that that game is that high. I don't think it's a top ten game. I haven't rated it, I don't think, on Pinside. I don't know. I mean, it's got some of the best callouts in all of pinball because they got the entire next gen cast. but Stern Star Trek plays so much better than the Williams version so much better Ryan what were your thoughts well I mean just a little side thought it be interesting to see if just some of these newer games like Dialed In and I guess now Keith Elwin game Iron Maiden, can kind of break the top five of Pinsire's top 100 because, you know, those top five there have kind of been unmoved for a while and they all kind of, like, have a little bit of nostalgia. You know, there's Lord of the Rings is the newest game in there. And, you know, it is dialed in and is Iron Maiden a better game than all those other games, but will the collector community kind of like force those games out because they don't want those golden, you know, the remake titles touched because they're so good? My thoughts, I don't know. I wanted some kind of like evidence that people pump up the games that they own, but it's not there as much as I thought it was going to be with your data. Yeah, I'm sorry. We had to go where the truth takes us. Darn data running a perfectly good hypothesis. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I asked you. I said, oh, hey, how about this other bit? I made you work for all that sponsorship money. A seamless transition, Ryan. Straight down the middle would be very proud of you because you are forcing us to not fail for this one episode. So, yes, so Ryan got these results on the Pennside ratings and ownership, and he found the results completely lackluster. So he decided he wanted another data segment in the distance where we could talk about, hey, well, what about the Pennside ratio? What about gains? And he had specifically a point about looking at Stargazer and saying, what about the idea of gains that are wish-listed versus owned? Like, where does that fall? So I contacted Robin again, and I was like, hey, Robin, you know, what you did was swell, but we'd like some, even more data. And Robin was like, that's a great idea. I'd love to give you more data. So on April 18th, he went ahead and he pulled the top 200 solid state games on Pennside, same parameters as before, you know, 15 votes, all that, but not segregated by ownership or not. He gave me the number of times that particular game was wishlisted and the number of times it was listed as being owned, a number of owners, according to the Pinside site. So we put those together. I sent you guys some charting of the top 10 pins, which we'll walk through. I want to note that out of the 200 games that were provided, 74 of them have a higher wishlist count than they do an owner count. and the results were in terms of ratio the number one game with a higher wishlist ratio versus a ownership ratio is Kingpin 59 to 3 ratio number two is The Big Lebowski number three is Alien number four is Lexi Lightspeed Escape from Earth number five is Joust six is Defender seven is Spirit eight is Stargazer 9 is total nuclear annihilation and 10 is mystery castle so Ryan what stood out to you the moment you got these because I think this is much easier to understand than all that other data yeah 100% I guess in the top 10 the things that stood out to me is that 3 of those probably not shouldn't be there because the data is the data but total nuclear annihilation if you look at the amount of owners it's at 111. So I guess people are treating their Pinsight collection very seriously, and they might have pre-ordered it, but they're not adding it to their collection yet. So that number will go down eventually to what it's meant to be. And the same with Alien and Big Lebowski, if people are ever able to get theirs. The owner's count of Kingpin is three. Obviously, we kind of know the exact figure of what that's meant to be, but I guess that is also represented in the wish list. There's probably a lot more people than 60 people that want a Kingpin, but they're not on Pinside updating their collection. What else can we decide on from that? So I guess if you kind of ignore Kingpin a little bit because of that and Big Lebowski, and yeah, what's Lexi Lightspeed doing there? I have no idea. Now, I need to say, I don't really know what Defender or Mystery Castle are, so I can't really comment much on the popularity of those. I'm assuming they were relatively low-run games. Actually, I mean, I guess that's the unifying factor for most of these. I mean, Joust is low-run, Stargazer is low-run. Lebowski and Alien are low-run. I thought they shouldn't be. They weren't supposed to be low-run. I mean, technically, Lexi is... You know, I've wondered, well, let me jump back to Kingpin at first. Do you guys think that this Kingpin, because this number comes from April 18th, do you think the Kingpin number on the wishlist side of the ratio surged after Texas Pinball? That was my very first thought, is I wish we had a number from before Texas, because that would have been an interesting comparison. I'm surprised Bing Bang Bar isn't higher. Where is it? It's at 14, Bing Bang Bar. I guess there is a lot more of them the owners count on Big Bang Bar as 104 so that's I guess more than half of the owners so I guess the ratio is a way out there I guess it's just that it's the mystique of what is the game and people really haven't played it I don't believe there's any on site like there are Big Bang Bars people want what they can't have and I wonder if a lot of people wishlist things while they wait, because right outside the top 10 at 11th is Houdini. Yeah. It's got high shots. Does it? You may not have heard, but Houdini has some high shots. I mean, the reason why I kind of, you know, brought this up and messaged you about it is that I kind of started a little hunt for a stargazer, and sometimes the harder it is to get something, the more you want it, and it's just that human nature of wanting something that you can't have. And I was just like, I went on the owners list, and wow, there's only 65 owners on Pinsize, and over 150 people want it because it's just a low-production unit. And once people know that they can't buy another one after they sell it, they hold on to them, right? Yeah. It's actually pretty fun to play. It is pretty fun. The art package sells it for a lot of people who don't care about gameplay. Last, when we once did our 1980 Solid State tournament, Stargazer was the highest rated Stern electronic game. I remember going into that. And I think a lot of it was driven by the artwork. I mean, there are some fans of the old Stern electronics who kind of think every single one of those games is good. They're not, by the way. There's a very samey sort of feel to a lot of them. But a lot of them are fun. And that one, we actually had one on location for a while. Not a good pin to operate, apparently. But it was a nice treat to have one that played so well. Yeah, I mean, I would definitely not say no to getting a Stargazer. Yeah, I think on a lot of these, yeah, clearly there's just a lot of, when you look at this list, there's a lot of people who maybe really wanted to buy something, and then because of issues, they just sort of kept it on the wish list side of things. That's the vibe I get with, I can see maybe, like, like Total Nuclear Annihilation being there. The production speed is very slow, so there's that. And there are also a lot of people who probably liked the gameplay, but don't think it's a $6,000 game, so they put it on the wish list because maybe they can pick it up used for $500 less in a couple years, and, you know, that's what they're doing because you get those, and on Pinsight you do get those reminders, or you can when your wishlist games come up on sale. I do. I had to start de-wishlisting anything that was commonly sold because I got tired of seeing ads 3,000 miles away for games because I wasn't going to go to that much trouble for Pinbot. I mean, we have to have some law here. I mean, one other thing that I, since you kind of included all the data, I kind of sorted by, you know, owner's count and a wishlist count, and then you kind of see a bit of a trend, and you're like, wow, did CGC use this for their remakes? Like, Medieval Madness is up there, and I mean, it's pretty obvious anyway. But it's crazy to see all that data in one spot versus clicking on a title individually. Like, the Bush's Count for Twilight Zone is still at 1,300, which is the most out of any machine. And then it's Medieval Madness, Adam's Family, Monster Bash, Theater of Magic. I wouldn't have thought that Theater of Magic was that high. That 1,000 plus people have it on their wish list just on Pinside. It seems to be the highest in the world. Theater is not a bad game. It's not a great game. I don't understand. The art's great on it, but I don't know. I've never understood. I've never understood. I don't want to understand, maybe, is the issue. I don't know. We have one on location. 700. You know, I'm fine playing it It's a fan layout game That isn't as executed as well As anything that Brian Eddy did I just don't get it I don't understand It's not as pretty as Tales of the Arabian Nights If you're going for art, why not go for the better art package I don't, you know I don't understand I'm just a simple podcaster Well, I said that I'm going to do an aside Nick from the EM Pinball Tour, who we interviewed way back, like in November or so. He was in town a different time, and I went over to a collector's house. And I hadn't been drinking, I do promise, but I just kept saying, wild under glass. And another person couldn't understand what I was saying because I was throwing out world that much. I was going, wild. He's like, what are you talking about? I said, I'm talking about the wild under glass. Don't you care about your wild? and so he doesn't talk to me anymore and I assume he thinks I'm insane. And that's okay because we can't all like me. But yes, well done to Glass. Very important to some people. Not very important to me, I remind a long time ago. Are you going to start a pin-side thread on this as well and release all the data? Yeah, I haven't decided if I just put it all in the same thread or not. I might. Here's the thing. One time I did another data pool with Robin. I don't even know if I covered it on the podcast. I might not have. Sometimes I just want to nerd out on things. And I got all this data. I did a regression analysis involving ownership data. That's why I knew I could get the extract pulled because Robin helped me out before with it. And I went and I put it up on Pinside. I had this whole write-up. There were ten posts in that thread when it was done. Ten posts. And, like, five of them were me responding to people. And one guy went in and said something along the lines of, wow, some people are really into this hobby. I'm like, what? What a bunch of... I'm like looking at these post counts and I'm like, I'm not the guy with 3,500 freaking posts talking about spinning pizza discs. I went and did something meaningful and this is the thanks I get? Oh, you had a lot of time on your hands. We must be really into this hobby. Regression. Nerd. Come on. You know what it's like these days? People want that instant satisfaction. You need to turn these graphs into memes or something. Somehow dumb it down so that the comments post it. Do it so it's in full movie videos, YouTube videos of it. The graphs popping out in sections of a pie chart shooting out at you. Like the Boromir poster, one does not simply wishlist things on Pennside. Exactly. Meme the entire time. Well, I can... You get at least 11 or 12 copies. Yeah, I'll up it. I'll just start tagging people's names, like Ryan's tag in there, so that I'll force people. Oh, this is so clever of you, Dan. They won't really mean it. It doesn't matter. You're just trying to get them like button clicks. So those are our data segments. So it's time to play a little game. You and Martin, Ryan, like to play games a lot, I've noticed. on your podcast. Yeah, keep it fresh. That's right. Keep it fresh. You have some pretty clever ones. I have a pretty clever one, too. I call it Slam the Top 101 to 200. So, for those that don't know, on Head to Head Pinball, Ryan and Martin play a game every episode. It's called Slam the Top 100, where Ryan asks his Google phone to randomize numbers. They edit out all the repeat numbers they get. So 30 minutes later, they have two games matched up from the top 100 on Pinside, and they each take 30 seconds to argue in favor of the game they've been randomly assigned and 30 seconds to rip apart the opposing person's game, and then they put a poll up on Pinside. So we're going to do basically the same thing, except I don't want to use the same games. So we're going to do the top 101 to 200. We're not asking Google. I'm going to use random.org to do it. and instead of just giving you 30 seconds to argue for and 30 seconds against, you're going to actually get 30 seconds to argue in favor of your game, 30 seconds to argue against Tony's game, and 30 seconds to argue against my game. Does that make sense? Sure. Okay. Okay. So you might. I'm just looking at all these games, and I'm like, I know, like, maybe 30 or something. No, yeah, this is going to suck. This is going to be terrible. That's why we're never going to repeat this segment ever again. I hope I get number 146, which is Defender, and I can say, hey, a lot of people want it. A lot of people want it. So I'll go ahead and generate yours first here so that you can go ahead and look it up, Ryan. And let me click the random. Let me click. And your number is not that. It's 189. Ah, it's Airborne. Oh, I've heard of that one. Isn't that a Capcom game? Ah, hey. Yes. I've had this in my collection for a few days. That is going to be more than probably anything that either Tony or I get. All right, so let me give Tony his number. Tony, your number is 184. Jiminy Christmas likes the 180s. Yeah, and that's Pharaoh. I've heard of that one. I've played that as well. This is a fluke. You're acting like you're not going to know any of these things. All right, and what's my number going to be? 157. So that is Starship Troopers. Oh, yeah. I saw that one up for sale. That's some real random there. You guys are going to realize how hard this is when there's just 30 seconds and you just panic about what you know. Now, you guys normally do it in the order whoever got the best rated game had to go first, right? That's right. All right, so we'll stick with that because we're basically stealing your concept. So that means I'll go first, Tony will go second, and you will go last. Okay, who's going to do the timer? Here, I've already got it up on my phone. Oh, do you? Okay. I'll let you do it. You let me know when you are ready, and I will begin arguing in favor of Starship Troopers. Ready? I am ready. Go. Okay, Starship Troopers, Weld Under Glass. This is an incredible game on Sega. It uses the White Star board system. It's got a little flipper that you can control with a separate button. It actually shoots really, really well. It is a fairly typical span layout that is executed with precision. It's got four different modes. The right outlaying is also the ball shooter lane. The backbox is weird. It's got this sort of convex format. It's got these LED counters in the play field. The brain bug pop-up toy has got a warrior bug that moves around, and you get to do a live fire simulator target attack. Wow. That was really a lot of information. Yeah, I've played Starship Troopers a few times. Okay. Tony, are you going to time yourself? Yeah, I'll time myself. Wild in the glass. Yeah. Well, you can't say that with Sarah. Okay. Here we go. It's got a wonderful-looking background, a crazy-looking guy. It's got that Egyptian theme that is so wonderfully loved by people time and time over. Four flippers, three slingshots, some drop targets. Everybody loves a good drop target. Good capture ball. It's got the Magna Save. And if you don't love a good Magna Save, what's wrong with you? I mean, seriously. It's got multiball, it's got a split play field, it's got a kicker in the upper play field. That's the kind of stuff that you just don't see anymore. All right. I've never seen this game in my entire life. Well, you did pretty good. You did pretty good. All right. And so go ahead. All right. You ready, Ryan? Yeah. All right. Go. World on the Glass. Airborne. Beautiful game by Capcom. You've got the sun setting on the cabinet, and you've got a little naked girl on the side as well, if you really like that kind of stuff. One of Capcom's best, probably their second best game, and I know this may be a linear game, and I saw people have a knock on it, but linear games like Daldin is linear. It's good if the modes are good. Super powerful for the sea out there, those steep ramps, wireforms. If you love wireforms, you can't see the playthrough of wireforms everywhere. If you love wireforms. Okay. Some people are going to think of wireforms. All right, so Tony, when you're set for me, I'll spend 30 seconds to attack Pharaoh, and then I'll need another 30 seconds to attack Airborne. All right. Ready? Go. Okay, Pharaoh, this game sucks. It is terrible. You haven't ever played it before? That is good. It has a lame two-ball multiball. That's all it's got going for it. That upper playfield, talk about Grand Lizard looks better with its upper playfield. You can't keep the ball up there. There's nothing good about this. It's a Williams System 7, a board set that was best left in the dustbin of history. There is really nothing redeeming about this beyond the name. That's all the time I want. Okay. You've got another second and a half. Okay. And let me get prepped here for... What does that Thera guy got on his chin? I don't know. I zoomed in on the picture, and I just don't know. Okay. Whenever your timer's set, I'll be ready. Ready? Go. All right. Airborne. Capcom. Total disaster of a company. Their only good game was the one that never came out, Kingpin. This game is terrible. The art package is incredibly boring. All it is is a bunch of sunset colors striped everywhere. Habitrails, more like Habit derailed, because this game doesn't ever let you play. Not to mention the entirely completely linear rule set, which was a staple of Capcom, because they didn't know how to program anything. It's by a nobody designer with a nobody artist. pilot your quiver takeoff into fail. That should have been. Okay. All right. So, Tony, first 30 seconds would be to attack Starship Troopers. Starship Troopers. Wonderful book turned into a below average movie. And then they took and made a pinball off of it. I mean, if it had been off the book, it might have at least had some hopes and dreams. But this is just a pile of crap. I mean, look at the entire play field's eaten up by just a little data screen that doesn't give you anything. There's nothing interesting to see on it. The Bashim brain bug is just a waste. There's too many flippers, and it just doesn't shoot well at all. Anybody who could even have a dream of playing a good game isn't here. That movie was fun, so I do take umbrage with that. The movie was fun, but it wasn't Starship Troopers. That's the problem. It's called Starship Troopers. Well sure it's called Starship Troopers What was the tagline? Do you want to live forever? Yeah Come on you apes do you want to live forever? I think it's better just to say Would you like to know more? Well the tagline for the pinball machine Is be a trooper And it's like yeah you've got to be a trooper to play this bloody game There's an extra two seconds of smashing on that game for you Yeah I felt that Cheating me Okay Okay, now I have to bash on Airborne. All right, here we go. Airborne. And for some reason on the side of the machine, to start anything out, it's a bunch of Navy jets. I'm pretty certain they're not part of the Airborne. I'm just going to float this out here, but I don't think the Army flies F-18s. But on top of that, yeah, why are they flying in front of Jupiter? That also doesn't make any sense. Nothing about this game. The art's bad. The gameplay is bad. And it's by Capcom. Capcom, who hasn't put out a good game on anything in, what, five years? Never played that one either. Well, you did your best. Okay, so, Ryan, your first 30 seconds will be to attack Starship Troopers. Or you could just pass and acknowledge that it was a great game. That is an option. Okay. Let me know when you're ready. Ready? Go. Starship Troopers, a great movie, but this is what Stern and Data East relied on back in the day, is they had no original thoughts. They copied a popular theme at the time and tried to make a good game around it. Joe Belser, you know, some decent games he's made, but this is not one of them. And let me just finish up with a story, which has nothing to do with slamming. I've got a friend who came from a different country, okay? I've got a friend who came from a different country. This is a funny story, okay? And you're done. You had this really... That was a great story. Good job. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Where did you finish your story? Finish your story. I've got a... Okay. These two friends, they were from the Middle East, and they came down to Australia, and they wanted more of a Western name. So... And they were teenagers at the time, and their parents were like, you know, choose your name. Like, first and last name. One of them named himself Sebastian Valmont. Right? love it what's that what's that movie um Cruel Intentions right okay yeah like the the hunky hunky guy from there and then he changed it back he's back to being like a normal guy his brother his brother who was older at the time named himself this is on his he's like his passport now right Johnny I'm Johnny I swear to God and he hasn't changed his name back and he's getting married soon. There's a middle-eastern guy named Johnny Rico getting married. So, every time I think of such a tribute now, all I think of is a guy who liked it when he was a teenager, and now it's his name forever. Well, he owns it. Oh, gosh. He's still owning it. That's a solid story. I thought that was more funny than bagging the tip. I agree. Okay. Alright, Pharaoh. Ready? Go. I played this game, and this game is an absolute borefest. And the justification the owner gave was, oh, it's cheaper and it's a better Black Knight 3000, which is overrated. It's nothing like that at all. If you look at the side of the cabinet, the cab is really nice art. The head box looks like a chicken with a giant lobe. Have a look. What has that got to do with the Pharaoh? Why is there a giant chicken on this machine? you think Amos' face is ugly have a look at that face of the guy disgusting, horrible game okay, well I will figure out a way I guess to do the three vote poll on we'll put it out there so people can go ahead and tell me that I won okay so that was I have no idea what that's supposed to be I mean, hanging off that guy's chin it looks so terrible it looks like It looks like quarters. I put your quarters here, and that's going to end up on my team. Maybe they thought it was sort of subliminal, you know, trying to get money drops. We'll do a little subliminal coin drop. That's the wild world on the glass. You put your quarter in there, and it ends up on his chin. So many halfway decent games in there, and I got bloody Pharaoh. All right, we're heading into our last section here in pinball, the worst of the fall pinball poll that has been going pretty well all in all. I've been pretty happy with it. I've been disappointed because of all this hate-based stuff. Everything's based on hate. You have to embrace the hate. I've tried to keep things positive. I've been positive this entire show. I don't understand. Dennis and Tony, hate is the gold standard. Hashtag the gold standard. Yeah. We should strive. We should strive to a higher level. All right. So we're going to start with our round two results in what should not be a surprise to anybody. Popeye is a much worse game than Roadshow. I think so. By a lot. 91.8% of you think that Popeye is worse than Roadshow because you're all very smart, beautiful people. The next one was actually kind of a surprise to me. Guns N' Roses beat Pinball Magic. Maybe people like Pinball Magic more than I think I'm assuming in the earlier segment When Ryan referenced that Airborne was Capcom's second best game I don't think he meant Kingpin was number one I think he meant Pinball Magic But I guess we'll ask him now Which production wise I would agree I think Pinball Magic is probably their strongest game It's Kingpin We're going to follow that one up with Freddy Beat the X-Files No surprise there Rescue 911 beat Twister But 71% no surprise Shaq Attack beat Flipper Football Yeah I abstain from that one Because I'm just assuming That I mean it's Flipper Football's like went to Europe Strikes and Spares Beat Big Hurt Barbed Wire beat Apollo 13 As it should have Mario Andretti beat NBA Fast Break, as it should have. Lost in Space beat Royal Rumble, as it most definitely should have. If anything, that one was closer than I thought. That one was 76.6%. That's closer than Lost in Space deserves. South Park beat The Who's Tommy Pinball Wizard. Star Wars Trilogy beat Maverick. Space Jam beat Jackbot. Viper Knight Drivin' beat The Lost World Jurassic Park. Star Wars Episode I beat Indianapolis 500, Harley-Davidson beat Corvette, and World Challenge Soccer beat Waterworld. Honestly, other than the Pinball Magic one, I'm not surprised by any of those. No, I don't think there was anything shocking with these results. So what will happen now, Ryan, is Tony's going to announce what each round three matchup is, and we'll give our thoughts on which game we think is the worst of the two. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I've been playing along. Oh, good. Just think about how you're going to actually vote. Now you have to articulate it verbally. All right. With reasoning. With reasoning. The round three match-ups. Number one, Popeye saves the earth versus Guns N' Roses. Okay, Ryan, we'll let you lead off. You're our guest. Popeye. Why? Because Guns N' Roses isn't that bad. It's the argument, I guess, that everyone uses is you can't see half the play field. which, hey, people are starting to use that for Alice Cooper as well. They're like, oh, you can't see, you know, in Alice Cooper either. And it's funny how some things are okay with some people machines and not okay in others. That's a good point. Yeah. Well, as will be no surprise, I completely agree with you, Ryan. Popeye is worse than Guns N' Roses. I've articulated twice now the frustrations with being unable to see the ball. I've also articulated with the poor geometry. And also, it scores bonus bad points for being a contributing factor to the destruction of Williams' pinball division. It got bonus bad points. Bonus bad points. BBT. BBT. And I'm going to agree. I mean, Popeye, there's not enough spinach to make Popeye a better game than Guns N' Roses. Popeye's just, no. The hat trick. No, it's done. Nice spinach reference, too. So we're going to go ahead and jump there to the second round. It's going to be Freddy and Nightmare on Elm Street versus Rescue 911. Ryan, you want to start? Yeah. I really should be abstaining because I haven't played Freddy, but I have played Rescue 911, and when the helicopter grabbed the ball, I was like, this is the very first time I was playing, I was like, oh, my God, this is cool as ****. And then it grabbed the ball again, and I was like, ah. And then it grabbed the ball again, I was like, huh. And then I was done with the game. I didn't want to play it again. So I'll give it to Rescue 911. I will abstain on this. As I've noted, I have not played Freddy. Actually, on some of these, I've started to review footage because I need to start weighing in. But I have not gotten around to doing that for Freddy. So I'm going to sit back on this one. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and go with Freddy on this one. I've not played Rescue, but I've played Freddy. And it was bad. bad. I just... The machine looked amazing, but the game played so bad. I'm going to tell you, I do have a Freddy story, even though I've never played it. I'll tell a little Freddy story. It's in Vault's Pinside. There was a person on Pinside, I think maybe out of Canada, I'm not sure, and he started posting, I don't even know why, I must have been really bored, dude, if I went into a Freddy thread. He's like trying to buy a Freddy. He's like, I really want to get a Freddy. I really want one. Most of the comments were like, no you don't. You don't understand. He's like, Oh, no, I love Freddy. It's like my favorite horror series. And they're like, it doesn't matter. You don't want this one. What's the full title of the game? Freddy, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Where is it ranked on the Pinside Top 100? It's not in the top 200. It might not be ranked. Yeah, I don't think it is. If it doesn't have 15 votes, it ain't ranked. A lot, a lot of Gottlieb Premier games are not ranked. Here it is, 237. Oh, okay. 98 rankings. It has it. Okay. Yeah, it was one of their higher production runs. Rescue 911 is one of the most produced System 3 games ever, so more people would probably have experienced it. But anyway, I finally found one kind of near us in the St. Louis area, which is about several hours east. It's on the east side of Missouri, so basically it's one state away. And I sent him the link just like two weeks later. I sent him the link. I said, I don't know the seller. I don't know if this is a good price for the condition it's in, but I know you were looking for a Freddy, so I just wanted to let you know because they don't pop up all that often. So here's a link. And the guy just responds, oh, I changed my mind. Okay. Well, that was probably smart, but okay. I wonder if he did the right thing and took it off his pin side wish list. I hope that data is nice and accurate. That's a good point. What's the third matchup? Number three is Shaq Attack versus Strikes and Spares. I'm abstaining I'm just going to take that now this is two strikes and spares right yeah this is 90 this is strikes and not and strikes spares not strikes and spares strikes and spares is a fun game strikes spares it's constipated players Tony Sounders apparently But, like, I thought, yeah. It confused me at first when I put the list together. I'm like, I played that game. I know that game is not from 95. So, when I started looking up here, I'm like, okay, no, this is a completely different animal. I've not played either of these. So, yeah. So, likewise, I'm not going to vote on this. I think the Strikes and Spares, Gottlieb 1, plays almost like a bowler. Like, you've got the pins that sit down and they get knocked up, almost like a bowler. Yeah. But I'm not certain on that. I don't know. Ryan, do you have any thoughts on that? Have you played the uh version? I haven't played either one. But I guess I'll just look at the... Ah, hey, I have played this. Yeah. I've played this. You probably owned it. This is not a pinball machine. This is literally... It's a bowler, right? Made by Gutleaf. Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually... Now, there's a problem in my list because there's a non-pinball machine. I think it does actually have pinball flippers at the bottom, so it would be very easy to think of it as a pinball. It does have pinball, and it basically just releases the balls kind of one by one. Like, you press a button, it releases the ball, and you try and get a strike. So you're not really playing pinball. You're playing bowling, and you're propelling the balls, like, in a pinball manner. You know what? I'm not going to abstain. Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not going to abstain on this. I'm going to vote for Shaq Attack to eliminate strikes and spares from being in contention, because it shouldn't be here. I agree with you. I will do the exact same because I apparently messed up. I should have done more research when I put this list together. But then we wouldn't have had that perfect balance. I know, that perfect 64 was so nice. Sacrifices had to be made. So, pinball community, we ask for your help. Help us legitimately crush spikes and spares by voting for Shaq Attack, which nobody likes anyway. So, thank you. Okay. All right. So, on to four. barbed wire versus Mario Andretti another Gottlieb matchup Ryan's favorite manufacturer perhaps I haven't played either one of them so I can't I'll vote based off the translate later on today when you put up the threads I will vote now I did go and I explicitly went and reviewed Mario Andretti footage so I could have a reasonable competency and be able to assess the gameplay. I'm voting bar four. All right, Mario Andretti. Send me the link in the chat so I can put my votes in as well. I can do it twice. So, yeah, in terms of the toy on Mario Andretti, it's kind of lame. It's these two cars, and they're like just on a metal bar, helicopter bar, that just spin around. So it looks really simplistic. But the cars actually, they do, it looks like they can interfere with the ball, but it whips around when certain modes are going. It looks, none of that matters. You know what I think about toys. Nothing. It actually has geometric logic to it, and barbed wire is a clunk fest. It's a clunk fest from the ball launch to everything else. So Mario may not be a great game but barbed wire is a bad game I know Mario has unbalanced scoring but so does barbed wire so they are a wash on poor software So there you go See I didn do all this research and I just know that Barb Wire is such a bad game that there's no way that this early on in the matchups against something that's worse than it, unless the only thing that they could have done otherwise is that, like, if it had meant, like, Lost in Space before now. Hmm. Playing with Barb Wire. Speaking of Lost in Space. That might be in our next round. It is in our next round. If I can think ahead. It's Lost in Space and South Park. Oh, this is interesting. Now, I'm assuming, Ryan, you've played both of these games. I have, but I only played Lost in Space kind of once at Expo about a year and a half ago, and my friend was like, oh my god, Lost in Space, there's pretty much none of these in Australia, and he made me play it, and I had no idea what I was doing, but what I did notice was the start of MultiBall is pretty much what X-Men did. They ripped off that side of multiple where all the balls come down, get stuck on the spinning disc, and it spins around until they kind of come apart. Yeah, a disc with a magnet? Hey, JJP, I have an idea for you. So which one do you think is worse? Well, okay, I guess I've only played a couple of games on all of them, on both of them, But South Park was very important to my childhood upbringing. And that game, I know it earns well on location because, hey, oh, look at South Park. And for a gobble hole to be, like, that big, and it's the epitomization of bad software where you hit things over and over again and eventually you get into the same shot over and over. It is like Loney D. Ropp. This topic wins. Yeah. So South Park wins for me easily. Okay. While I sympathize with your position, I am going to vote for Lost in Space because all it is is multiball after multiball after multiball. It's just as redundant as South Park. Arguably, its call-outs are less annoying than South Park, but South Park has one key advantage. No one cares about that Lost in Space movie, and at least with South Park, you can become a hobby operator, stick it on route somewhere, and it's going to make bank for you. So at least have that. But then it's the whole thing. It's just kind of like Game of Thrones, you know, beautiful, artistic world, and they show that piece of crap art. You know what I mean? Like South Park had the potential to be this amazing game, and it's not. Whereas Lost in Space, if no one cares about it, it's kind of like the shadow. Everyone, like, pumps up the shadow, but it's because no one cared about the movie. I see your point, but now in terms of Game of Thrones, though, a lot of people would argue Game of Thrones is an excellent piece of software and has really quite good geometry. Could you tell me about your issues with the gradient shading? I need to learn about gradient shading. It's not about gradient shading. It's just obviously they didn't have the freedom to, like Star Wars, you know, beautiful art and like what we see on other pens. so it's just, you know, no... But they did get to use the... They did actually get to use the character assets, unlike some things. Pirates. I mean, just saying. When we're talking weld under glass, there are a lot of elements to that weld. Oh, gosh. No, Game of Thrones is an SF file, and I own it, so... Back to South Park in Washington State. I don't care for a Game of Thrones just because I don't know how to play it. I know which house I'm supposed to pick. After that, though, I've never just sat there and been like, okay, what is the order by which I progress through these modes? I don't think it's that hard to memorize the one right path because there is one right path, as there always is, but I just have not invested the time. We don't have one on location anymore, so I don't have any place to learn it. Sad. When we had three of them on location, you didn't have any interest in learning. well it's like two of the three locations were like premium models right I just never liked I don't like that upper play field it's challenging but I just don't find it fun you prefer the peasant model I do I'm peasant biased I'm like the peasant ramp in medieval madness you don't really want to do you don't really want to appease me but you got to stick it in there so that's like that's me in a nutshell the peasant peasant pro peasant pro yes peasant pro I'm also going to go with Lost in Space yes Just because I think this is a situation where I very easily think both of these games could have gone on from here. I just from personal experience think Lost in Space is a much, much worse game. But, yeah, no. If they weren't against each other, I think they would have both made it through this round because there's not a lot else in here that would have taken either of them out. Okay. Well, it's a split decision. So next up is the Star Wars Trilogy In Space Jam Dr. Jim! Ryan, have you ever played Space Jam? Because I haven't I haven't played Space Jam And I also haven't played the Star Wars Trilogy So do we have a unanimous abstention? I mean, I will be abstained I have played Star Wars Trilogy Only a couple times, though It is really bad But I've heard terrible things about Space Jam So I just don't I didn't have time to review Space Jam footage yet Yeah, I was obscene. I almost bought a Space Jam simply a couple of years... This is when I was first going into pinball, because it was so d***y, and it kind of got snapped up, so I could have provided a really good opinion on it, and probably it would have been a lot of hate. Space Jam is a fun movie, and it's a fun theme, so when a pinball machine is bad based off a bad movie, I don't feel hate towards it. it's when it's like Star Wars and it's just like, you know, this much-loved franchise. And that's when I'm like, ah, this should be so much better. But Star Wars has a 40X multiplier. Have you considered the 40X multiplier? I was like, was that around back in 1997? Here's the only thing. I know I mentioned it, I think, in round one with this. Here's the only thing I really remember about Star Wars Trilogy. It has this massive gobble hole for the Sarlacc pit. I mean, there were a few, I don't know if you've seen like Super Mario Brothers from Premiere, but it has these holes. Ultimately, they either feed to a subway or they're VUKs. They function in a normal way like any other scoop or kick out would, except for whatever reason in the play field. They're just huge. Yeah, the hole is like eight times bigger than it needs to be. That is... Doesn't Santa's Park have those things? Yeah, you mentioned that. I couldn't remember if it did or didn't because I just remember the stupid toilet. And the claws that make your ears bleed I remember a lot of bad things about South Park So They're not as famey bad as Lost in Space But yeah So that's the only thing I remember about Star Wars Trilogy Star Wars Trilogy is Arguably the worst Star Wars game that was ever done I don't know I don't know if the Hankin game is good or not So They didn't make very many They didn't get over to the US very much Yeah. So anyway, next up. Next up, Viper Knight Drivin' and Star Wars Episode I. Now, Ryan, you've surely played Star Wars Episode I. I used to judge our games. You used to play pinball with me. Sorry, I swore. That was far from the first time. It's horrible. You're going with Star Wars? Well, I'm having a look at Viper Driving Knight. Oh, you haven't played Viper. Oh, it's got the wonderful global plastic-y terribleness. Okay. I'm going to do my – Tony, chime in on this to clarify it, but I'm going to give you my sense of Viper, Ryan. Here's the thing. There was an idea there. I think Sega was sitting and thinking, hey, look, there have been these games like Indianapolis 500, Corvette. People like awesome sports cars. So let's build one around the Dodge Viper, which was the pentagon. What is the tree trunk in the middle of the play field? That tree trunk-looking thing is the ball lock. Is that a mountain? What's it meant to be? I don't remember. Now I have to. It's a mess. It's a mess. It's a mess. Yeah, the. Okay. It's like, please be up right now. I need to look. Because it's just been, we had it on location for a while. And, oh, yeah, no, that's supposed to be a mountain. It's supposed to be a mountain. Okay. Is this them trying to cash in on, like, Neek's estate or something? Well, I think it was more like Williams at the time had, like, Corvette and Indy 500. And so they wanted a car game. And they were able to get the Dodge license. So they're like, okay, let's put a hot girl in the middle. I don't know if No Good Gophers was inspiring them but they're like these stupid little hedgehogs these little raccoons and they're like talking dirty and stuff they're very naughty raccoons after I got done playing it the first time I'm like, did those raccoons say what I thought they said? and so I was like, yeah, is this a modified ROM? and I don't think it was So I was just like, okay, well, I don't know if I'd have that at a pizza joint, but hey, whatever. And the main gimmick, though, was that you played it with glow balls. And glow balls do not have the same physics as a regular pinball. They're lighter. I guess maybe kind of like you might think of it in a way like a Powerball, but they're bouncier, too, because they've got this rubber coating to glow under the UV lighting. Kind of like Predator, there was UV lighting. Well, in this case, they actually had it. And it's just, you're just trying to lock these balls by the mountain area. There are these kick-out holes where you lock in. And then you, like, get this 30-second ball save. There's a post save that's between the flippers that pops up. It's, like, active for 30 seconds during multiball, which is easy to activate. It is. I'm voting Viper because it sucks. Yeah, I'm so bad. I haven't played this game, but I'm looking at the flyer, right? Animated, rabid, roadkill raccoons give lifelike motion to Viper. Cash in on the hot backlight action. Wow. Like, they're not even selling the game properly on the flyer. It's so freaking cheesy. So I think I'm going to vote for Viper based on that. Right. So this game came out in 98. So look, I mean, the raccoons and how they shake or rip off of the Martians from Attack At this point, Sega was just like stealing every decent idea Williams had. And then, I mean, because the layout on Viper inherently isn't bad. It's a pretty typical fan layout almost. Everything's in the back. There are no dangerous shots. It's just, this is not good. I mean, Star Wars isn't great, but it's, I mean, it's just a little rushed. Viper was just a lot of ideas that just don't work well. You know that you can listen to the driving theme featuring Mancow and the crew of Mancow Morning's Madhouse to enhance the driving experience. I remember when Mancow was popular back in the mid-'90s. I've actually never heard of Mancow. You've never heard of Mancow? Mancow was a popular morning drive DJ that was syndicated across the country back in the mid-'90s. and I'm voting Viper and I Drive-In because I don't need to say anymore. You don't want to Antonio Cruz the highways at night as you encounter hitchhikers, drag races, and raccoon roadkill, and more? Rabbids. Raccoon roadkill. Okay. Rabbids. Rabbids. Yes. Rabbids. Rabbids. So, last matchup, I think. Last matchup is Harley Davidson versus World Challenge Soccer. The Stegos Stern Harley, obviously, not the early 90s one, which was a competitor to the Street Level series that Bally Williams did. Right. I have played both of these. I believe so. I'm looking up a picture of World Challenge Soccer to make sure. Yeah. I wanted to think I heard on your show, though I couldn't remember if it was you or just Marty, who had played World Challenge Soccer and hated it. That's the thing, though. I mean, I hated Harley-Davidson. Harley-Davidson has an okay layout, but the rules of multiball, well, to get into multiball, you bash the Harley-Davidson. and then he rises up, and then you lock the balls in there, and then multiball is ready. And then during multiball, I believe, the only jackpot is hitting the Harley-Davidson, and then the super jackpot is hitting the Harley-Davidson. And it's like the dumbest rule ever. It's like you've got all these shots on the play field, and the only shot is literally just to hit that over and over again. But, god, World Challenge Soccer, I mean, the example that I played, it was in a kind of a sorry state. It's just a sad excuse for a pinball machine. Like, it's just... Who designed it? Jon Norris. I'm thinking of someone who designed a lot of... Yeah, exactly. I'm sure he's designed a lot of cool games, but the geometry of the whole thing, it just doesn't work. It's just like it's not a pinball machine. It's just like a piece of crap. It's just like, let's just put stuff everywhere, and that's a pinball machine. I don't know. It's just horrible. Okay. I had a fun time trying to play it and bag it, but I have to vote for World Challenge Soccer. I will be voting for Harley. I have not played World Challenge Soccer. However, I have watched quite a bit of footage of it because it is one of three games on my wish list. So, yes. Oh, no. So, thank you for your honesty, Ryan. I do appreciate it. Though you are right. I'm fascinated. I only want it if it's cheap, but I'm fascinated by it because if you don't know the story of World Challenge Soccer, there's a brief little story on it. That was Jon Norris' fastest design. He got that game put together in five weeks. Why would you want that then? That's not something that you should buy. You can be like, if you're a shareholder, you'd be like, yes, your fastest design. If you're a buyer, you're like, no. Well, I do expect it to be at a fairly subpar to pinball average pricing, So that's part of it. No, I'm just, I'm interested. Okay, okay. I've watched tuned examples. I think that the shots work reasonably well if the parts are working appropriately. Whereas I don't like Harley-Davidson for all the reasons you've expressed. It's just multiballs. All the multiballs have the same lame rules. And you pointed out the main multiball, the Harley multiball, but red light multiball is no better. None of the multiball modes are any better. They all stink. They stink. How much is a world challenge Because I mean there's a limit To how low pinball prices Can go in Australia because They still have to import them like all the World challenge solvers are coming from Europe They have to clean them up they have to Convert them they have to you know get them To a sellable standard In the US I guess like they go Really cheap like how cheap could you get one of These machines Honestly I've never seen one for sale Because Gottlieb sent almost all the world-challenged soccers to Europe. Most of them went to France. So in my world, a fully working one needs to be under $1,000. Yes, you'd be looking at about $2,000 Australian dollars for one. It's just people that sell it, I guess, the families that are buying a commercial for the first time. So I guess this is why people isn't... Or people who think they're getting World Cup soccer and are tricked. which I'll go into the story about it afterwards but tell me which one are you abstaining I'm going to abstain I'll give you the quick lowdown on World Challenge Soccer because it is interesting but Jon Norris did the design he did rescue 911 so if you love the helicopter here's the sequel no what happened was they being Gottlieb Gottlieb Premier they wanted to get the World Cup license and the licensor told them that they couldn't have it, that it was already acquired by Williams. So they knew Williams had the license and they wanted to beat them to market. So they told Jon Norris, just take something else and re-theme it, basically. So he took one of his street-level games called Car Hop, added on a ramp, and that was what he did for most of the five weeks. They had it on a ramp. They gave it a new art package. They gave it new rules, I believe improved rules versus what Carhop had. And they just needed it to keep the line busy until Rescue 911 was ready. So they only made like 1,400 of them. But they sold every single one because there was World Cup mania going on in Europe, and they just scooped those puppies up. So they sold every one. It was a huge hit. Well, the World Cup. Huge hit for Gottlieb. The World Cup mania was happening in, I think, the 1994 World Cup was held in the U.S. So I guess you guys had to have that problem. All the soccer people were really excited for there to be a World Cup. There was high demand for it. It surprised him. He didn't think it would be that. But, yeah, that was his shortest design cycle ever. But, to be fair, he already had a fully-fledged design in his pocket that he reused. Oh, my God. They just packed on a ramp. It's just clicks, okay? Deep Root. The five days of Deep Root is that when they're going to figure out what everyone's doing, right, with a theme, like Ghostbusters and Deadpool, and they're going to get Jon Norris to muck up his designs in five weeks and just release them before everyone else. It's possible. It's possible. In fact, the five days of Deep Root is he's going to design a game in five days. Or he'll design a game every day for five days. Exactly. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, when we had the interview with Robert and he mentioned that he didn't understand why companies were insisting on having the programmers do the rules now, my immediate thought was he's having Jon Norris do his own rules because John always did his own rules. That was his thing. The problem, and I think that's completely fair, the problem, as Jon Norris would tell you, wasn't, you know, and of course he could be biased because they were his rules, but he admitted that his frustration at Premier wasn't that he didn't think he could do good rules but they had a rule you were never allowed to go back and change them after the first run unless it was a serious bug that would say burn out transistors and such so he was never allowed he knew Gladiators had a scoring flaw, he wanted to fix it he couldn't fix it, Gladiators was a great game if you could just fix the scoring I think a lot of those Premier games could be great games that people would reprogram that no one bothers. So it is what it is. Anyway, so that's the story about World Challenge Soccer. You should love it. No, I got my vote and I've already submitted it. Okay, that's fair. I'm sure it will be moving on. Even though Harley-Davidson is such a bad game, it actually makes Harley writers who play it want to own Hondas instead. That game probably sold more Gold Wings than any ad campaign Gold Wing ever did. Well, that is the last of the poll. And that's the last of the show. So I want to say thank you again to Ryan C. Well, first, first, first. Oh, what do we got? You're intervening. I'm intervening first. My notes don't show an intervening. Because we're at the end of the show, and everybody except for me has had to be beat this episode. So I just wanted to say. Oh, my God. Okay. I just want to be part of the team I'm going to take one from the team you know this is a lot of work because I have to move that beeper ass so much unless I just solve it everyone has had what Ryan doesn't know is I have a notepad out where I'm writing all the time stamps down on every word I have to censor my pad is we got a good gig Tony I want to stay on for another two and a half hours and talk about loot boxes and everything else happening in the video game world loot crates, you want loot crate drama I sent you my Xbox Live profile. Yeah, he did. He sent me his profile, which I think I can safely summarize as saying it's just a bunch of bro shooters. Like, what is this? This is like, hey, let's see. Let's play every game where people have no neck, like Gears of War and Halo. And there you go. So are you looking forward to the upcoming anticipated announcement of the new Halo game and the new Gears of War games? They're not confirmed yet. I'm so out of the loop on it that I didn't even know they were happening but I've never I could never survive through Halo it was I couldn't do it for some reason I didn't get the I didn't have an original Xbox so I didn't get the whole Halo thing versus Gears of War but what I wanted to quickly discuss is there's a game that I used to play on Xbox religiously and I played it again the other day kind of for the first time in a while and I realised it was almost like training for pinball and that game is Peggle. Oh, Peggle. Yeah, I've played a lot of Peggle back in the day. That was... Yeah, I used to play it with my mate. I used to be my Gears of War buddy and then we had a break from that and we spent about a year playing Peggle every single night for about three or four hours. You want to meet up and play some Peggle? It was just trash talking. Basically, we used to play each other and trash talk each other for just the entire time and it was quite fun. But I realized the other day, there's a ball, there's geometry, right? And then down the side, there's multipliers. And the higher your multiplier goes, the more strategy you have to take with the risk-reward of going for the pink peg versus the other colored pegs. So I thought it was quite interesting that I was into that before I was into pinball. And then I gravitated towards pinball and never played video games again. I never really thought about that. but that does make a lot of sense, and that's a solid game. Well, if you think about that game as well, if you have that game on your PC or Xbox, give it another go, and a lot of these things that happen tying to pinball as well, like the fanfare, that O2Joy plays, and that's kind of like your jackpot, like the end of the game. You know, well done, you've finished the game. When a peg hits certain shots, like say you're in Tron and you get super jets, it makes a high-pitched sound. And every combo you make goes higher and higher and higher so you feel like you're progressing. And Peggle does the same thing with its sounds. So there's a lot in Peggle that ties in with pinball machines. Did you know that there is a sequel? Ah, yeah. I've 100%ed the sequel as well. I've got 100% on both those games, but it's not as good as the... Yeah, I've cleared all the levels. Yeah, I played a lot of Peggle. Yeah, Dr. Peggle-ass. I played it before I started podcasting, so I've never talked about it. Yeah. I played a lot of games before I started podcasting. We could talk about all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there anything you wanted to plug or any other items you wanted to discuss? Do you want to talk about how Maria just needed a sandwich at the middle of Gears of War 2? They didn't need a sandwich. Spoilers. She was in pretty bad shape. She needed a hamburger. Look, you can't just off every anorexic you meet. I never, everyone talks about how that was the most dramatic Gears of War. I sat there, I saw that, and I'm like, just give her some french fries. What's going on? She's hungry. Feed her. You don't have to offer. I love the bake. That and Razor Hail, it was stupid. That whole game, Gears 2 is the worst Gears game. It's worse than Judgment. So it went full on Final Fantasy, like Final Fantasy VII, where you're playing through it, and your people die constantly, and you res them. But when Aerith dies, spoilers, there's nothing you can do about it. Kind of. I mean, in Gears 2, the plot is you're trying to find your, the co, when you play co-op, you play, Marcus is the main guy and Dom is his friend. You're trying to find Dom's wife. And you find her and she's like in a little sarcophagus, she's like in a little jail. And you let her out and she's just super thin and she goes, it's like, I can't say, she can't speak. So, you shoot her in the head. No. Or you could have taken her to McDonald's. No, that's not what happened. She just needed some food. People are always weird when they're starving, but you give them some food and it fixes a lot of problems, I'm telling you. If Dom had a Snickers bar, it would have been a completely different game. You give her a box of Tim Pans, she would have shaped up. It was Dom's story arc, because then in spoiler, in number three, he sacrificed, this is the part that pissed me off, that the Maria thing, that was fine. In number three, well, he goes and visits her grave as well. they dragged that on, that whole Maria story arc. For sure. Yeah. In number three, he sacrifices his life and it was totally, like, in movies, there's only a certain amount that you can do, but it pisses me off so much in video games when you can control the entire choreography of, like, everything that happens because you're animating these freaking characters, right? So, like, do whatever you want. And they create these scenarios that people can easily escape. Like, you can see the escape path there, but someone has to go and sacrifice their life so that they can run off because a bee explosion happens. Like, no, that didn't need to happen. F*** video games. You walk away from an explosion. Okay, a question to you guys. I know you want to finish, Dennis. You're like, I'm over this. What's the most emotional that you've ever been playing a video game? What scene or what video game actually worth the whole cutscene or choreography to make you feel emotions. A world under screen. Well, do you want to narrow it down by any particular emotion? Like an emotional, like a crying emotion. Like, you know, you felt moved. Not happy or anything. Like, wow, I just blew up someone's face. Talking more about, you know, sad feelings. Someone died. So not the rage of missing a 99% shot with a sniper on XCOM. The smash the controller rage. Right, okay, okay, well, yeah, in terms of sadness about the, I guess, the arc, even though I didn't, hmm, well, recent, in terms of recent games, I mean, Final Fantasy VII, the heiress thing, actually was pretty emotional when I played it. Was it six with the twins, or was it four with the twins? There was 4, which was originally sold as 2 in the U.S., Final Fantasy 4. Final Fantasy actually had some good starts. Even 15, which I didn't like the gameplay of, the sacrifices that happened at the end of that game, they executed that pretty well. It was pretty, I thought that was pretty emotional. So those are probably my favorite saddest moments. And then in terms of, I also really like horror games, and Resident Evil 7, I know I mentioned it a few months ago, but I don't know when I've ever been so scared, other than that first act of that game, playing through a horror game. It was just, it was, it just, it works really well. It's really terrifying. Which one's Resident Evil that you're the girl with the South African accent? Is that six? That's five. Five, okay. Yeah, that was a lot from that play. Right, five. Right, five. Well, that's a seven. Yeah, seven. That was when a friend of mine from my World of Warcraft days, which Marty would appreciate, he was like, you can get an Xbox 360 so we can play Resident Evil 5. And I'm like, I ain't getting no console. I'm a PC gamer. And he's like, you need to get it because you have to play this game. So I got it, and I switched to console gaming at that point because it was cheaper. And then maintained my PC. And we played that co-op. Yeah, it was Sheva. Resident Evil 6 is garbage. It's total garbage. You don't want to play it. And then they did some Resident Evil Revelations games. Those are pretty good. And then just this last year, they released Resident Evil 7, which is first-person mode. So that's the big change. It's first-person, but it was back to being very suspenseful. Five got a lot of criticism with Sheva because there was a lot. It was very gun-driven. You were doing a lot of shooting. This is much more back to being atmospheric. And you're feeling really weak, really fragile, really lost, and very normal in an environment that is abnormal. and so it works really well I mean if you want a non-Resident Evil stand out that I'd also cite for good horror emotionality to it The Evil Within, I've not played the second one yet but the first one is very well done and it's in that same vein, sort of classical suspense horror, which I like in gaming, I like it more than in movies I would new I don't think there's anything new that's gotten me, but The Twins in Final Fantasy 4, which was released in the USS2, when they did their big sacrifice. Yep. I mean, I was younger, but that hit me pretty big. That's the one where Tela sacrifices as well. Yeah. The party. Yeah. No, that whole storyline, considering how young I was when I played through that Final Fantasy, was just gut punch after gut punch. And as said, Eris and Seven. But most of the gaming I've done doesn't really have story like that because it's much broader. I don't do a lot of character driven stuff other than like in my XCOM like in I've had several XCOM playthroughs where it's been like there's characters that I really like you know like Dennis' character my wife's character who are awesome and then just through a whole run of bad luck in one match just get totally wiped out and I always feel sad but I haven't had anything more recent than probably Final Fantasy Not that I can remember that's really been like tug at the heartstring, gut punch you for it. Whereas Dom and Maria, that's like at the top of my worst executed. Holy crap. Just, you know what? Just get her a steak. Just one steak. Or a salad. I mean, a little dressing on the side. I remember Cliff Buzinski was doing an interview on that, and he was like, it's so hard to transition from like, you know, we're still learning how to do the story, like from bro-shooter to trying to tell this emotional story. I'm like, well, just don't tell the emotional story. Just keep it as a bro-shooter. Mine is The Last of Us, and it's because of the time in my life I kind of had a newborn kid, and that just pulled on all the right heartstrings for... I think I shed a tear at the start, the opening scene, like a father dies or something. I can't remember exactly. and then at the end when you know, spoiler alert he kind of kills everyone for this girl because he was kind of like, she was the replacement that's right, he loses his kid at the start and she was kind of the replacement kid and he would rather kind of live in that post-apocalyptic you know, world than have it all sold just so he can kind of share a relationship with her Oh, that does remind me, another one I do need to mention, I played through it twice on two different consoles and it got me both times, and that is Telltale's first Walking Dead game. Oh, you're right. Yeah, with Clementine. That is, yeah. I did the end differently both times, and both times I was like, oh, gosh. The writing team on that, they lost that writing team to another studio, I think, a little bit after that game. Yeah, I was about to say. I played all the Telltale games after that. None of them were as good. They just wouldn't capture the same. Yeah, no, the writers, I can't remember who they, oh, yeah, Firewatch they went and did Firewatch oh yeah Firewatch was amazing it didn't have a tug on you I mean it has some sad moments but it was well written it didn't have any it wasn't like favorite ball that with Clementine yeah I was like oh yeah that's my favorite that's my favorite story in Telltale yeah that was another one as well that is you know I've got a little girl her name is very close to Clementine so it was just too real yeah I know people who won't play that game anything involved with little kids now. Yeah, well, I mean, kids will do that on occasion. I've actually turned movies off before because it's been like, I can't watch any more of this movie. I just can't handle this. It's not... It's just too much. Before I had kids, I was like, yeah, that's fine. As long as they don't kill the dog, it's fine. Who cares? You can't kill dogs. That's basically, that whole theory is played out and explored by John Witt. That's the plot. It's like, but what happens if you kill a dog? That's what happens. You leave dogs alone. And Mal and me. That was the other high action movie. And Turner and Hooch, which almost killed Tom Hanks' career. Terrible movie, too. All right. Well, I will wrap it up now so that you can go and see your movie, Tony, and I can get dinner. You have been listening to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Thanks again to Ryan from Head to Head Pinball. We do have a link to his show in the show notes. If you aren't listening to it, you really should check it out. It is a lot of fun. Ryan and Marty are a lot funnier than Tony and I are on air, so they do have that going for them, even if their taste in games is subpar. You can find us on Facebook. Flipper Football. I am Defense Flipper Football. I don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, not the football. Oh, you see? You haven't even paid attention. You're trying to burn me. You don't even have the burn in your pocket. You know what? Maybe you need to go on Mrs. Penn and have her teach you some moves, teach you some trash talk. You know what I'm saying? Lucy, Lucy. That's right. You've got to be Lucy. You've got to be ready. I'm going to look at your. Tennessee, Tennessee, Tennessee, and Tony Woney. Oh, I've heard that one before. I've heard that one plenty of times. Tony Woney. You can also email the show, but we don't ask you to, as eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com. We're also available on other social platforms. Yeah, we're on Twitter and Instagram as eclectic underscore gamers. And that's it for two weeks. Thanks again, Ryan, for coming on. Thank you, and I apologize to everyone that has to listen to me twice. We'll see how long it takes me to edit all this profanity out. I just have timestamp, four-letter word, timestamp, four-letter word, marked all up. It's going to be a big pain. All right, well, goodbye, everyone. See you, everybody. See ya. Son of a... _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: f3cfd2e2-a434-47bb-9ef5-ede87faf80fd*