# Episode 46 - Pinball Expo & Video Games Galore **Source:** Eclectic Gamers Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2017-10-23 **Duration:** 111m 50s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://soundcloud.com/user-465086826/episode-46 --- ## Analysis Tony and Dennis from Eclectic Gamers Podcast discuss Pinball Expo 2017, focusing on manufacturer presence and the major announcement: Jersey Jack Pinball's Pirates of the Caribbean. They analyze game features (concentric circles, upper playfield, five flippers, 105 modes across five films), note the designer's first pinball credit, and express concern about aggressive pricing ($8,500 base, $12,500 for limited editions). Highway Pinball and Spooky Pinball notably skipped the expo; Spooky cited design issues per organizers, but the designer disputed this, suggesting disagreement with Expo management instead. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Jersey Jack Pinball's Pirates of the Caribbean is the only new game announced at Expo 2017 — _Tony and Dennis discuss that JJP 'literally the only people who showed a new game' and therefore 'by default' wins Expo_ - [HIGH] Pirates of the Caribbean has 105 total modes (20 per movie + 5 special modes) with 3.25 sextillion gameplay variations — _Dennis states game 'covers all five of the Pirates films' with randomized scenes and calculated variation count_ - [HIGH] Spooky Pinball officially ditched Expo 2017 and had no formal booth presence — _Tony explicitly states 'Spooky Pinball officially ditched Expo' and 'did not have a formal presence'_ - [HIGH] Highway Pinball had no presence at Expo 2017 despite recent Aliens shipment arrival — _Dennis reports container ship of Aliens arrived and 'people have been reporting getting games' but company chose not to attend/promote_ - [HIGH] Pirates of the Caribbean base model costs $8,500 with limited edition at $12,500 — _Tony and Dennis confirm pricing: 'bog standard model is $8,000? $8,500?' and 'super limited edition...is like $12,000, $12,500? Yeah, $12,500'_ - [MEDIUM] An Expo organizer claimed Spooky/TNA weren't attending due to design issues, but TNA's designer disputed this — _Dennis reports 'one of the Expo organizers claimed a reason...had to do with design issues' but 'the designer of TNA' said 'that is not true...The expression thus being we have a problem with how you run Expo'_ - [MEDIUM] Pirates of the Caribbean features a designer (Eric Mugnier) making his first pinball game — _Tony recalls 'this was this designer first go...Eric Mugnier' though unsure of name pronunciation_ - [MEDIUM] Pirates of the Caribbean plays fast for a widebody, second fastest JJP after Dialed In — _Dennis notes 'it is the fastest playing JJP game other than Dialed In' and 'I can believe that'_ ### Notable Quotes > "They're the only ones who showed a new game. Therefore, I think they, by default, win." > — **Tony**, N/A > _Establishes that new game announcements are the primary measure of Expo success_ > "My guess is simply that Alice Cooper's not ready. And without that, there was no reason for them to be there because that's what all the questions would be about." > — **Dennis**, N/A > _Speculation that Spooky's Alice game delay drove the decision to skip Expo_ > "One of the organizers then claimed a reason...had to do with design issues...And so there was some backlash with the designer of TNA saying that is not true. The expression thus being we have a problem with how you run Expo." > — **Dennis**, N/A > _Reveals conflict between Spooky/TNA and Expo management, suggesting organizational friction_ > "I think the biggest problem with this game is the fact that I think it's a terrible theme." > — **Tony**, N/A > _Expresses skepticism about Pirates IP choice despite acknowledging gameplay merit_ > "I haven't cared for a single theme that Jersey Jack has run with. I think that they have all been subpar selections." > — **Dennis**, N/A > _Pattern criticism of JJP's theme licensing choices across their catalog_ > "It is hard to see this...are you kidding me? Because that's like $12,000, $12,500?...I'm in shock every time I see the price list." > — **Tony**, N/A > _Expresses alarm at escalating pinball pricing trends and five-figure LE models_ > "I think Expo's just not as important as it used to be." > — **Dennis**, N/A > _Assessment that Expo's relevance to manufacturers and community is declining_ > "The reason for those that don't ever think, well, why would a widebody always feel so slow? It's because there's so much horizontal movement." > — **Dennis**, N/A > _Technical explanation of widebody playfield design physics and pacing_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jersey Jack Pinball | company | Manufacturer that announced Pirates of the Caribbean at Expo 2017, noted as Expo's 'winner' for being the only company to show a new game | | Spooky Pinball | company | Boutique manufacturer that officially skipped Expo 2017; had TNA displayed at Pinball Life party instead; cited design issues vs. alleged Expo management conflict | | Highway Pinball | company | Manufacturer with no Expo presence despite recent Aliens shipment arriving; noted for bad press and avoiding confrontation | | Pirates of the Caribbean | game | Jersey Jack Pinball's new wide-body game featuring five flippers, concentric spinning discs, upper playfield with cannon, 105 modes across five films, 20+ selectable characters; priced $8,500-$12,500 | | Total Nuclear Annihilation (TNA) | game | Spooky Pinball game designed by Scott Denisey; eventually shown at Expo in vendor booth after Spooky declined formal booth; designer disputed Expo organizer's explanation for Spooky's absence | | Alice | game | Spooky Pinball game presumed to be delayed, possibly explaining Spooky's decision to skip Expo according to speculation | | Aliens | game | Highway Pinball title; container ship recently arrived in US with new stock after long delay | | Eric Mugnier | person | Designer of Pirates of the Caribbean, noted as making his first pinball game | | Scott Denisey | person | Designer of Total Nuclear Annihilation; works at Pinball Life as day job; disputed Expo organizer's explanation for Spooky's absence | | Kiefer | person | Programmer for Pirates of the Caribbean | | Tony | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; expressed concern about Pirates theme selection and pinball pricing escalation | | Dennis | person | Co-host of Eclectic Gamers Podcast; provided detailed feature analysis and design commentary on Pirates of the Caribbean | | Pinball Expo 2017 | event | Major pinball industry event where Pirates was announced; notable for Spooky/Highway absence and Expo organizer conflicts | | Pinball Life | company | Major pinball parts supplier; hosted party during Expo where TNA was displayed; Scott Denisey works there | | Skylab | game | Pinball machine owned by Dennis; recently fixed reset and bonus scoring issues; now for sale with local interest | | Silver Slugger | game | Pinball machine owned by Dennis; recently repaired left flipper coil mounting and right pop bumper MOSFET issues; now fully functional | | Dialed In | game | Jersey Jack Pinball game noted as the fastest-playing JJP title; Pirates potentially second-fastest JJP | | Game of Thrones | game | Referenced as precedent for selectable character feature that differs from Pirates' implementation | | Wizards of Oz | game | Widebody example cited as feeling faster than Hobbit despite format due to packed playfield design | | Woz | game | Jersey Jack Pinball game; price has increased significantly since original launch | | Hobbit | game | Widebody example cited as feeling slower due to wide-open playfield design | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pinball Expo 2017 coverage and analysis, Pirates of the Caribbean (JJP) game announcement and features, Pinball game pricing and market sustainability, Manufacturer absence/presence strategy and politics - **Secondary:** Spooky Pinball and Expo organizer conflict, Widebody playfield design and mechanics, Game licensing and IP selection, Hardware restoration and troubleshooting ### Sentiment **Mixed** (0.45) — Positive sentiment toward Pirates' game design and mechanics (features, layout, playability), but significant negative sentiment on pricing escalation and theme selection. Critical but not hostile tone toward manufacturer decisions and Expo relevance. Overall assessment: cautious optimism about the game itself tempered by market sustainability concerns. ### Signals - **[business_signal]** Spooky Pinball absence attributed to internal friction with Expo management over treatment of vendors; noted pattern of organizer issues (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'I've read for quite a while now that at least one of the organizers of Expo is notorious for treating his vendors like crap...if there's something like that floating around I could definitely understand that' - **[community_signal]** Expo organizer publicly attributed Spooky's absence to TNA design issues; TNA designer rebutted claiming actual issue is Expo management practices (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'one of the Expo organizers then claimed a reason...And so there was some backlash with the designer of TNA saying that is not true...The expression thus being we have a problem with how you run Expo' - **[event_signal]** Spooky Pinball held presence at Pinball Life party instead of formal Expo booth; TNA was displayed in vendor booth later (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'They were at the very famous Pinball Life party...TNA did end up showing up at Expo later on. It was in another vendor's booth' - **[design_philosophy]** Pirates of the Caribbean theme selection criticized as weak choice despite game mechanics appeal; pattern noted across JJP's theme licensing (confidence: high) — Tony: 'I think the biggest problem with this game is the fact that I think it's a terrible theme'; Dennis: 'I haven't cared for a single theme that Jersey Jack has run with' - **[design_philosophy]** Pirates of the Caribbean widebody packed with features (5 flippers, concentric circles, upper playfield) to avoid traditional widebody slowness; compared to Wizard of Oz vs Hobbit pacing (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'if you cram stuff into those games where it's not wide open, then the ball's going to hit stuff...That's why Wizard of Oz feels faster than Hobbit' - **[event_signal]** Pirates of the Caribbean officially announced at Pinball Expo 2017 as jersey Jack Pinball's major release; only new game shown at expo (confidence: high) — Tony: 'the only ones who showed a new game. Therefore...they, by default, win'; Dennis detailed feature list from expo coverage - **[licensing_signal]** Pirates of the Caribbean licensing restricted voice call-outs and face shots from films; hired actor (Gibbs character) for skipper voice work instead (confidence: medium) — Dennis: 'they do not have voice call-outs from the films...They got one of the actors to do the call-outs...on the screen, the footage, it can be things like the characters running away from stuff, but not face shots' - **[personnel_signal]** Eric Mugnier is designer on Pirates of the Caribbean; noted as his first pinball game credit (confidence: medium) — Tony: 'I think his name Eric Mugnier...this was this designer first go'; Dennis confirms 'this was his first pin' - **[market_signal]** Pirates of the Caribbean pricing ($8,500 base, $12,500 LE) reflects escalating market trend; hosts express shock at five-figure pricing becoming standard (confidence: high) — Tony: 'I'm in shock every time I see the price list...I just think that I'm in shock every time I see the price list'; Dennis notes pattern since Batman 66 LE - **[announcement]** Highway Pinball Aliens container ship arrived in US with new stock after extended delay; no Expo presence or promotion (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'their container ship of alien pins...did arrive, and people over the last couple of days have been reporting in the United States getting games' - **[product_strategy]** Pirates of the Caribbean three-tier model with cosmetic-only differences in gameplay; all models have same 105 modes and mechanics (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'There are three different models, but the differences are cosmetic. The gameplay is the same on all of them'; Tony: 'I like that the gameplay is the same on all three models' - **[sentiment_shift]** Expo perceived as declining in manufacturer relevance and importance; multiple companies questioning participation value (confidence: high) — Dennis: 'I think Expo's just not as important as it used to be...being there could have done nothing but hurt [Highway's] image'; notes Spooky gets 'more mileage out of things like Texas than they do out of Expo' --- ## Transcript Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, October 22nd. It's episode 46. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to be talking to you about some pinball, from which there was some pretty good-sized news this week. Or two weeks, really. and video games. Yeah, a lot of video games. We've been playing a lot of games, I think. So, yay us. I've been playing a video game that I didn't even put on the list because it's not... It goes on the list. It maybe goes on the list. We'll talk more about it when we get to the video game segment. It is kind of messed up. All right. We'll open that segment with it, and then you can decide how much is worthy of being said. Yeah. But until then, what's been going on? I know you've been playing video games. I've been playing video games. Not a whole lot going on. I have managed to, other than the one day where I went over to your place to try your new silver slugger and play pinball for an hour or two, I played no pinball this month. I missed all the tournaments this month. Isn't it liberating? It's something, all right. I mean, it's not that I haven't wanted to go. There's just always been something going on. The 403 tournament, I had the on-call phone and this and that, and I couldn't make it. Then I was at my grandmother's birthday party. So, I mean, there's stuff that you just can't. That's right. It's more important than the pinballs. And here we are recording during the Attack from Mars remake launch party. So, I ruined that one. Yeah, I know. Oh, well. I know. Yeah, I was at the Pizza West one yesterday, and I got asked, are you going to the Attack for Mars? No. No, why not? It's like, because it's time to record. When else am I going to get it done? I mean, we could have gone. We just would have had to record last night. Oh, well, they're making enough off of my money as it is. And next weekend we've got a game night, and that's when the Shawnee Open is, which is the pump and dump. Well, yeah, but that's easy because if it's normal, they'll open it up before a game night. So you can go in and do your qualifier and fail to qualify and still make it a game night. I didn't do it last year. I did it in 2015. I might be good enough, though, that if I did that, I might still get in the bottom of B division. Oh. And then I'd feel like I'd need to drive back out there. Yeah, seeing as I'm hosting game night, I'm not even going to take the chance. It could be one of those magical nights where suddenly I'm just amazing at pinball for like 15 minutes. Well, and I'm still sort of standing on principle that other than charity events, I don't do pump and dump. Well, you don't have to pump and dump. I don't care. You could go in and do a single playthrough and just believe in yourself. It encourages bad behavior. Poor protocol. It's just me financing the skilled people. Screw their skills. I don't care about them enough. So, yeah, okay, so you didn't make any pinball other than when you came over last weekend for a few hours, and we did that, and I've seen you playing Forts, which I know you're going to talk about in the video game segment. Yeah, I've been playing Forts and Dungeons 3 and Cold Waters. Oh, yes. The waters are cold. They are very cold. It's getting to be that time of year. Any Overwatch? It's the Halloween event. I did, and I managed to, much to my daughter's happiness, I managed to snag the Mercy Witchskin without having to buy it. That's good. And the other day, my daughter was sick, so I had to stay home from work with her the other day. And she passed out at like 11 in the morning And slept for like 5 hours So while she was asleep I was like I'm going to play some Overwatch So I fired up Overwatch I'm like it's the middle of the day I'm not too worried I'll get some fun games in Fired up a match Started playing And in like less than 5 minutes I'm like I've never played this bad I don't know what's wrong This is the absolute worst game I've ever played and I just quit straight to desktop. It was so bad. I was playing Random Heroes. It wasn't like it was a ranked match. Right. But I was playing Random Hero, and in five minutes of play, I had nine deaths and zero kills. Well, random can be brutal sometimes. It was really, really, really brutal. And it doesn't help that everyone I ended up with was either terrible or I didn't know how to play. Like, I'm still not great at Doomfist, and I got Doomfist three times. And every time I went into the fight, I just got picked off. Yeah. Yeah, I still can't play him. I've done some. We actually did some competitive this week. Mike, who's been on this podcast a few times, and myself. and we were trying to earn loot crates through the Halloween event. But once we get done with the arcade mode, which I normally do Mystery Hero there, we tend to do competitive matches. Oh gosh, it looked like we had forgotten how to play Overwatch. It was so, so bad. It's just like my rank was falling. I fell out of gold into silver. I pulled it back up. We had two really good games yesterday that I did after pinball. And it's like, oh, okay, maybe it's not us. Maybe we just had really bad teams because, you know, instinctively I want to blame the team for everything, but, you know, sometimes the problem might be oneself. So I try and keep that perspective in place. But normally you can tell when it's you or when it's the team. I mean, when you're doing good and you're keeping everyone up and everything seems to be going okay and something away from you collapses, that's not your fault. when you've got one of your guys who when you've got a Dixie Reinhardt who just does the old charge straight into the middle of the enemy with no support every time he gets to the front that's not necessarily your fault yeah we add a little bit of that the thing was normally it'll be a bad comp someone will think it's quick play and they'll make a mistake like offensive toward yarns and things like that and we Bonzo. Yeah, there was a lot of that. But we did have two games where the team comp I thought was good. We were just outplayed. Just outplayed. That's how it was. Can't always win. Let's see. Okay, well, besides that, I had a birthday since the last podcast, so I did get a few video games, which is part of the reason why I didn't play. Happy birthday. Thank you. I'm getting very old. You're 105. Oh, gosh, if only. Then I'd be coming around to be cool because I'd be like, we're 105 and you're playing Titanfall 2? You must suck at it. It's like, no, I don't need that many years to be bad at it. But I have four new games because of that. So I got Resident Evil 7 Biohazard and Halo Wars 2. I haven't started those yet. And then Titanfall 2 and Wardor, Middle Earth Shadow of War. So I'm going to talk about those in the video game segment because I've actually put in some time on those. Let's see. A couple other things more on the pinball front. As I noted last time that I thought Skylab would be for sale, Skylab is now for sale. I do have someone who's already expressed interest in it. We're trying to hammer out a time he can come and see it. I'm not in a particular rush, so I offered it up to the local community first to see if anyone wanted it. I wanted to fix a reset issue it was having, and I did. It was wired, come disconnected. So I started that on, and then I noticed that it was doing a weird bonus score situation, Whenever you earned an odd value, all the bonuses in thousands. But if it was an odd number, it would give you an extra 1,000 points. So if it was supposed to be 3,000, which is the smallest bonus you'd ever have, it'd give you 4,000. If it was supposed to give you 6,000, it'd give you 6,000. I could not figure this out. I posted on Pennside asking for help. People were suggesting either the score motor or the advance unit, which makes sense because those are the two units that are associated with scoring and advancing the bonus. But couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. My dad came over. We're going through the schematic. It took us two hours to figure out that it was one switch that needed to be gapped just a little bit more. But we didn't suspect that initially because why was it only doing it in the odd situations? That switch is involved in every situation. So I don't know why. We never really figured that out. Our guess is the way the score motor works like a cam. And, well, it is a cam. and there are these notches. One notch might have been a little bit deeper than the other. So that was the even notch. So it gapped properly. The odd revolution would not. I don't know. Anyway, it fixed it, so it's fully working now. So that was fun. And then Silver Slugger. I've got it fully functional now. When you came over, there was a problem with the left flipper sticking. Yeah. And I finally – it wasn't when I got the game. So I knew it was after I disassembled and cleaned those all up. And I was thinking, well, do I need a rebuild kit? But every family in the sleeves and all that on the coil, it looked good. So it was substitute screws. They mounted it with substitute screws, and they were coming loose because they didn't have lock washers. So I found my lock washers, and that fixed it. So that was the result. And then there was the right pop bumper, which I think I mentioned in the past, had melted coil plastic in it, which meant it overheated at some stage. So I had ordered a new coil. That finally came. I installed it, I followed the schematic I made sure I put it in correctly and put in a new fuse because the old fuse was blown and it didn't work but in under 30 seconds that coil was overheating I burned my hand touching it and the fuse did not blow but the whole glass inside of it had turned yellow from the heat so this was another one I did with my dad who was, I think I've noticed he's an electrical engineer so he's much stronger on these schematics than I am and so of course the thought is it's probably something upstream at this stage so it looked like it was going to be what's called a MOSFET it's a type of transistor and I'd read that on some other games these MOSFETs can leak they can leak current that won't engage the coil like it wouldn't pull a pop bumper but it would still be enough to heat it up too much but maybe not blow the fuse we put a jumper on the fuse block and the pop bumper fired So it may have fired on me and it just stayed pulled down the entire time so I wouldn't keep hearing it. And I wouldn't have heard it over the ball launch. But I don't know why the fuse didn't blow. So anyway, we had a whole bag of MOSFETs from Sharky's. Because Sharky's, I think, three needed to be replaced. And they were compatible with this. How convenient. So got that soldered in, put back in the old yellowed fuse, which, you know, it might fail at some point because I doubt it can handle a full 1.5 amps anymore. But it's working, so that's fixed. So anyway, so the game's fully functional. I got some decals for the drop targets, put those on. So I'm done with it, unless I want to put in some more LEDs. This one's got some ghosting issues with certain LED positioning, so I'm keeping a lot of the bulbs standard for the time being, because I do not own any non-ghosting LEDs. That's it. That's what I've been working on. Well, that sounds like you've been mildly busy in the pinball realms. Yeah, I had this whole past week off. So I had three days the prior week, and then I had this entire last week off. So I have way too much vacation piled up, and it's my last chance I can really use any until after our annual conference at work. So I spent it fixing machines and playing video games. Yeah, what a good, responsible adult would do. So now we're going to be responsible podcasters, and we're going to go into, formally, our pinball topic, which almost entirely, other than our System 11 tournament, is going to be about Pinball Expo 2017. That's right. Yay! That's right. Super late. It was amazing. No, I don't know. No, we don't. We weren't there. All the other podcasts have probably already covered this, but if I know anything about pinball, it's that fans just like to hear the same stuff over and over again. So here we are. But we'll give our take, which could be quite a bit different than some of the other people. Yes, it will be. It'll be amazing. Yes, that's what we do, amazing things. I want to actually start – I figured we'd do it by company, and I'd like to start with two companies that weren't at Expo, even though it's in the Expo segment. It's kind of weird, but bear with me on that. And the first one would be that's really not at Expo at all was Highway Pinball. I just stuck them in here because I thought it was noteworthy to say they did not have a presence. To my knowledge, none of their games were at Expo. I don't know if a single one was in the free play area or anything. I'd read that there weren't any aliens available. However, their container ship of alien pins that we reported on being somewhere out in the ocean surrounded by water, those did arrive, and people over the last couple of days have been reporting in the United States getting games. So there have been new aliens that have finally shipped out. and that is a good thing, but the company also obviously is not promoting anything or at least not choosing to use Expo to promote anything, which might not be a good thing. Don't know. Any thoughts on that? I'm thinking that with the sheer amount of bad press and how confrontational of a thing it would be with them having absolutely no news and nothing other than we're trying, it makes sense for them not to show up. There was nothing. It could have done, being there could have done nothing but hurt them. It could not have helped them in any way, but the wrong thing said to the wrong people or the wrong blowups could have hurt their image, and it's already in bad enough shape that they did not need to take any more damage than they've already taken. 100% agree with you. Okay, that's it with Highway. Yay, Highway, woo! That's right. Road on a Highway. Wait, that's not right. I guess that was Ventura Highway is the name of that song. Never mind. Ezra is too old. Ezra is too old. Okay. Spooky Pinball. Now, this one was a little more nuanced. They officially ditched Expo. They did not have a formal presence at Expo. They were at the very famous Pinball Life party, and Pinball Life is a major parts supplier for those that haven't. A few episodes back, I'm afraid I didn't write down which number it was. A few episodes back, though, we did an interview with Terry, who is an owner-operator of Pinball Life. If you want to hear a little bit about their operation and stuff, it's a 25-minute interview or so. And I think the noteworthy thing is that at the Pinball Life party, there were total nuclear annihilations there. And for those that don't know, Scott Denisey, the designer of total nuclear annihilation, or commonly referred to as TNA, he works at Pinball Life. Like, that's his day job. So there's a relationship there. TNA did end up showing up at Expo later on. It was in another vendor's booth. So it wasn't there for the whole time, but it did eventually make a formal appearance. And the only real thing to talk to you about on this was, what do you think of Spooky's decision to not actually get a booth for their company at Expo? Do you think it was a good idea, a bad idea? Do you think it was irrelevant to either Expo or their company? My guess is simply that Alice Cooper's not ready. And without that, there was no reason for them to be there because that's what all the questions would be about. Hmm. That could make sense. But do you – so do you think, given that total nuclear annihilation was already announced, that there's no – there was no real value to have a formal presence at – I mean, I know Expo has sort of a – it's seen as an industry event. But, well, we'll talk more about that later because I think different people see it as different things now. To throw in a little bit of those sprinkles, those colorful candy little sprinkles on our ice cream, that is this discussion point. It is, from what I have read, there was a little bit of drama here. I don't know why Spooky specifically decided not to go to Expo. However, one of the Expo organizers then claimed a reason that they weren't going. And that reason, if I remember correctly, had to do with there being some issues or like design issues that they were trying to figure out or something, I guess, with TNA. And so there was some backlash with the designer of TNA saying that is not true. We are not avoiding Expo because we have an internal problem. The expression thus being we have a problem with how you run Expo. That's why we're really not there. Which could be, I could see that. I mean, being an industry thing and with Spooky being the little boutique people that are super popular grassroots type thing, I could see them staying out purely to maintain the us being different than them type thing. Yeah, I could see an angle like that. My takeaway would be it's irrelevant. I don't think it hurts or really helps Spooky one way or another to be at Expo or to not be at Expo. They're a small player. So from an industry perspective, they're just not a big enough deal to need it, especially given that they do a lot of direct sales to consumers. I think they get a lot more mileage out of things like Texas than they do out of Expo. So I think it makes a lot of sense. I think being at the Pinball Life Party got them plenty of exposure anyway. and I have read for quite a while now that at least one of the organizers of Expo is notorious for treating his vendors like crap and that a lot of people just don't want to be there anymore so well yeah and if there's something like that floating around I could definitely understand that if it's a situation where it's just not worth the headache and the hassle and the abuse you take to be there, especially considering how big some of the other things have gotten. I think Expo's just not as important as it used to be. No, I don't think so. But let's go ahead and jump to the third company, and who is widely agreed upon as being the winner, quote-unquote. We've got to do it like E3. There's a winner. Winner! That's right. And supposedly the winner of Expo is Jersey Jack Pinball with their Pirates of the Caribbean. Are they the winner because they're literally the only people who showed a new game? You know, I think the answer has to be yes. I think the only way you can win is if you show a game. And they're the only ones who showed anything new. Therefore, I think they, by default, win. But there was a lot of positive buzz as well about how the reveal was done. They had the streamers out of Buffalo, the Buffalo Pinball people. They put on – I did not see that presentation. I did see footage. Our area champion, Kerry Wing, streamed some footage for us on Facebook, put some videos up. So I did see videos while Expo was going on. I did not watch the Buffalo stream. I have heard that the presentation on that stream was excellent, however. So very, very good reveal by all accounts. And, yes, I think even if the reveal was garbage, the fact that it was the only new game that was announced, I think kind of defaultly lets them win. So, yes. in a way it was an easy golden ring to grab but I don't know what to call this I think I'll just call it Pirates for now and just hope the listeners don't get it confused with the Stern Pirates of the Caribbean, maybe we should call it JJ Pirates, I don't know so far the abbreviation is the same as Pirates of the Caribbean but with JJP in front so like JJPOTC it's just a mouthful so anyway here's what I noted in terms of the features because the game is jam packed with gizmos it's a wide body and goo goss there were half a dozen gizmos and almost as many goo goss as well there are three concentric circles for both giving out awards and providing English on the ball kind of like the spinning circle on Whirlwind would or on X-Men, but it's actually three different ones within. So it's one, then another, and then another, and they're all kind of touching each other, and they can spin in different directions at different speeds. So it does more than just the conventional single spin. There is an upper play field that rocks sideways. There's a cannon shot from that area, which has vertical movement, so it goes up and down rather than what we've seen cannons before on things like ACDC, which are going horizontally. Yeah. Five Flipper, the very large gimmicky promotional statement of 3.25 sextillion gameplay variations. This was achieved because the game covers all five of the Pirates films that have been released. And it randomizes, I believe, five scenes. There are 20 scenes for each movie. And so when you start a new game, it randomizes five scenes of those 20 for each of the five movies, I believe. But I think in total there are 105 modes. So there are 20 for each movie and then, I guess, five special modes, like mini wizard modes and wizard mode. And there are 20-plus selectable characters. But unlike a game like Game of Thrones, you can't pick a character someone else has already chosen. So that's the feature list. Tony, I don't know what you've seen in terms of images. There are three different models, but the differences are cosmetic. The gameplay is the same on all of them. I don't know, but I figured we should just jump right into it. What do you think? I'm going to go with the always standard. I like that the gameplay is the same on all three models. Yeah. That is a very big and important thing to me. I like the little spinning disc, triple disc thing there on the middle of the playfield. I've watched several videos of it, and them spinning indifferently and this and that. That's awesome. I think that is amazing, and it's kind of a cool little gimmick, goo-gah, whatever you want to call it. I like it a lot. The upper playfield, I can take or leave it. I actually haven't seen any, none of the videos I watched have the canon that I noticed. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means I didn't notice it. I think the biggest problem with this game is the fact that I think it's a terrible theme. And we'll see what happens. And again, I don't want to say one way or another until I've actually played the game. So there's just things. It's just little thoughts. I just think that I don't think that the Pirates of the Caribbean is a saga thing like Star Wars or Star Trek or any of the Marvel stuff. But they've made five of them. Well, yeah, but I'll be honest. you want to go something big like that we needed a faster than furious machine I think that would have been a better theme than Pirates of the Caribbean I only live my life a quarter ramp at a time exactly I mean if it's just you know oh they made a whole bunch of those movies well yeah they made a whole bunch of Dora the Explorer movies too but that doesn't mean I want to go play Dora the Explorer pinball that's mean she would have taught you things there's already a Pirates of the Caribbean out there. It's not a terrible game. I don't know. It just seems like a waste of the theme. Hmm. Okay. Well, I mean, I agree with you in the sense that I don't care for the theme, personally, but I haven't cared for a single theme that Jersey Jack has run with. I think that they have all been subpar selections. They probably had to pay through the nose for this one, And I think it shows in certain ways as well. I think they've been transparent about some of the things. Like, I don't think they have voice call-outs from the films. So you don't hear Johnny Depp talk in any of it. They got one of the actors to do the call-outs for the game. So they brought in someone who was associated with the movies to do, I think, the skipper, the first mate of Johnny Depp's ship. I forget, Mr. Gibbs or something, I think is his character name. And I think, like, on the screen, the footage, it can be things like the characters running away from stuff, but not face shots. I guess they only, you know, it's one of those where the license was fairly selective on what they could use and what they can't use. So, but I'm not entirely certain on that, because, again, I don't care as much on it. That's, like, dialed in. The theme does nothing innately for me, but it's a fun shooter, so I like playing it. Yeah. I agree with you about the circles. I think the concentric circles are awesome. I think it's the most exciting thing, which is kind of sad because it's not necessarily the most innovative. Oh, yeah, okay, there are three concentric ones, whatever. I mean, let's not give the innovation award to that. But the idea of it both doing like the mystery select, kind of like the eight ball does on Sharky's Shootout, but having three different nearby devices, kind of like how Whirlwind put them in different sections, but this, being concentric, has them all grouped up together, so it's very tightly packed. It could make it a lot more difficult to always know where that ball is going to come off of that plate, which I think is exciting. Upper playfield, I hate upper playfields, so that doesn't impress me. It looks like the cannon, I don't know if the cannon shot is supposed to be as hard as it is right now. I think it's nice that it's not used all the time. I would think it would get tiresome to do that. whether or not it's... I think it's probably a neat thing to watch. I don't know how hard it is to aim once you're going, because like you, I didn't really see it in action to get a good feel for it. I like the selectable characters, except with over 20, it's like... Okay I think there was an interview with either the programmer or the game designer and this was this designer first go I just remember his I think his name Eric Mugnier I sure I saying his last name wrong because as we know I say everyone last name wrong on this show Even your own. Right. So Kiefer is doing the programming, I believe. But Eric, this was his first pin. And I think it looks really neat. I hear it plays fast. Now, it's a widebody, so that's not true. However, it may play fast for a widebody. And I've seen people report that it is the fastest playing JJP game other than Dialed In. And I can believe that because the thing that makes widebodies slow is that people, yes, I make fun of widebodies all the time because, you know, some of that's a bit of a shtick and some of it is just, you know, based on reality. The reason for those that don't ever think, well, why would a widebody always feel so slow? It's because there's so much horizontal movement. But if you cram stuff into those games where it's not wide open, then the ball's going to hit stuff and it's going to come back. That's why Wizard of Oz feels faster than Hobbit, because it is. Because Hobbit is wide open. This game has stuff. I mean, the five flippers, two of them are for the upper play field. Two of them are down below. That fifth flipper, it's in the middle. I like that. I like that it's not an orbit flipper because of how they've packed everything. I mean, I like orbit flippers if they're useful, like on Spider-Man or the Warp Ramp in Star Trek, where you need them. The flipper on the side orbit for Hobbit is dumb, and I don't understand why it's there. But you do something like this where it's in the middle, kind of a la Twilight Zone had one sort of like that. It gives you some new options. It's different, and I like what they did since they went wide body, which I still think is a mistake. Like, you know, you might as well take advantage of the space that you've got and do something interesting with the layout. It did, from what I saw, look like it played at a decent clip. I don't think it's as fast as a very ramp-heavy game like Full Throttle, for example, but I do think it has decent speed. I don't think it has flow. It doesn't look like a flow game to me, but I think it has decent speed. What do you think of the pricing? I think the pricing is doing exactly what pinball pricing has been doing for a while lately and it's just insane I'm not saying that I'm not saying that they don't have to price it that way to hit the numbers that they're wanting to hit I can fully understand that it's just considering the standard model, the bog standard model is $8,000? $8,500? $8,500. $8,500 for the bog standard model. And it just goes up. And not like a little bit up. It goes like insane up. It's crazy. I mean, I know there's people out there who can afford it. I know there's people out there that's fine. I've got no issues with that. I just, it is hard to see this. I mean, this is something we've seen start rolling up and And Stern did that whole Batman 66 LE thing. And now we're starting to see games in excess of $10,000 not being some weird one-off. It's just what's expected now, apparently, for the high-end stuff. And I just, I'm in shock every time I see the price list. When I saw the game, before I saw the price drop, I saw the game and I was expecting $8,000. $8,500. Okay, whatever. I was close. And then when the super limited edition or whatever they're calling it dropped, it's just like, are you kidding me? Because that's like $12,000, $12,500? Yeah, $12,500. Yeah, $12,500. I mean, it's just, I was in shock. I did not expect to see that kind of jump. And I should have. I should expect that with pinball anymore. I should expect that the bare bones minimum of a pinball game anymore is going to be well over $5,000. And anything that even works with being Ellie-ish is going to be five figures. Yeah, I was a bit surprised. I went back and looked at Jersey Jack's website to see if this was a major change in pricing, and it's sort of one of those yes-no things. When Woz first launched, it was much, much less than it's sold for now. All games are still in production with Jersey Jack. Woz is at the same pricing tier as Pirates. So $8,500 for the standard, $9,500 for the LE. I'm not quite sure why it's called a limited edition when they don't commit to a limited count on their LEs, but it's just branding. And then $12,500 for what's called the collector's edition, which in the case of JJP's Pirates is limited to $200. So comparing standard to standard, Woz and Pirates are the same price. Dialed In and Hobbit are $8,000 standard, and the tiers work the exact same way. So this is a $500 markup from Dialed In, which just came out recently. There's more stuff in this? Sure. I mean, more than Dialed In. More than Hobbit? I don't know. There's a lot of stuff going on under the playfield on Hobbit. It definitely looks fuller. Is this $500 for the license, maybe? When you think maybe it was, I would not be surprised if Disney was more expensive to deal with than whoever they had to turn to to get Hobbit. And obviously, Dialed In didn't have any of that. But then you could ask yourself, well, why wasn't Dialed In cheaper than Hobbit? I don't know. No one. They're not in the business of giving price breaks. But, yeah, here's an interesting question. I've actually heard it come up on two other podcasts, so let's steal it. Do you think that this announcement of Pirates sabotages Jersey Jack's sales of Dialed In? Interesting. No. No, I don't think it does. I mean, Stern reliably releases multiple games in a year. If anything, I think a release like this from Jersey Jack is something that's been much needed because of their history between announcement and game release and everything else. They need something to show that they are pro. They are able to consistently put out good product. as opposed to like Woz and then it took forever after the announcement of Hobbit before Hobbit dropped and then they started making things look a little better because they announced Dialed In and then Dialed In dropped in a decent amount of time and if this happens with JGP Pirates where it is between the announcement and the reveal and it drops in a decent amount of time and it lets them get a kind of flow going, I think it will actually help them because most of the people who can afford to collect these machines, brand new machines anyway, are the kind of people who when they want a machine, they want it and it doesn't matter if they just bought a machine. Sure, some people are going to be, well, do I want the dialed in or do I want the pirates? but I think a lot of genuine collectors are just going to go, I want the machine, and they will buy the machine because it's what they want. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, I don't know. I probably wouldn't use the word sabotage either. I don't think there was a high growth potential for Dialed In. I think Dialed In will go down as Jersey Jack's worst-selling game, and I think that was a given the moment they went without a license. But it's still probably, of the Jersey Jack games I've played, it is by far their best game. I agree. I agree. But anyone who's hardcore enough about it, it'll still be available. So that's the thing. Like you noted, if they're well-heeled enough that they can afford both and they end up playing Dialed In and loving it, then that's great. These JJP games, I mean, upper play field coming out with one screw, conveniences aside, which was a major and very cool engineering thing that they stressed about the Pirates game, these are really not made for operators. They're just too expensive. Because here's the thing, no matter how fancy that is, no matter how beautiful that box is, and people talk about all the time who have put things like Waz on location about how it goes and it draws people over and they put money into the Waz first. how much more money does a JJP game earn in the coin box versus a Star Wars pro because if it's not 40% more it's not worth an operator's time to buy it you can buy three Stern pros for the price of two JJP standards at this point so it's a numbers game because you're going to sell off the game eventually anyway or if you don't how long do you have to run it before you've paid it off and it's just longer unless they actually get more coin drop They may get more coin drop. I've heard on certain locations they do get pretty good coin drop, but not that pretty good of coin drop. Not enough to make it worth the extra money. And that's not JJP's model. Their spiel in their presentation was about how they want to make full-featured machines, not strip things out. And they have a price point that says we're not stripping things out. And if that's what people want, if they want my scoffed-at phrase, world under glass, then there you go. There's your world. It only costs you the price of a small country. Enjoy it. Yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting thing. I mean, I don't think when it comes to – I just don't think routes are where these games are aimed. I don't think routes are really where any pinball is aimed anymore. They're out there and they exist and they help with popularity, but I think it's getting to the point where everything's aimed at the collector. Well, let's go ahead and, well, obviously refer back to this a bit, but I want to jump over to Stern Pinball at Expo then, because I think you've given us a natural transition for it. As you noted, JJP was the only company that introduced a new game. Stern Pinball gave a talk, I believe it was before the JJP talk, but they mostly talked a bit about code and mostly about the importance of barcades. Now, this talk, and there's been a lot of discussion on Pinside since it happened, because a lot of collectors feel that Stern's presentation was a huge miss, and JJP's presentation was a huge hit. Not just because Stern didn't announce a new game, but rather that Stern was talking so much about barcades, people came away from that talk thinking, why are they not talking about the collector? Isn't most of their sales to the collector at this point? Now, saying aside that this was Expo, an industry event, and Stern may have decided that they need to do an industry-oriented presentation, which would have been about operating location pinball, and also the idea that you grow your collector community by exposing them to pinball, and you do not expose people to pinball by just catering to collectors. You have to have it on location, so they don't want to lose that. But saying those things aside, what do you think about stern and deciding to talk about that that idea the barcade idea the idea that you need to pair pinball and beer together and then that's going to be good for the long-term health of the hobby and that's where they should be playing in versus the jjp standard which is no you need to give collectors what they want these super deep sextillion game options super developed code out of the gate and just a game that people feel like they're getting their money's worth and could have for years before they got bored with it. Do you think that Stern was wrong to do the presentation the way they did it? I don't think they're wrong and with it being an industry event I think it's the exact type of thing you would expect to see at a normal industry event. Would they Have come off better To the collector if they'd gone If they'd done elsewhere yeah of course they would have But it's definitely a thing Where I think they are looking at The type of Stuff that is What has kept them going And What has caused The resurgence because honestly I don't think the resurgence is because people just randomly went man you know I liked pinball back in the 80s and 90s and I've got money now so I'm going to buy my own pinball machine I think as the barcades have come up and people have started seeing them they've been playing them they've been having fun with their friends and this and that that a lot of people who have started collecting that's how they came back into the fold it's a visibility thing and with it going well yeah I remember I remember playing that game when I was in elementary school. Compared to the games you see now, they're very different, and I think that has a lot to do with the growth in the market. Earlier I had asked you about the idea of Jersey Jack's Pirates sabotaging the dialed-in sales. Let's spin it a little more competitively now. What do you think this Pirates game does to Stern's LE sales? Nothing. Nothing? I don't think so. I don't think it's going to be enough to be noticeable. I don't think it's anything where it's going to be where Stern is worried about anything. Their standards are still setting at the bottom of the price point. Their standard is still a cost in a range where somebody can easily, if they want one, they can get one without it being complete bank breaking, especially if they pick up a used one. Their LEs are obviously pricier But other than the insanity that was like Batman 66 It's still not terrible And most people are going to be picking that stuff up I mean, I think it's terrible It's nothing I'd ever pay But it's one of those things where people are going to be picking up for the licenses And if you sit down and show somebody Well, you can get an LE Star Wars or an Ellie Pirates of the Caribbean. Which one is more interesting to you? Star Wars is going to go every time. I mean, it's going to have a bigger draw. Maybe there is some hidden secret Pirates of the Caribbean fanboy hyper community out there that I don't know about, that I'm not locked into, because, hey, I don't know all the fan communities out there, but I just don't see where it is going to be as interesting of a pull because just like us talking, it's like, oh, yeah, I guess there was a new Pirates release this year. I don't know. I haven't watched a Pirates movie in years, but they happened, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I think this may have more of an impact. I agree with you on a few things. first, if we're talking pro models, no. I see no impact because there's too much of a price gap. Those are two different target audiences. LE models, maybe. It wouldn't be LE to LE per se, but a Stern LE is running... I don't think an LE to LE is a fair... If we were looking at Star Wars, I don't think LE to LE is really fair. I think it would be more the premium to the LE. The Star Wars premium to the Jersey Jack LE? Yeah. Right. Yeah, because I hate the whole LEs that aren't limited. We talked about that a little bit ago. Right, right. But because I just went to, I mean, Star Wars Premium is less than the standard of Pirates. And the LE is less than the LE of Pirates. Well, I think that the... Yeah, yeah. I think a Stern LE runs around the price of the standard Jersey Jack Pirates. I think they're within $1,000 of each other. Yeah, I just looked it up. The Star Wars LE is $9,000. And that's their MSRP. The actual price is going to be cheaper. Right, for Stern. Stern is the only one that does that. But Stern, yeah, it will be, I think in all instances, at least $1,000 less. So, okay, so, yeah, that's the one that's closest to the on price, just on price. You've got the limited Stern versus the totally unlimited bog standard, as you described it, Jersey Jack Pirates. I think in the case of that game specifically, Stern wins on license. Here's the thing, though, that where I could see it coming into play in Jersey Jack's favor is the feature matrix is more impressive on the bog standard Jersey Jack game than it is on the Stern LE. As in, the Stern LE doesn't even come with a shaker motor. It's that sort of stuff. If you're about the toys, if you're about the mechs, then the Jersey Jack game, all of them really, come across as more featured than what the LEs look like out of Stern. Now, in some cases, it may not make as much of a difference. seem to be as big of a deal. And definitely Pirates feels the most mechanically feature-rich Jersey Jack game since Woz. Because Wizard of Oz had the two upper playfields and all that. So it depends on what you want. But I'd heard, and I don't know if this is true or not, but I've heard that not all the Star Wars LEs are sold yet. And I don't remember how many they said they were making. So the notion that I know some people have is that Stern's already having trouble selling to the collector market because there's not the same perceived value. And so the question is, when you have a game that's this feature-rich against a game, and unfortunately for Star Wars, which looks very mechanically stripped compared even to other Stern games, even when you go up to the LE version which only really adds the more advanced Death Star mech and the Hyperloop ramp that it's a question of well, would that be people being willing to say it's really about the money for me I could buy this limited edition thing from Stern or I could have this more technologically advanced game from JJP even though it's not going to be a limited count even if I don't get the Invisiglass and stuff because I'm doing the bog standard but it's going to be a more longevity-based experience because there's more stuff in it. And it plays just like the more advanced, the more expensive versions of the JJP game. That's where I could see maybe that that might... I don't think it's enough that Stern worries because of their total pie of money, I don't think the LEs are a huge slice of it. I know people... I think they have the highest profit margin on them, but I don't think that it's – I see it more as gravy to Stern, and that may be inaccurate, but I could see that being the threat. I mean, the biggest mistake – I mean, we all have our own preferences on the types of games we like to play. So, you know, staying outside, like, my biases against wide bodies and such, the biggest mistake that Jersey Jack has is the theme. But, you know, Stern doesn't always have winner themes either. So, Jersey Jack's never had a winner theme, so I don't know. No, well, that's the thing is it feels like all of Jersey Jack's themes are what can we possibly catch on a decent price or what can we possibly roll? They haven't rolled anything big. I think in a way that's one way where Pirates hurts them is it's like, yeah, we've got Pirates of the Caribbean. And Stern did that how many years ago? Over a decade, I think. Jersey Jack's going for all these family-friendly licenses, but they could do better ones, I guess. Lego. It's like family-friendly licenses. It's like The Hobbit and Pirates of the Caribbean. Well, it's a timeless children's story, and kids like crazy Johnny Depp acting like Keith Richards. I guess I mean that's like how spooky games well TNA aside spooky games are always sort of horror themed is the idea anything they develop in house is sort of horror themed and Jersey Jackets all the themes need to be family friendly it's just the decision he's decided to go now I don't know why that means you didn't reach out and say instead of pirates you didn't try and do Lego movie because I think that would be an awesome theme but who knows anyway so there's been discussion about that but anyway and again on Pennside where Stern takes a beating all the time it's real easy to think that when they didn't show anything they didn't have any major code drop updates and I think that's Stern's biggest problem right now there is this perception I think it's a fairly accurate perception that they are, while it looked like they were getting better for a while, they seem to be slipping again on having code ready to go when the games are ready to go. I mean, Star Wars was on beta for months after its release. And you really shouldn't be, this is not Project Greenlight. They really should not be releasing these games on beta. That's a valid, that's a very valid point. So, I mean, I respect that they were honest enough about it, that they gave it a prior to version 1.0 release and didn't just actually have beta code that they pretended was finalized. But, you know, from the beta release of things like Batman 66 and Star Wars to the non-beta release but glaring lack of support on KISS. That's where I think Stern has a newsletter now. Everyone's assuming it's a Zach Sharp creation now that he's the marketing coordinator there. but it's called the Stern of the Union and they do a monthly kind of newsletter announcement and the first one that they did it included outlined code like here are the games that are about to have code drop here are the games we are still working on code for which I thought was very smart because a lot of people have just been sitting there going oh gosh is Star Trek still getting code being worked on it's not listed there so let's say no but but KISS was so okay KISS has not been abandoned They are planning to do something new. Ghostbusters is still expecting another update. A lot of people had heard through whatever, and maybe someone just made something up, that they were done with Ghostbusters. Because the complaint about Ghostbusters is the final wizard mode isn't very well coded. I think that's a somewhat nitpicky complaint. I like the complaints on Star Trek. It has a few bugs in it. It's like, yeah, I wish it was polished out too, but come on. It's good enough. Whatever. next company I wanted us to hop over to American Pinball they of the Houdini fame they were there they had machines I don't know anything out of if they did a talk or anything but there have been some changes to the machine since the earlier prototypes that were shown at say Texas where they unveiled the machine but they do still expect to have games shipping by the end of the year I don't know if you had any new thoughts on American Pinball. All I know is that they were present. I haven't played it. I never got the chance. We talked about that back in our Texas episode that I got in the line and then the machines broke and I was like, well, I'm not going to stand in this line and I left and I tried to get back in the line, which isn't, I understand they were quickly hand-assembled prototypes. I don't hold any of that against them. We'll see what happens and we'll see where it goes. I'm still surprised that they're expecting to ship before the end of the year, but we'll see what happens. Tying back to all the questioning that I love to keep asking, do you think that the announcement of Pirates of the Caribbean impacts the sales on Houdini, a game that's priced about $1,500 less than what the box standard would be? No. No, because I don't really think Houdini is going to do very well. I think between the early stuff that fired up, the way things have gone, I think they'll sell all right. I don't think it's going to break them, but I don't think this is something that I would consider a huge contender. So if it does cost them, I don't think it's going to cost them much. Let's have you do a guess. I doubt they'll ever announce numbers, but based off of that, I lean towards what you're thinking. I agree completely that I think the price point's too different for this to really be impacted by something as expensive as Pirates. And it already is significantly more expensive than a Stern Pro, so it's not competing on that front either. It's kind of its own beast. How many units do you think they end up selling of Houdini? Or what do you think their production run size ends up being maybe a better way to think of it? I would be amazed if it went as far as 150. Wow. Wow. You are thinking very conservative numbers. I was going to be, I was going to really get safe and say, oh, I doubt they go over 500. Oh. Okay. Well. Well. No, no. You're. It could be. You are more tied into the community. You read more stuff. Maybe there's more hype flowing around. No. That was this. I've just been I've been thinking to me this has got the same kind of feel that we had well this predates me but that was around like America's Most Haunted and all that stuff and they didn't sell a whole lot and I think with everything going on I don't think it's going to sell a lot I think it'll sell enough that they're going to be able to attempt a game number two unless something really horrible goes on. But I think anything that makes them break even enough that they can try for another game and can prove that they have some abilities, all they're going to be really hoping for. And I think that's the best that they're going to get. I could be completely wrong This might turn out to be the game of the century but I just not fully sure The reviews would be better if it was the game of the century They be more universally Yeah For most reports it an interesting game A lot of people seem to find it decent playing, but very few people seem to exclaim that it is their favorite game. And my 500 was way, I mean, that was, honestly, it was intellectually lazy of me probably to throw a number out that high. I like more how you derived your number from. Here's what I'll actually, let me revise mine down. I'm still going to guess more than you. I'm going to say 250 units. I'll say 250. And the reason I'm thinking that is, with all of the buzz about TNA, last I heard, they were still just shy of 200 units of a game that's $1,000 less and has so much more praise. however the reason why and I don't know where TNA ends ends up ending when it's all said and done but Houdini because it has ramps because it has more mechanical gimmicks to it there are just certain people that are turned off on TNA versus Houdini sorry that acronym is so it's such a struggle I'm a man child I'm sorry but the because TNA does not have any of the ramps, it doesn't have a catapult that launches 22 inches across the table, or any of that stuff, there's a certain segment of people that aren't into it. They aren't into the gameplay of a game that plays that old. And Houdini doesn't have that problem. Houdini feels modern. Because it is modern. So I think they have an easier time getting sales on it. But given that it... And they're doing that weird... It's not a license. They didn't have to pay a license because it's public domain, but people know Houdini. So I'm thinking they probably get to $200 based off of the gameplay, and they get another $50 because they're a bunch of people that will buy anything that has magic in it called pinball. So everyone with theater of magic and pinball magic has to buy this to keep their collection 100% magical pure. There's magical purity. And there's some people that love magic and pinball. I get it. I don't. I don't. I like illusion, but I've never been into it in pinball per se. But that's why I'm going to go. I'll say $250. But that keeps it under Rob Zombie, and it may very well deserve to have more sales than Rob Zombie. Yeah, no, that's a very real possibility. But people love to support Spooky as part of that. And I think there was speculation going on with Rob Zombie because the America's Most Haunted became so valuable after they capped at $150 and sold them all. But that's a story for another time. Let's hit our last Expo company. That's Dutch Pinball, the makers of the Big Lebowski. They were at Expo. They introduced their new contract manufacturer, whose – I didn't write their name down. I've read it several times. They're more known in the making of postage machines. In fact, I think I used to use a postage machine that was made by them. The games will not be assembled in Europe. They will be assembled in China. This company has three manufacturing locations, I think Germany, Israel, and China. And they've announced that they will be doing the build in China. And the only other noteworthy thing, and I think it's very noteworthy, was that it was confirmed that the new buys from new buyers will have to be supplied before the current customers can receive their machines. At least on some scale, they have to give a certain number to the new buyers first. Because they do not have enough money to do the production and give. And they've said that for a while, that the financing would have to be worked out. But they don't have enough money to do refunds to everyone. That's why they were going this route. Well, they don't have enough money to do the build, obviously, either. So they need new money to do the build from deposits with Cointaker and Nitro. And the only way they can get that money is when the games are delivered. So they have to deliver the new games to the new money to make enough to eventually build the old games. They did have one of their old prototypes there. From what I've heard, it was off almost all of Expo. It was a sad, sorry little failure of a tired machine. So, Tony, what are your thoughts on Dutch Pinball? and their pyramid structure to how they're going to get all these games built with this new console. It's not a pyramid scheme. I didn't say scheme. It's a pyramid cone. I said pyramid structure because I'm nice. Okay, so what do you think of a cone? What do you think of a cone? Would you take a bite of this cone? Oh, gosh, no. Oh, man. This is a dumpster fire. I mean, that's literally all it is. This is a raging dumpster fire. And I feel horrible for all of the Lebowski people who have put out their money, not received their games, to turn around and find out that other people are going to put out money and get games before them, even though they're just buying in now. Combined with We will see How the quality is For machines being assembled From some place that has No real experience No I know what this is This is Dutch doing everything they can To try and Survive And In my mind I want to say it's them trying to be Good and doing whatever it takes so that they can fulfill the promises that they have with people. But this company's dead. There is no way this company, I will be amazed if they get a whole lot of new sales out of this. I could be wrong. Maybe, I don't know, maybe the vast majority of people are just going to go, wow, The Big Lebowski's a great movie, and I can order this pinball machine, and that's cool, and I'll do that right now, and not actually have any knowledge of the background or the history. But I just, it's sad. And I feel bad for everybody. I feel bad for everybody involved. I feel bad for the Dutch pinball guys at this point. this it feels like you could take everything to do with Dutch Pinball and find one of those websites where you just put cringy stuff up and everything they do could just go straight to that website because it's just sad the deposit the deposit list supposedly are full through Nitro and Cointaker but there have been people waiting for quite a while that have refundable say $1000 deposits and are on the wait list, at least back when the count was thought to be contained at 300. I think in a past newsletter update or webinar discussion that they did, I believe Dutch Pinball indicated that they were going to have to up the production numbers. I don't think they ever promised that they were going to keep a limit, so it's not the same as modifying your LE sizes like J-Pop did. But getting back to the question, I keep asking during this, What do you think about J.J.P.'s Pirates, though, now being announced? Does that change? Well, look, I know it's sort of lazy of me to keep asking the same freaking question over and over. And I'm doing it because, yes, it is lazy, and it just makes it easier to do the show. But also, next time, I really, really think maybe your opinion will change. Because here we have a game that has been known, shown, and in some cases played for a number of years now, and it's $10,000. You can get the LE for less than that of the new Pirates game. You can get, other than the collector's edition of any JJP game and Batman Super LE, you can get any pinball machine that's in production right now for less than Big Lebowski. do these new games that have since been announced years after Big Lebowski was shown do they not sabotage the sales on getting this new money in? Do I finally have one that you will agree with? Yeah, I'll give it to you. I just can't see how anybody would go after Big Lebowski at this point. I mean, this is like This would be like The guy who comes Rolling along And sees the car rack And then Immediately goes I really think I'm going to buy that car Oh you're going to buy a car like that No no I'm going to buy that car specifically I really like how the Crust sides look I mean it's Yeah no They're definitely in trouble because of Because of J.J.P. JGP is putting the squeeze on Dutch yes you sound less convinced than I want you to be but I'll take whatever little mini win I can get well I agree with you that the fundamental problem with Dutch pinball is Dutch pinball that is the problem that's why most people who might be interested would stay away but I do have to question even if you were totally ignorant of the process And it seems impossible, but you know what? It seemed like American Pinball somehow didn't know how toxic J-Pop was, and I still don't get that. Yeah, that makes no sense. So for people that want to get into the building, they sure didn't do a lot of research ahead of time. So it's like there are possibly some people that love the movie and or love pinball that maybe aren't all that familiar with the exact nature of the circumstance going on with Dutch pinball. but Big Lebowski is such old news it's such old news it's a great looking game I hear it, I've never played it I hear it plays pretty good but you know it's not the wonder kid it's not the new amazing it's flash in the pan is over so there are just new games that are being announced now Dutch was pushing that thing back when Stern was still doing single color dots It's a different time. I just think that the ship for its sails have passed. The people, the early achievers, as they're called, who bought in from the get-go, they're stuck. That's why they're always hoping all this stuff will work. They have no other option, well, short of a lawsuit. But if I've learned anything about pinball, it's that everyone's afraid to sue. and it's so they're, you know, unless they want to do that they're stuck hoping that any clever scheme that Dutch can come up with will work this is too clever by half I don't even see, I mean, is someone going to move out to China and help it's not that the Chinese manufacturing can't have high quality but they have never built a pinball machine before, who's going to show them who's going to be out there I don't know The parent company has never built one either. This is not a thing that licks envelopes for you. So I don't know. Do you think my last thing before we go out of Expo, I was going to ask you, do you think Dutch should have even been at Expo? Because I do not. I think it was a waste of money to fly out there and just to introduce the contract manufacturer. I don't know who they thought they were reassuring by doing it this way, but I think they could have saved a few thousand dollars on plane tickets and then had more money to do their pennies on the dollar refund that I think ultimately is going to end up happening because I think they will get sued. Yeah, no, I think it was a complete mistake. Okay. They gained and had nothing by it. I don't think it's possible for them, in the eyes of people who actually know and watch, I don't think they can possibly bring themselves back. I don't think they can make themselves be something decent. So, no. No, they're just, it's too burned, too much damage. Okay. Well, we're done with Expo. So, let's just do the last thing in our pinball segment real quick, which is the round four of our System 11 tournament. In terms of the round three results, there was only one quote-unquote upset. It's one that didn't come fast enough, and it's not much of one because there's only one seed difference. But Space Station, which is the 13th seed, did finally beat out Mouse and Around, which was the 12th seed, with 60% of the vote. So Mouse and Around is dead in the trap where it belongs. And that's because I've been doing it on the other rounds. To note, what was the largest margin of victory? It was the three-seed Taxi over the six-seed Black Knight 2000, which Taxi secured 71.4% of the vote. So that was the highest. Well, we are down to the final four. So Whirlwind's number one seed is up against the 13th seed, Space Station. Which one do you pick here? I'm going to go with Whirlwind. I would as well. I've been a pretty ardent defender of Whirlwind throughout this. And then the other matchup is Elvira and the Party Monsters, the number two seed, which is going against Taxi, which, as I noted earlier, is the three seed. Which do you pick of these two? I'm going to go with Taxi, but I could take it either way. I consider them both. I like them both about the same amount. Yeah, I'd pick Taxi as well. I think they're both fun games. I just have a little more fun on Taxi would be probably how I'd summarize it. That's why I decided to. Now, here comes the important question. Do you think Jersey Jack and Ball's Pirates of the Caribbean is going to have an effect on who the overall winner of the System 11 tournament is? I hate you. I mean, no comment. No comment. Okay, video games. Let's go to video games. Okay. Now, what's this game that is complicated, that you didn't put in the list. Yeah, I'll add it to the list. No, it's too late. Just verbally add it. Well, I will, but I'll add it to the list so it's in there so we don't forget. That would help when I write up the show story. Yeah, I forgot I do that. Okay. Well, this started out yesterday. I had some downtime in the morning, And I started watching A let's play that a couple Of my preferred streamers Did And they were Both voicing different characters In one of them One of the Visual novel like dating sim games It was a fan choice game that they Started doing And Have you ever played any of those dating sim Visual novel games or seen somebody play? No, actually, I don't think I've ever. No, I don't even think I've ever played a visual novel, actually. Well, basically, the whole layout of the game is that you're the protagonist. There's a whole bunch of girls. They like you for some reason, or you're all together for some reason, and you make choices, dialogue choices, and you're just trying to make them fall in love with you. That's it. It's a real simple premise. I mean, I've played a couple of them in the past. I've watched a lot of streamers play them just for the sheer, because some of them are really, really terribly bad. So a lot of them, especially some of the streamers I watch, they do voices. That's like kind of their thing. So they'll watch it and they'll do all the reading, so it's something I can have on on the side while I do something else. and some of them can be just really terrible premises and they're horrible, horrible, horrible this one is special and I knew for the fact that they were doing it and they flat out said the only reason we're doing it is because everybody told us how messed up this is so we're doing it and when you open this game up it has a warning that it is not for children, it is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the easily disturbed. I have heard of this game. This is so funny. I mean, I don't know what the twist is, but go on. I'm not giving anything away. I started watching this game, and I'll go ahead and tell you the name now. It is Doki Doki Literature Club. Yep, yep. I listened to another podcast that was talking about this, but no one has gotten far enough to find the twist yet, and they're starting to get really annoyed because they said at least the first 45 minutes is boring. So that's all I know about it. The first 45 minutes is very bog standard for this type of game. The first, yeah, probably maybe even more than that. But when I was watching them play and it started to get to the twist, my wife started paying attention, and then things went, I mean, this game has a twist and it is, this game is tagged as psychological horror. It is steam tagged. So, my wife ended up sitting down next to me while we watched the final two chapters of the playthrough, of the three chapters of playthrough that these, that they did. And it ended, and where it ended, it stopped. They're, they were done playing they were done and we were staring at it and i was talking to my wife and i'd looked it up on steam and the game is free on steam and we ended up playing it for three hours last night wow and which got us through to the first to the beginning of the twist okay and there's more to go and it's Just one of those things that it was, we hit it and it was just like, I, okay. Even though I knew what was coming because I bloody watched it, I had to play it for myself, making different choices because I wanted to try and change things. And it's just like, I, I'm done for tonight. I'm done. But it is something that is just Takes such a normal Kind of sappy Silly Game type And turns it into something That is just like Soul crushing at times That Yeah No that's special But hey I played a video game with my wife So that was great Yeah. And it finished and it was like, okay, we're sad now. Hmm. Okay, well, I don't know. Three is a tempting price point, but I don't know. Yeah, like I said, it is three on Steam. Hmm. Yeah, I've heard it mentioned a couple of times now on podcasts, and I'm like, uh, but no one was saying enough. It was odd because there were people that don't normally like visual novels, And that was their problem was they weren't getting to anything that they were really liking to see the point. But they also were admitting they weren't very far in. So that was the struggle. Yeah, no, it is. See, I've played enough visual novels in the past that playing it, it was just like, okay, yeah, this is all bog standard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can ignore half the text type game. But yeah, no, it Wow It was definitely different And we'll keep playing to see how things are different Than I saw on the Let's Play Now the Let's Play I don't think I would recommend the Let's Play Because A, specifically I like those streamers Which is fine But the Let's Play is One, two, three, four Almost six hours and it's massively slowed down because they were doing all the different voices for all the characters and reading everything out loud and then also doing commentary stuff while they played. So I don't think that'd be the type of thing. I think it's something that if I had been convinced to sit down and play this without knowing the twist was coming, but knowing that I needed to stay on until I hit a point, I think I would have liked it more. I don't hate it I enjoy it but seeing as we knew what was coming the only reason we didn't get through the whole first section a lot faster is because we intentionally went a different route and a lot of the stuff since it was the beginning my wife hadn't seen so it's enjoyable it is definitely not for easily disturbed people or teenagers or children no no no no So, it sounds like you ruled out most of humanity. Well, it depends upon how easily disturbed you consider most people being. Okay. Well, we'll go ahead and transition away from the literature club to a different type of club. EA club. Well, not really. We're not going to talk about the EA club. We're going to talk about... This might be more soul-crushing and depressing than the other. That's why, while most of this is going to be us, as we usually do, talking about games that we play, I wanted to talk about this one news item because it's such a big deal to games that we like to play. And so the announcement that recently happened was EA, Electronic Arts, indicated that they are closing down Visceral Games. Visceral Games was working on a Star Wars game, and I'd seen it most commonly described as the Uncharted of Star Wars. It was going to be single player, a very story-driven experience. here's a quote I wanted to read out it's a bit long but I think it kind of explains in corporate speak what's going on this is from EA's Patrick Soderlund and what he said was throughout the development process we have been testing the game concept with players listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace it has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come we need to pivot the design. We will maintain the stunning visuals, authenticity in the Star Wars universe, and focus on bringing a Star Wars story to life. Importantly, we are shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore. EA Worldwide is going to be taking over the Star Wars title. The game is obviously delayed now beyond its original release, which was expected to be sometime in 2019. The co-writer of the story, very famous creative director from Naughty Dog, Amy Henning, it is not clear if she's going to be remaining with EA. The last I read indicated they're basically leaving it up to her, and I imagine she'll have very favorable terms if she leaves. but I also expect her to leave based off of how it was phrased and for those that don't know Visceral Games is best known I would say for the Dead Space trilogy but they did also handle the Battlefield Hardline which was sort of a cops and robbers oriented version of the Battlefield franchise Tony I gave a lot of corpse speak out of Soderlund obviously we have been watching with bated breath for all of these Star Wars titles that EA secured. They have a 10-year agreement, as my understanding, with Disney to do Star Wars games, and that was signed in 2013. So this now is probably going to come at the tail end of that 10-year arrangement. And how many games have they actually put out in that time? Well, you know, the only ones I'm really familiar with are the Battlefront games so far. But I thought they had about a half dozen in the pipe. I remember seeing a little bit on this game, but they've never shown much, even though it was announced right around, I think it was announced in 2013 that this one was being worked on. Maybe it was 2014. But it's been a while, and they've not shown very much at E3 or anything. But that corp speak that I read off, and this decision that they need to shift the design, what do you think that means? I think it's probably like a lot of the stuff we're seeing lately is a shift away from a single player experience I agree if I'm going to use the descriptors that I've heard before and these are not my ideas but they're the ones that I do accept while this was the Uncharted of Star Wars I think now they want it to be the Destiny of Star Wars that would be a solid guess And here's the thing is, there are a lot of games that are really good ideas and look really good that are single player in Star Wars that have been canceled. And I just, man, I don't know. We'll see what happens. It's EA. They're just, EA's terrible. Well, this doesn't help their rep, that's for sure. I mean, yeah. And, you know, I believe, if I'm remembering right, this is the second game now of Amy Hennig that has been canceled. I don't think she's had a game out for six years, which for someone who's such a renowned creative director back when she was with Naughty Dog to basically have half a decade of her. This is why I don't think she'll stay at EA, because they just wasted half a decade of her career life for nothing. She's achieved nothing. What's the last, her last game out is, well, Visceral's last game out was Battlefield Hardline. Yeah, I don't know if she worked on it. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think she did, which I didn't play Hardline. It was sort of a mixed reaction in terms of how the campaign went and I demoed it I demoed the online multiplayer elements and I didn like it enough to want to play it over a war battlefield so I just I never acquired it But anyway, yeah, sort of sad. I mean, I think what this is going to have people start questioning is, are AAA single-player driven games on the, you know, I don't want to read too much into it, but I mean, are they on the decline unless they're open world sandbox, loot crate driven Shadow of War style things? The Uncharted series did very well for Sony so if this was going to be like Uncharted, there's no reason to think that it wouldn't have had a high degree of sales but obviously EA feels they need to have something where they noted, players want to come back to and enjoy for a long time so apparently they don't feel a 10 hour single player experience is going to do that at $60. Right, and then comes up the other problem is a 10 hour Single player experience is Yeah No I think that's exactly What they're doing I think it's Kind of a sad way to go I would like to see more Single player Type games because I've not played the Battlefront the new Battlefront I'm not really interested in them because I only Like so much Multiplayer and with so many games Out there being pure multiplayer that the amount of interest I have in that is pretty much tied up in my playing of Overwatch and a couple of other games. But it's just, I don't know. I don't know where things are going there. I play a lot more single-player games than I do anything else. I do too. That's why it's sort of sad for me. But, well, we'll just keep our eyes out and see what happens under EA Worldwide with this title. Well, let's hop over into games we've been playing. I'll kick us off with Mafia 3, which I talked about a little bit last time. I'm further along now. I'd say deep into the second act at this stage. I actually put in a lot of time on it this weekend because I'm trying to finish this one up. Because this is a single-player experience that is a sprawling sandbox. The problem is it's now reminding me of Assassin's Creed 1, where I feel like I'm doing the same missions over and over. It's very rinse-repeat. You need to take out some sort of mob boss, but the only way to get the mob boss to come out is to do enough damage to his organization. They give you a mix of things like interrogations, destroying property, or killing someone, usually. And then when you do enough of them, you've done enough damage, and then you can go and do the mission to get the guy. I like the story. The story's kept me engaged. That's why I'm still playing it. But like Assassin's Creed 1, it feels like I'm doing the same stuff to get through those main missions to do the main hits that is just tedious. So anyway, but I'm still enjoying it, just not as much as I did through the first act where all that stuff was new and I didn't realize it was going to be that repetitive. So unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. That's how they've padded out the time a bit. So I'm really just focusing on main missions at this point. I'm not doing side missions at this stage because the main ones, just to do that much damage, it's taken hours. It takes hours to do it. So the side missions aren't the fun, interesting, quick type things like you'd see in Saints Row type side missions where they're all races or whatever, but they're fun and different. They're just... The true side mission stuff, yeah, they're, like, I haven't even done the racing, and they have racing. They have some other interesting things where doing the side missions might get you more money from your rackets and stuff. So, you don't need to do it, but you can do it, and they've given you... So, no, there's stuff there if you want to play in the sandbox a long time. The main mission chains, the missions you have to do to get to the next boss, those are repetitive. But I have to do them to finish the story, so I can't skip those. But that's all I'm doing now because I want to experience the story. The side stuff, story stuff, is not engaging enough for me to really worry about. The game that I actually saw someone on a little YouTube thing describing a bunch of video games It's described Mafia III as a game that is best experienced by watching all the cutscenes on YouTube. And I see where that's coming from now. But anyway, I'm still enjoying it. It's just I've realized that I don't want to spend 100 plus hours in this game because I'd rather do War Door if I'm going to put that much time in. So I'm focused on the main storyline, and focusing on that makes the repetitive nature of those missions really stand out. So, unfortunate, but it is what it is. Well, that's kind of good and bad. I guess that kind of refers a little bit back to, like, what we were just talking about with EA, with the, you know, 10-hour single-player type thing. How much of that stuff was added in just because they had the single-player and they had everything done, and then somebody was like, this is too short to release as is. So they added a bunch of stuff to crank it. Well, this main mission stuff is over 10 hours a lot. Oh, wow. So, I mean, that's all I'm doing is main mission stuff. That's all I'm doing now. Interesting. Well, we'll jump from that to a game I've been playing. Do you recall back in the glory days of the, I don't know, it would probably have been late 90s, early 2000s, Dungeon Keeper? That, I might have played the second one. Dungeon Keeper 2? I don't know if I played the first. Yeah. Well, this game that I'm playing now is called Dungeons. It's actually Dungeons 3. Yeah, the original Dungeon Keeper was in 97. And it is kind of a modernized take on the Dungeon Keeper type games with a lot of extra stuff gone in, added to it. But it does a great job of being a game that is not, it does not take itself hyper seriously. So it starts out as a basic dungeon game Where you start out, you have a dungeon core And you build traps And you dig out to treasure And build a treasure room You create a dungeon because you're the great big evil bad So you're building a dungeon of course Because all evil bad has to have a dungeon Well this game is a little different And I've not played any of the other dungeon games I found, I own one I must have gotten it from a Humble Bundle at some time but I don't think I've ever played it in addition to building out your dungeon and fighting off the heroes so they can't they don't kill your dungeon take your dungeon and this and that you actually can take your mobs your hordes of orcs and goblins and stuff and demons you can go to the surface world and take out towns and little good things and corrupt the land to make it evil and it has an actual ongoing storyline as you play of you taking over lands and good is fighting back against you as good appears and it might be getting strong enough you kind of slip away and start setting up somewhere else and doing more damage there and overall the game just from a gameplay perspective it's very fun. It's very interesting and it's got enough variance that it would be fun to play as is. But this game is pushed over the top by the sheer insanity that is the narration and the meta in the game because the narrator very much knows you are playing a game and makes references to it constantly. Everything in this game references something you would expect from fantasy in a way that is changed just enough so that you are obviously not going to get sued. At one point, the main character calls out the narrator. It's like, okay, okay, okay. We get it. That's enough Lord of the Rings references. We can stop for a while I mean One of the Like one of the towns Or the little town things Where you're trying to break into At one point Is Steelsmith As opposed to World of Warcraft's Ironforge Oh yeah And there's another There's another town that's referenced And it is Instead of Stormwind It is like Rain breeze or something I don't remember exactly But there are lots of little just slightly shifted References to be obvious But The narration and everything Is just so much fun And The back and forth between The main character Because you're playing the big evil bad And then there's a main your main character who's not actually you. It's like you're number one lackey. And the narrator, there's back and forth between them. Like they get into a huge argument at one point very early in the game. And they've been having an argument because part of the script that the narrator's supposed to read comes up that the narrator was making a sandwich, so the lead lackey started doing it. And then the narrator comes back and is like, hey, that's my job. And they start arguing. And it's like, well, you don't even need to be here. I can do your job. There's no need for you to be here. And so in the middle of your next fight, you fight all these bad guys and this and that. And out of nowhere, bears appear. And you're suddenly being attacked by bears because the narrator is having a hissy fit. And It's just It's fun and irreverent Enough that I think It is a game that I would Recommend for people who like the Real time strategy type Gameplay And people who like the other Obviously the other dungeons games But people who like even the older like Dungeon Keeper 2 And all that It is a lot of fun I've been really enjoying it and it's on Steam. It's $40, so it's not a full $60 hit like a lot of games, but it has been a lot of fun. I've enjoyed it a lot. I put a lot of hours into it since it came out. It just released last week. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's brand new. Yeah, it came out on the 17th, I think, And I've put six hours into it already, which, considering I put six hours into that, we put three hours into Doki Doki. I know I put another at least five hours into Cold Waters this week. And Forts, which I'll talk about later, I've put three hours into that today. So it's been, oh, yeah. And like I've played a lot of games this week Actually Four hours into Wolfenstein the New Order this week Um Um Um Several other Overwatch I've put a bunch of time into Overwatch in the last couple weeks I've played Several more like Three hours of Stellaris in the last couple weeks I've been playing a lot of games lately I actually went from that slump that I talked about last episode that I've actually been playing a ton of games the last couple weeks. Yeah, I've really, of course, with me being off for the week, I was able to really up my count. Sometimes when I take time off, I just read or something. But yeah, lots of gaming. In fact, my next one I'm going to talk about is the one I put the least amount of time in, and that's Middle-Earth Shadow War, or as we often refer to it as, War Door. I'm in the second act, and the reason why I'm not further is because I know as a sandbox game this is going to eat a lot of time, and I'm already playing Mafia III, a sandbox game, I wanted to clear one over the other, but I didn't want this one to sit because I really wanted to play it. So game to the second act is important because the second act is where you are given the ability to recruit the orcs. You don't have that ability in the first act at all. So the first act is really about how the Witch King acquires his tower, basically, if you remember where he is based out of from the movies. Well, that place used to be good, and he took it over, and Sauron let him have it. So you're kind of helping in the last defense of that area, and that's used to introduce you to a lot of the mechanics. The main thing about the story is, unlike Dungeons 3, this takes itself super seriously for the main stuff. Super serious. It's frustrating in a way, because they're also, in a not good way, very irreverent with the material. I can't say that the Shadow of Mordor was ever particularly great in terms of the story, but from the very first part of this game where they decide that, hey, She-Wub, the giant spider, she needs to be a hot girl now, and constantly is morphing into a woman, which is not an ability that Tolkien ever gave that spider, is, it's just so, it's so, oh, oh, I'm just like, did you really? I mean, that the spider is sentient is, yes, that's true. But it's like, oh, well, no, we need to make her attractive because people don't want to look at a spider, I guess. Okay. You know, just if you can let that go and not care too much, it will help. So just sort of accept they did some things because it's video games and they're trying to check all these boxes off on who they want to appeal to. So the story has been kind of like, okay, whatever. Your character is super serious all the time. when you get to the second act and you start getting the orcs, and they showed a little bit of that dynamic in E3, and I'm still getting the tutorial on all the things you can do with the orcs. Holy cow. I mean, you do experience in the first act just how much broader the nemesis system is. I wanted to go on a hunt for a particular orc so you can target them to go and find them, and he, the one I wanted, it's video games, so video game magic happens. I go out of the menu. He's right there, and he's like, you're going to hunt me? No, I'm hunting you. It's like, how did you know I was in my mini-map? Well, he knew, and we had to fight because that's what he decided to do to me. So they've got all that stuff going on. The first orc you recruit when you start building your army, he's your guide. He's your narrator, and he's teaching you about all sorts of things, and he's doing his orc humor. And that part works really, really well. So I like the orcs a lot. That's what I've been hearing on a lot of the reviews is the building of the army and the recruiting and all that. That is this game's strength. The story is not. And that's fine. So I'm going along for the ride, but I'm not very far in that fun part yet because I got enough so I could talk here. And then I was like, okay, I'm going to go back to Mafia. I want to get through that because I like the Mafia story and I want to get through it. Anyway, so I'm looking forward to continuing onward with that. But otherwise, you spend a lot of the first act getting a lot of those abilities back you had at the end of Mordor. You somehow lost, you know, video games. You lost them all. You didn't remember how to do any of those cool drains anymore or anything. But the skill points are coming pretty fast. I actually, without going and picking the secondary level of stuff, I've unlocked almost everything by the time I got to act. Oh, really? Main abilities. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like those are like six skills deep main abilities. But everything is just one skill point. and then off of all of those are three radial options that you can do for enhancements on each of those abilities. I haven't done any of those yet. I've chosen instead to try and just unlock as much breadth as possible before I go for depth, but that's just my choice. Anyway, so that's Wardor so far. I'll give more updates as I get further along in it, but anyway, yes. So far, so good. It's been what I've expected. Loot crates are not a big deal. You don't have to buy them. I was going to ask how the loot crate situation felt to you, seeing as I know there's been a lot of cry and stuff about it, having a single-player game with loot crates. I would be annoyed if you need them, but things like the epic or legendary orcs and stuff, they are out in the world. I've heard confirmations from others that have gotten further in the game. So, yeah, there are things like XP enhancements and stuff. But you can get certain crates by doing, like, multiplayer hit missions where it's, like, someone else died in the game, another person's game, and you can go in and you can hunt their orc who killed them. Yeah, you can do that in the first one, as I recall. Right, right. But now they'll give you crates as your reward. So, yeah, I mean, I don't like it as much as, like, the cosmetic loot crates of Overwatch, which are totally just fluff because these do have an impact on your character. so I understand the complaint but it's not pay to win you don't have to pay to win and maybe to get all the achievements in it you would run into a major time sink and you know if there's someone like me who doesn't put in that much time on a particular game usually I could see where the temptation might exist to buy the crates and I don't like the idea of buying like if you want an XP boost and they're going to sell stuff, sell the XP boost Don't sell a chance to win the XP list. I don't like that, but it's not a deal breaker for this game. It's obviously tacked on. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was at the publisher's bequest just to try and make more money off of this, but it does not seem necessary to me, so I'm not worried about it. Well, that's good. I'm just afraid that it's just the beginning of what's going to become a more and more common thing until it does become necessary. But sometime I think we probably, for a video game topic, should do the nature of game pricing and the rise of the loot crates, which seems to be the sequel to the rise of DLC. Yeah, and the whole thing with mobile gaming and the whales where you can buy all your extra stuff and that's what people look for on mobile gaming. That's where a lot of those mobile games are aimed at. They're not aimed at the free-to-play player. They're aimed at the people who are dropping hundreds and thousands of dollars a week. to play the, to buy extras for the game. Yeah, actually, let's plan to do that on a future episode. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I think it would be a good discussion. Well, then the other game I've been playing, the one I played today for three hours, we talked about a little bit, is Forts. Now, Forts I just found out about literally yesterday and picked up because it's an interesting little take on, have you played the physics games where you build a bridge? No. I've seen footage of them. I've reviewed them for genre assignment, but not playing them. Well, this is kind of like that, except for what you're doing is you are building a fort and putting weapons on it and fighting other forts. And it's got a campaign that's really just designed to teach you the game. And it has some challenges in it. but it seems to be a game that's really designed around your skirmishes and your multiplayer and stuff. But it's a lot of fun. As you build your fort up, you have different, like you can put metal armor on and you have your normal wooden braces that hold the fort up, and you've got, you know, there's weapons that do bullet, that just shoot regular bullets, and then you could have things that start fires. But the whole thing is the way the physics works, and if somebody's got their base set up with a big extension, you can cut the line and drop that off. And even if it's attached to the ground, you can still cut it off from the main part of the base, and it will go inactive until they can rebuild all of it. So in the challenges in the campaigns a lot of times You start out with a little base And they're like, well, there's this really powerful weapon here You need to build a bridge to it to activate it And your opponent's building the bridge to something like that as well So while you're building the bridge across At the same time, you're trying to drop fire on their construction So they don't build it up as fast as you do And they're doing the same thing to you It's just kind of a fun time waster. I've been enjoying it, and the price point is very good. It is on sale this weekend on Steam, which means it will be off sale by the time people hear this. But it is, let me see, let me look the price back up. Its normal price is $14.99. It's on sale until the 27th For $10 But It's just for a nice easy Little kind of half there Game it's a lot of fun When I say half there I mean I don't necessarily always Pay the most attention and I do poorly Because of it But it is Got enough Interest going on and enough Stuff set up and it talks to you enough and it's got enough humor built into it that it can keep your attention pretty well, at least mine. Okay. That sounds nice. And with it being on sale until the 27th, there will be a few days for people to get a chance to grab it at the slightly reduced rate that it currently is available for. Yeah. Which is good. And it's got a – it's multiplayer. It has online – besides just online multiplayer, It's also got online co-op where you can play co-op where you each have a fort and work together against the opponents. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it supports up to eight players. So I haven't done any online multiplayer because I don't do that stuff very much, but it's been a lot of fun. Cool. Well, my last game also supports cooperative play in the multiplayer mode, and that would be Titanfall 2, of which I have played zero minutes of multiplayer. Which is funny, because Titanfall 1 did not have single player. It was all multiplayer. A game that was only on Xbox, and it was greatly reduced in price. Not all that long after release, and I got it, and I was surprised at just how competent it was. I guess I should have known it would be. The studio Respawn was the weeds of Infinity Ward that did all the good Call of Duties back in the day. so they went off and they made a mech shooter that doesn't play like the traditional mech games but plays much more like a FPS and so Titanfall continues in that I did some multiplayer in the demos back when they were betaing out the new mechanics and I know they made tweaks after that which was good because it was actually playing too slow in my view versus the first game but the single player campaign it's good, it's competent I don't think the story was great I know some people really love it I think it for a shooter is very good better than what I'd usually see on a battlefield, for example. But it really teaches you a lot of the pilot mechanics by going through that single-player game. It's not just a glorified demo. It's much deeper than that. It's several hours. And it's a decent story to go through. A lot of platforming segments, which I think will come in handy for people because in most of the game modes in the original Titanfall, you're not in the Titan most of the time. You're usually outside being yourself as a pilot. You're just called a pilot. There are a lot of things you can do in terms of wall running and stuff, and the fluidity in Titanfall was better than any other game that did that parkour stuff that I played. So I really respected it for that. But it's different. It's very different to get used to. And so I think that the Titanfall 2 campaign does a lot to teach you about a bunch of the different mech builds, but also how to really maneuver when you're not in one. because if you don't do it very well in the multiplayer, you tend to be a pretty easy target. So anyway, I did get all the way through the campaign, and so I'll probably start playing the multiplayer at some stage, but like you, I don't do a ton of multiplayer, and with the Halloween event going on in Overwatch, that's been taking all my multiplayer time right now. But I did enjoy the single-player campaign, so if you can get the game for cheap just for the single-player to see if you like the mechanics, I'd say go for it because there are enough hours there that if you're paying under $30, I think you'll have a good time. Yeah, I've heard the single player is really worthwhile, and I've not heard anybody say anything bad about the single player on Titanfall 2. No, it is good. Titanfall 2, I would say overall, is probably a very good game. It's just EA, in their brilliance, they released it right after Battlefield 1 was released by them. I remember us talking about that last year. Yeah, because it was so stupid. And when they were on an investor call, they defended that decision as being smart. But they then point out that Titanfall 2 sales were bad, and I think they want to blame things like Call of Duty Infinite War, and I think they should be looking at themselves first because they were part of their own problem. Those gains appeal to the same demographic. The people who want to play first-person shooter are bro shooters. These are all bro shooters. And you know what? We only buy so many at a time. That's just how it works. So, anyway. Well, that's it for me. I don't have anything else to talk about. That's it for me as well. Okay. Well, I should remind our listeners then. You can reach out to us, EclecticGamersPodcast at gmail.com or on social media. Facebook.com slash EclecticGamersPodcast is probably our most active locale. Yeah. We're also at eclectic underscore gamers on Twitter and Instagram. And in two weeks, we'll see if we'll have enough time to do some headier discussions, because I think we have some good topics in mind. Especially in the future state or the present state of video games. I think that'll be a good one. Yeah, because we played a lot of stuff this time around. Yeah. But I'll be back working for these next two weeks, so I won't have nearly as much free time as I did. But I might still end up playing a lot. We'll have to see. But until next time, I'm Dennis. I'm Tony. And so long, everyone. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: f8fcdd45-0a1d-43e5-b101-59ece35a1c1a*