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Episode 17 - Dennis' Coup D'etat?

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 38m·held·Sep 12, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Batman 66 announced as Stern's first LCD pinball; episode covers merchandise, hardware issues, and Overwatch gameplay.

Summary

Dennis hosts Episode 17 of the Eclectic Gamers Podcast solo (Tony absent), announces a new podcast merchandise shirt design and iTunes review contest, discusses the 'clear coat separation' (ghosting) issue affecting recent Stern machines, provides extensive coverage of the newly announced Batman 66 pinball machine from Stern (first with LCD screens, no Pro model, Premium and 30 Super LE editions shipping November 2016), and transitions into a lengthy discussion of Overwatch following a free weekend trial with guest Mike.

Key Claims

  • Batman 66 will be Stern's first game to feature LCD screens instead of DMD, with one main LCD (~15-16 inches) replacing the DMD and another integrated into the playfield

    high confidence · Dennis discussing Batman 66 specifications; cross-referenced with interview on Coast to Coast Pinball episode 229

  • Batman 66 will ship in November 2016 with 240 Limited Edition machines and 30 invite-only Super LE machines (no Pro model)

    high confidence · Dennis announcing Batman 66 lineup details

  • Clear coat separation ('ghosting') has primarily affected recent runs of limited edition Ghostbusters and some Game of Thrones machines, though not widespread

    medium confidence · Dennis summarizing industry discussion; notes he personally has not seen the issue on location machines

  • Batman 66 will feature custom voice work by Adam West, similar to Ernie Hudson's work on Ghostbusters

    high confidence · Dennis describing Batman 66 voice acting

  • The crane toy in Batman 66 is thematically justified through a pun (Penguin controls the crane) rather than reflecting the original Batman 66 show

    medium confidence · Dennis and Mike discussing crane toy logic; Dennis notes Scarecrow-as-Dr.-Crane pun does not apply since Scarecrow is not in Batman 66

  • Batman 66 gameplay differs from Batman: The Dark Knight with improved flow, as designer Gomez intended

    medium confidence · Dennis referencing Coast to Coast Pinball interview; personal assessment of Batman: The Dark Knight poor flow

  • Stern has been aware of the clear coat separation issue but has not made a public announcement

    high confidence · Dennis discussing Stern's handling of the ghosting problem

  • Overwatch uses six-vs-six gameplay with objective-based modes, contrasting with Battlefield's 32-vs-32 conquest model

    high confidence · Dennis and Mike discussing Overwatch game modes and scale

Notable Quotes

  • “He's been sent to a farm, an upstate farm. He gets to play Overwatch all day and Pandemic all night. The rivers are milkshakes and the prairies are made of red vines.”

    Dennis @ ~0:45 — Humorous explanation of co-host Tony's absence; establishes show tone and dynamic

  • “I think it works for album art, but I'm not a big fan of it. And I really didn't like how many colors are in it when it comes to shirts because I'm more of a single color ink shirt sort of person.”

    Dennis @ ~2:30 — Explains design philosophy behind new merchandise

  • “There's a new pinball machine that's been announced, Mike. It's called Batman 66. I hope there's that shark repellent.”

    Dennis @ ~22:15 — Announces Batman 66 pinball; establishes theme reference

  • “This makes it the first Stern game to go away from a dot matrix and go to LCD. Lots of other pinball companies... are already doing LCD instead of doing single color dots.”

    Dennis @ ~24:30 — Key technology shift in Stern's lineup; positions Batman 66 as industry milestone

  • “Do you remember a big crane scene in any of the Batman Christopher Nolan movies? No. Here's the thing. All it was is a pun. Scarecrow controls the crane because it's Dr. Crane.”

    Dennis @ ~27:45 — Explains toy design logic; reveals thematic disconnect with Batman 66 theme

  • “Batman: The Dark Knight is an okay game in my view. It doesn't flow very well, so I understand why the designer, Gomez, is wanting to put more flow into Batman 66.”

    Dennis @ ~33:00 — Personal gameplay assessment of source game; explains design direction

  • “This game kept saying, 'too many snipers.' And I was like, that is what Battlefield needs to say, 'too many snipers,' because more than one is too many, basically.”

    Dennis @ ~48:00 — Comparing game design philosophy between Overwatch and Battlefield

  • “I see why the game's so popular... this game's class interactions concept for tactical play they implement it in a clever way and I think they make it work.”

Entities

DennispersonTonypersonMikepersonWendy HokepersonAdam WestpersonErnie HudsonpersonGomezpersonStern PinballcompanyBatman 66game

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Batman 66 pinball officially announced by Stern for November 2016 release

    high · Dennis discussing Batman 66 announcement; specifications, lineup, and shipping timeline confirmed through Coast to Coast Pinball interview

  • ?

    technology_signal: Stern transitioning from DMD to LCD displays in Batman 66, marking industry milestone

    high · Dennis: 'This makes it the first Stern game to go away from a dot matrix and go to LCD'; specific screen sizes mentioned (15-16 inch main screen + playfield integration)

  • ?

    product_concern: Clear coat separation ('ghosting') issue affecting recent Stern machines (Ghostbusters LE, Game of Thrones)

    medium · Dennis: 'apparently as a quick summary...this has been an issue for a while...Stern is aware of the situation'; notes limited distribution among recent LE/specific runs

  • ?

    product_strategy: Batman 66 using tiered LE strategy with 240 standard LE units and 30 invite-only Super LE units (each aesthetically unique)

    high · Dennis: 'They are making 240 limited editions...30 of what are called Super LEs, which will be invite-only...each one of those Super LEs will have something slightly different, aesthetically'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Batman 66 marketed as Premium and Super LE only (no Pro model), reflecting designer view of theme appeal

    medium · Dennis discussing no Pro model decision; notes operator vs. collector market segmentation implications

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.295

0:00
Welcome to Episode 17 of the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. It is September 11th, 2016, and I am your host, Dennis. Wait a minute. This is a little odd. Tony always does the intros. Well, there is no Tony this time. There is only me. And many of you are probably wondering, okay, well, how is that possible? Is it some sort of coup d'etat? Is it some sort of rebellion? And I say no, no, no such concerns need worry you. Tony's fine. He's been sent to a farm, an upstate farm. He gets to play Overwatch all day and Pandemic all night. The rivers are milkshakes and the prairies are made of red vines. It's where your old dog Sparky has gone. You remember Sparky, don't you? Yeah, that's where Tony is. He's with Sparky now. It's pretty good. Of course, so is the unlimited power that comes along with his absence. Oh, the glorious things I could give you today. Just imagine me monologuing for five hours about just pinball. We could rename the podcast. We could call it Dennis's Coast to Canada Pinball Podcast. It's exciting. just thinking about it. But in truth, this is a planned absence for Tony. He will be back, and for the time being, you're going to just have to put up with me, but not me alone. But first off, I want to talk about some stuff before we actually get into the bulk of our content. So the first thing I have to announce is we have a shirt design. There has been a picture of the shirt on our Facebook page. It is also serving as the album art for this episode, and just a little background on that. Tony, I believe, initially thought up the idea of us doing a shirt months and months ago, and we didn't really pursue anything with it because we were too busy working on building up the podcast. And I had been thinking for quite a while about it, though, just in terms of a concept, because I actually am not a big fan of the EGP logo that we use for the podcast. And I know because I designed it. So the current logo we use with the white background, That was just me searching for three public domain images that served the three core concepts of the podcast. I threw them together. I think it works for album art, but I'm not a big fan of it. And I really didn't like how many colors are in it when it comes to shirts because I'm more of a single color ink shirt sort of person, in part because it's so cheap and in part because I just like it stylistically. So I had run by Tony an idea of us doing this shirt like a play field, like the lower part of the play field with flippers. But instead of traditional slings, we would use controllers. And instead of a pinball, we would use a gaming die to serve as the proxy for our tabletop segment. And he liked the idea. And so I contacted Wendy Hoke and asked her if she could mock up a design and gave her those sort of broad concepts of what we knew. We knew we wanted the controllers as slings. We knew we wanted a gaming die. We knew we wanted flippers. But we didn't know how to really incorporate the name of the podcast. So she mocked up what essentially is the finalized version. We did a minor adjustment to give the die some more motion. That was Tony's idea. And so what you see now is what you get. So for those who aren't looking at the image, basically we've got the flippers. We've got a 20-sided die, a D20, serving as the pinball. It's kind of being fired from the right flipper. And then the slings look kind of like the classic NES controllers. And then Eclectic Gamers appears at the top. It kind of looks like each letter is on a Scrabble tile. And then down below everything is the word Podcast, which looks somewhat akin to what it would appear on a dot matrix display from a pinball machine. So we only ordered a small run. We wanted to see if it actually looked good.

Dennis @ ~44:30 — Initial gameplay impressions of Overwatch; analysis of tactical mechanics

Batman: The Dark Knight
game
Ghostbusters (Stern, Limited Edition)game
Game of Thrones (LE)game
Overwatchgame
Coast to Coast Pinballorganization
IFPAorganization
403 Clubvenue
Eclectic Gamers Podcastorganization
Fallout 4: Nuka-Cola Worldgame
Rainbow Six Siegegame
No Man's Skygame
?

design_innovation: Batman 66 integrating LCD screen into playfield (similar to Hobbit book feature), advancing interactive display design

high · Dennis: 'one's going to be integrated, I guess, into the play field in some way...maybe it sits up in a corner, kind of like how The Hobbit does'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Batman 66 designed with improved playfield flow compared to source game Batman Dark Knight

    medium · Dennis referencing Coast to Coast interview explaining gameplay changes; designer Gomez addressing flow issues

  • ?

    community_signal: Community mixed on Batman 66 Pro model absence; collector interest driven by first LCD transition; some frustration over pricing tier limitation

    medium · Dennis: 'I've seen online there's a lot of frustration from some people...on the collector side a lot of interest because this is Stern's first LCD'

  • ?

    product_launch: Batman 66 scheduled to ship November 2016 (within 2-3 months of announcement)

    high · Dennis: 'The game is supposed to ship in November 2016, so a little bit later this year'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Stern secured Batman 66 TV series license and Adam West voice talent for new pinball game

    high · Dennis: 'custom voice work by Adam West...kind of like how Ernie Hudson did call-outs for Ghostbusters'

  • ?

    content_signal: Coast to Coast Pinball (Nate's show) provided exclusive interview with Stern on Batman 66 gameplay details

    high · Dennis: 'There was an interview with two Stern employees on Coast to Coast Pinball, episode 229...I don't want to recap it here. That is Nate's show, not mine.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Kansas City area has two Batman Dark Knight machines on location; uncertain if Batman 66 will deploy to location operators

    medium · Dennis: 'There are actually two Batman Dark Knights on location right now that I know of in Kansas City'; notes doubtful about location placement for 66 due to theme appeal

    • 4:10
    Giving shirts to all the guest hosts we've had so far is a thank you for taking their time out to help us out. And then there were a few other interested parties. So other than that, I have two spare shirts. So we're doing a contest, just a drawing, really. I didn't come up with anything super clever. So one of the things we've been trying to do, though, is get more iTunes reviews so that the podcast is better found through those search algorithms. So that's what the contest is. There will be a link in the show notes to the contest where you can go and fill out a form. It's only open to U.S. residents, not just continental U.S. I'll ship anywhere in the U.S., but we're not going to be doing international shipping. And so what you need to do is you need to leave a rating and a review on the U.S. store in iTunes. And then you need to fill out the form that the show notes links to. And the show notes will also link to our iTunes page. For those of you that do not usually use iTunes. And just fill that out. Indicate what name you left the review under. Indicate your name. It's all very straightforward. And then you designate which shirt size that you want. We have two shirts, and they're each different sizes. We have a large, and we have an extra large, and that's all we've got left. So I'll do a drawing for both of those. And so we'll close that off in a couple of weeks, and at the next podcast episode, we do plan to announce who the winners are for both of those shirts, and we'll get them sent out, and we will be done until we order a new slate of them. The shirts only arrived a couple days ago. I think they came out really well. So once I build up enough funds, I'll consider doing another batch of them. But you get a lot of bulk discounting in shirts when you buy. So generally you want to buy at least a dozen in order to really save on them. So it may be a ways off before we do it again. But hopefully the next time around we'll do what I'll call a real contest, something that's more fun. Sort of like a Coinbox Pinball podcast. I know they do things where you guess the number of plays that their games have or how popular they are. which would be great if I had pinball machines on location, but unfortunately I do not. So something akin to that I think is a really clever idea. It's just nothing we could really execute right off the top of the bat. Now, while Tony did leave me the purview to go it alone for this entire podcast, I have decided I'm not going to monologue it, and we're actually even going to stick entirely with our three-format structure and not just have me go on and on about pinball. But I am not doing it alone. So we are bringing back a guest host. So, Mike, from episode 11, which was our E3 2016 episode, welcome back to the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Thank you. It's good to be back. All right. Well, we're ready for our intros, which Tony and I would normally just go into anything off topic that we would have to talk about at this point. I just figured, do you have any games that you've been currently playing that you want to just mention? Stuff that we probably wouldn't necessarily be covering. Well, mostly I've been working on Fallout 4's new DLC, the Nuka-Cola World. I'm not very far into it yet, so I don't really have a feel on if it's going to be as good as Far Harbor was. You get to play as a raider now. You basically go in and kill the old boss raider, so now you're the overboss. So you're not the main protagonist?
    7:29
    No, you still play the same person. Oh, okay. You're a raider protagonist. Well, it's like, you go in, you kill their boss, and then they're like, why don't you be our boss now? And, of course, like in everything in Fallout 4, you're like, okay. That's true. And, of course, like in everything in Fallout 4, being the boss means I run everyone's errands. Yeah. I don't know. I kind of wish I could, like, go back and go, Preston, I found this giant group of raiders. Let's go kill them. And, of course, Preston would be like, I have word of another settlement that needs our help. But I'd be like, no, Preston, raiders, we've got to go kill them. I'll mark the location on your map. Oh, Preston. I could probably go get the Brotherhood of Steel, and they could come, and we would, like, wipe the whole place out. And then that would be cool, but no. So, I don't know. I'll see how it goes. Other than that, I mean, there's nothing really major coming out in September I want, so I'm going to try and work on the backlog. You know, of the free games with gold, I've got that Warriors Orochi I've been working on. I haven't played that in, like, a week or two now. The Dynasty Warriors type game. Right. I'm still working on Weird Creature Finder slash Spaceship Fuel Making Simulator No Man's Sky. Hmm. We covered that extensively. Yes. I mean, it's definitely not what they said it was going to be, but it's kind of a game I put in and just kind of relax, because there's nothing overly stressful about playing it. You can just kind of go about doing whatever.
    8:54
    And I mean, other than that, I've been playing a lot of Hatsune Miku Project Diva X. And that's a rhythm game. Yes, which I'm not the greatest at rhythm games, but it's not the only genre that I will play that I'm not greatest at because I play a lot of schmups and I just die all over and over them. So that's about it. OK, well, I let's see. I finished Breaking Bad. It actually got better as it went along. I was sort of I liked it all the way through, but I didn't get what the big deal was through the first two seasons. and then I started to see where the narrative structure worked a lot better as it went along.
    9:32
    I did really bad at the 403 Club monthly pinball tournament. I often do really bad there, as in going to and out. But this time, I was actually, I wasn't last, tied for last. I was dead last. And it was a small turnout because of the holiday weekend. So I took 14th, and the next lowest was 10th. But the interesting thing was I went to the IFPA website, which does the scoring for all of these tournaments, and I got zero points for that. I didn't know that it was possible to ever get zero points. I thought I would have at least gotten .01 points. I think that they wanted to take points from me. I think that that was the plan, but they probably have something in their rules that they're not allowed to take points other than through their decay system. But anyway, I like to think that maybe I set some new ground there. Even though out of the two matches, five games I played, I only had one where I was truly crushed. All the rest, including the one I won, were all pretty close. But anyway, I was not playing well at all. Even afterwards, I stayed and played a bunch of games, and I lost almost all of them. I was just not doing well. And that's pinball. So, at least for me. Let's see. video game wise a couple of things to mention. Well first I should note that I did go ahead and pick up the Sierra Humble Bundle. I don't buy a lot of PC games but these were all the old classics they are not modernized at all. I mean they were some of them, they did come with the modernizations that happened in the 90s, in the early 90s where some of the early very text based styles were given VGA and point and click so So there aren't any Steam achievements or anything for them. I don't know if I'm going to motivate myself to actually play them, but Nostalgia did let me decide that I wanted to go ahead and pick. I didn't get the whole bundle. I got, like, the first two categories. I went up to just above the average. I paid a penny above the average price and got, because that had all the titles I really wanted. I wasn't a huge King's Quest person, but this got me Police Quest and Space Quest and Quest for Glory, which were the three that I liked the most. And I can't say I've played all, like, I've only played Police Quest 3. And I think I did play all the space quests. And I did play all the Quest for Glory, at least the first three Quest for Glories. I don't know if I played before. But anyway, so I have those. I've been working a little bit on Rainbow Six Siege. I got that back around Christmas. And I just never put much time in on it. Didn't do very well in the tutorials. Well, I guess they're called situations. And I kept getting stuck. I got about halfway through. And then I just started having a lot of trouble. and it was getting really repetitive. I am not any good at Siege. I've never been great at Rainbow Six. So anyway, I went in and just played. I'm still not through all the situations. I cleared a couple more. But I went in and started playing multiplayer, and I don't think I know what I'm doing very well, and I'm not very good at it. And a great example of this was I was playing, and I was on the defense on a team, and I went in, and we started up, and within 30 seconds, someone that I never saw headshot me and eliminated my character and then I hear this and I have a text message sent to me from another teammate and all it said was you're terrible and that was one very mean and two very true so I actually but I stuck through it I kept doing it they even tried to kick me from the team because I was so bad I guess standard Xbox live Yeah, and those messages, it helps reinforce, just in case I start to forget how bad it can be. I get to, oh, don't worry, they're blocked now. And I reported them for unsportsmanlike behavior. But, you know, it's always interesting. But a good counterpoint to that, it is the free weekend of Overwatch. And we're going to dive into that more in a little while when we get to the video game segment. But I was playing around yesterday with a few characters, and I switched to the character Mercy, who is the straight-up healer, very Team Fortress 2 style healer. And it was my first full match as Mercy. I'm going in, and I'm healing a guy. He gets dropped. I revive him. And then through the TeamSpeak Audible chat, I hear this player say, this guy knows what he's doing.
    14:01
    And no, other than I've played a lot of healers in my time. You have played a lot of healers. So it's like, you know, I just thought it was an interesting counterpoint to my naivete of Rainbow Six versus my, while completely unfamiliarity with Overwatch as a game itself, the concept of which the character I was playing made a lot of sense to me. All right, intro's out of the way. We will follow the traditional format, which means pinball comes first. There's not a whole lot to talk about in pinball because there hasn't really been a whole lot of news. The first thing, though, I want to touch on is the clear coat separation issue that all of the other pinball podcasts have been talking about. And so I don't want to say much else because everyone else has been talking about it. This is commonly called ghosting. I don't know why they're calling it ghosting. There was already a term called ghosting for pinball machines when you put in LED lights and they stay lit when they shouldn't because you've replaced incandescence and they're not set up right. so whoever named this didn't do a very good job when they thought oh well we'll call this ghosting too so that's my big complaint about ghosting is guys don't be calling it ghosting when there was already the term ghosting there were plenty of other things we could call it like clear code separation so apparently as a quick summary just in case we have some listeners that possibly care and don't listen to any of the other pinball podcasts this has been an issue for a while Everyone knows that Stern is aware of the situation. I don't know anyone, hands-on, who has had a ghosting issue. It seems to have only been impacting the most recent run of some of the titles, like the limited edition version of Ghostbusters, and supposedly some of the Game of Thrones games coming out have been having it. I haven't noticed it on the pros that we have on location. We have two Ghostbuster pros on location. I didn't see any ghosting on them when I looked. I didn't look that closely. I was too busy losing. and the same for the Game of Thrones but I know the Game of Thrones we have on location are all I believe months and months before this issue arose I don't have any comment on the big debate which is should Stern have announced something publicly about the problem which they have not I guess I would lean towards no as long as the problem wasn't really widespread but I'm basing that off of my own work experience where if we have a problem we do not announce it publicly unless it affects the mass public and then we will say like if we mess up a registration system for example we'll just try and fix it and keep it quiet and we'll just apologize to everyone who contacts us but we won't send out a big email blast saying we're sorry we totally screwed up the registration systems for all of you who haven't even yet tried to register because you don't know because we're going to fix it before you ever figure it out would be the plan but if we can't we do an announcement so anyway nothing really else to say on that uh follow the other pinball podcast if you really care about clear coat separation because it's just something that i'm probably never going to comment on again uh the only other the real pinball news is batman there's a new pinball machine that's been announced mike it's called batman 66 i hope there's that shark repellent i i hope so too i have not yet seen well actually we've seen next to nothing about it. Here's the thing. It's really hard to talk about because there are no pictures of the play field yet. There have been some pictures of some of the toys. So like I've seen the bat helicopter and there've been a few of the little like gadget looking things. Some of the little artwork that looks very reminiscent to the show. They've shown some like clips of that, some drawing sort of stuff. So there have been little bits and pieces. A summary of what the game is that we do know from what they have announced. It is based on the Batman, the Dark Knight pinball machine, but it isn't a straight up reskin of it, like how Shrek was a reskin of Family Guy. It's not that. It's not Spider-Man Vault Edition, which is comic Spider-Man art instead of movie Spider-Man art and different dots. It's not just that. They are changing the layout up somewhat. I guess it's supposed to have some more flow. There was an interview with two Stern employees on Coast to Coast Pinball, episode 229. We will have a link to that in the show notes, so anyone who wants to hear the interview, go and hear it. I don't want to recap it here. That is Nate's show, not mine. But there was a lot of sort of explanation about some of the changes that are happening between Batman 66 and Batman Dark Knight from a gameplay perspective. Another big noteworthy item is this game will feature two LCD screens. this makes it the first Stern game to go away from a dot matrix and go to LCD. Lots of other pinball companies, not that there are tons of pinball companies, but most of the other pinball companies are already doing LCD instead of doing single color dots. So one of the screens will be in place of the DMD. It's going to basically be a laptop size screen. So about 15, somewhere I think between 15 and 16 inches. And then one's going to be integrated, I guess, into the play field in some way. Like maybe it sits up in a corner, kind of like how The Hobbit does where there's a little book LCD, which lets you not have to look up while you play, which I think is really cool. I don't imagine they're doing the full throttle style of highway pinball where they've actually got a screen in the playfield. But Stern's done that before. They had a screen. It wasn't a LCD screen, but they had a screen for World Poker Tour in the middle of the playfield to let you show what your hand was. So anyway, they're doing something now. So that's sort of exciting. The crane toy, there was a moving crane on the Dark Knight. That crane toy is going to still be in this game. I don't know how that fits thematically. I never saw all of Batman 66, but I saw some episodes. I remember watching a lot of it when I was a kid. Do you remember watching lots of episodes with cranes? No, not really. Okay. I don't either. And the thing is, the crane in, do you remember a big crane scene in any of the Batman Christopher Nolan movies? No. No, you don't. Here's the thing. All it was is a pun. Scarecrow controls the crane because it's Dr. Crane. Oh, my God. Yes. So that's the logic. That's the logic of it. They don't even have that because there's no Scarecrow in Batman 66. I've heard that Penguin's controlling the crane, which, you know, maybe he has a shipping empire. I don't know. I never really understood Penguin. But, you know, I think it's a cool toy. It moves around. It has a little wrecking ball that you try and hit with the pinball on the Dark Knight. And so it's really interactive. And so as far as toys go, I think it's one of the better toys. It's not just the simple Bash toy. It moves around a bit. It moves around more than Slimer moves around on Ghostbusters. So anyway, so that's still going to be in. The voice work, they're going to get custom voice work by Adam West. So kind of like how Ernie Hudson did call-outs for Ghostbusters, are going to have Adam West doing call-outs for Batman 66. That's good. There better be a hurry-up mode where he carries the bomb around.
    21:10
    Yes, I hope so, too. A lot of people online have been posting pictures, and everyone remembers that.
    21:17
    And also when Batman is dancing. Yes, the Bat-toosie. The Bat-toosie, yes. Or possibly the scene where Batman is surfing, and he's got the board shorts on over his Batsuit. So there's that as well. There's a lot of fun you could have with this. The game is supposed to ship in November 2016, so a little bit later this year. And lineup-wise, no pro model. They will have premiums. They are making 240 limited editions, which is a fairly limited run for Star, and they typically do more limiteds than that. And then 30 of what are called Super LEs, which will be invite-only. And my understanding is each one of those Super LEs will have something slightly different, aesthetically, not gameplay-wise, but aesthetically they will all have some special neat treat. Obviously, as invite-only, the company will be inviting people to buy that particular version.
    22:13
    Any additional thoughts you have on the concept as a theme? No, I think it could be kind of fun. I always liked the old campy Batman.
    22:24
    It's been so long since I've seen it. I must have caught it on Nickelodeon from time to time. not a theme that really resonates with me.
    22:34
    Maybe that's why they're not doing pros, is they may think this isn't going to be a big... Pro models are designed for operators, really. They typically have less things that don't break down. My Star Trek is a pro model. They're cheaper. That's my attraction to pros.
    22:51
    They are the ones that are designed to be out on location and played. So they're usually easier to maintain because they tend to forego moving ramps. They tend to forego wireframe and instead do vacuum-made ramps and stuff. Anyway, you can always look and see the differences. But given that, I think this makes a lot of sense. I've seen online there's a lot of frustration from some people. I don't know if it's just that they're upset. Since there won't be a pro model, you know that there won't be one at the typical pro price. there's probably on the collector side a lot of interest because this is Stern's first LCD so I guess if you want to have a first and you want their first transition from dot matrix to the LCD era you feel compelled to buy this and then maybe you're mad because you didn't love it enough that you want to buy a premium I don't know, I don't care so it's probably priced out of the range I would ever consider anyway from a new in box standpoint super LE concept, I don't have any issues with that. I know some people, I guess, have groused, I don't see the point. I don't see the point in carrying. I just, like, I don't see the point in doing the extra limited run on the LEs. I think that makes a lot of sense. The idea is to make them collectible, then when you make 500 of them, obviously, that collectibility starts to go down a lot. I mean, when you consider that a lot of pinball machines have runs, especially older pinball machines, had runs of under 3,000. We're just talking EMs and stuff. There's not a whole ton of demand compared to other hobbies. So what may sound ultra may be the only way to really make it meaningfully limited I don know But anyway yeah it an interesting idea I doubt it will ever really affect me I'll be amazed if we see one on location in this area. There are actually two Batman Dark Knights on location right now that I know of in Kansas City. So now since the gameplay is a little different, maybe that'll motivate people. But I don't know if this is going to be a great player or not. Batman Dark Knight is an okay game in my view. It doesn't flow very well, so I understand why the designer, Gomez, is wanting to put more flow into Batman 66. But it's a competent game. I think it has long ball times, so I don't really like it for tournament play, unless you've rigged it up to be harder, and currently the location ones are. But, yeah, it's not one that I've ever wanted to own, So based off of what I know of The Dark Knight, this modified version of The Dark Knight doesn't appeal to me from a gameplay perspective unless I get to experience it and see if it actually is significantly better.
    25:40
    But all right, we're done with pinball. So let's move on. Video games, topic number two. Let's open with Overwatch, which was one that I wasn't even planning on us really talking about, but we ended up with a free weekend. We put in a few hours yesterday, both you and I, and we played together on the Xbox One version. My base thoughts initially is, I see why the game's so popular. Yes. It was fun to play. I definitely lean more towards the tactical approach that Battlefield does from a gameplay perspective. I like the idea of building a squad and going and kind of using that squad to execute objectives. but this game's class interactions concept for tactical play they implement it in a clever way and I think they make it work. They make it make sense so that you may want to change things up if the game modes change so it's like you're doing capturing a point and then it becomes an escort mission. That's different than what I'm used to. Though even though you've got tons and tons of characters you really still are only working with four classes. By and large that's all that seems to matter. I do like the warnings that it gives, though. Yes. And Battlefield should steal a page from this and say, too many snipers. Yes. This game kept saying, too many snipers. And I was like, that is what Battlefield needs to say, too many snipers, because more than one is too many, basically. What did you think of the modes? I mean, they seem straightforward. Yeah, I mean, I like that it's all objective-based. It brings all the action to one area. So it's not like a deathmatch thing where you're constantly looking for people, and then you pop around a corner and suddenly you're dead because someone was there waiting, camping. Right. But conversely, unlike a game like Battlefield with its multiple conquest points, there's also not a lot of opportunity for broader strategic play. You're going to go for this one point. Everyone's going to go for this one point. Well, that's also just because it's so fewer people. I mean, you're doing six on six, whereas Battlefield is 32 versus 32. Right. It's very much a different style shooter than Battlefield is. In fact, I'd say it's different than a lot of things, but it's also very reminiscent of a lot of games I've played in the past. In some ways, it reminds me of Quake and such, just modernized. In terms of the modes that they would, I'm amazed there's not a capture the flag mode, honestly. Not that I'm asking for one.
    28:10
    Capture the flag I kind of liked in the early 2000s, and generally I don't like how it's executed anymore. Maybe it's just me not liking how it's executed. I was never a big fan of that movie. But as we noted, there are four classes, and we're not going to go all super deep into Overwatch, because Tony and Jack talked it to death last episode, and I'm not going to do that here. But I thought it might be fun to go through the class categories now that we've experienced it. I think I've tried all the characters now. I've tried most of them. So now some of them I tried an arbitrarily short amount of time and go hate it and moved on. So that being said, I thought maybe we could highlight some of the characters we really liked in each of the classes or characters maybe we didn't like. Whatever, however it flows is how it flows. So let's start with the offense categories.
    29:01
    I know you've played some of them. Yeah, I think I've played most of them. And any that stood out to you as being enjoyable to play? Well, I liked Soldier 76 or whatever.
    29:14
    He's pretty straightforward to play. Pharah was pretty cool. Now, was she in the offense category? I don't remember. I don't think so. She was in the first set. That was offense, wasn't it? Okay, and then she is. Okay, yeah. So, you know, her main gun is a rocket launcher. Yes, yes. I was thinking, she has rockets. That's probably offensive. Yeah. Okay. And her special was pretty cool. That seemed like the one you were playing the most when we were grouped together. Yeah. Of the offensive sets. Yes. I looked at my play time all the characters after we were done, and yeah, her bar was really long compared to everyone else. Okay. So she was probably your favorite offense character then, I would assume. Yeah. If I felt we needed more offense, I switched to her. Okay. I liked, Soldier 76 was my favorite of the offensive characters. I tried. He's well-rounded. His circle heel is a nice support tool so he's not just a lone gunner sort of character. I think he's really, as Tony and Jack had both noted in the last episode, if you were someone who's familiar with other shooters, Soldier 76 is an excellent character to acquaint you with this game because you're going to know how he works. He's that straightforward. I'd give my second tip of the hat, and I didn't think I would have at first, but I'll give it to Reaper. I played him a little, but I didn't get a whole lot. Yeah, I played him a little, and then I went back to him later when we were doing our last sort of hour of play and gave him a little bit more time.
    30:51
    I'd say the most noteworthy thing about Reaper is his special power is OP. It's super OP. His death blossom, as I would call it. He does good short range damage Because he's carrying dual shotguns And his invincible smoke move Is pretty intuitive to use So you can fire it off You can't attack while you're in that mode But you also can't be damaged So it's a good way to try and seek cover Or maybe do some flanking Or something along those lines And it has a decent amount of time that it works at But my only issue So I'm noting him as my second favorite Of the offensive characters I've played But my big problem with him is he's such a solo character. He doesn't feel to me like he actually works cooperatively with the team. He's the character you play where you're going to go and try and get a whole huge kill-to-death ratio thing going on, and you don't really care what the rest of your team is doing. I mean, he can be used in a tactical way with everyone else. I don't want to say that, you know, if you're playing this, you're a bad person. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had him on my list. But he's well, while he was my second favorite offensive character, he's well below 76 for me. The only offense character that I wanted to note that I didn't like was Genji.
    32:07
    I tried him once, but I didn't really get a whole lot of time on him. I tried him once, and then I felt I was being unfair, so I went back to him again. And he's just too hard for me to use effectively. I couldn't figure out. I get the idea. It's cool that he can reflect projectiles and stuff, but I was like, no. I'm not using him right. I'm not killing anyone, so I'm not using him right. He's an offensive character. That's what he's supposed to be doing. So let's shift over into the defensive characters. Junkrat. Okay. Tony, I think, noted that he's a big Junkrat fan. Yeah. Well, I think I really started to like Junkrat after I used his tire at one point and killed pretty much everyone on the opposite team with it. Yes. Oh, yeah, he's got the raging tire fire thing going on. Yeah. Exploding spare tire thing. Because they were, like, all covering the whatever point we were trying to capture, and I sent that thing in and exploded it and just, like, quintuple kill. Yeah.
    33:07
    Any others that stood out to you? Not really. I think he was the only really defensive person I played a lot. Yeah.
    33:15
    I'm probably going to say her name wrong. Is it May? May. May? Okay. I never got a chance to play her yet. There was a couple times I was going to, but we already had someone playing her. I was like, well, I don't want to double up with her. Yeah. No, actually, I was really, because each of these characters are rated with three stars on how difficult they are to properly use. So, like, Genji's a three-star character. So, me being bad at him, I understood. It's just I was so bad at him, I don't want to go back to it.
    33:40
    She is a three-star as well, so I was very skeptical. I really liked her, though. She is a great nuisance design character. Yeah, I can understand that. So you've got ice attacks. She's got a short-range ice beam attack. She's got a long-range icicle attack. She creates these ice walls. She can encase herself in ice and heal up. It just, the blend of the tools she has is, I think, really, really good. And I get why she's such an excellent, why she's a defensive character. It's because, I mean, those walls come in handy, and the cooldown is pretty good on her. Yeah. So, yeah, she was actually really comfortable to play, and I didn't feel like she was all that difficult. I could see what the difficulty is going to be on knowing how to use the wall and things like that and when to use particular weapons. Her special, which is like this ice drone attack, it's pretty cool, too. I mean, it doesn't essentially just wipe everyone out, but it immobilizes them and gives everyone a chance to concentrate fire. So I really liked her. And I guess my second pick after her would be Bastion. Yes, I forgot about Bastion. I mean, I would describe him, I would reference Gears of War and say grind. Yes. Because he is just a big old Gatling gun. But he's easy to use. Yeah. And that's why he's there on my list, is that he's easy to use.
    35:01
    Dislike. Go ahead. The one I, I didn't hate any of them. The one that came closest to dislike for me, and I put hardly any time on her, was Widowmaker. I didn't try her. I'm not a sniper fan. I'm not a huge sniper fan. And Hanzo works like a sniper as well, but Widowmaker was more awkward for me to play than Hanzo. Hanzo kind of, like, I didn't feel like I was inept at him. I didn't love him, and people love Hanzo. Yes, they do. I was getting headshot by Hanzo all the time, so I kind of hate him from that perspective. But from a playing perspective, he was okay. I also did put a little bit of time on Torbjorn, the Engineer Dwarf guy. I hadn't tried him yet. Okay. he was too hard for me to use properly. I don't think I ever figured him out. So he's getting in the dislike category for the same reason that Genji is. I'm like, I don't know. He's trying to gather scrap. I love the idea of building turrets. Again, Engineer, Team Fortress, it was making me think, oh, this could be a lot of fun. No, it wasn't. It was not. I did not have fun with him. Third class, the tanks. Well, I put in a decent amount of time on D.Va. my big issue with her is I feel someone who's in a mech should be a little more offensive and her offensive capabilities are kind of crap yeah I think most of the tanks are pretty weak yeah but I played Reinhardt a little bit and if I can get well I mean he's obviously a very close up character because his weapon is a hammer but if I can get close to someone I can wreck them yes and his shield was awesome it worked very well I used him on one point in one of the escort missions and I just kept that thing up in front of everyone and all my teammates were able to stay behind it and cover anyone that was coming at us. Yeah, the Reinhardt shield is a huge damage sponge. I mean, D.Va has a shield as well, but her energy to power it doesn't last very long. Although, I guess originally her energy on that was even shorter. Oh, wow. I remember reading about her getting buffed and that was one of the things I talked about. It makes sense. It's very difficult for her to move in very far if it had been shorter.
    37:14
    My thoughts actually mirror yours. I put D.Va as my favorite, but she, yeah, I mean, she's not a damaged character, but I think her mech special is very useful for point capturing. The ability for it to explode, and then her to bring it back in. And her defense is decent. So she's pretty maneuverable. Her shield does come in and it's a good shield. I mean, Reinhardt's is a sponge where it just can absorb a certain amount of damage and so he can keep it up forever if he's not taking damage. D.Va can keep her shield up no matter how much damage is coming until she runs out of energy for it. So I feel that coupled with her ability to have her mech be destroyed and then she becomes a relatively agile character who still does okay damage. In some ways, you might even argue she does better damage when she's out of her mech with her handgun. It's more precise than her scattergun. It offers her some tactical options, so I see potential for her. I can't say that I'm explaining that potential very well, but I enjoyed playing her as a character. My second pick would be Reinhardt, though. I do not like Reinhardt's hammer. I'm a gun person, and he's too whack, whack, whack, whack-a-mole. But that shield is so good that when it comes to, I mean, tanking, he is definitely the tank I would name. And then I don't like any of the other tanks.
    38:39
    I don't remember who else is in there. Roadhog? I tried him, I think, once, and I was just like, no, I don't like that. No. I tried, I don't remember what her name is, the pink-haired big lady. Yeah. Who has like a... The particle beam. Yeah, she has like a particle beam that does like no damage. No, she's a tank. She's got particle... And her shields only last, like, seconds. Yes, yes. That's the problem I have with her. Not that she doesn't do any damage. That's just frustrating. She can take a lot of damage, but she has a self-shield, and she has an apply shield to other person. They are on separate timers, which is nice. They, in some capacity, when people are taking damage while those shields are up, they enhance her offensive damage, which she needs. but it's not like those shields last until they take a certain amount of damage or anything they just go away after like 5 seconds or something I would say ridiculous I didn't see other people playing her and she I don't believe was named when Jack and Tony were talking but I think she probably needs a buff at least on the Xbox I can't figure out why you would ever pick her over another tank my least favorite tank is actually Roadhog he's just the worst a lot of people play him and play him effectively. I don't think that he needs a buff. The problem is, I cannot use him effectively. He's too short range. He's got short range gun and a little bit longer short range gun. And then he has this chain to do the stun move, which is awesome, except you have to be accurate to be able to use the chain effectively. He's basically walking around with these short range shotgun things, but you're trying to snipe with this chain to pull people in. He's dumb. I don't like him. I don't like him one bit. So, finally, where are the support characters?
    40:30
    Any support characters that stood out to you as enjoyable to play? I liked Lucio some, but I didn't feel I was using his support abilities to the best. Because you have to switch back and forth on his gun. Right, he's got like a... And speed. Yeah. I think it's speed. Well, it's like... Movement. Yeah, well, I mean, it's like some damage dealing thing. But, I mean, I liked his knockback ability. That was helpful. Other than that, I mean, I tried Mercy once And just, healing is not my playstyle So I don't feel I was very good with her Well, then Mercy's not going to stand out Because she's so pure She's so much She's just a med pack Yeah Mercy was my favorite Because, as I noted earlier It reminds me of the medic class In Team Fortress 2 So, of all the support characters She is the most pure healer of them all. But her offense, because of that, is a total joke. I mean, it's inconvenient to say the least, even switch to her sidearm, which is her offense. I think I saw like one person use that once. I got a few people with it at certain points, but I'd only ever really switch to it if I was alone. Yeah. Pretty much any time I saw Mercy, she was basically tethered to someone. Yes. She needs to be tethered. That's her job. She's a little tetherable. So, because her offense is a joke, the uh on the switching to it requires you to use the right on the d-pad which is not convenient they didn't just make it so you could pull like the left trigger which is not used on her at all left trigger is not used she's definitely the best healing choice though and when you don't need to heal she can tether and do an offensive boost to someone so it she she's a very valuable character you just but you have to like playing that style and i'm fine playing that style so It works for me. And she's got Resurrect, which can come in handy if you've been Death Blossomed or something. So the second support character I really liked was Zenyatta. I never got a chance to play him. The Dhalsim. I'm calling him Robot Dhalsim. He's floating around there. What I like is he's got these two orbs. It gives him a healing debuff mix. So I can, say, target your character and put a healing orb on you. And it just stays on you until I assign it to someone else. So it's like tethering, but he's not having to tether. He just applies it. Same with the debuff orb. I see an enemy, I can put the debuff orb on him. When that enemy dies, I get the debuff orb back, and I can put it on someone else. And I can do it from across the map. He requires a bit more accuracy than Mercy does for both of those things, but it works fine. He also can do damage. His main attack is not particularly strong, but he can charge it with the left trigger, and that actually hits pretty hard. so the only thing I really didn't care for about him is his special it's he's invulnerable and then he kind of emits a healing aura which heals people around him I see value for it if you're like on a point it's not as valuable as resurrect although it's just it's okay uh it didn't stand out to me but I enjoyed playing him he's got decent movement and all of that so uh I did not like any of the other support characters.
    43:39
    And Anna and Symmetra are the worst. I tried Symmetra once, and I was like, I can't do anything with her. The problem I have with Symmetra is it's like so many of these other ones I named, I felt like I don't know how to play her. She's got this little turret, but I didn't understand it. Her support shield seemed to be too weak to be worthwhile to me. I'd rather have been able to just heal people instead of giving them a shield. And then Anna is just she requires too much precision. She's a sniper. She's got her abilities awesome. On paper, she's got my favorite set of abilities. But I used her a couple of times and I just felt like I wasn't executing the healing very well because I'm having to snipe people properly to heal them and I was too far away then to use a lot of the other stuff that was cool. It was like, okay, it just didn't work for me. So anyway, that's Overwatch. So fun. I have it on my little list to own. I didn't think we were supposed to be unlocking achievements, but apparently we've started unlocking achievements because the game, I guess, became confused. Anyway, it is fun, and I do recommend people who like smaller quantity shooters, games that aren't massive armies on each side, go ahead and give it a try. I'd try it over Call of Duty at least.
    44:56
    So let's go on to another shooter. Let's talk about the Titanfall 2 tech demo, tech test. Yeah, I don't remember exactly. It wasn't a beta. It was a tech something. Yeah, it was basically, I think they called it like online tech test or something. It was basically just, I think, for them to test server loads and stuff like that. Now, I only played it the first week and they did the test, but you did. I did the second weekend as well, which they made some changes that massively improved the game. So this is good because now we can have a dialogue because there were some experiences I had that really bothered me. So I guess what I would like to open with is where were the Titans? That first weekend they were not there. Okay. Because here's the thing. I skipped. I did not try the pilot. They had three modes that I could try on that weekend. I skipped pilot mode because by definition pilot mode does not have Titans. So I don't care. That is, we were formerly Infinity Ward. You still want to play Call of Duty our style? Here you go, pilot mode. I don't care about that. So I did play Hardpoint, which is the, I would argue, the main mode from Titanfall 1. It seemed to be the mode with the most players. It was the mode I liked to play the most. But it was Titan free. Totally Titan free. My team dominated. Normally, in Titanfall 1, if you were crushing everyone and owning everything, you earned your Titans really fast. My team steamrolled these people, and no one on our team or their team ever got a Titan deployed. Yeah, that first weekend, I saw Titans a couple of times, and they were literally right at the end of the match. Okay. The other mode I tried was a new mode that they created called Bounty Mode. And I did get my Titan, I believe, three times in Bounty Mode. But I didn't like Bounty Mode. I don't understand exactly how... I guess I understand how it's supposed to work. I don't understand how it's supposed to be fun.
    47:04
    Because it's not Battlefield Hardline. This is Titanfall. So the whole idea in Bounty Mode is you're going around and you're gathering money, and then you're supposed to take that money back to your bank basically and deposit it, which means for the other side, I guess camping the bank is the smart strategy because everyone's going to have to go back to cash in if they want to earn any points. Well, you go around and try and kill objectives to earn the cash, but you don't really earn the cash until you deposit it. So, I mean, I don't know. It seems like it has a bottleneck issue that makes me think it's just going to turn into a camp fest. But, I mean, I like that it let me try some Titans. I enjoyed the Titans when I was playing them. I thought the Titan play felt pretty good. Pilot play felt a little, it felt different. It felt less, I don't know if fluid's the right word. Maybe I should just say it felt slow-ish. Yeah, well, I mean, one of the big issues was that one map. I don't remember what it was called, but there wasn't a lot of movement options. Whereas in the first Titanfall, you can move around and not touch the ground for a while because you can just wall run across things. There was like a swamp map in Titanfall 1 where they even had on the Xbox side, they even had an achievement for staying off of the ground for a couple minutes or something, which was actually pretty easy to do because there were all sorts of fallen trees and stuff. They weren't falling to the ground. They were leaning against the rest of the forest. and you could stay up top and jump from tree to tree and rock to rock, and that's how most pilots did because down below was bad. It was a dangerous zone. But the second weekend, they changed the timer on Titans, so they charged faster. They also got a huge boost in charge time if you captured a hard point. Oh, wow. Okay, that's good because hard point, that was a problem, I think, in Titanfall 1 is there were people that wouldn't always, not too bad, not as bad as we've seen in Battlefield, but some people won play the points They won play objectives Always a frustration of mine in objective shooters like this So that weekend I generally got a Titan two or three times a match So that was a lot better And that sounds akin to what I remember from Titanfall 1, that three Titans a match is reasonable. Although having more Titans showed another problem with that one map where at one point my team, like four of us, had Titans. There's not enough room for four Titans to move around that map. We were basically getting bottlenecked trying to attack their last point that we didn't have captured. But they had like one or two Titans and we were trying to fight them. But the street was so narrow, you could basically get two Titans there and everyone else was stuck behind them. And there was no other way to move around. Oh, wow. I can't think of a single map in the first Titanfall that had that. I mean, there were places where you couldn't fit all the Titans in one point. You can't all be at alpha, but the maps were always. It's very lenient for being able to try and get around towards a point. Yeah. And the other map they introduced, though, in that second weekend was a lot better. It felt more like a traditional Titanfall map. You had your Alpha and your Charlie were on opposite ends. Those were out in the open so that you could be in a Titan and claim them, whereas the Bravo was basically there was this giant building in the middle, and Bravo was in kind of a walkway in the middle that you can only get to as a pilot. but it had a lot more movement options. It just, it flowed a lot better. It felt like more of a traditional Titanfall map. And even the layout you described of the hard points, that's very traditional to first iteration Titanfall, where it was, I can't think of any map actually that had every hard point accessible to the Titans. Usually you add at least one where only a pilot can do the claim, which is, you know, important for offering up different strategic options for, Oh, well, we know the Titans can't get in and get us. You got to pull out, you got to do some Call of Duty skills here. And it was a good blend. So, okay. So it sounds like they fixed a lot of stuff. I wonder if that map, the one where you can't have four Titans on the map, you would just describe it that way, if it was, if that's just a byproduct of they never ran into that problem with their testing of the map because they had such limited Titan spawn. Well, my understanding is that the build that we played for that weekend It was like two months old. So I would imagine they would surely have been able to test that at some point. Yeah, and the game's coming out relatively soon. I'm trying really hard to rationalize why they would have such a poorly designed map in a game that's supposed to be about going around in a big mech. Yeah, I don't know. It just, I mean, we've seen other games where, you know, I keep bringing up Battlefield because we've played so many of them, but there are lots of, Battlefield 4, I think, is an excellent case in point where you had a lot of maps that were laid out fine for conquest, and then they fell apart on the other modes. But again, they were laid out fine for their main purpose. Maybe this map, Hardpoint, isn't its main purpose, but I would have assumed that all of the maps would have at least been oriented around Hardpoint, and then maybe things like pilot combat or whatever would suffer because they were too big or something. so anyway for me I've kept the game given the feedback that happened regarding the second weekend of testing I have kept it on my wish list but I know I'm not buying it on release this makes my life a lot easier actually well and also it comes out like a week after Battlefield 1 yes and so anyway it's not a priority purchase for me and we should probably shift to our final video game topic then which you have laid the groundwork for which would be Battlefield 1. We put in a little bit of time on the Battlefield 1 beta. I would say more than a little. We put in a little bit. It was a little bit of time. So I guess I would open with describing that as this is what I'm talking about. This is what I want. War. War never changes. And it shouldn't. Only their eras should change. Mike and I both played together In a squad A number of times In fact I don't think I Other than if we had one of us lose connection Or something I don't think I ever played a game Where you were not in the same We had one instance where we were on opposite teams briefly Because of how you got back in But otherwise if I played I was always in a squad And you were always in that squad And we would communicate Via our Xbox TeamSpeak Which is how we've always done Battlefield Sometimes our squads have been bigger back in the glory days, but we did both modes extensively. They gave us two modes to try out, rush mode and conquest. Conquest is going around and capturing various points, and then you fight for the claim on those points. Rush mode is one team is offense, one team is defense, and there are two sets of boxes, basically, and as those are destroyed, you fall back more and more, and I think there are something like six box sets that you do. It was five. Five. There was ten total. Okay. So we did both of those. And these are very, for those that aren't familiar, these are the classic Battlefield modes. They go back, as far as my history, Battlefield goes back to Battlefield Bad Company 1. And both of these were the two modes in that.
    54:40
    Yeah, the first Battlefield I played was 1943, which was kind of just a, it was an Xbox Live Arcade type thing. So it only had three maps, and it was just Conquest. but that's what got me into Battlefield. Back then, you know, they had demos for everything. Yes. So I downloaded, played the demos, like, this is a lot of fun. And I bought the full game, and I spent a lot of time on it. And then when Bad Company 2 came out, I bought that. And I can't even imagine how many hours we put in that game. A lot. We've played a lot. We have played a lot of Battlefield. This, we only had one map for the beta. It was the Sinai Desert, which was used for both the modes. the first day of the demo was a big mess.
    55:25
    It wasn't the beta's fault, it appears. EA was having some multi-server issue across all of their games. I don't know if it was DDO. I didn't hear it was DDO. I didn't hear anything about that. Anyway, we got in, but it was very frustrating. It would be one game, and then we were out.
    55:44
    But after the first day, it was smooth. It was very smooth. I think we had a couple of instances each where we would lose connection to the EA server and got kicked or the game would crash.
    55:57
    Unfortunately, crashes have been part of Battlefield, especially since Battlefield 3, where I think they were really pushing the hardware on the Xbox 360s. But this was nothing. It wasn't like once an hour or anything. No, it's just every once in a great while it would crash out. So let's go ahead and talk a bit about our thoughts about Battlefield. And I guess we should predicate this. I'm trying to think of a diplomatic way to say it, and I don't really have a great one. So I'm just going to say it straight up, that Mike and I are, quite frankly, really, really, really good at Battlefield. So, like, we could probably play this game professionally and make fortunes and money. but out of kindness for MLG Gaming, we do not. It's not that, and no offense intended, but it's not that we are great shooter gamers, but rather that we know how to play objectives, and Battlefield rewards you for playing objectives. It always has. Battlefield is not about your kill-to-death ratio. I mean, the top player on the team could have zero kills and 20 deaths, But if they play the objective, they use their support abilities correctly, they can easily still get top score in the game. Yes. And that's what I like about it. And that's why when we talk about the squads and the classes in the game, it's so important. And you can change, like in Overwatch, you can change mid-game and it makes sense sometimes to change. But not because you're at a different point in the map. It makes sense to change because the circumstances of the other army have changed. It's just a play style I really, really enjoy. Let's go ahead and start with Rush, I think. Because I'd say we spent more time with Conquest, but we spent some hours on Rush. We did not short shrift any of this. We take our battlefield very seriously here in Kansas. And so what initial thoughts about any differences that you want to point out versus the Rush from prior battlefields? Well, I mean, it's hard to get a sense of how it's going to go in the full game since we only got one map. Yeah. But Battlefield 4 Rush, I didn't really like it that much, as opposed to the previous games. I felt the maps were just too designed for conquest, with Rush just kind of thrown into it. I agree with this. So I didn't feel they were balanced very well for Rush. It wasn't like back in Bad Company 2, where it was like all the maps were designed for Rush,
    58:27
    with the conquest just thrown in a part of the map. And I mean, a lot of that probably had to do with the fact that it was fewer players. Back then it was 12 on 12, I think. But those maps in that game flowed very well for Rush, whereas Battlefield 3, you kind of started to see it more towards conquest-oriented. But in Battlefield 4, those maps just fell apart for Rush, I felt, on some of them. They didn't feel very well balanced. I agree that it was. And I had read, actually, that the developers had indicated that they, because Conquest has become the most played mode in the Battlefield games, which may not have always been the case historically, at least Rush used to seem to be the initial concept that they really pushed. I think, didn't they start Rush with the Bad Company series? I think, I don't know if they started with it, but I mean, that's what I remember it from. And that was the, that's like what most of my Bad Company 1 play was. I don't, I'm trying to think, was there Conquest in Bad Company 1? I believe there was, but, and the names may not have always been the same as Conquest and Rush, but it seemed, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if that was the first, but it definitely was Push. It was definitely a big popular mode. Because the idea then was there were, the whole plot in the single player is you're after all this gold in the Bad Company series. And that's what those boxes were, were like boxes of gold. And so the attackers are trying to destroy the gold so you can't take it. I guess a page out of Die Hard 3. I don't know. And then defenders are trying to guard their gold so they can keep it.
    60:00
    The map on this one I felt worked pretty well for rough. Yeah, it felt balanced. It felt balanced. I mean, you had multiple directions you could attack from. I mean, you didn't always have to go straight up the middle. You could flank to the sides. The biggest issue I had with that, and I also noticed this in Conquest, was it didn't seem like vehicle deployment was as balanced. Yes, and I felt it mostly with Rush here. And more specifically, it seemed like there was almost a glitch that affected defensive teams. And maybe that's incorrect. But to me, it seemed like defense stopped. I would see the symbol that there were, like, tanks that you were supposed to be able to spawn in, but they were always at zero and I didn't see any tanks on deployment after the first set of boxes for defense. It seemed like after the first set of boxes, there were still at the new spawn points you would get the symbol for deployment into a tank. I often didn't see any. Actually, I don't even know if I ever saw deployment options at the further back defensive boxes, but offense still seemed to have vehicles. And this, I mean, maybe it was intended, but then I don't know why you would show a symbol for zero tank. I mean, it wasn't like they showed planes or anything else. And you had them at the start. And there have been other Battlefield games where you would have vehicles accessible at a certain point and then not have them accessible anymore. That's not atypical, but you'd also never see the option to have them. You wouldn't have them on the spawn map. Yeah, and it was generally more balanced, whereas if you didn't have vehicle deployments anymore, they probably didn't either. Right. Whereas in this one, you had sometimes problems where you'd be back on the third or fourth point back. You have no vehicle options, and they're rolling forward with like three tanks. Yes, and it was a problem. Tanks are already, and some of this is just going to be a learning curve in part, and some of it could very well be balancing issues that need to be addressed. But you go into Battlefield 1, and this extends outside of Rush in and of itself, But I feel that it seems almost overly difficult to deal with tanks. Yes. And as someone who enjoys being in a tank, I don't like to say that lightly. You never want tanks to feel weak. They should always feel like they can take a hit. Yes. But in this, because you've moved away from a war with RPGs, you've got some – all of the – there are distance-capable ways for people to deal with tanks. But most of those, they're personnel-based, things you carry. Like they have a new rocket gun, but it does hardly any damage. You can use your K-Rounds as a scout and snipe into the tank, but it does barely any damage. I mean, almost everything that's at distance does hardly any damage. Well, the problem is even the close-up stuff does hardly any damage. I mean, those little tiny one-person light tanks, I threw three rounds of dynamite on one of those one time, blew it up, and that didn't even take out the tank.
    63:11
    And I think that's a problem because, I mean, in the past games, I mean, tanks, they're powerful. You're in a tank, you can do a lot of damage. but they're balanced by the fact that a single person can still take you out be it someone shooting rockets at you from a distance or someone running up throwing C4 detonate it and one C4 will take out your tank even if it's at full health and in this game it doesn't work that way and I hope that's going to be addressed in the full release they've already said the light tanks in the beta were OP and they're going to nerf them But are they OP on their health? Are they OP on the damage they do? I don't know. Because they seem to do a lot of damage. And that's what I've assumed the nerf will be. They're going to get hit offensively on the nerf stick. You're a light tank. You should not be owning things better than a heavy tank. Yeah. But, you know, maybe it'll affect their defense as well. I've wondered if perhaps their line of thinking was now they're emphasizing more targeted damage on vehicles. so they're thinking, well, tanks will hold up better now because you should be throwing the dynamite on the treads instead. I know. I actually, on one of my builds, I'm using the anti-tank mines, which don't do a ton of damage, but they do really well, it seems, blowing up the treads so that they're disabled. Yeah, but I mean, a tank mine in the last game would take out a tank. Right. Yes. Definitely. You had to watch for it. You had to have your top gunner shooting the ground. Yeah, so I think it's a problem that it takes so much to take out a single tank. Because, I mean, there were times during, like, conquest matches where it would be like, I'm going to go take Charlie. I get to Charlie. They have two tanks sitting there, and it's like, I'm on the class that can take out tanks, and I can't take out one of them by myself. You run out of whatever kind of ammo you use for that. You throw dynamite. You run out of dynamite before you can take a tank out. You use your anti-tank rocket gun. You run out of shots for that. You've done like maybe 50% of the damage on it, if that. You've got those big anti-tank grenades. Oh, yeah. You carry like two of those. Which you can throw like four feet. Yeah. And so that's not a good distance option. So every time you run into a tank, it's just like, well, I'm going to go somewhere else because I can't deal with this. Right. And, I mean, I've seen some people online say, well, people just aren't figuring out how to do it yet. You know, there's all the emplacements you can use. It's like, okay, yeah, I get on the big cannon. I shoot it once, the tank turns and blows me up. Right, that happened to me. Because those emplacements don't seem to be capable of single-shot killing them. No. And I mean, I heard some people say, well, my squad, we have four assaults and a support. We could take out a tank. And it's like, you shouldn't need your entire squad to be based on taking out one target. Right, right. I mean, obviously, some of the scenarios, for example, the need to, you're going to run out of dynamite, or support being able to restock you. Yes, that's a tactical option. It's a tactical option that we employ when we play. The thing that I think it's easy to lose track of on paper is, you know, going in to fight a tank with dynamite is almost a suicide mission anyway. The odds of being able to get back to wherever support has deployed in ammo box to restock, that's part of the thing is the flow of the battle is very, very difficult unless you're in a position of distance and relative safety to actually use med kits effectively. And that's always been true. That's always been true because it would be unrealistic. Otherwise, we'd be like, here, I'm going to just keep pouring in dynamite into your pocket while you're fighting. You have to have certain situations where it can all arise, a true vantage point situation, which was a map from the bad company two days where it was a poorly designed map. It was the most broken map I've ever seen. Just to give a quick summary of it, it was one of the Vietnam-era DLC maps. And the rush mode was very, very frustrating for offense at the very start. Well, the very start turned into spawn as quickly as you can because offense and defense spawn the same distance away from that one box. Yes. And so you spawn in, and it's just a rush to whoever can get that first. Yes. And whoever gets to that first, I mean, if defense gets to that first, offense is probably not going to win. if offense can get to that first well then you've got an easier time getting to that second box and moving on because then you have a fight you get the box armed and we were very we got very good at this where we would get the box armed and then if enough of the rest of your people who don't know about it finally get up there before because it took time takes time to disarm a box then they're able to shoot and keep the box from being disarmed and then you had more options at the second box on approach but what we would refer to, if we were on defense, we would do the same. We would rush to the box to make sure no one could initially arm it. Once the rest of the team catches up, we would set up what we refer to as vantage pointing it, because the name of the map was vantage point, where we would use resupply crates, and then it would be a bunch of assaults with grenade launchers on their assault rifles, and we would just go thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. Or you could do handhelds. Because back in that game, ammo crates resupplied your handheld grenades really fast. So you could sit on an animal crate and just infinitely throw grenades. And that's what we do because they only had one. The first box, there was only one approach that was viable. There was a really, really steep hill. People could try and get up, and all of the snipers were over there taking care of that. Or you could vantage point up there, too. You could just do vantage. If the other people on your team figured out what we were doing, there was no way anyone was getting through. Right, and people would quit out, and we would have super-duper kill-to-death ratios, and we would laugh at them. And then if we were on offense and we couldn't get that box armed right away and keep it armed, then it just depends. A lot of other, I mean, sometimes they didn't know about vantage pointing, but a lot of people did. And it was very frustrating. So we don't like to see, for fairness reasons, we don't like to see vantage pointing in new games. And this avoided that. But outside, the whole reason I brought up vantage point was that was a rare situation where you could actually constantly resupply explosives in a safe manner. Yeah. That normally does not happen. It doesn't happen much here. Well, yeah, and I mean, those things now don't respond to you as fast. Right. What do you think of the change on tank repair, where you can repair inside the tank?
    69:44
    You know, I'm kind of mixed on that. As a person who likes to drive a tank a lot, I like it. As a person who likes to blow up tanks as well, I don't like it. because one of the things that, you know, like Battlefield 4 and all the previous ones, you know, you start shooting a tank with your RPG, which I really miss my RPG.
    70:06
    So you're shooting your tank with an RPG or something from a distance, and the tank gets to low health. They get out and try to repair.
    70:15
    You run up, kill the guy that's repairing, take the tank. Right. I used to do that all the time. And so with this one, I mean, with the self-repair, you can't really do that. Yeah, I think the self-repair has contributed to the problem with the tanks being too hard to defeat. So I'm actually going to come down against the idea of the self-repair. When I'm driving, I do also enjoy using it. I imagine the developers thought, well, now that everyone else who's in the tank, there's not a build where you can, unless you were the tank driver, where you can go around and have your repair tool and fix the tanks. So it's not like everyone can get out and constantly keep your tank alive. But on the flip side, no one now has to get out to keep the tank alive, which means your option for if you can't destroy the tank, hurt the tank enough, make the driver get out, and then try and take out the driver. That's not an option anymore. I get that the driver can't do anything while he's repairing the tank. Okay, on the light tank, maybe that will, after it's nerfed, make a difference. On the other tanks, it doesn't mean a whole lot. and it does a decent amount of repair. And because of the limited options, it's not like you're getting hit with a bunch of RPGs anymore. Yeah. It's pretty safe to stay in and repair the tank. I mean, the only time it's not been for me is when other tanks... I mean, right now, the only real effective way I feel to fight tanks is with other tanks. Yeah. Which it's always been that tank versus tank is a supposed to be thing. And so that's good. But yeah, I think they're lasting a little bit too long. I think the self-repair is a good thing, I think, for airplanes. Yes. Because, you know, it's kind of hard to land an airplane, get out, and repair it. So, I mean, that's useful for them. But for tanks, it's not something I really think they need. Let's transition over to talking about the conquest mode some. It's different now. How the ticket system works is different now. The same base concept is in place. You want to control as many points as possible because that's what lets you win. The big change that they had in the beta, though, is in the olden days, killing the enemy cost them tickets.
    72:27
    Now it's ticking up instead of ticking down because there is no costing of tickets anymore. Killing the enemy does not help your team win. Control is everything. Control is the only thing. What are your thoughts on that shift? um because this is pretty controversial yeah battlefield fans personally i like it because i've always played battlefield to the old what they call ptfo play the effing objective and so i like that it's the points now are all about controlling those objectives i understand some of the criticisms of it because it's like well certain things they don't feel like they're contributing. Like I know some people said, you know, if you're in an airplane, you can sort of try and capture like the E point. But otherwise, all you're up there doing is killing and they don't feel like you're contributing. And my thought is, well, you just described 90% of snipers. Right. And that's what I've assumed is why this changes in place is it is not joking. We've seen in Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 situations where half of our own team is recon snipers all on hills trying to shoot people in the head instead of actually going and they never go and try and capture a point and and the rationalization see there always a rationalization and that rationalization is well I depleting tickets for you My kills are useful It like everyone knows that the reason they doing it is they want to have an amazing kill ratio because they're obsessed with that stat. But practically speaking, they did have a point. They were helping bleed tickets. They just weren't helping nearly as much as controlling one more point would have helped. And, I mean, the problem is, I mean, in the past games, your recon class, I think they call them scout and battlefield line. Yeah, they do. They always had some kind of support mechanisms that could be useful.
    74:23
    Spot mines? Spot mines or the little, what was it called, tugs in the last game. Yeah, yeah. You could put those on like a conquest point or near a rush objective, and then you could see when the enemy was coming. But a lot of times they're so far away that none of that stuff is useful. They're using their respawn beacon so they can just get back to their little Heidi Hill. So it doesn't help the squad have a good position for fighting on the objectives. Yeah, so it's like, okay,
    74:51
    I'm dead, everyone else in my squad that was fighting for the objective is dead, our options are to redeploy in the base, or spawn on our recon guy who's out in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And I figured that part of the situation there was that they, I'm assuming DICE realized that There were a lot of situations where, I mean, it was very responsive base. It was closer. And that's sad. That should be the furthest. Or at least the base you had a vehicle to get to. Yes.
    75:21
    So, yeah. So this, again, because we only got to play one map, it's hard to speak broadly on Conquest outside of this major change. My thought on the change itself is I'm okay with it. I'm willing to see where, I don't hate it. I do get it. I get the idea where it's like, okay, well, if you're in an aircraft, are you worthless?
    75:44
    You're not. You're not because being able to bomb all those tanks down there and get rid of them helps with capturing of the point. Yeah, and I mean, I got a little bit of airplane time, and this isn't going to be like Battlefield 4 where it's like, oh, well, there's the jets up there doing their jet thing against other jets. Right. Maybe occasionally taking on a helicopter, which is actually helpful because helicopters can hurt you on the ground, whereas jets are pretty much useless against the ground. This one, you know, you're in biplanes and stuff. They're not, you know, flying supersonic across the battlefield. They're helpful. Yes. I got killed by the bomber several times trying to capture a point. I'm sitting there like, okay, I'm capturing, I'm capturing, suddenly bombs are raining down on me and I'm dead. So I feel the airplanes are still useful. While they may not be able to capture all the points, there was that one point, like I said, that an airplane you could kind of control.
    76:40
    But I feel, you know, if you're in an airplane and you see, okay, well, that point's being taken, I can go over there, curb bomb the place, and maybe take out a person or two who's trying to claim it. That can still be helpful towards the team. And the airplanes are the best way to take out that train when it comes in. Yes. I mean, if they can do a bombing on them across that train, that'll do a lot of damage to it. I think that, I mean, to me, the big change on the ticket setup and the conquest point thing is to deal with sniperpalooza. That's my assumption of what DICE was doing.
    77:16
    I'm fine with keeping it this way for doing the conquest points. What I would advocate is if there is a way to perhaps make it so that – because the biggest issue, honestly, outside of the snipers who just need to learn to deal with it, in my view, is the planes. They need to be able to help with the claiming of the points a little bit more, and then I think that alleviates some of that concern. Because here's the problem. On the Sinai Desert map, they've got one point where it's broad enough that planes could be able to circle around and constantly claim a point. It's the echo point, but it's way out in the middle of nowhere. So it's like, oh, well, that's the plane point. They're away from the rest of the fight. I don't like that. If it was closer, no problem. If it was that they could maybe claim instead of that point, if it was more like Charlie and Delta had almost overlapping broad ranges and the planes could stay in the middle of the map there because those two points are so close together, that would, I think that would they don't need to be able to claim all the points but I think if they had that they would feel like oh okay, we've got Echo let's go work on Charlie or Delta and then Alpha, Bravo and Foxtrot are all none of these are said this way anymore, they're all apples and butter now but I still use the old phonetic alphabet the old being the new everything that is once old is new again so yeah, that would be my That would be my tweak. Because I'd like to see this longer term to see if it actually helps. There's still tons of people playing Recon on those hills. But it didn't feel like 50% like it used to. Except on some of the rush modes where there's good strategic sense for defense. As much as I hate it, it's smart for them to all be up there with their scopes gleaming as they blow all our heads off as we try and advance.
    79:09
    Let's talk about a few other just sort of disparate aspects of the game. Horses? Yes, let's talk about ponies, as I call them. Ponies. Oh, I do love riding a pony with my saber slashing. Majestic creatures of death. Can a cavalry officer slice a tank in half with a saber? I never checked. However, it seems... I think that's the one thing they can't do. But it does seem that every person, even the heavily armored grind locust gunner type guy, it was one hit kills with the swords if on horse. If you're off horse, then you had to beat them down a little bit more. But yeah, I'm thinking maybe a bit OP. Maybe a bit. The horses absorb a lot of damage. I started killing them on purpose because I just got tired of them. I mean, they'd be like friendly to stationary ponies or neutral ponies. I was like, no, this horse is going to die. Because people would be on those horses and maybe you'll snap a headshot and get lucky. Maybe you'll hit the body, the torso eventually and get him down. Well, the problem is, it wasn't just the horses were sponges. If you were on a horse, you were a sponge as well. Oh, yeah, you are stronger. Don't look it. You've got your spiffy little cap. Yeah, your little, you know, like leather coat or whatever. but it's like you're spraying a fire and there's a guy on the horse like he's not dying no and if you do die well then he falls off and the horse still brings you over and it's not just the saber that's effective up close the rifle he gets is pretty good too he's just hip firing but with the reticle you get it's pretty easy to hip fire I initially wasn't even trying to use the rifle at all and I started and I was like oh wow this is actually really effective and the horse itself is a vehicle of death. I had two instances where I was killed while charging someone to try and savor them and in both cases I got roadkill credits. I called them roadkill because the horse ran forward continued to run forward and trampled them to death as my war pony was trained to do. I was expecting to watch it eat them. It did not eat them. That would have been exciting. I think we both agree horses are a little too powerful. At least on the defensive side, I would say. I like the concept. It's something completely new to the game.
    81:34
    It's a new way to move around. I like that they're useful. I just think they're a little too useful.
    81:41
    They are essentially the replacement for what I would consider the quad bikes and motorcycles in prior battlefields. I hated those because you feel worthless and helpless unless someone's riding on the back of your quad with you and has their gun. In this, you're actually still able to fight, but yeah, they're a little too useful at the present time. Here's a thing that maybe doesn't affect a huge percentage of people, but oh gosh, the inversion controls were messed up. Yeah. So the game supports, as it always has, it supports inversion. Mike and I just coincidentally, we both play with a Y-inverted approach. And this dates back to how I played shooters on PC and flight sims and all that. So anyway, so I always invert Y. I always have an inverted look. So when I push down on the controller, I expect my head to go up. I don't think that so much just pushing down as pulling back. Yeah, it is. I'm trying to describe it for the layperson because most of our listeners probably don't play flight sims. They probably just play pinball. I don't know. We'll see. but anyway so this supported the inversion it even supported if you just wanted to invert for planes because some people will invert but only in flight because they only invert for flight sets so they know that's a thing and that worked fine other than if you inverted you did not invert for flight also because then that re-inverted it de-inverted you on the plane the double inversion cancelled itself but only for planes because it was the flight inversion Yeah, that was weird. So they apparently created a double negative scenario there, which, okay, I'll remember to keep that in mind. Here's the problem. Tank driving. Yes. For some reason, all of the tanks, just the tanks though, not the horses, not the Jeeps, but all of the tanks, the driver was not inverted. It would, no matter what, you were not inverted. I did not see a scenario where you were. Yeah. You switch over to a side gunner, inversion's back on. Mm-hmm. They need to fix this. This will screw everyone up who plays Inverted and all real players play Inverted. So I saw, and it wasn't Xbox specific, I saw people on the PlayStation 4 Battlefield forums complaining about it. I didn't check on PC. I did a search to see were other people having this issue and they were. And they were asking for help. And then people who obviously didn't play Inverted would just say things like, well, did you invert it? Yeah, we know how to invert. We have to do it for every game when we start. This is how it is. So that was actually the biggest bug that bothered me, was a lack of proper inversion on tank driving. Because I started holding the right stick weird, like I'd put my hand on top of it. I'd reposition it on the base of my thumb, not the tip, just to try and mentally tell myself that's some sort of trick. So I'd remember, this is not inverted. I need to, if I want the tank to go down, I pulled back instead of pushing forward. It was just very annoying. Very, very annoying.
    84:53
    Because, I mean, it would be like, okay, I've been in a tank for a while, and now I'm out of the tank, and now my brain's scrambled trying to figure out which way is up.
    85:02
    I don't really have any other complaints to point out. Gun selection, on the last day of the beta, they unlocked all of the weapons for everyone. All of the weapons that they had available. That they had available, which are, it was a limited set. And we'd actually already earned a number of them because we played this so much on the classes that we really liked. There are a lot of cool ones. I'm sure Tony will hate all of them for being way too modern-esque prototypes that got snuck into a war they barely featured in. But they were a lot of fun. Yeah. I liked, I mean, some of them felt really well. And I mean, I liked that they had versions that had kind of scopes on them to a degree. or even just, you know, better than iron sights. Yeah, they had some sights where it would be like they've got iron crossbars, so they basically were serving the role of red dots or red line scopes, but they were metal, so it was okay. They're steampunky, so it's all right. Were there any of the new gadgets that you liked? I mean, I kind of liked the anti-tank rocket gun. I just wish it had a lot more power to it. It's really good on infantry, I've seen. Yeah. Well, I mean, and then there's also the fact that you have to go prone to use it. Yes. Or at least, I guess, maybe if you were, like, behind a wall, you could put it on the wall. I mean, I think upping the power on that would help a lot with the tanks. Right. And it's probably going to have to be my replacement for my anti-sniper weapon since there's no RPG. Right. But that was kind of cool. I think dynamite needs to be more powerful because it's basically the C4 replacement. Mm-hmm. I mean, most of the other stuff was pretty much common, so if you're on your resupply crates and stuff. Yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of super unique gadgets. Some of them were just different iterations, like anti-tank mines. We've had anti-tank mines before. I'd say the biggest one that I noticed, though none of my builds used it, was the gas grenade. Yes. And that was pretty clever because you cannot aim down sights when you've got the gas mask on. So that's its main value. You're probably not going to choke someone to death with mustard gas, which, interestingly, much like in World War I, other than the first time it was used, gas didn't get a lot of people. They had to deal with it was the problem. You had to crawl up out of the trenches and stuff because it would sink even though you had your gas masks and such. But, yeah, so I thought that was pretty clever. Otherwise, all of my gadgets were pretty typical stuff that I've had in other games. I preferred incendiary grenades myself. I've always been partial to them because I like how they scream, how they scream as they cook. Well, speaking of fire, I guess we should talk about the little special pickup type class things they have. Oh, yeah. I barely grabbed any of them, so I almost forgot about that. But you're right. There were a couple of specialty class, three maybe on the map. There was a minigun-esque guy, grind guy. There was a flamethrower, and then wasn't there like an anti-tank gun? Yes, there was basically like an Uber version of the anti-tank rifle. Right. I got that once. The problem with that is it spawned out in E. It was out in the middle of nowhere. Right. So you have to go down there and get it. Hope you can actually claim it. Hope that there's not for some reason like two or three snipers camping down there, because there always seem to be. Which didn't make sense. Because they can't see anything else down there. For those that aren't familiar, Echo is way to the south of the rest of the combat, and it's kind of in a valley surrounded by sand dunes. So it's not like they can look back at the other points and see them. There's nothing to see. You're down in a gulf. So if you wanted that anti-tank rifle, you had to go down there. Hope it was actually down there and someone else somewhere on the map wasn't carrying it around. I got to use it once. It does what I think the anti-tank rifle should do. I was able to take out a tank in, like, I think five shots, which for, like, an uber weapon, I think it should be less, especially since it's so hard to get.
    89:02
    But that was, I mean, it was, overall, it was pretty neat. Like I said, I feel it should be more powerful, and the normal one that you can carry should be at about that power. Okay, I never got that one, so I have no comments. The big heavy gun guy was kind of cool. I died to a lot of them. I also never got a chance to pick it up. Really? That spawned a box truck. Oh, I saw it. I never got a chance to grab it. I used it a couple of times. It's very satisfying. It does look fun. Because, I mean, the guy that you're carrying it, you're in like a full suit of armor. At least in the front. Yeah. So you're harder to take down. I mean, obviously, the gun is too big. You can't iron sight it. So you're all just hip firing it. But it does so much damage. It's got good range. I mean, it spreads out some at range, but it's devastating. Now, the flamethrower. I did get to use the flamethrower once. I cooked one person. The problem with it is it was at B. And so you're trying to get from B to, like, over maybe, like, C, D area where a lot of the action is really taking place. So you've got that long desert kind of area you have to go across. But if you're in, like, that, you know, Charlie Delta or whatever. Delta is now Duff or whatever. Yeah, Duff Man. But if you're in that area with the flamethrower where all those buildings are, it works wonderful. Yeah, and I was actually going away from those buildings over to Foxtrot when I had it, so I was in the open. Because I had it running around in there for a while, and I cooked a lot of people. No, definitely in city combat scenarios, tight quarter areas, the flamethrower, it's got decent range. Yeah, it's got decent range, as a flamethrower really should. I think that's a big problem a lot of games get wrong. They think flamethrowers are just like shotguns and they have no range. When a real flamethrower has some pretty good range.
    90:53
    That's our summary of Battlefield 1. I have pre-ordered it. Yes. Overall, it is very enjoyable. There's just a few balance tweaks that I think to be made, mostly with horses and tanks and fixing that tank inversion problem. Yeah, and I have a high degree of confidence that that got picked up in the beta. I've seen it's been reported on Battlefield forums. So, yes, October 21st, in the U.S. at least, is the release. That's a Friday, isn't it? You know, I don't know. I think it is. All these days blend together. What a weird release day. I know, but it's like, I might have to take that Saturday off work. No, no, no. You need to work to pay for your battlefield. I can pay for my battlefield. Oh, okay. Well, let's go to our final segment, which is the tabletop segment. You know, normally Tony does practically all of the background research on tabletop. And we should give him some credit for this because it is he who has referred to this game a couple of times. And I've been unable, I have been suppressed, I have been prevented from ever really explaining the truth of it. And so Mike and I are going to talk a little bit about Pandemic once and for all to let everyone know exactly what it is. And I have a link to the game info in the show notes, so you can go and you can read up on Pandemic in case you questioned the authenticity of these descriptions. But there is no reason to question them. You are in capable hands, and trust me, this game is as bad as I have always tried to claim that it is. So let me summarize it properly, because we never really have. What is Pandemic? Pandemic's plot to the game is that there are virulent diseases, and they've broken out. They're different ones, and they've broken out simultaneously all over the Earth. So you have a game board, and it depicts several major population centers on Earth. Each turn, your team of players is cooperative. You travel between cities. You have different classes that each of you play, which have different abilities that you can exploit while playing. and you try and treat the infected populace and discover a cure for each of the diseases by building a research station and doing all of this sort of research. You have a deck of cards, and the deck of cards provides the players with their abilities, but there are also epidemic cards that are in the game, and those cards accelerate and intensify the activity that the diseases are doing. So now with Tony out of the way, Mike and I are going to explain why this game is crap. Mike what do you think of Pandemic? you can't win it exactly this is what I have tried to say on two different episodes now and Tony lamely replies you can win it I think it's just a mass delusion of those people that have won it no you didn't win it you just think you did I've suspected that as is actually fairly common on a number of tabletop games Unfortunately, and this is one of the weaknesses of tabletop gaming, that this is something that you have to accept because you don't have a computer handling things for you, is that they probably didn't actually play by the rules. I'm sure they thought, I'm sure Johnny thought that he was playing by the rules, but they probably misinterpreted something, like maybe they didn't draw an epidemic card right. Or perhaps, I could imagine it'd be possible that if you didn't trust to randomness, you could win perhaps through randomness. Or if someone deliberately put all the epidemic cards on the bottom of the deck or something along those lines.
    94:30
    It's just the way the game is set up, the disease has just spread because there are multiple ones. It's not like a real epidemic. I mean, a real epidemic would be catastrophic. They've been catastrophic in our past. But generally, you only have one epidemic at a time. You don't have four. You don't have four of them at a time where you're trying to solve what all these different diseases are and you're globetrotting around the world because when there were like four major disease outbreaks, the world said, we got to deal with this. Let's send in five people. No, no. So it's not realistic. It's not a realistic interpretation of disease. It's not a realistic interpretation of the profession of public health. and it's not a realistic depiction of anything except life because you don't win at life and you don't win at this everything is just a loss so from that perspective it's a great metaphor but beyond that I can't think of can you think of any virtues Mike of this game maybe some praise that we should sing of it I'm going to feel really sort of almost bad if the developers of the game were to listen to this episode, except I think that they know they meant to make a game that couldn't be won. So they're probably quite satisfied. Well, I would say if it has any good values to it, it does promote teamwork because we learned very quickly. Like, the first time we played it, we were just like, okay, we're playing it, we're seeing how it plays out, and we didn't get anywhere near winning. And so we realized, okay, we have to go at this, and even before we start, we have to figure out what each of us is going to be doing. Right, right. Like, we had the who is going to build the research? You build all the research stations because that's your perk. And you can carry two of the whatever, so you do that. And then we draw our cards, and then before we even did anything else, it's like, okay, what do we got? Who's going where? Who's going to do what? We try and figure it out before we even really start playing the game, so we have a game plan, so maybe we can try and win, even though we were delusional, thinking we could. Well, Tony built up that delusion, because we played with him, and he kept insisting that it could be... He actually downplayed... like he didn't tell us that we would almost definitely lose even he didn't even suggest that as i recall just after we lost he said that oh yeah well it's pretty common to lose well yes 100 is a pretty common outcome but and i mean there were times where we thought we were going to win it's like okay we've got everything figured out all we need to do is get you here i'll give you this and then we'll have everything we need to win and then we'd be going and we'd realize we run out of cards like the person before we could win and it's like that's my design it made us think we could win no because we went in with and that's why i'm so certain that is not meant to be one is we went in with i have to i mean i don't i don't want to sound boastful but we went in with as far as i could tell a perfect strategic plan on how to execute it so i guess if you could chalk it up to bad luck bad draws or whatever but the bottom line is we played the game properly. We played the game perfectly. We used our minds and we should have won. And when your mind can't overcome the cards, it means the cards are designed to not let you win. It was very sad. So I do not recommend Pandemic to people who enjoy winning games. But if you like to lose or maybe you win too much in life and want to feel what loss is like, go ahead and give it a try. But you finally heard the full truth, I feel. Well, that's it for episode 17. we should have another episode in two weeks and thanks again Mike for joining us on the podcast once more no problem I got to talk a lot about Battlefield yes we went video game heavy because that is your wheelhouse and I'm more than happy and not to mention that that's been what I've been primarily playing as well so it fed in quite nicely until next time I'm Dennis and I will say so long everyone