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Pinpals Ep 11 - 2025 Pinpals Awards Show

Electric Bat Cast·podcast_episode·3h 17m·analyzed·Feb 5, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.034

TL;DR

Pin Pals 2025 Awards: 40+ technical awards for 8 2025 games, deep design analysis.

Summary

Pin Pals hosts a live 2025 awards show featuring deep technical analysis across 40+ categories for 8 nominated games (Dungeons & Dragons, King Kong, Dune, Evil Dead, Harry Potter, Portal, Predator, Star Wars: Fall of the Empire). Rather than generic awards, they break down lighting into five subcategories (theme immersion, attraction, moments, rules communication, overall), with similar depth for display, sound, and code. Dune wins theme immersion lighting; Harry Potter wins attraction; Predator wins moments lighting; Star Wars wins rules communication lighting.

Key Claims

  • Pin Pals will give approximately 40 awards across lighting, display, sound, playfield design, and code categories

    high confidence · Serge explicitly states this is the structure of the show, displayed on multiple presentation slides

  • Winchester and Beetlejuice are excluded from 2025 awards because code is not complete/shipping is too early

    high confidence · Serge explains Winchester code 'isn't there yet' and Beetlejuice 'hasn't even shipped yet' so they'll count for 2026

  • Cale is receiving one of the first Beetlejuice machines, possibly with a custom serial number

    high confidence · Cale states 'It should be number 10 or close to that' and discusses potential custom numbering

  • Walking Dead Remastered had no new code, only cosmetic updates from the original 2015 release

    high confidence · Serge: 'We played the Walking Dead Remastered...there was just nothing new in the code when the game came out in 2025'

  • Dune achieves superior day/night theme immersion through subtle lighting changes compared to Avatar's failed UV lighting approach

    high confidence · Cale confirms: 'JJP with all of their resources tried to pull off something like this in Avatar. And it just missed the mark...the lighting to me is inferior to Dune'

  • Predator's lighting creates meaningful moments through camouflage mode effects and minigun multiball with forest lighting

    high confidence · Serge demonstrates videos of pink predator lighting reveal and jungle blast multiball lighting sequences

  • Predator may become a rare collectible similar to Big Bang Bar with limited production run

    medium confidence · Cale speculation: 'This game's going to become kind of like one of those rare gems, kind of like a Big Bang Bar'

  • Star Wars: Fall of the Empire has clear rules communication lighting with color-coded mode difficulty (green=easy, yellow=medium, orange=hard)

    high confidence · Serge demonstrates video showing F-O-R-C character spots with different colors indicating difficulty levels

Notable Quotes

  • “This is a hobby of obsessive, crazy, passionate people. And despite that bar, you might be one of the craziest.”

    Serge (paraphrasing audience feedback) @ ~0:00-1:00 — Sets tone for the community-driven awards show; acknowledges pinball enthusiast intensity

  • “We dive insanely deep into the layout and especially the code of every game. And we're definitely going to do that today. So we're not just going to give an award for code, for example. We're going to give 20 awards for code.”

    Serge @ ~2:30 — Establishes Pin Pals' unique deep-analysis approach vs. other awards shows

  • “The code isn't there yet. And this isn't just a show about what games were introduced in the past year. It's really diving deep into the code, the layout, things that are playable by a good percentage of the public.”

    Serge (justifying game exclusions) @ ~7:45 — Clarifies Pin Pals criteria: games must have complete, playable code to qualify

  • “I don't consider that code. You hit things, something happens. But I don't consider that code.”

    Serge (on Alice in Wonderland kit game) @ ~10:15 — Defines Pin Pals' threshold for what constitutes 'code' in their analysis

  • “This game's going to become kind of like one of those rare gems, kind of like a Big Bang Bar. You know, there's only a few hundred out there. People are going to want to get their hands on it in the future.”

    Cale (on Predator) @ ~35:00 — Predator positioned as potential future collectible due to rarity and quality

  • “You felt like you were on an amusement park ride...I would argue the theme shouldn't make you feel that, but I agree with you. You did feel like that.”

    Cale (on Harry Potter JJP attraction) @ ~28:45 — Acknowledges JJP's overwhelming lighting creates emotional/attraction response despite theme-gameplay disconnect

  • “I lost out of a championship there from a finals because I lost against Neil Graff on not understanding how to use that ball save on the premium.”

    Jimmy Morgan (chat comment) — Real competitive consequence of unclear rules communication on Star Wars Premium/LE

Entities

SergepersonCalepersonRachelpersonPin PalsorganizationElectric Bat ArcadeorganizationDunegameHarry Pottergame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Predator Arnold Schwarzenegger call-outs remain controversial within community despite otherwise strong reception

    medium · Cale acknowledges: 'The sound is great. Not the call-outs. I know there's the whole thing with Arnold...'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pin Pals awards show format designed in response to community request, demonstrating audience demand for deep technical analysis beyond standard award categories

    high · Serge: 'We weren't planning on doing an award show because obviously there are other award shows out there. But people reached out to us and said...'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Predator receives surprise positive reception for lighting effects despite lower profile; hosts anticipate it becoming recognized gem

    medium · Serge: 'I'm going to give a shout-out to Predator, actually. And that's going to shock a few people.' Cale enthusiastically agrees after viewing demos

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Avatar's UV lighting feature, touted as major selling point, failed to deliver effective theme immersion in practice compared to Dune's day/night system

    high · Cale: 'JJP with all of their resources tried to pull off something like this in Avatar. And it just missed the mark...the lighting to me is inferior to Dune'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Dune achieves superior theme immersion through subtle, integrated lighting effects (day/night, sand mechanics) vs. JJP's overt attraction-focused approach

    high · Serge demonstrates three distinct thematic lighting moments; Cale confirms superiority to Avatar UV implementation

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.593

0:00
We don't know what's going on. We think we could do our podcast live. We don't even do any edits, right, Cale, on our podcast? We just speak? We're going to show people how we do it. Right, we are going to show people how we do it.
0:14
But as far as you're concerned, you would say we're live now and we can start, right? I think we are live.
0:21
All right, then. Hey, everyone. How's it going? Welcome to the Pintals Award Show for 2025. Cale, we weren't planning on doing an award show because obviously there are other award shows out there. But people reached out to us and said, Serge, this is a hobby of obsessive, crazy, passionate people. And despite that bar, you might be one of the craziest. And I take that as an honor, Cale, by the way. Anyway, what were you going to say, Cale? Sorry, you go. No, no. I'm with you. I was writing a message to Rachel to say, like, hey, come in and comment to, like, test to make sure everything's going properly. Okay, good. I was doing some behind-the-scenes stuff. You should be doing those behind-the-scenes stuff. So that's what we're going to do today, Cale. We're going to do our award show.
1:10
And they said, what do you think of the year in pinball? And we're going to do that today, but not like all the others have done before. You're talking about 2025, right? 2025, right. we will be giving all the usual awards for lighting, display, sound, playfield design, code. And, yes, other podcasts are doing that too. But if you watch the show so far, the Pintel show so far, you know that we're different here. We dive insanely deep into the layout and especially the code of every game. And we're definitely going to do that today. So we're not just going to give an award for code, for example. We're going to give 20 awards for code. Let me show you what I mean. But first, I think you deserve it. What are you going to say, Cale? Well, have you noticed that we have some comments? Hey, I can see them. Hey, thanks, Bear. And Damon, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah. For you early joiners, I think you get to hear our award show theme song. Are you ready for it?

  • Andrew Wilkening at Stern designed the lighting for Star Wars: Fall of the Empire

    high confidence · Serge cites conversation with Ray Day: 'Andrew Wilkening did the lighting for this game'

  • Star Wars Premium/LE has a ball save feature that is not clearly communicated to players

    medium confidence · Jimmy Morgan comment: 'I lost out of a championship...from not understanding how to use that ball save on the premium'

    • @ ~52:30

  • “I believe that just as I believe like Jurassic Park has perfect code, I believe that Flash Gordon is the best classic of all time.”

    Serge @ ~45:00 — Personal benchmark: Flash Gordon lighting rules communication standard referenced in awards context

  • “The lighting is great in the game. The sound is great. Not the call-outs. I know there's the whole thing with Arnold, but the sound effects are actually there.”

    Cale (on Predator) @ ~36:00 — Acknowledges Predator Arnold call-out controversy but separates it from overall sound effects quality

  • “Stern is so good at code, frankly, and just kind of structure of what code should be like and having to communicate things to the player.”

    Cale @ ~51:30 — Recognition of Stern's strength in code structure and player communication

    • Predator
    game
    Star Wars: Fall of the Empiregame
    King Konggame
    Dungeons & Dragonsgame
    Evil Deadgame
    Portalgame
    Barrels of Funcompany
    Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
    Pinball Brotherscompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Andrew Wilkeningperson
    Spooky Pinballcompany
    Multimorphiccompany
  • ?

    licensing_signal: Star Wars: Fall of the Empire lighting uses color-coding system to communicate mode difficulty without explicit text, suggesting design constraint around display text overlay

    medium · Serge: 'Green being easy and yellow being a little bit medium...you're not going to understand that the first time you play, but over time it matters'

  • $

    market_signal: Predator positioned as potential future rare collectible with limited production run, similar to Big Bang Bar scarcity model

    medium · Cale: 'This game's going to become kind of like one of those rare gems, kind of like a Big Bang Bar. You know, there's only a few hundred out there'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Andrew Wilkening credited as lighting designer for Star Wars: Fall of the Empire; demonstrates division of lighting labor at Stern

    high · Ray Day conversation cited; Serge credits Wilkening for rules communication lighting implementation

  • ?

    product_strategy: 2025 games (Dune, Evil Dead, Harry Potter, Predator, Star Wars) all rank in Pinside Top 11-20, indicating sustained quality and staying power beyond launch hype

    high · Serge: 'These have staying power. Like Dune, Evil Dead, Harry Potter, they're all in the top 11 or so on the ratings'

  • ?

    product_concern: Star Wars: Fall of the Empire Premium/LE has unclear ball save mechanic causing competitive disadvantage; players losing tournaments due to lack of documentation

    high · Jimmy Morgan: 'I lost out of a championship...from not understanding how to use that ball save on the premium'

    • 2:04
    It's the Tim Powell's award show with Cale and Snow. Watch as they go. Ridiculously deep. Perhaps too deep. With over 40 technical awards and pinball designed over the past year, our audience at Q demands this level of madness.
    2:33
    Absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. Can we get an applause? Can you hear that surge? I do hear that, Cale. Thank you so much. There we go. Yes, that is the opening short version of our Pin Pals theme song. I did actually make a longer one. I thought maybe that would be too crazy. Maybe for the outro. For the outro? All right, all right. I'll try to remember that to do that in the end.
    2:57
    And so our viewers here might wonder, how did you choose these awards? What complex formula has led to these very clear conclusions? The math is too complicated to get into here, Cale, and it involved much calculus. But in essence, it boiled down to my own personal opinions. And so with each award, I'll say what I thought. But very much, Cale, I want to leave room for your thoughts. You're a player. You're a pinball enthusiast. But you're really an operator, especially. And so you bring that unique perspective that I lack. And if there's a disagreement, Cale, I love it. I want to hear it. And with that said, Cale, are you ready to start? Let's go, man. I've been waiting all week for this. All right. So I'm going to go through the awards first here. Like I said, there's going to be lighting, display, sound, play field design, and code. But a lot, lot deeper than that. And so I'll tell you what I mean. So when I say lighting, I mean five different awards for lighting, right? People just give the lighting award, and they always give it to J.J.P. because they have the biggest and brightest lights, but that's not how we think about it here. We talk about lighting has four different functions as far as I'm concerned in pinball. The four functions are theme immersion. Can you use lighting to make you feel like you're in the game? You know, Rick and Morty has that when you get into dimensions, for example. It gives you weird lighting on the play field. Attraction, that's the traditional thing people think of when they think of lighting. they think, oh, look, that looks cool. Let me go over to that game. That's what we mean by attraction. Moments, and I don't just mean moments. Later we're giving awards for moments in code, but moments in lighting. You can actually use the lighting to amp you up, to make you feel like a big moment is happening. We'll talk about rules communication. You could use lighting for that, telling the player what's going on in the game and what do you have to do. That's sort of an underappreciated value of lighting. And often from early as pinball, one of the most important things to do about it. And then we'll give the overall lighting achievement. Cale, do you have any questions about our lighting awards, our five awards? No, it's crystal clear. That's good. All right.
    4:52
    So, exactly, Pocket. I agree. We don't like the everything is lit awards, you know, where everything's lit and people are like, oh, that's the best lighting. To me, that's the worst lighting when everything is lit, you know, because you just don't communicate anything. So theme immersion, number one. I'm going to tell you my award for it. But before I go through, I'm just going to give you an overview of the other awards. We're going to talk about the display, and we're not going to just say, oh, best display. We're going to say, which is the most informative display in the last year? What's the most innovative display that's done something different with it? What about the animations? And then the overall display award. And then when we get to sound, we'll talk about sound effects. We'll talk about score. We'll talk about call-outs, all three of them. And then we'll talk about best overall sound. So with each award, I'm going to give a best overall, but we're going to really dive deep into each individual one. playfield design, many awards for that. And you can read them here now, but I promise we'll go over each individual one as we go along. And then, of course, code. Code is two pages, two slides here. I'm going to give ten different awards for the ten PinPals criteria for what makes good code, things like moments and theme immersion and breadth and depth, et cetera. And then separate from that, I'm going to give additional awards for what has the best launch code, best individual mode, best overall modes, multiballs, multipliers, missions, all of that. Of course, we'll do the best all-around champion in code over the past year. So those are all our many, many awards that we're going to be doing. It's about over 40 awards. Strap in, people. We're really going deep on this one, as you might expect from us.
    6:22
    And so let's talk about the games, though. What are the 2025 games? So here's the total nominees. You know, we have from Stern Pinball, Dungeons & Dragons, and King Kong. We have from Barrels, Dune, and Spooky had Evil Dead, and JGP had Harry Potter, and don't forget Portal from P3 Multimorphic, and Pinball Brothers had Predator. Oh, I almost forgot about Star Wars, Fall of the Empire. There are a bunch at the bottom here, but I'm going to cross those out, and I'm going to tell you why I'm crossing those out for these 2025s. So Winchester, I'm removing it because I'm considering it for 2026. It's shipping now, slowly. The code isn't there yet. And this isn't just a show about, like, what games, you know, were introduced in the past year. It's really diving deep into the code, the layout, things that are playable by a good percentage of the public. So that's why Winchester will not count. Similarly, Beetlejuice, I'll be counting that for 2026. Hasn't even shipped yet, to my knowledge. And I know, Cale, you're going to get one of the first ones. Is that right? Yeah, it should be number 10 or close to that. I don't know how they're going to do the numbering. we might get a custom number. You know, you can... Oh, I like that. Yeah, just do that.
    7:33
    Are they going to add an account? What do you think? It should be soon. All right. No, I think they stopped with the show games, right?
    7:42
    Thanks so much for the shout-out to the singing, Damon. And then we're not going to count Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I removed it because it's too niche. Jaws 50th, I removed because I consider Jaws 2024 a great game. But I'm not going to call the Jaws 50 as something new in code. It came out in 2024. Walking Dead Remastered, I removed it because I consider that 2015. You know, unless it had new code, which it didn't, by the way. You know, so we played, Cale, you and I, the Walking Dead Remastered. And if they had actually remastered the code, and I know they're planning on it, but there was just nothing new in the code when the game came out in 2025. So I'm not going to consider it for this year. What do you think, Cale? Is that fair? Oh, absolutely fair, yeah. What about the little, what is it, Alice in Wonderland?
    8:32
    Oh, the little, the one from like, that's like $1,000 or whatever? Explain why you omitted that one. I omitted that because I consider that it has no code.
    8:42
    You hit things, something happens. But I don't consider that code. We're not going to. But you know what? For $1,000, I accept that it doesn't have code. Although I think it's a little more than $1,000 now, right? I can't last I heard it's a thousand but if it comes as a kit and you have to build it yourself I actually saw like a Lego set similar yeah or Ikea or whatever I actually saw it I didn't stand in line to play it but it was at Expo so I saw it flipping nice I'm sorry you didn't get a chance to play it though I'm curious me too right I mean it's an intro it's a gateway drug into pinball and for that I respect it my opinion Not for the bat, though, right?
    9:24
    No. It's like an intro into a pain in the ass. I mean, you have to build the thing. It might be fun. I don't know. Right. But there were a lot of issues. Anyway, this show is not about that game. Let's move on. Okay, good. All right. I'll tell you what else I'm not counting. I'm not counting Medieval Madness Merlin Edition from CGC. It's a great game, but I consider that 1997 kill. That's the award show for 1997. If we could go back in time, I would have given it the best award to medieval men. Absolutely. It would have won a lot of stuff, so no shade there. Cactus Canyon is perhaps the trickiest one because that's been out for 800 years, right? But it's also, you know, when did the new code come out? And then there was the kit, and when does the kit come out? Does it count as last year? I respect it. And Josh Sharp, fan of the show, by the way, shout out to Josh Sharp, who did a lot of work on that, with great, of course, lime and sheets. So no shade to Cactus Canyon. And I also don't have enough experience with it, frankly, because the new code just-ish came out. So I respect it very much. I'd like to learn it in depth, but it's, for me, not for these awards. Cale, do you think that's fair? Very fair. It's sort of confusing when we should even call that and what year it is. So those are the nominees here, eight games. And we'll go along the awards now that I laid out before, starting with lighting.
    10:43
    And we're going to start with theme immersion. Hello, very bad. Good afternoon and welcome in the chat. So lighting. Five different awards for lighting. We're going to start with the theme immersion. We're not just starting with the boom, attraction, everyone look at me kind of thing. Can you use lighting to immerse somebody in the IP and the intellectual property? And I'll tell you my vote, Cale, and as usual, you can tell me if you disagree with this. I'm going to give the first award to Dune, and let me tell you why. And with every award, I'm going to try to give my explanation here. And I'm going to do it with some videos, okay? Okay. All right. The first video I'm going to show is shout-out to Carl over at IE Pinball for streaming this. I'm going to show you three videos of Dune to show off what it can do with lighting for theme-immersive reasons. One of the biggest things in Dune in the game is changing between day and night. So I wanted to show that off here.
    11:31
    Where am I? Let's go to water. All right, here you're at night. Let's miss the shot. And when you get to thinners, so you're at night, right? You hit the wrong drop. And you can see the night up here on the display. Now suddenly it turns to day. and that lighting, it's not like that's a big moment. That happens a lot in the game. It's not like that's an attraction thing. Nobody's noticing flashing lights when that goes on, but it makes you feel like you're in the day versus night and over and over again. What do you think about that, Cale?
    12:00
    Very cool, and they actually pulled it off just so people understand how difficult this is because it is such a subtle change. J.J.P. with all of their resources tried to pull off something like this in Avatar.
    12:19
    And it just missed the mark. So this is a serious accomplishment. Totally agree there. And not only that, in Avatar it was supposed to be one of their big selling points. We have UV lighting, we're going to make you feel like you're going into the night. And there's some decent things about that game, but the lighting to me is inferior to Dune, I would say, where you do feel like you're in day versus night when you're in it. You really actually feel it, and the code supports that, too, and all of that. I'll show you some more Dune videos, because I don't want to just say it for one thing, day versus night. I could have honestly given, like, ten reasons for the theme immersion here, but I'll give you another one. There's a mini wizard mode called Fall of Sietch Tabar, I believe it's called. So I want to point that out. That's a stand mode, right? And so in this mode, in this mini wizard mode... I fall speech. the fan covers the play field and you have to reveal the fan. You have to shake it away and reveal the shot. So I'll show you what I mean here.
    13:15
    So it's dark, right? Look what you get. It's a spinner. It's dark. The fan is covering the play field matching the display.
    13:27
    But I can also drain on this. That's very cool. That's a cool idea. Don't stop there. And then the sand recovers. Look at this. The sand's going to recover now. Wow.
    13:38
    And so is it only the spinner shots to reveal? I want to correct it. You can see them live here. The three spinner shots, they're flashing rectangles. I want the mode. I want to watch in advanced mode. See if he reveals the sand. Or the wizard mode.
    13:53
    If I haven't hit the underseeker, I haven't hit it. That's kind of what I'm thinking right now. Should have sent Kale.
    13:58
    Excuse me. That is very cool. Because just like in the real world, and we live in Arizona, we've lived through haboobs. Right. Big sandstorms. The wind brings the sand. You've got to wipe it away, and the wind brings it right back. That's right. It's the windset plains of Arrakis that we find ourselves here in, in Arizona. Yeah. I'm going to give one more just to show off what this could do and why I'm so, like, sold on this as theme immersion lighting. There's another mode, Fade's Arena Fight, where it's all like in white. And in the movie, it's also in white. And so the game is bathed in the white light. So here he is. He's going to start this. No, I'm going to do this, though. Fade's Arena, Fade Rautha's Arena Fight mode. Sort of a mini wizard mode, too. Oh, look at that. No, no, I do not.
    14:49
    So the game feels lit in white. It makes for a moment. I'm going to refuse to pay theater prices. Suddenly it feels very different than the rest of the game you were playing based on that. Yeah. You have to remember I have two warnings. Don't nudge that much.
    15:09
    Also, Carl's really good at pinball. There's one series of combos. I like that the right hand turns off when he does that move, and now the ball saves it off. I don't know. It's just really cool. There's like a little shimmy on the lights, too, just like when you hit something. Just kind of very subtle. All right, that's a shout-out to Dune for theme immersion. Would you argue that point, Cale?
    15:32
    It's phenomenal. I kind of wish I still had the game because there's so much going on here that was maybe not in the game when I had it. Or I just didn't catch it because I didn't put a lot of time into it. But, man, that's phenomenal. Yeah, a lot of these games, it's going to be really tricky as we go through these awards because all these games that came out, a lot of them are suddenly in the top 20 in pin side. That often happens when a new game comes out. People maybe overrate it, but these have staying power. Like Dune, Evil Dead, Harry Potter, they're all in the top 11 or so on the ratings. So there's a lot great in all of these games, I'd say. But for theme immersion, Dune gets it right with the lighting. That's my opinion.
    16:14
    All right. Attraction. This is the obvious one for J.J.P., and I'll continue with the obvious point here. is that J.J.P. puts the most lighting in their game, right? And so if you're, like, walking by games, it attracts you, you know? And I'll show you what I mean, and I'll talk about it. And shout-out here to... I'm trying to get better at streaming. Just look how many darn inserts of lighting. And then we also have these light bars on the side that Eric got a patent for. Entertainer type.
    16:44
    So I'm a tech guy, you know, kind of dirty, socially awkward. Maybe they'll have to find pinball players. It sure does. It's not any pinball.
    16:55
    You can hear him, right, Kel? Oh, absolutely. Help me branch out. Anyway, Kel, would you argue with that point on the attraction part of Harry Potter lighting? Not at all. And I talked about this on the Electric Backcast when we purchased Godfather. the reason we actually that was the that wasn't the first jjp game in the arcade but it was the first one rachel and i actually purchased ourselves because we played it at our distributors showroom and that is the thing that uh got me into the game just the the attraction you felt like you were on a an amusement park ride that's right now i would argue godfather shouldn't feel like that, but I agree with you. I would argue the theme shouldn't make you feel like that, but I would agree with you. You did feel like that.
    17:50
    Yeah. We've got some input in the chat. Might help to mute video shares? Okay, when I share the video, I'm just going to mute it, he's saying. Oh, okay. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. And what's up, Lauren Silverman in the house and Jason Bure? Thank you for joining us. Yeah, shout out to all the people, all the electric back fans here and pin pals as well. So, you know, I think this is really the attraction part of lighting is the JJP award. It will continue to get that award every year as long as it releases a game. Their lighting is just the most, you know, impressive. It's like walking, people make the comparison, and I don't think it's a crazy one. You walk into a casino, you know which game you're going to, you know, when you have a JJP or you're going to first.
    18:30
    Next award, we'll talk about moments. I don't mean moments in code. We're going to talk about that too later. But I mean moments made out of lighting, that the lighting makes you feel something based on it. And I'm going to give you a surprise one for this, Cale. I'm going to give a shout-out to Predator, actually. And that's going to shock a few people. I know you and I got to play it once, and I know it's also at Retro Ralph's house. Let me show you the video and then see what I mean, and I'll mute it because we don't need to hear the sounds from it. And I'm going to show two versions of it, of two reasons why I say it creates moments through lighting. And this is a shout-out to Retro Ralph and Rudy for streaming this game here. So the first one I'll show.
    19:11
    All right, so look at the pink predator there, and now he's in this predator mode, right? And you're facing the predator who rises here, and you know how predators camouflage, right? So it suddenly goes back to pink.
    19:25
    You're in this predator mode. Let's wait for it, you know. Ralph's going to hit some drops or try to.
    19:39
    Let's see what happens when he hits those drops. I swear he's going to. Do it for me, Ralph. Hit those drops.
    19:45
    Do you see what I mean, how the lighting made you feel like you hit the predator there? Yeah, this game's impressive. Let's hit it one more time, I think. He'll hit it one more time for me, maybe.
    19:55
    That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. That's impressive, actually. You know, I know people would want to hate on games like this, which they shouldn't, I don't think, if they do.
    20:06
    There's a lot of thought put into lighting like that to make you feel like you're facing the predator.
    20:11
    Yeah. I'll give you one more, and then we'll see if there's any debate on that point. Thank you for the kind words. 22, DMACC. Absolutely. All right, this one I'm not going to mute because I want to make you feel like it. This is one of the multiballs in the game where you activate the minigun, and it probably will be quite loud, but let's hear it. I need to get this multi ball because I'm all nervous now because I want to show people and I'm sorry to call out Rashi will go right here. I Got it. Okay. So now you guys get to see jungle blast. So the ball is gonna go here
    20:46
    Alright green lights for the forest lighting I Love this part. This is so fun when you have the game cranked up watch this
    20:59
    And the gun sounds are amazing. Although I have no ammo at all right now, so that kind of sucks. Damn it.
    21:18
    Alright, Cal, what do you say to that? The game's just impressive. I mean, the whole... We were blown away. We were very pleasantly surprised about every aspect of this game, and then you're still able to pull out some stuff we maybe haven't noticed. I think this game's going to become kind of like one of those rare gems, kind of like a Big Bang Bar. You know, there's only a few hundred out there. People are going to want to get their hands on it, you know, in the future. But, yeah. I totally agree. The lighting is great in the game. The sound is great. Not the call-outs. I know there's the whole thing with Arnold, but the sound effects are actually there. They make you feel in the game. The code is pretty reasonable, I think, on it. We might do a deep dive episode on just it. The hardware.
    22:10
    The flippers. The flippers feel good. Fast pinball, all that hardware. Now, the one thing I'd say about it is I don't love the layout. It's a floaty widebody. Widebodies don't always have to be floaty, but it's a bit floaty. But the code is there. Lighting is there. The sound is there.
    22:25
    Sound effects, I should say, is there. and that makes it a good game. I agree. That's that. So good game award right there. So that wins for what? That's going to win for Moments in Lighting. We're still in Lighting, Kel. Okay, let's go. And there are four different lighting awards individually. We talked about theme immersion, and we gave that to Dune. We talked about attraction, the usual award to Harry Potter and J.J.P. Moments, Predator. Hopefully I've given a reasonable argument why that's the genuine answer. And then the next award. So let's do the next award, which is Rules Communication. And I thought to best define this, what I mean by rules communication, I want to go way back to the early 1980s with the great Flash Gordon. That's not winning the award, but I want to give you an example of what it means to have good lighting. And we saw a lot of that game this weekend. Oh, that's right. That's right, for the big states. And Arizona had a state championship, and they picked a lot of Flash Gordon. And I'm going to use this shout-out to Raccoon City Pinball here, with Daniele last year winning California State Championships, even though he's from Italy, which is a really funny situation. But what I want to point out is this saucer, right? This saucer, the saucer can go either direction. The ball can go down or it can go up. And just within 40 seconds, you're going to see it do both things. And you're going to look at these lights and also even these lights. A lot of people note these lights, how the lights go down or go up, and that tells you which direction the ball is going to go. But you could even see these lights. So when the ball first goes in the saucer, the lights will go all the way down. When the second time the ball goes on the saucer, the lights from here will go all the way up. So I'll show that, and then we'll talk about it. This is my definition of rules communications for lighting. But there's the side ones, the drop target ones. All right, so it's going to go down.
    24:06
    Look at those lights pointing down, right? And now he's going to get the ball back up. He's also really good at pinball, by the way. Yeah. All right, let's see. Look at those lights go up now. Oh, yeah. So that's how you could use lighting to matter, to actually explain things to the player, what they should expect. It's subtle.
    24:27
    And, yes, I believe that just as I believe like Jurassic Park has perfect code, I believe that Flash Gordon is the best classic of all time. That's my personal belief. Shout out to Flash Gordon.
    24:39
    And so, anyway, that's my explanation of rules communication. So having said that, let me give you my award, Cale, and see what you say about it. My award is for Star Wars Fought E, Fall of the Empire, the new Star Wars game for rules communication through lighting. Pretty easy to explain with a few videos here to shout out to Joel over at Flippin' Out for doing his great tutorials on these games. He does a glass off so I can actually show you, like, all the different things that happens. And I think if I do, you'll see quickly what I mean by that. I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do Luke multiball. So you're going to light locks with the droid target. So I have three locks lit over there, and then you lock them in the vertical uptake. So there's one ball locked. It's going to shoot down.
    25:24
    Let's go two balls locked. They become solid. And let's go three balls locked. Now, normally, you would want to do this in a mode. Now I'm going to show one more, at least one more, just to give you a sense. Now you're in the multi-ball. That same multi-ball.
    25:43
    You get a bunch of jackpots. And once you've hit enough of those, you can hit that, and that does the whole thing, and then now look at the light show. Clearly it's saying, hey, shoot me here, shoot me here. So I'm going to go ahead and shoot him there, and that's the big moment, the super jackpot. And Joel calls it out himself. It's saying, look, it's saying, shoot me here.
    26:03
    It's an undervalued or underappreciated part of pinball when it tells you what to do. And I love how he takes the glass off and shows you what's going on. Joel is the everyman streamer.
    26:14
    He sure is. Great streamer. You know, check it out. Absolutely. I'll even show one more just to really give you a sense why. It seems like a random award to discuss, but it's just as important as any lighting, I'd say. So you see how F, O, R, C are all solid? I just have to hit E. Now, if you look at every character spot on the play field, they're a different color, either green, orange, or yellow. Green means it's the easiest mode. All right, so I won't go through the whole thing, but green being easy and yellow being a little bit medium and orange or red being harder. You're not going to understand that the first time you play, but over time it matters. It registers with you, that sort of thing, that all these modes are lit and they all have different difficulties, and that's how you learn them. What do you say to that, Cale? Do you think that's a reasonable award? Absolutely, yeah. Good job, Stern. Yeah, good job, Stern. Shout out to Ray Day. But on this one, I was talking to Ray Day just a few days ago over at Starfighters Pinball Festival, and he was saying that Andrew Wilkening did the lighting for this game. So I'm going to give the shout-out to Andrew Wilkening over at Stern for good rules communication and lighting. Very valuable, especially, you know, Stern is so good at code, frankly, and just kind of structure of what code should be like and having to communicate things to the player.
    27:33
    You know, fair from Jimmy Morgan here, too, is, like, I agree with you. it is not clear how to use that ball save. They should do, like, an Instagram post exactly how to use the ball save on the premium in L.E. I say that as somebody who lost out of a championship there from a finals because I lost against Neil Graff on not understanding how to use that damn thing on the premium. That was my first time. But it's not about me, Cale. That's not what this is about. This is about great awards in pinball. And I think in the lighting department, they do a great job explaining things to the players. That's for sure. Hey, Serge, can you do me a quick favor? Turn the gain down on your microphone because I think at certain points you might be speaking loud and it's clipping a little bit. All right. What about now? I think that's good. All right. Thanks for that, Cale. You are the best in the business at that. Yeah. Okay. So those are our four awards, individual awards in lighting. I gave Dune for theme immersion, JJP, Harry Potter for attraction, Moments, Predator, Rules, Communications, Star Wars. For me, best overall lighting, I'm going to give it to Dune. I think it did a lot with those theme immersions, the sand and the day and night and the white mode and all these other things they do with it. It also is there for those other things like rules communication and moments, for example. But for me, it had the impressive lighting. It also had some innovation with the way it does its sort of ambient lighting. They call it HAL system. Everyone has one. JGP has its light bar. Stern has its expression lighting, and Dune has these things called their HAL system. But I just find it overall the most impressive, obviously subjective. What do you say, Kel? Yeah, I'm with you, man. Thanks so much, Pocket. I appreciate that feedback. So Dune there for lighting. All right, let's talk about display. And as usual, we're not going to just say what has the best display. We're going to talk about what has the most informative display first, what actually gives communication to the player if they want it. And a lot of people are not looking up at the screen. I get that. Sometimes you're just watching somebody else play, and that's when you look at the screen. But for certain players, like, you do want to trap up and see what the screen is telling you. And for that, there really is nothing better than JP to win part of Harry Potter. I'm going to explain that. Here I'm going to try to. So here is the Harry Potter display. and just to get really crazy on you, Cale, I thought it would be fun to explain everything on this display and what it does. What do you say, Cale? Yeah. Should we get that crazy? I was waiting for this. Oh, I bet you are. Cale, you and I, by the way, we might be going to Retro Ralphs to stream Harry Potter at some point and go through the rules of it, but I thought I'd give a little bit of an appetizer there to explain everything that's going on here. So modes play out in the center. The clips from movies will play out in the center. You'll see your score and how many balls you have left. But I'm going to block that with just the play field here to show you a few things. So on the top left is the Ministry of Magic mode. So this top left is what mode you're in. This is how much time you have left in the mode. It puts a little hourglass there. Here it tells you what you have to do in the mode. You have to shoot red gold shots, and there's one remaining shot, and it would be worth 3 million points if you hit it, for example. So that's your modes. Now, it's a whole other question of when you look at the play field, do you know what shot to hit? And I would say the answer is no. But that's not the argument here. The argument is not how confusing the game is, which a lot of JRPG games can be confusing. The argument is just saying the display. Does the display do what it's supposed to? And I would say clearly it does. It gives you the information. It tells you everything you need. This, by the way, is explore Hogwarts multiball. So it's saying how many flags do you have? What flags are you missing? And you're missing, let's say, the red flags here and here. So you might have to hit red shots to lower those flags to start that multiball. Then here is Diagon Alley. That's like these stores in the game. And you have to shoot Diagon Alley. And every time you do, it spells a letter in the white letters that are missing here, like the A-G-O-N. And then you spell it, and then you shoot the center lane to add the Diagon letter. You have to get four shots for the four letters remaining. And then you shoot again, and that gives you a store. Again, pretty complicated. You still with me, Kale?
    31:43
    You don't have to be. Yeah. But at what point do I go, but I don't know? Correct. The very beginning.
    31:52
    This is not an argument that the code is clear. That's not my argument. The only argument I'm making, and in fact, I would join you on the argument that the code is not clear, and I have issues with it. Okay.
    32:06
    And this goes with a lot of machines ever since they started using the LCD, right? Correct. Is the display actually clear? No. With you describing it and, like, just looking at the display, like if it was a video game, yeah, it's clear. Right. But you're actually doing something. It's like Granny and the Gators. You know, what am I doing? You know, when they designed those games or, like, the baby Pac-Man, you did one or the other. Like, on this, you're having to do it all at the same time. And is it very clear? I think the clearest displays on any, like, new machine. Are simplest. Well, like Pulp Fiction. Yeah, that's the clearest display there is. Right. The alphanumeric display.
    32:53
    I don't disagree with you, by the way. This is not an argument for what communicates the best to the player. This is an argument for what communicates the most to the player. Those are a nuanced difference here. It gives you the most information. Is that digestible? No.
    33:10
    Right. So what do you think J.J.P. expects? Because they've always done this kind of thing, and some people love it, And some people have complained about it. But from, like, you know, Keith and Joe, when they're, in your opinion, when they're designing it, what are they thinking that, like, well, the player should trap up and then look at all of the information on the screen, and then the gameplay will be clear? I do have a discussion about it later in this episode. But as a preview to that, what I would say is they want to give you the most features in a game. They want to load it up with the most. It is a buffet. They want to give you as many delicious options as you can. The problem with any buffet, though, is you give a lot on a person's plate, and you don't want to go to a buffet every day. Once in a while you want to go to a buffet, but it's not for everyday consumption. And the other thing I would say is it comes down to stacking, and that will be a little bit of a rant later on. It's okay to have a lot of features, but if they're all happening at the same time, then it's quite confusing about what's going on. So you can get away with a lot of features if you reduce the stacking, essentially.
    34:19
    They're pro-stacking. Yes, absolutely. And there's an element of this where, like, you know, one of the guys came from the slot machine industry, and this is all – it goes back to, like, attracting people to this game. And it works. It absolutely works. For attraction. Right. Should I let go of explaining the rest of it, Kale, or keep on going? What do you say? No, no, let's go. You want me to keep going? Okay, for the chat and just for posterity, I'll explain the rest. So this has to do with Death Eater battles. It says here, shoot the drop target to light the battle. And it says you've defeated one and you have to defeat another. The drop target is right here. And so it's saying you have to go into there to get your Death Eater going.
    35:03
    And then next one is Quidditch. So you need to get 75 spins to qualify the next Quidditch match, and there's a spinner up here, and you have to rip that spinner for 75 spins, and that will start your next Quidditch match. Then let's go down to here. This is the single most confusing thing in the game. Actually, the single most confusing, that's right, of all the many things in this game, I promise you, this is the most confusing one of them all. And I believe that I'm the only one on Earth who understands this besides the coders of the game. And that's what I believe to you. This is the bonus system in the game. So the bonus system in the game, it actually tells you your bonus right here. So it's a little blurry on the screen, but it says 2.5 million. So that's what you have in bonus. It says your bonus X, 1X, 2X, 3X, and so forth.
    35:51
    But this thing, this is a book, all right? This is what gets crazy, okay? The book, you could change the book with an action button at any time. And as you do, it changes the book. And whatever book it is explains the rules of how you build bonus in the game. So, for example, if the Allies book is showing, the only thing that will build bonus is to collect the Allies. If another book is showing, Explore Hogwarts, the only thing that builds bonus is the Explore Hogwarts multiball that I mentioned earlier. There's mode books. There's potion books. There's all these books. And the books explain how you build bonus in the game. So the game has a variable bonus rules that are like 10 different sets of rules to build a bonus, roughly, based on these many books that you could have in the game. How's that for deep?
    36:40
    All right. I got two things. All right. Keep going. Yeah, let's do it. Could you imagine somebody waking up from a coma like a pinball fan in 1980? and then talking about how like, you know, it almost seems like a joke. You know in those slapstick comedies where there are, they show like CNN, MSNBC, and then the tricon gets too big. Right. And all of a sudden there's a stock ticker. Correct. And all you can see is the person's like eyes. It's like this very much seems like a joke. And they would be like, the pinball machines are so complicated now. You have to watch a video on YouTube with a guy breaking down what this all means. One thing I love about this. Yes. The flags. The flags mean something here. Yep. They're all different colors. That's like the skeuomorphification of this. because I love in video games where when your character takes damage, there's no bar showing that. It might be like, oh, now your character's limping. Correct. They look a little rougher. Right. So I love that aspect of this. Yeah, you like non-text-based communication, basically that can communicate things through signals rather than through like you have to read in the middle of pinball. And I agree with that too. So maybe most informative is the wrong name for it. Maybe it should be most information. Informative implies that there's understanding on the user side. So I might change this to most information. You can't debate that point. That's an objective point, Cale, right? This has the most information. They win every year. They win every year, okay. And I will close it out. I will close it out with this final bottom right here. This is for the Golden Trio multiball. You have to light your Harry and your Hermione and your Ron, and you do that by spelling Harry on the bottom lanes, spelling Hermione, which is like right over here, where her picture is, and spelling Ron, which is right over here. As you do spell it successfully, their wand lights up like that, and so you can actually see when you're completing them. So I've already lit my Harry and my Ron locks, but I haven't lit my Hermione lock. I need to spell one more time the letter E, so I'm going to have to hit those stand-ups to light the lock on the right ramp to go to the right orbit, I mean the wands right here in the upper right. So that's your golden trio, multi-ball. And I think that successfully explains everything on this very information-heavy display. Deal? Yeah. And I'll tell you, one argument for all this, I can go both ways. Yeah, steal mana for me. like with the JBS show, we did a real long, we did a three-hour long podcast with George Gomez, and we got a few complaints that it was too long. And, you know, my thing is like, why do you not want more information? You can always pause. You can always pause it. And I think that, you know, with this is why do you not want all this information? You know, I think that's what the developers are thinking when they put all this in there, because most of these games end up in the home where you have a lot of time with them.
    40:05
    And I'm speaking, you know, JJP specifically. Most of all pinball machines show up in the home. 70% at least, right? Yeah, with Stern. Yeah, they've said that publicly. But, like, why not put all this information in there? You know, you have it at home. You can take a break if it's too much for you. I am won over quite often by that steel man argument you just made there, that in a display, I don't mind information. I think there's an elegant way to do it, and that's more subjective, you know, if this is that. But I like a good amount of information.
    40:42
    And that's J.J.P.'s style. They're just going to give you a lot. Right. More than anything, I do agree with you on this point about reading versus showing, and I like showing. And the more of that they can do, the better. all right um that's a good point from from down g over there like the value sometimes of a game with this much is that you could discover something two years later you know in it that there's the game has replayability because there's always something new to see for example this crazy book rule that i talked about you know over there and that's valuable by the way to get the bonus x if you're curious it's one singular shot but probably the hardest shot in the game this one right here from the side flipper. If you do that, that makes your bonus X go up if you're curious and you own what is a great game, in my opinion, Harry Potter. Okay. Great point. That was it for... Let me down. That's right. Yeah, and Harry Potter wins the award for you getting your money's worth out of it. I wanted to give an honorable mention to Portal over at P3, which puts its display on the game play field itself and therefore can give you a lot of information. And I argued back and forth whether I should actually give it to Portal on this.
    41:55
    And I'll show you just to show you here. This is two different game states. And this one. I've never seen this. Have you played this game? I went to Ace Kogi like in L.A. I don't know, a few months back. Yeah. And maybe, I don't know, it might have been a year back. And they had a portal. And I went there because they had a portal. I was in L.A., but I went there because they had a portal. And I went all the way to try it. Or they had, you know, the P3. and I went there and it was down. And it broke my heart, Cale. I would love to try a P3. I've never tried it. I know you have, right? What do you want to tell me about it? Well, I haven't played this particular module, but I've played tons of other P3 games, and they're cool. They don't feel like traditional pinball machines, so I think you kind of need to have that in your mind when you approach it. Just approach it as like a game, you know, an interesting game that's going to be doing interesting things. But just because of the way they are set up where the play field is literally a giant LCD display, the mechanisms are different. Like the flipper feel, you know. Interesting. Yeah, flipper feel. Did you try it recently? Because I know they kind of updated their flipper feel. Yes. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, but no matter what, just because of the way – I mean, you can see the flipper mechs above the play field. I mean, you're not going to get the exact same feel as like a Stern or a CGC or something. I'm not saying that's bad. It's just like when you approach it, realize it's something different. Right. Well, I'll give you why I was going to debate between this as the most informative display. So it shows you information on the display as you're staring at it on the play field. And, for example, let's say you beat a mode. Here's your mode that you beat. and so it tells you what you scored in the mode, whether you discovered a radio. There are these hidden radio shots. How fast you did the mode, the run time. So if you're like a speed runner, you could try to beat your record of a minute 33 of getting through the mode, for example. If you look at this display, it shows you something that I've often argued for, which is like counters on the play field as inserts. I know like Spooky does that. Without the display part, they just have inserts that do it for Rick and Morty, for example, or TNA. You know, it tells you what the reactor level is at. And here they could do that with the display, so they show you how many spinners you have, you know, to rip, for example. That's so cool. I know you love those displays. I do love those displays. Kel, what do you say? What would you give to most informative display, having said all that? It could be these two or others. Harry Potter. Fair enough. Okay. All right. Let me give you another award now in display, innovation in display. There are new things you can do with displays, and Dune has proven it. And let me explain why I'm going to give this to Dune here. They do several things within innovation. Well, one is they have a screen in the back, right? Now, that was there in Labyrinth 2, and it's also been there in Circus Voltaire, you know, long before that. So it's not the first to do that, but it is the first to use it in this way, and I'll show you what I mean. When you do things on the game, it affects what happens on that lower display. This isn't even the main display where it shows your scores. This is just meant for theme immersion as a display. And I'll show you what I mean. So you have this guy in the back here, and when you blow him up, when you make that shot, when the worm is down and you make the shot and it jumps the ramp and it hits into this guy, he will shake and then fire will come out of there. Another thing that happens is there's an ornithopter. It's like these things that fly around. And wherever it is... It looks like a dragonfly. And it corresponds to a lit shot on the playfield, and it moves. When the shot moves on the playfield, it moves on this display. I'll show you what I mean here. So, for example, here you have your ornithopter on the lower display. This is the lower display. This is the upper one.
    45:38
    And there's the shot. The yellow shot represents the ornithopter. When you hit it, and actually this is later when it explodes, basically, and so you could actually destroy things. The fire comes out. Let me show, let's say, the trailer.
    46:00
    See what I mean, Cal? Yeah. I think that's a pretty clear reason why it's so innovative and display. It's giving you a display in a different format. Yes. Nobody's doing anything like that. That's awesome. And I'll even – yeah. A little trivia for you. Those displays that Barrels is using, they came from Deep Root. Those – Were those the touchscreens? Those are the touchscreens that were going to be in the lock bar.
    46:30
    Interesting. Well, I mean, I'm sure that might have an influence there. If they had a lot of the inventory, it helps them. But I frankly, I know they said they'll only do this when the game calls for it. I think they should do it in every game. I think it should be a signature for them. I think it's perhaps an underappreciated thing they do that gives you theme immersion in the game. You know, like that display has no information on it. It's just there to make you feel. Now, I'm going to tell you what. if you would have included Winchester in this lineup, you have an argument. Because it is used incredibly well in Winchester. Oh, with the Pepper's Ghost effect? Yeah. For me, yeah, like next year, spoiler alert, that will win Best Display. It would be hard to imagine anything beating that display in Winchester, how they're using it. Which is great. Quickly, I just want to answer Pocket, talking about one of the play portal. I wonder if anyone in AZ has one. I don't know if anybody in AZ has one. And just quickly, that system is very hard to operate. One of the main reasons is they have like tons of balls in them, like 20 or 30 or something like that. And they often, as you can imagine, it's not a traditional pinball trough and they can often get stuck in this, the portal trough or the P3 trough. So they're super hard to operate. Great for the home, though. Yeah, P3, get it to somebody's place here in Arizona so we can play it. Us pen pals, maybe stream it and talk about it some more. It's a cool platform. Yeah.
    48:05
    More on innovative display, though. So Dune obviously has that extra display. You could show explosions. You could show the ornithopters moving. But I'm going to give you another subtle one that I noticed that they did. Man, blew me away on innovation, at least. It's always remarkable to see, like, normally, you know how you're looking at a screen, you hold the flipper up, and then it shows you, it changes the screen to a whole bunch of information. That's on every game. JJPs and sterns and spookies and all of that. That's how it works, right? Standard pinball stuff when you hold up the flipper. What they did, I can't believe nobody thought of this. What they did is, if you hold up the flipper, it will show you the information, but it overlays it on the original screen. So I'll show you what I mean.
    48:42
    When you hold up your flipper, that's what it looks like. It doesn't change the screen to a new one. There's no sharp screen transition. It's more smooth than that. So it just overlays the information. What ball are you on? How many tilt warnings do you have remaining? What's your current bonus, for example? You're in the night right now. You're almost there at the day because the thing is over here. So when you hit a spinner, 24 more spins will get you to the day kind of thing. It explains what these things do. So this is what the standard game looks like while you're playing it. But if you trap up the ball, it looks like this. To me, that's an innovative idea in display.
    49:20
    First of all it makes you feel more immersed because it not changing the color on the background as you trapping up You still in Dune while you doing it That my claim What do you say to that Cale I think that a clear winner Yes. Innovation in display. So that's it for that one. Let's talk about animations.
    49:39
    And here, for me on animations, I'm going to go back to Portal, and I'll tell you why. We're going to show some animations on it. Here the animations are in the game itself, of course. and I'll show two examples of what impresses me for Portal here. One is I mentioned the spinner. For example, so he's going to hit that spinner. The spinner is going to go up, and now he's in this mode. You're in an elevator while you're in this mode, and so it's going to open up. You can skip if you press both flippers to skip. As he makes shots in this mode, I want you to look at the display and how it reacts to you as he's making those shots. So now elevator opens up. shots are lit on the play field and these red stop signs, he makes a shot and it moves you. That is so cool. So here, there are two more shots, for example, and he's missing them. Let's see what happens when he hits them.
    50:29
    He should be able to backhand this. And again, it moves you. I think that's a pretty good display right there. Pretty good animation. Man, that might win innovation in display. I know, that's another, that's the debate, right? I'll give you another reason to like Portal for its display. You know, Myst Multiball. Shout out to Myst Multiball from Dracula, one of the best multiball starts of all time, right, where the ball is moving across the play field and you have to hit it. And so they did an homage to that here.
    51:03
    I'll show it in this one. Now, it's not going to be as exciting because it's virtual. Look at this ball move. See, the ball's moving here, for example, right there. and so anyway you have to hit it and that lets the ball go kind of thing now you're not going to feel the feeling of the kinetic feeling of hitting a ball like a mist for me mist multi-ball is one of the top 10 multi-ball starts of all time up there with like Showtime and Adam's Family or whatever but still a pretty cool way to use an animation and a display what do you say yeah you nailed it once again you nailed it cheers thank you very much Cale I appreciate that and with that we can go to our last award which is overall display. Is it going to be Dune? Is it going to be Harry Potter? Is it going to be the portal? I honestly wrestled with this, Cale. Do you have an opinion?
    51:55
    I don't see how it's not Harry Potter. Exactly. I almost didn't want to do it, but it is. It is Harry Potter ultimately that I picked. JP DeWin really is good at what he does. He puts a lot of thought and effort into it. And I won't buck the trend on this one. And I will say Harry Potter again for that. But I did want to also show off the other aspects of display, innovation, animations, that sort of thing. Any other things you want to say about display before we move on to the next set of awards? Nope.
    52:26
    All right. So this is going to be for sound. And first I'll give it for sound effects. And this one I'll show some videos, but I won't turn the audio off so you could hear it. And for me, I'm going to give this to Dune. and this is Jeff over at Dirty Pool Pinball. Shout out to Jeff there. Jeff is meticulous about his spinner sound selection, the thought process behind it, things that make you feel like you're playing pinball. I'll show you what I mean and then we'll talk about it.
    52:56
    We got our spinners lit. Let's get the spinnies going. So let's get a good rip on this one. That's fantastic. That's going to fill it all up. Look at all these little red dots. Keep showing up. You love to see it. All right, Cale, what do you say to that?
    53:13
    Oh, yeah, I love the sound design in that. And when Jeff joined the team, he just made it that much better.
    53:23
    Yeah, he's really, really good at what he does, you know, I would say. And people will be talking about him in the same, assuming he does more games, you know, in the same breath as, like, Chris Granner and David Thiel and all those people, right, that have done great sound effects too. and then next we move on to Score let's go to this one here for Score, this is a tricky one because you could talk about Star Wars, they have the entire awesome John Williams theme of course but also Harry Potter has the entire John Williams theme in it too and so Battle of the John Williams there, but for me I'm going to yet again actually give it out to Dune, I'll tell you why I'm going to give it to Dune, so here they have the great Hans Zimmer score, but the difference is how they use it. They use it the entire game. Like, the entire game the score is playing. It is incredibly immersive that way. I'll play the same video but a little bit longer now.
    54:20
    Just listen for the score. Our spinner's lit. Let's get the spinnies going. So let's get a good rip on this one. That's fantastic. That's going to fill it all up. Look at all these little red dots. Keep showing up. You love to see it. Okay, so now if we can hit, the two other spinners are still lit. So, almost would have done it. That was a waste of the last gun. Don't do that. Don't do that shit. All right, we're collecting our spice.
    54:52
    I was holding that button up and didn't realize it, by the way. Just in case you really want your flipper to be up the whole time. All right, you're up. There was a small amount of flow going, and then it... No.
    55:08
    No. I thought I'd ended with that one. Perfect. I thought that was a perfect place to end it. But the score is playing the whole time. First of all, the sound system is... I'm not an expert sound person. I wouldn't claim to be. I'm more of a code guy. But the sound system is strong. You feel the bass in the game, and they play a lot of bass, and a lot of Hans Zimmer bums, you know, like that. That's my own opinion. What do you say, Cale? Obviously a subjective point. Yeah, I agree with that. The important thing about the sound system in this one, unlike Labyrinth, in this game it has a dedicated amp, and it's a pretty big damn amp. So that's why you're getting a little more punch out of Dune.
    55:56
    You know what? I'm glad you explained that well. I didn't know that, actually. and it might have the most bass I've seen or heard in any game factory default. You don't have to put something extra into this game, like pin sound or whatever. It's ready to go. Shout-out also to Predator, which has the great Alan Silvestri score in it, too. And a lot of it, yeah, like Predator makes you feel, because of the theme song, exactly. It's a great theme song, you know, that way. So there's some two John Williams scores in pinball last year, an Alan Silvestri score. There's Hans Zimmer here. it's a year for game scores, for movie scores that way. Alright, next award, Callouts.
    56:38
    Tricky, actually, and you might disagree with this one. I'm going to give it to Evil Dead. Of course it has the Bruce Campbell callouts. When I first heard this game in the trailer, I was like, I heard the Bruce Campbell callouts, and I was like, they're cool, and I'm glad they got him, but they actually sounded flat in the trailer, but weirdly when you play the game, it makes you like they feel right in the game. I can't explain that. I'm going to play the trailer, show you what I mean, how like let's see if you feel like they're in the trailer. It sounds flat, but somehow in the game it doesn't. Let's go.
    57:18
    Hey, let me ask you something. Do you believe in the existence of evil? Shoot some ramps so we can get on with it. The only guarantees in life are death and taxes. And I don't pay taxes, so it's just death.
    57:35
    Get this thing loaded. Daddy wants to play. This part is the relevant part. Gun's loaded. Wish I was.
    57:46
    Oh, son of a... All right. Kel, what do you say about the callouts in Evil Dead? I think they're great I thought you might argue that the other honorable mention is Dungeons and Dragons That's what I was debating between because of Michael Dorn and all those callouts you go I was leaving that to the end because I didn't know if D&D was going to win anything But yeah, it's hard I think D&D keeps getting overshadowed by other games because it came out so early in the year. Right. But the amount of dialogue, the theme immersion is unmatched.
    58:34
    And the music, you feel like you're at the Renaissance Festival. Not only that, the Foley, when, you know, oh, you know, you just encountered this, you know. When you're in the dungeon, the sounds change.
    58:51
    Let's see. I don't know. There's one more award. Let's see what happens. Well, what do you – Kel, do you think I should – I gave it to Evil Dead. Second place for me was D&D for Callouts. Do you think that was wrong? Should I have switched that order?
    59:05
    Man, I just think so. So, and it's maybe because I have D&D at home and I experience it more than you do, the amount of call-outs, the different actors, the theatrics, the way it works with the music, I'm going to have to give it a D&D. Okay, fair enough. We have chat debating the point. Some people think D&D. Some people think Evil Dead. And I debated the point, too. I think we narrowed down the right two, let's say that, for call-outs. And then we have to end here with best overall sound. For me, in the end, I have the score. I have the sound effects. I gave it to Dune. Call-outs, Evil Dead, D&D, I could have debated that point. What's your best sound of the year, Cale?
    59:59
    I do think Dune slightly, slightly edges out of D&D. I appreciate you saying that. I'm surprised. You know what? That takes a big man to say that, Kale. Yeah, right.
    60:13
    I like it. Okay. Really, barrels of fun so far. Killing it in light and sound. As I understand it, David Van Ness comes from a movie background. So for me, it's no surprise that the effort his team puts into lighting and sound and also display in their games. You know, we could talk about the game itself later, the play field, the layout, the code. but in those other sort of things that add ambiance to games, you know, like that's Barrel's niche, I would say. If you want to feel immersed from the lighting and the sounds part of pinball, like Barrel's knows how to do it to me so far. Now, their next challenge is to make us feel the wind blowing through our hair while we're flying through the sky on Falkor. Oh, is that right? The never-ending story is coming. Is that right? Never-ending story with Falkor? Is that the dog? Yeah.
    61:02
    What do you think about that as a theme? Well, we talked about it on the JBS show, and we weren't really excited about it. But let's see what happens. Yeah, I mean, I saw the movie as a kid, but I also share your lack of excitement about it, even though I'm the right demographic for it. It's just not for me.
    61:22
    All right, let's go to play field design. And we're not going to say, hey, what's the best layout? We're not going to do that. We're going to think about it a few different ways because it's my claim that each designer out there is actually designing with a different priority in mind. You know, you have Steve Ritchie, king of flow. He wants a fast-flowing layout. It doesn't really matter to him what game he's designing for, whether it's Elton John or Spider-Man or Star Trek. Of course, arguably the most flowy layout of all time. We'll define flow in a little bit. But that's what he's designing for, right? Next, I'll talk about, like, Eric Menier. He designs, in my opinion, for two things. He designs for theme immersion and ball paths, the most ball paths. I'll tell you what I mean by theme immersion. Like when you play Guns N' Roses, that is not a fast-flowing layout. It's a bit of an awkward, arguably clunky layout. But you've got the drumsticks that form the return for the ramp. You've got cymbals on the pop bumpers. You've got an upper play field that's a bass guitar, for example. So he thinks about first, how does the layout immerse you in the theme, for example, there? And that's what I'm starting with, which is theme immersion.
    62:29
    What game actually makes you, like, another way to put this is what layout could only be for that theme? Like, you take Iron Maiden, one of the greatest games ever made, but that layout wasn't even designed for Iron Maiden, right? That was designed for Archer, you know, for example. Could it have been another game? Sure. And I would have enjoyed it, too. It didn't need to be Iron Maiden. I don't even love that Iron Maiden music that much, you know, no shade meant to be thrown there. But what I mean to say is you can have great layouts that have nothing to do with the theme, and then you have layouts that could only be for that theme. So that's how I'm defining theme immersion. Not the best playing one, but just the most unique one to that property. And so for that, I'm going to give it to Portal. And let me see if I can explain why.
    63:14
    This layout could not conceivably be for any other game. It has, like, all these places where the ball goes and comes out that are surprising each time. Let's go to zoom in on the back here. So the ball can go jump here and make it to this ramp, and then there's a hole here. The ball can shoot out and go there, but the ball can come out here or it can come out here. The ramps open up. This ramp opens up. That ramp opens up. There's a hole in there. The ball can come out any one of many different directions. Here's the upper play field. You could hit this cube to push it back, get a ball in a hole. The ball jumps out of a different hole. For example, here's that hole that it could jump out of, for example. So that's my argument for, like, could this layout be for literally any other theme? I would argue no. What do you say to that award and that concept of an award, Cale? I think that's a clear winner, Serge. Fair enough. Okay, no argument there. Different category here next is unique layout.
    64:12
    And so, you know, does this layout do things that I have never seen before in another layout? Can I claim that any other game has done that before? I've had two arguments here in my head between Harry Potter and King Kong. Both games are four-flipper games. It's not unique, but I'm just saying that. In King Kong, which is quite unique and a great game, the ball can be kept on the upper half of the playfield just by hitting it back and forth between the upper flippers, like you do in the Crossing the Chasm mode. I've never seen anything like that before, so that's unique. But in the end, actually, I did give it to Harry Potter as the most unique layout. And I'll tell you what makes it unique to me. So let's look at the layout here. It's a game with multiple ramps. So there's a ramp, and there's a ramp, and there's a ramp, for example. There's ramps on the upper playfield. And all those ramps, not the upper playfield ones necessarily, but all those ramps feed the outlanes. They don't feed the inlanes. There is no return. If you notice, all those many guide rails there are habit rails, and none of them are coming back into the inlanes. I can't think of literally any game that's ever done that before. You have Dialed In, which has a left return that goes to a flipper. You have High Speed, where the balls come down to a flipper, but they're not multiple ramp games. You know, like High Speed is not a multiple ramp game like that, you know, for example. And then Dialed In has other ramps that return to the inlane. In this game, there is no return to an inlane. That sounds like, why am I harping on that point? it means the gameplay is incredibly fast. Because the ball doesn't take time to go down an in-lane and then bounce through a metal rail and then fall down to the flipper. Instead, it flies down the out-lane, and it goes so fast you have to hit it on the fly. It's constantly surprising you in that game. So both are huge innovations with both Harry Potter and King Kong, but that's what I'm going to analyze here with Harry Potter and why it's so special and unique. What do you say to that, Cale? after you explained it I have no argument I need to spend more time with the game so hopefully we'll get to go to Ralph soon and play it on stream but man I love I absolutely love the King Kong layout and I've said it over and over again that's a game I could play I could just flip that white wood forever Like, it doesn't need any code. Just the ball paths are fun. I did not feel that when I played Harry Potter. I felt confused. Yeah, and I might come up one day with an award for most interesting ball paths. That's different than most ball paths. What I mean is, I was saying earlier that every designer designs for a purpose. Steve Ritchie is designing for flow. Eric Menier is designing for theme immersion, and often most ball paths. Elwin, of course, is known to be said, having said that he designs for kinetic satisfaction. But Jack Danger actually would say that he designs for the most interesting ball paths. That's how he starts. He doesn't start with mechs. He starts with the layout and just says what feels interesting. And obviously you look at X-Men and you look at Foo Fighters where there's these crossover shots. It's not like the game has a lot of ball paths. It just has very interesting ones. You know, it's not like taking the ball, diverting it somewhere else, and surprising you. It's surprising you in that one shot how the ball flows.
    67:39
    I'll call maybe the Jack Danger Award is the most interesting ball path. I didn't add it to this, but probably this year, because X-Men was last year, King Kong would get that for most interesting ball paths, Cale. Is that fair? Yeah, totally. So let's just play this little game. If X-Men was in this lineup, how would it have changed your opinion? It would have won most unique layout, definitively.
    68:07
    Chris Franchi in the house. Hey, Chris Franchi. Thanks so much for joining us. Shout out to Chris Franchi. And Nucci.
    68:14
    Man, I agree. Yeah. I want to focus on another thing on this layout, too. For me, Eric Menier is, like, top three pinball designers working today.
    68:26
    And it doesn't mean I have to love all those games. Like, I didn't love Godfather that much. Sorry, Cale. The layout is incredible, but I don't feel the theme. I don't get the code. The code doesn't work for me. Whatever. We're not here to talk about that. But I'm saying as a layout designer, he's just really masterful.
    68:41
    Like Guns N' Roses, I feel is clunky, but if what you care about is theme immersion, that game has it, you know, kind of thing. So it's all about what you want in a game. Do you want the fast-flowing layout like a Steve Richard game? Do you want to feel like you're in the theme like, let's say, Guns N' Roses? Or do you want kinetic satisfaction like Elwin will give you in every single game he makes? In this game, though, let's talk about... Why not both, right? Why not both? And I think Harry Potter gets at that. And so this is not clunky at all, this layout. This is an incredibly fast-flowing layout. If you hit this left ramp, right, there are games that put a ramp on the side there. Or let's say if you've ever played Wonka before, which is a good layout, like the J.J.P. game, it puts its ramp all the way on the right.
    69:23
    And the problem with putting a ramp all the way on the side is it blocks orbit shots, you know, for example. And so it's cool to have a ramp on the side, but it could block orbit shots. In lesser games, there would be no way for the ball to go under the ramp. But if you notice, there is a lane here on the other side of the ramp because you could shoot underneath that ramp like that.
    69:46
    And that is also not that common. A lot of games don't have that where they figure out how to put a ramp on the side where the designer figures out how to do that but still allow flow around it. So, shout out to Harry Potter, is what I'm trying to say. That's why I'm giving the award for most unique layout. Different award, though. Here's King Kong, by the way, just to compare the two. Really, really cool game. And I'm going to give it the next award, which is most kinetic satisfaction, a.k.a. the Elwynn Design Award. We'll go most years to Elwynn if he's designing games. We have to define, you know, he mentions the term kinetic satisfaction himself, but it's worth defining a little bit. sometimes actually flow is an enemy of kinetic satisfaction if you think about king kong you don't make every shot necessarily and in fact there are there are times where you can flow in that game to be clear but you often play that game a bit more stop and go for example if you hit the ball and it's coming down the river on the left side what are you going to do kale as the ball is coming down the river well do you have a strategy yeah i'm going to hold up the left flipper for a ski pass. Exactly right. You're not hitting it on the fly. Maybe the game does have flow, but in its design, it is you purposely hold up the flipper, and then you trap it, and then you decide what shot you want.
    71:08
    I'm just not an insult to say it. I don't think it's designed to have as much flow as, like, Star Trek from Stern, you know, where you're just shooting non-stop and feeling every shot going. It has very good flow. It just doesn't design for maximal flow. Instead, it's designed with kinetic satisfaction. What I mean there is when you hit that right orbit and there's a punchback target that hits it back at you, you feel that when it's going. When you're able to trap up the ball and there's a diverter, you pop up the diverter with the action button, the log bridge, and then it traps the ball and then you hit a ramp and you feel that a lot. Or the gong that hits the ball back at you or the magnet that flings the ball. It has feeling to it. Sometimes when you have a big, wide ramp, let's say like Johnny Mnemonic, I think people wrongly call that kinetic satisfaction. It's a great game. It's a great layout. It's great flow. But I don't know that it has kinetic satisfaction is what I mean. And I think when Elwynn says the term kinetic satisfaction, he means something different than flow.
    72:08
    I'll pause there. What do you say to that, Cale, as an argument? Yeah, I agree with all of that. And that's why, of course, King Kong will get the most kinetic satisfaction, as will all Elwynn games probably, as long as he's designing. That is what he designs for. King Kong definitely gets my vote on that.
    72:26
    Yes, totally agree. And so there's my kinetic satisfaction awards. You know, one example of the kinetic satisfaction, the right orbit into that kickback target. This thing. Yes. If you notice it, the timing of that is like if you hit an orbit and it went all the way around. It's perfectly timed as if you were to hit it this way. Instead, it's coming back at you this way, messing with your head. You know, Elwin has said that that was the first thing he designed in this game when he designed the game. And that's what I mean about each designer designing for a different purpose. You know, like Jack Danger has said, he designed the layout for most interesting ball paths first, and then he adds the mechs. Keith Owen has designed something that makes you feel the kinetic motion of a punchback kicking the ball back at you. Whereas, let's say, Eric Minier designs, like, how does this represent the theme as best as I can and give you a lot of ball paths and that sort of thing. And then, of course, we go to our next award. But you could ask, like, maybe just to touch on the Harry Potter, why I didn't say, why I don't give the nod to Harry Potter for kinetic satisfaction. It's a very fun game. But, like, if you look at the spinner placements, for example, in Harry Potter, You have this spinner here, and the only way to hit the spinner is going backwards. So the ball comes down and rips the spinner. You can't actually hit the spinner directly, and you don't feel the kinetic feeling of hitting that spinner. Compare that to, like, Bond 60th or King Kong, where you rip the spinner, and, boy, it feels good when you rip that spinner. You know, central place spinner, for example, or the drop targets when you hit them and sweep it and then make the side ramp. There's another spinner in Harry Potter on the far lower right. but you can't really rip that spinner. You basically just get the tip of the flipper, and it goes a few spins in there. You don't feel it as much. And so just those are examples of where, like, it's a bit lacking, at least compared to King Kong in kinetic satisfaction. It's still very fun. It's still very flowy, but that's that. Any arguments there, Kel? Sure. No, no. And we've talked about their spinners before. It is very interesting the way those are set up. Yeah. Like, I don't quite get why they don't put a spinner right here in the center. I can't accept that, but, you know, maybe I'm missing something. Like old-school Gottlieb flipper. Yeah.
    74:47
    All right, so next award is Best Flow. And so what do I even mean by flow here? A game that doesn't let you trap up, that forces you to shoot shots, and those shots connect one to the next to the next, where you can chain shots together. And King Kong has flow, but I gave it to Harry Potter. When that ball comes screaming down the out lane here, because there's no return, you cannot ski pass. If you try to ski pass, typically the ball will go right into the slingshot and get out of control. So the game forces you to take a shot. Maybe you make that shot to the right orbit, and then the ball comes down a different screaming back again. Or you can make this shot with the left flipper, and it goes a loop all the way around. Or the upper flipper on the play field, the upper play field, you can make repeated ramps, a spinner, then shoot another shot. It flows like crazy, that game. This is like one of the slowest games I've ever played, I would say. That's why I give it an award. And I know you need more time on it, and hopefully we get that, Cale, but I think I can get you to agree with me on that.
    75:48
    I mean, you're right. You're right. I haven't spent enough time with Harry Potter to appreciate it, but you're absolutely right. I think that wins for best flow. Okay. That's my Steve Ritchie award. He didn't make the game last year, so there's nothing there, you know, to give. But, all right, next one is most ball paths. This isn't always a good thing necessarily, by the way. But what it means is you make a shot and you don't know where the ball is going to come out.
    76:18
    How many of those do you have? So, I mean, let's cut to the shade. I mean, this is an obvious winner here, right? What is your obvious winner? Isn't it Harry Potter? Yes, except that. Except that I'm going to give a tie, all right? when Godfather came out, there was this running joke that started in pinball where they were like, this game has this many ball paths, and ball paths became the new toys, basically. They were showing off it as 42 ball paths or whatever.
    76:50
    That's one of the things that Eric designed for it, theme immersion and number of ball paths where the game comes out places that you don't expect, and it's different every single time.
    76:59
    I haven't personally counted, but both are really high in Portal and Harry Potter. I mentioned Portal earlier. There's all these holes in the game. I could argue that's Flo's down flow in Portal perhaps, but there are all these holes in the game where you get the ball in and then it comes out somewhere different every single time. And then, of course, there's Harry Potter. There's a lot more than even the play field is showing here. There's multiple magnets that will trap a ball and send it down this orbit or back down that orbit. Of course, there's a spinning staircase that's a diverter that goes in four different directions, obviously, and if you hit the shot here, the ball can go in four different directions, but if you hit the shot in the center ramp, it will go to the staircase and also go in four different directions, and so it's probably Harry Potter as number one and maybe Portal as number two right behind it in terms of just sheer number of ball paths. No surprise there, so we can move on unless you want to say anything else about this, what I'll call the Godfather award. No, I think it wins. Okay. Alright, most satisfying ramp in pinball. This is just a ramp that feels good to hit. What makes you feel the best? This is my vote, at least for this, I'll tell you. It's King Kong side ramp.
    78:08
    I'll show the video and then see what you say, Cal, at the other end of it. This is when you actually make the game. Have low.
    78:16
    Punch that. Hit that. More climbing. More ramps. and then you trap up again. Yeah. Boy, that's a fun sequence, and obviously that side ramp is so fun to hit. What do you say, Kel? No, that's a clear winner, and I first noticed that when I was playing the games at Stern when they did the release, because at first when I looked at the game, I was like, man, I bet that ramp is going to be really hard to hit. It's not. And that's what makes it so cool, and then when you hit it, There's so much hang time when the ball is actually, you're like, wow, how freaking cool is that? This is a clear winner.
    79:00
    Yeah, and a little subtlety is that there are two different in-lane returns. So the side ramp returns to the top of the in-lane, but the gong mech, I'm sorry, I meant to say the gong mech here and also the cave return a little bit lower. And so that means that the ball, when it returns a little lower, is slower, and you could often just hold up your flipper and try to trap it as it comes there. whereas when it comes from the side ramp you have to hit again right away right until usually the center ramp um so uh that sequence gets a lot of flow within it and so it feels good at the end of your you know the ramp shot too um and of course you have to tie it to some points and they do so just feel great yeah and you know one interesting thing about that ramp the ramp as you see it as we all played it that didn't fit in in the bomb oh interesting it was originally much shorter path and Keith set this up because he felt like it needed to have more hang time on the ramp to get the timing right. And so he set it up this way and then showed Gomez. And George was like, you know what, you're right. And he cleared it. It was a little more expensive. It's more metal. Yeah, more metal. But damn, it's fun. It's a good ramp. Maybe I'll give a hot take here is that I would say the least satisfying ramp perhaps of the year is the center ramp.
    80:23
    So this is a – Oh, you don't like – I like that one. Oh, you like the center ramp? Yeah. Wedgehead, podcast, shout out to them, has a whole episode on why they hate central ramps, which is hilarious, and I recommend listening to it. And so when a ramp is perfectly center, their claim is it's just not fun. That's their claim, when it's perfectly center. When it's off to the side, it's okay. But what they would say is, like, if you played, like, Mousin Around or something, like, a game that just has, like, a story, like, Police Force or a game that has a center, perfectly dead center ramp, like, it's just not as satisfying. A lot of games have this in the back here. Like, Kiss has one, Aerosmith, for example, and now King Kong has a center ramp. I know they don't want me to compare King Kong to Aerosmith in layout or whatever.
    81:08
    But center ramps, just, like, you hit it. Maybe it goes halfway. It comes all the way back down. straight down the bottom. That's my opinion. I could do without perfectly center ramps. Cale, argue it for me. Well, on this particular layout, I'm not saying it always works, but on this particular layout, a layout that's so interesting like that keeps like, I'm also going to just put that perfectly center ramp right in the middle of it. What else do you want there? I think it works. And the fact that that is the ball lock, I think it's cool because, like, you have all these other paths you're thinking about that are very interesting. And then he adds the center ramp right in the bozo zone. Yeah, right in the bozo zone. Exactly. So true.
    82:04
    Which is also probably why they put a post there. It's an important shot because it is a ball lock. Right. And the ball goes straight down if you don't hit it. Like, it's a bit steep, so if you don't hit it enough, it goes straight down. And then they have some center posts there that can bounce it up. And I agree with our chat here, Kat and Brian here, saying that King Kong is a great sequence where, you know, right flipper to the left loop and the side ramp and the right flipper, and you can repeat that.
    82:26
    And Pocket is saying, you know, center ramps, they help with flow, but they don't make you feel satisfied, although they made you feel satisfied, Cale. Yeah, I like it.
    82:37
    Okay, there we go. I'd argue that the fall of the Empire Center ramp is slightly better because it's a jump ramp. Jump ramps are cool, and you don't always make them, and then they go somewhere that you may not expect.
    82:50
    But anyway. But not in a premium. Not in a premium. The premium, they make it worse. You're paying for it to be worse because you're paying to have a shot hit a dead end. Yeah. I can't get behind that. I'm sorry. I can't. But anyway, that's me.
    83:09
    All right. Okay, so next we're going to go to individual mech, and I'm a little concerned here, Cale, that I've chosen wrongly, and I'll tell you why. Why is that? Cale, you did a podcast, roundtable podcast, with Jamie and Ralph, as you do, and you've already laid out your case for what you think is the best individual mech, and you made a very good argument on that podcast, and it, I admit, has already convinced me that I am wrong,
    83:36
    and I didn't change it. because I thought that was unfair, I will have to stand by my answer, and then I'll have to let you beat me up over the right answer. Is that fair, Akil? I'm ready. Okay. So I had said for my best individual mech, which is the Dune mech, the Willy the Worm, and I was saying that because, boy, that mech is cool, and I do say it's really cool, okay? The Worm can rise. You can treat it as a bash toy in one of the modes, so you could have to hit it straight on. There's a magnet when it's all the way down. It can eat the ball, and we know how we like creatures that eat balls in pinball, and we hate when they don't eat the ball in pinball. It can spit the ball back out and put it on this ramp. It can go all the way down and let you shoot behind it into this thing.
    84:18
    And so that's why I gave the award to Dune. Cale, what do you say? You agree with me, I assume. Can we go back to the photo while I talk about this? Okay. First of all, I want to talk about, before I rip it to shreds, I want to talk about how cool it is. Oh, good. But look at that whole image.
    84:42
    I mean, this is like when we were kids, this is the toy set you wanted. You know, it's like it reminds me of Stompers or the Ewok Village. It really ties the whole room together. But, by the way, I might have given up the vote for best sculpts in pinball, you know, just the game, like all these sculpts that they have around. But, sorry, keep going. Yeah, but clearly the winner for best mech is the dragon in D&D Premium. Premium specific. Make your argument.
    85:18
    So first of all, as far as toys go, the dragon looks like a dragon. Let's just say if you took these toys out of a game And you were to display them on your shelf the way people do You would have to explain what this weird cylinder is on your shelf It does not look like the worm in Dune The dragon, you would not have to explain That's a freaking dragon head coming out of a mountain A cave You know, you wouldn't have to, well, you know, explain, you know, well, it had to be shaped like a can of beans because that's the way it would work kinetically in a pinball machine. And it's actually very cool if you saw it in action. So that's one, you know, pro for the D&D Dragon. The D&D Dragon is a, it shoots out balls like flames across the play field during the Dragon Multi-Ball. It's a bash toy, but it's a bash toy that has to move. You have to enable it for the chin to come down, and you pop the chin with the balls.
    86:38
    Not only that, the dragon talks, and it has Hollywood-quality call-outs while you're playing. It taunts you. You know, I mean, to me, it's just a very clear winner when it comes to mechs. Not only is it the best mech of 2025, it's one of the best mechs in the history of pinball.
    87:05
    Another thing, this is from the operator side of it, it works. I don't know if they fixed the worm in Dune, but the worm had serious issues. And I know people might be saying, well, hold on.
    87:23
    There were issues with the dragon mech, like some board in the dragon that was almost catching on fire. It was just like a diode popping and smoke would pop. But the very first runs of the dragon did have issues, and they fixed it with subsequent runs. but the worm in D&D, I mean the worm in Dune had serious issues like show-stopping issues. You couldn't even play the game when these malfunctions would pop up, and you even saw that in Carl's stream of Dune where he had to stop the whole stream several times to reset the worm.
    87:59
    So that's another mark against the worm, but I don't know. Have I convinced you? I'll tell you my answer, Kel. I'm going to do something that I wasn't prepared to do.
    88:16
    Obviously, yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. The new winner. You have defeated me with your jiu-jitsu argument. I am hereby defeated. The answer is Dungeons and Dragons. That's dragons awesome. You're right. And it protects its gold. You have to bash its head and move it out of the way. I didn't get a chance to play the premium. I don't think I ever have, and that's the problem. I played the pro.
    88:40
    And I'm sorry, Cal. Sorry. Apology accepted. We got a lot of people in chat pointing out the sexual nature of the dune sculpt here.
    88:54
    And I'll just leave that to the chat to discuss. Yeah. Absolutely. Now, a different award. You ready for a different award, Cal, or anything else you want to say about that? No, no, go with it.
    89:07
    Okay. Different award for best overall mechs. So an individual mech is saying, wow, that dragon is amazing, or wow, that worm is second most amazing. But the overall mech, that's saying all the stuff you throw in the game. Oh, this is crazy. Interactive. What's your feeling on that? Do you know the answer? Well, it's clearly D&D. Oh, my gosh. Are you kidding with that? Even, look, the dragon. Here I'm going to argue with you. Okay. Let's get to the argument. All right. Should I tell you what the answer is first? Yeah, then we'll go. Okay. All right. Here's the actual answer, and this one I'll stand by. Evil Dead. And let's go into it, okay? For Max. All right. You have, for Max. No question. Okay. Let's get into it. I'm not even sure I'm going to show all of them here. All right. You have a cabin physical ball lock with a swinging cabin that moves out. The balls come down, and then you have a tape recorder that comes on, like, seemingly only in that one moment where the tape recorder comes on. It's making you feel that. Next to it, you have the double-barrel shotgun that shoots balls out two at a time to start that multi-ball. You have a moving hand that moves back and forth that you could bash toy, just like that, on the side like that. Here I talked about the tape recorder that's moving. You have a playfield, standing targets that raise up that you could hit to lower them to then turn into, go into the lower playfield. you have these pop-ups that people make a big deal about in Medieval Madness, for example. And yet here, you have them in just, here's another two things for you. Here's another two deadites that you could hit in the face, for example.
    90:42
    And then I think about this when I think about Elton John which is to me a worse layout, a great layout but a worse layout than, let's say Spider-Man, for example, of which it looks quite similar. Because in Elton John you have some drop targets, and you hit them, and then there's a wall there. You can't access the world behind it, whereas at least in Spider-Man, there's like the stand-up targets that you hit, and then they go down, and then you could go somewhere behind it. And then here, there's nothing there. You could just hit all these shots, and then in some times, some modes, you'll have stand-ups that come up. You hit them. They drop. Then a hole opens up, a trap door. You have to go into that trap door. So I'll show it like here, and you're in the lower play field, for example. So to me, it has a spinning head, by the way, this Linda, good Linda, bad Linda, when you get into that scoop. So, like, to me, it's just, like, obvious. It has the most – it has a ton of mechs going on in there. All right, I'll stop. Tell me your feeble argument for why the other one and a half mechs of D&D help.
    91:44
    You're absolutely right. I wasn't even thinking about Evil Dead. Ah, fair enough. But here, this is why I was siding with D&D, because it doesn't feel, unless you could, like, you know, argue this, it doesn't feel like any of these mechs are something new.
    92:11
    True. I don't argue that. It's more of what we've seen in the past 30 years all put into one machine. incredibly impressive. I think the only thing we see that we can say is something new is the shotgun, loading the shotgun shells. But we have seen things where you have to hit one... You have a double plunger in Twilight Zone, but it doesn't shoot both out at the same time. Right. Well, I'm just talking about how you load on the play field. Yep. You have to hit the shotgun shells there. Exactly. Hit one or the other and then both, right? Yep. So that was my thought process, where with D&D, we see truly something new.
    92:55
    But man, I have to agree with you. Evil Dead is going to win this one. Okay, good. Fair enough. Fair enough. I appreciate that, Cale. You know what? We can both admit when we're wrong sometimes. And why not? All right. So having said all that, finally, we could talk about what is the award for overall best playfield design. Is it Evil Dead with all those mechs? Is it Dungeons & Dragons with its very impressive dragon mech? What about that ramp in King Kong? What about the flow in Harry Potter? What about all those theme immersion that you get in Portal, for example? In the end, obviously subjective. But for me, I'm going to say Harry Potter. I think it's a top ten all-time layout. I think King Kong is right behind it as also one of the best layouts of all time. but for me, Harry Potter just flows like crazy. It surprises you where the ball comes out. It's an upper play field I enjoy when I'm actually up there, and it's really hard to do that with an upper play field. They did it in Jaws. They did it in Foo Fighters, but even for me, Harry Potter upper play field works. It's got shots behind the ramp. It puts a ramp on the side but lets you get past it. I don't like its spinner placement. You can't argue that point, but I'd say it flows fast, has a lot of ball pass diverters. I'm in on it. What do you say to that, Cale? I'm just going to have my vote I'm not going to argue against you make a very good argument but my vote goes to King Kong it's not a crazy comment I think I want to show the love to Eric Menier for such a crazy impressive layout it's unique with all those feeding the outlands it forces you to play on the fly as good pinball should I don't like stop and go too much you know? So anyway, that's, that's my answer, but, but obviously we could, we could disagree on that. I think those are the two clear choices.
    94:48
    And then, and then from the chat, they're asking about Winchester mystery house. I am considering that for next year. I'm not considering that for this past year. It's only for, it's for me, it's a 2026 game. It may really play amazing and I have a lot of great things to say about it, but it just, you know, 99.9% of people haven't played it yet. Hasn't, It hasn't even shipped to this month, so that's why I'm calling it 2026.
    95:10
    Do you think that's reasonable, by the way? Should I have included it as 2025? No, because – Because they announced it in 2025. I think it's all about when the game has shipped and the public has seen it. And there were only like a handful of like prototype level games. They were the prototypes. They weren't production machines. They were on the streets. and so you only got to play it if you went to a show and I played it, that game's phenomenal yeah yeah, I can't wait to talk about it next year once everybody, well is everybody going to get to play it? you know, it's so limited and I don't know how many locations are going to have them true story I think it also comes down to, like, what do you love? do you love interesting ballpads like Jack Danger gives you in Foo Fighters and X-Men And do you love kinetic satisfaction like Elwin gives you in Jaws and, of course, in Godzilla and, of course, here in King Kong? Do you love flow like you get in Harry Potter?
    96:08
    And then, you know, Steve Ritchie didn't make a game last year, so that's that. But anyway, you know, like that's the argument is what do you love in your layouts? And that's what matters.
    96:18
    So anyway, that's play-filled design. And so I gave it to Harry Potter. That's that. Are you ready, Cale, for our largest and last category of awards? Yeah. We are a code-focused show, as you know, Cale. We dive deep into all code. Often the day it comes out of a new pinball game, and we intend to keep doing that. And we give awards in code for the criteria that each pinball game has, these 10 technical award criteria of Pin Pal's criteria, things like moments and theme immersion and breadth and depth and so forth. We talk about it with every game that comes out as we dissect its code. So I thought it would be fair to give it an award for each one. And so that's what we're going to do. We're talking about what can make a moment in using code. We're not focused on what makes a moment necessarily with the best mech, for example, but it's all about what makes you feel a moment. And so I'm going to break that down, though, and we're going to further after we give those 10 awards, by the way, we're going to talk about launch code and individual modes and overall modes and multiballs and best code. We're going to talk even more code awards. There's about 20 code awards strapped in, in other words. But we're going to start with moments. And even within that, we're going to break it down to the best individual moment versus the best overall moment.
    97:34
    Individual moment here. I had a lot of debate in my head about this. I'll tell you the answer, and then I'll give you the honorable mentions, too. And you can say if you would fight me on any of those one things. As an example, one of the honorable mentions is Dragon Multiball start in Dungeons & Dragons. Like, I recognize that feels pretty cool when you do that. It's shooting balls at you and shooting all over the play field. So that was in my, like, top, let's say, six or seven potential moments to pick from. But let me give you – should I give you the other potential moments? Let me just tell you the winner first, okay? For me. All right. For me, the best individual moment is the Dune Desert Power multiball start, and I thought it would be fair to show you what that feels like to start it off, okay? What makes it a moment is the buildup to getting it makes thematic sense. the moment pauses and involves you in lights and sounds and call outs and uh the screen goes big and uh and then the mech helps too so let's let's check to show the video oh the uh the poppers like the blueberries you have to call your uh you have to hit the pop bumper to call their worm you have to get it in this this area here traps the ball away we go This is not the multi yet Now this is the build phase a risk and reward where you have to hit the ball And I actually build something And you have seven seconds left to hit it So you can build up the jackpot value And then when you're ready. 14, 15, keep going, keep building, keep building, go, go, go. All right, let's take that.
    99:07
    In theory, if I can actually get control here. There we go. All right. Let's go victory phase. The idea here is I want to get to the super jackpot phase and then use my thumper. But again, so three regular jackpots.
    99:32
    All right. So for me, there's like a reason why he went full screen there. He's not doing that in every game. He went full screen because he knows that feels like something. and even the display actually gets rid of all of the information and just zooms into the screen of the scene. And so that's why I feel it's a huge moment. Cale, I'll pause there. Do you want me to tell you the other moments before I hear your argument or do you want me to – the other honorable mentions, I mean, or do you want to argue it right away? Yeah, keep going. All right, let me give you the honorable mentions. We got dragon multiball start in Dungeons & Dragons, shooting the balls, dragon flying all across the play field with its balls. And then Death Star, Super Jackpot in Star Wars, where you make the shot and the flippers die. So you feel like you made that one shot like Luke did to get the ball into the Death Star when it doesn't reject, and it doesn't with the new fixes that they sent down. So the Death Star, Super Jackpot, I'll say. Dragon Multiball. The Dune Pain Box, that's its own other moment where the ball gets in and you have to hold the flipper down and hold the central action button down with one hand while playing it with the other hand. I'll give you Evil Dead, Boomstick, Multiball Star. You know, ready, aim, and then Ash Campbell, you know, Bruce Campbell says something crazy at you, and you have to hit fire. Evil Dead Cabin Multi-Ball Start is another one where, like, you know, shut it off, shut it off, and it goes crazy. I'll give you King Kong Deadeye, skill shot mode, where you have to, like, plunge into the left out lane as much as you can. The King Kong T-Rex battle, where you have to bash the T-Rex in the face and press the action button. And then I'll give you Predator, the earlier mode I showed you where, like, you're facing off against the Predator and the lights are going crazy. So that's what I'll say. Death Star. So Death Star, Dragon, Evil Dead, King Kong. I'm ready. You go.
    101:15
    Hands down, Death Star. And this is the reason because I've experienced every single thing you've mentioned. Good. And there was nothing that got me as excited as that Death Star – what is it technically called?
    101:37
    It's the end of that mode, right? Oh, the super jackpot of Death Star. So a lot of people don't see it. You have to get a bunch of jackpots and then one more in the Death Star. Yes. The first time I did that, I remember messaging people going, have you done this yet? just the feeling, the combination of so your flippers die, so you immediately look at the screen and there's, you know, the Death Star explodes and then, I mean, if you are a child of Star Wars and you remember seeing this on a big screen at some point, you really, it really took you back and I think that one excited more emotions than any of the other things you've mentioned. The thing with Dune, the Dune stuff is all amazing, but it all seems like real subdued. But that's the way the movie is, I think. It fits that theme. When you destroy the Death Star, it's a real theatrical event. I'll say, although you won't get me to change my vote, I respect the call. I think I had my own internal argument where I thought that was up there in my top three, the Death Star super jackpot. Have you done it live? I have not actually. Okay. So people need to listen to me on this one, right? Yeah, I think that's fair. Honestly, I haven't done it live. Yeah, I would admit it. But, yeah, I haven't. You're right. But, you know, I have to – because I don't – the thing is I don't go for the Death Star as a strategy because the other two are so damn easy. You know, the Hoth, you could, like, backhand that shot. And then the light escape or whatever, you know, you could just hit the center ramp a bunch. So it's like, do I go for that and risk draining because I could only really hit it from the right flipper, I find, and it maybe doesn't, you know, sometimes reject. So I don't go for it strategically so I don't see it as much as I should, and I should. and I'm sorry, Kale, I haven't. Okay. But I've seen it on camera and I respect it. It's a good moment. That's what I say. Yeah. Chat, what do you say? We always want to know from you. After all those moments and more, what do you say? And as you think about that, we're going to go for another mode award. I want the house. Another moment award, which is best overall moments. So just a lot of things going on in that game where you're like, wow, look, did you see when that happened? So I'll take, like, Star Wars, for example. That is a great moment when you defeat the Death Star. But I think the game needs more moments than that. And it's, I mean, another moment would be using the Force save, you know, I think is a cool thing to do. But I'll tell you why. For me, the clear answer here on the most moments, best overall moments in a game is Evil Dead. And I'll just show you a few. But the game has like 100 to me.
    104:40
    And I'll show you what I mean here. All right. So the first one. Let's actually talk about Boomsticks. So Boomstick, I've already hit the number one. So the first thing I want to show you Boomstick. Like you said earlier, Cale, you have to hit the one, then the two. Then you have to hit both together at the same time, which is quite innovative. And then you go down in the lower play field, you do a bunch of stuff, and then it gives you the call-out ready, aim, Boomstick, multi-ball, or whatever. So I actually have to hit number two. So you have to hit them both separately, and then this is the unique thing. Now you have to hit them at the same time. So if you hit one, it's just going to pop back out. it doesn't matter how you hit it, it's just going to pop out. So you have to hit them both at the same time, and then it will open up the cellar. Once you're in the cellar, I'm actually aiming at the targets over here. So I can't throw the ball around. So I hit it. There we go. I hit it again. That's how you load the shotgun.
    105:35
    Okay. Now I'm loading up two shots over here. And then if you watch the screen, you want to hit the fire button when the hand starts to move, and that'll shoot both out. So once again, this is... All right, that's my boomstick. Can I show you one or two more moments and then take the debate? Sure.
    105:53
    All right, next one I'll show you is, I believe, Sanity Laughing. It's the third ball. And then this is actually a pretty cool multiple start. So look at these balls. You can see up there in the camera, the swing's going to move out of the way. It's going to drop the balls behind this flipper, and then they're all going to come out.
    106:12
    All right, when you're in this, you want to hit yellow shots. All right. So that's that one. I'll show you one more, and then I'll take questions on it. All right. So this one is a mini wizard mode where every single mech is making noise in the game, and you have to hit them to shut them off.
    106:35
    The cellar is going to pop up, and then you want to hit the cellar. In insanity multiball, which is so great, every mech in the game you're going to see is going to be going nuts.
    106:47
    Because you're going nuts. So you have to hit every mech in the game. Every mech in the game to work your way through the multiball.
    106:55
    Here we go. So I need to hit that guy. I need to hit the pots in the back. There we go. I need to hit the cellar door. but the cellar door, I have to hit all three targets on the cellar door and then I need to hit that deadite and I need to hit... Alright, Cale. I'll stop there. I could have shown more. What do you say to that argument?
    107:21
    Once again, you've done it. You are 100% right. Good. I think so. I think I've made the argument there. Best overall moments goes to Evil Dead. That's that. Alright. But moving along, we're going to go to our next award, which is Best Theme Immersion Through Code in Pinball. And, Kel, you will be happy here, Kel. You know why, Kel?
    107:45
    There's one clear winner. There is one clear winner, and for me that is Dungeons & Dragons. And I'll tell you personally why I feel that is. Obviously, it's like a role-playing game. Dwight is obviously into the theme very much. He's very good at theme immersion. I have an argument against his pacing and other things in his games. But the theme immersion is there on a lot of his games. You can pick your characters, for example, you know, the wizard or whatever it is. You can do, here's your new characters, and they come with all these little things here, and who knows what all that's about. You can pick what town you're in. You can unlock characters. You can save your characters, for example. You can level them up. You can defeat owlbears on the screen and roll dice, and you have a party and whatever all that stuff means. I'm sorry, I never played Dungeons & Dragons, despite it seeming like I would have. and you play all these modes and you go to all these towns and it's just clear theme immersion through code. You don't need fancy – the dragon helps, that's for sure, but even forget about the mechs in the game. Just the code structure says this person cares about the theme deeply. That's what I would say. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah. I mean, I'll go as far as is there a pinball machine that has better theme immersion?
    109:00
    Through code, arguably no. Yeah, no. Right. I don't even think there's an argument. It might literally be the best theme immersion. I mean, you can save your progress. You can build your character. You're making all these decisions. You can play the game so many ways, just like actual D&D.
    109:17
    Yeah, this is a clear winner for a lifetime achievement award of theme immersion. Yes, and if I had to say, like, each individual coder, just like I was saying, each individual designer designs for a different goal. often I find each individual coder codes for a certain goal. Are they thinking about the risk and reward and pacing and that sort of thing? Are they thinking about, like Dwight does, I think he thinks about moments and theme immersion in code. You know, like Star Wars, you know, I'm not going to get into the Star Wars thing, but the point is, I'm not going to get into it. There are parts I don't like, but the thing I think he does in his code is, like, make you feel like you're in that thing, at least in this game, for example. Mm-hmm. Yep. But so no cats and Brian, not for this year. Every year we're going to do this. I think we could – what do you think, Cale? This is our first annual, but that assumes we're going to do more. I think we're going to do more. What do you say? Yeah, absolutely. And so we'll do it every year with the new games that come out, and we'll have this award show. But this is just for games in 2025.
    110:18
    All right. Obviously here you have this combined video mode dungeon kind of thing. And so that's theme immersion. And plus with the dungeons changing like every Sunday.
    110:29
    I mean, come on. It's amazing. Yeah, there's that. It's amazing. It's amazing there. All right, Breath. Breath is saying that when you start the game, what different things do you have to do? Are you playing modes? Are you playing multiballs? Is that it? Are there different types of modes that you can do? You know, what are your – are there different other features? You know, what I call modes, like a traditional mode that you start and you play it. But here, I'd have to say, this is almost close to being called the Elwynn Award, because in every game, he gives you 100 things to do. If you're playing Jurassic Park, not to talk about Jurassic Park here again, but you have your controller modes and your T-Rex modes and your T-Rex multiple and your Chaos multiball and your Raptor multiball, but you could also do the Pateks, for example. And King Kong takes that to the next level. You can play your modes at the gong, fine. You can play your King Kong multiball or your spider multiball, or you can go for the super sweep. You can go for the treasure hunt. You can go for island treasure, which is different. You can get map segments. You can get King Kong letters to get your Deadeye to get you eventually your T-Rex. You could go for climb arrows to get to your biplane attacks and then also your New York City events. Like, it's just there's 800 things to do in that game. And it's basically whenever L1 is making game, they're probably going to win the Breath of War that game is what I would say, you know, except for Bond 60th or something like that. But even that is impressive for a classic. So, breath. That's what I mean by breath. And hopefully I have defined it well. What do you say to that, Cale? Surge, I concur. All right, good. There's no argument here. Yeah, it's hard to think of an argument there. It's just a very classic, like, you compare that. Maybe we shouldn't compare it. But, like, you compare that to, like, X-Men, you know, for example. Like, there are modes and there are the multiballs. And I can't tell you another thing you should be doing when you start the game. You know, it's not like, maybe should you go to Danger Room and level it up? I guess that's okay. but like King Kong is just like there's 10 different things to do in that game right away cool yeah all right let's go to I here I list some of them how about that I didn't even mention all of them like King combos and all of that these are all the many things you could do just to start the game you know at the beginning so that's that breath it wins let's talk about depth so depth is saying here that you have stuff to do at the tail end of the game do you have stuff to do when you defeat the modes. That's common in almost all games. Do you have stuff to do at the end of multiballs? Okay, maybe. That's common. You get a super jackpot or whatever. But here, I'll give it to Evil Dead, and I'll try to explain why. Let's see if I... You know what? Actually, here's a good way to show it. So, Ralph pointed out Spooky's new feature called Spooky Tokens. It's actually not completely an innovative thing. Jaws did it with Shark Teeth in Stern's game, where you could kind of unlock additional modes by gaining Shark Teeth. So I'm not going say it's a new thing but this does give me a chance to show you all the many different essentially how many mini wizard modes a game has for doing stuff so let me just play the video and you'll still get six so i have six of them right now so what you do is you hold the left oh sorry the action button and the start button so i'm going to hold the action button and hit the start button and now it says select an award so right here you can see the cost of your coins and then how many coins you have so if i wanted to access like one of these other modes now i have six tokens, so I can't do destroy the book mode, and I can't do some of the other wizard modes, but there's a bunch of them that I can access. I didn't even know this was a thing. Yeah, but that's a surprise, right? That's cool. So you gain tokens, and then you could play you could start the game and just play a wizard mode instead of the traditional game.
    114:02
    And they cost different token amounts. Yeah, right now let's take a second to answer the chat. Katz and Brian has a good point. games that, you know, with updated codes. Yeah, but is this the fault? Well, in fairness, like, X-Men, even now, isn't complete. You know, I don't know if John Wick is not complete either, for example. And they could never win an award. 26, 2025, or really when they came out, which is like 2004. And this is the developer's fault. If you won an award, you've got to come out with a banger. Yes, that's what I'm going to say. Right. I mean, I will accept a completely overhauled code like, let me try to think about it. Maybe I don't have a good example. Metallica, I would have allowed to talk about Metallica code. They really redid that when they released it.
    114:54
    Cohen, is there a Pin Pals episode on Kong yet? I think that was our first episode, but so much new stuff is out, it might deserve a reboot. But our producer, Rachel Best, demands a pen pals on Avengers. I am writing.
    115:16
    And the reason she's giving me the thumbs up, the reason is she's noticed every time you've done a deep dive on a game, more people have played them at the bat. And I'm sure it's the same. I've heard stories from the same, you know, across the land. Yeah, and I've talked about, by the way, Nick, a fan of the podcast, and Nick has talked about coming on our show to talk Avengers, and I hope we can set that up, Cale, because I know the rules of Avengers. I'll start by saying that. And the rules of Avengers are very complicated. And there are things about the rules I don't love, but I also do love Ray Day, and I don't want to say bad things about it, but I will be honest and say the code. So I'm hoping to have Nick on to argue. I don't know his argument, but that he might love the code, you know, for example. And I want somebody to give another side to it, let's say, when we dive deep into Avengers. Yeah. But I'm ready is what I'm saying. Yeah, let's do it. You know, let's talk about powering up every character and what they do at level one, level two, level three of all your different shots with all the different gems. It's a perk system, Kale, that has like 18 different permutations of perks, essentially. Essentially 20. So there's level 0, 1, 2, 3, and then which gem it's placed on. And that gives you essentially, I would say it's like however many shots, something like 8 times 4, about 30 different perks in the modes. That's one confusing thing. The other confusing thing is the bingo drop target thing. That's another thing to get into. But all right, I digress. We're going to do it, Cale. We're going to do it. I've been avoiding it, but we're going to do it. I'm ready. Okay, let's do it. Okay. Okay, and so anyway, what I really like about Evil Dead and Depth is if you complete two modes, you get a mini wizard mode. If you complete four modes, you get a mini wizard mode. If you hit the interactive hand a bunch of times, you get a mini wizard mode. If you play the multiballs and you do the side quest in the multiballs, you get to its own wizard mode called Hero from the Sky. If you hit the captive ball a whole bunch in the spinners, you build up your insanity meter, and then there's multiple mini wizard modes there like Mirror Mirror, Insanity Laughing. And I'm probably forgetting some. There's the video mode, actually, which is quite in-depth for the game and really impressive. And that's like you get it through some secret unlocks of getting audio books and audio tapes or whatever. So the point is it has a lot to do, and it gives you something to achieve at the end of doing those things. So that's why, for me, it's that clear of a winner. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, well, I have to agree with you because I didn't even know this was a thing, and I'm excited to go try it out. Yes, great code. Great code. And good. And we have Nick in the chat saying that he is pumped and he does think Avengers has great code, which I'm happy to hear. All right. So, all right, let's go to Clarity.
    118:04
    All right. So for me, Clarity is the winner here is Dune. And it's not an argument. I don't think I can accept an argument here, Cale, but I will listen to one if you have one. But let me tell you, let me give you some background why here. All right. So here's my little mock-up of, like, understanding the Dune code. At the top, you have modes. The two blue things are different types of modes. At the bottom are the two main multiballs. And if you want to get into this type of mode called harvester mode, the spinners change from day to night. And so if you're in the day and you get in the scoop, you start your harvester mode. If you hit the spinner and it changes to night, you start your prophecy mode. There's this multiball. All you have to do is hit a shot a bunch of times on the far right. There's this other desert multiball. Hit the green shots. Fine. If you do well in those, any of those four things, you get dune letters. and Dune Letters give you the wizard modes of the game. That's it. That's the code. I can say it in about 20 seconds. There's a lot of depth to it past that, I get. But those are your main things to do in the game. And it's said pretty quick. I'll show the layout here. Here's the, they reinforce everything I just said in the layout, like the day versus night thing. So here's the night and the art and the day and the art on the slings, for example. They reinforce it in the lighting, as I showed earlier, with the day and night lighting in the rules that's reinforced. It has the fewest screen transitions per minute, for example. So when we compared it to, like, let's say King Kong, for example, which has a lot of screen transitions all the time. In Dune, it has so few screen transitions. And, in fact, they even, as I said earlier, invented a way for the info screen to overlay directly into the standard display to even further lead to unnecessary screen transitions. But having said all of that, Cale, there is one huge reason why Dune has the clearest code in Pinball. Are you ready for that clear reason? Yes, go. All right, and that is stacking. And I touched on this earlier that we were going to talk about it. And to do this, I'm going to have to have an incoming rant about stacking. Are you ready for this rant, Cale? Yeah, go. All right, and for this rant, I'm going to bring in a brand-new segment for the Pin Pals called our Pin Pals Deepest Dive. And I'll let the graphic and the theme song speak for themselves, Cale, as I go to this new segment here, Deepest Dive. It's time for our deepest dive. Where the pinpops explode and ball so deeply. It may cost some of our viewers to leave their bodies and get sleepy.
    120:33
    Warning. Don't listen and drive. Okay. Okay, so that's our... First of all, what do you think of that segment, by the way?
    120:55
    Oh, I like that. You're okay with that segment? I was about to fall asleep. Okay, good. What's up, Slinger? Yeah. That's right. We are doing it. It's our first live show. I think we're going to do them like this for an hour, and it's so good. You know what? It's good because, number one, we don't edit our podcast anyway, Cale, right? I mean, you do a lot of things, I'm sorry, on the edges, but we don't cut and paste or anything. We don't have ums. We just do the podcast. And so we might as well do our podcast live. Is that fair, Cale? Yeah.
    121:24
    Okay. Stacking. Let's dive deep into this concept of stacking. And, Jamie, get your bed out. It's time to go to sleep, if you're ready for this. This is the deep dive. I'll be right back. Okay. Just keep going. All right. I am going to keep going. I'm going to keep going. All right. I'm going to take a nap. All right. So for the pinball novices out there, stacking is the ability to play multiple game features at once. 95% of Stern games, there are some exceptions, but 95% of Stern games take a moderate or centrist approach to stacking. You can start a mode and then bring in a multiball. But you usually cannot start a multiball and then bring in a mode. So let's say if you're playing Deadpool, for example, you can start the juggernaut mode at the scoop, and then you bring in little Deadpool multiball. But if you start a little Deadpool multiball and free that ball behind the drop targets and multiball is going, you can't suddenly get in the scoop and start a mode. And that's kind of the moderate coding approach that most games have taken and Stern has led the way on in the world of modern pinball games. The advantages of doing this politically centrist way of pinball stacking is it's really good for risk and reward and really good for pacing. So, for example, it could create these moments of strategic decision-making with risk and reward. You say, gee, I'm one shot away from that multiball, but if I just start that mode first and then go for the multiball, I can use the multiball to help me in the mode and get a lot more points. Should I go for that mode first? Should I not?
    122:52
    You know, should you stack or not? It helps with pacing because it gets you through those activities if you kind of stack them together. So that's kind of the centrist approach. Any questions there, Cale, as you walked away and came back to Stern's approach? No, it's perfectly clear by the infogram. All right. Now, if Stern is the political centrist when it comes to stacking, you now have two companies that are at the extreme and opposite political ends of this debate, and I'm glad we can have this debate now that Barrels is into it here too. So Barrels of Fun with their Dune is anti-stacking.
    123:27
    Call it a closed borders approach where the game, for example, has these modes, these prophecy modes, and they're great modes. There are these six prophecy modes. But you can't bring any multiballs into them. Once you play them, once you're starting them, they are a single ball. You can't even time them out. Once you are in them, you are in them. You have to either win or drain. There is no in-between. I believe this approach at barrels is influenced by one of the greatest players of all time, Bo and Karens, who worked on these rules in Dune, along with Phil Grimaldi, another great player. And I would say that the advantage of a closed borders approach is clarity. It forces clarity. and that's why we're talking about it here, because if you don't have other features going on at the same time, you only have one feature to notice. If there's only one set of lights for the mode and there's no jackpot shots, for example, you're going to – thank you so much, Eric. You're going to, you know, be able to just play that mode and learn how that mode plays. You're also going to have theme immersion because that mode can make you feel like you're in the theme. There's not a bunch of other competing priorities. You can feel the moment of it. And so the advantage of the closed borders approach is clarity, moments, and theme immersion. You get to play the mode with no other blinking lights. The disadvantage of this approach is score balancing. So if a mode locks you out of multiball, then a player might avoid those modes. They're like, I don't want to get in that mode. I'll be stuck in a single ball. The only exception is, and I think they did this with Dune, is you have to make that single ball mode very, very, very valuable. And I'll get into that in a little bit. That's closed borders. Any question with closed borders? No. All right. On the other political extreme is JJP's open borders approach, which is led by another all-time great pinball player, Keith Johnson, who's generally advocated for open borders, stacking, everything goes. Harry Potter actually is not done by Keith Johnson. It's led by Joe Katz, who actually tones down some of the stacking, like 20% from the usual JJP levels. But there's still a lot going on at the same time. Like if you played Wonka, like everything goes, you know, at that time in that game. or like Hobbit or some other things. But anyway, breadth and depth is the advantage of the open borders approach. If you have a lot of features, do you have a lot of stuff in your code? Do you have 90 modes like Harry Potter does? Do you have six different multiballs like Pirates of the Caribbean does, for example, and 22 characters and six end lanes and out lanes and a combo system and three side quests and five super modes? If you have all of that stuff, then we're going to show it to you all at once with this version. So if you have a lot of stuff to show, then you might take the open borders approach. I'll pause there. Kel, what's your opinion of stacking? Do you want everything together at the same time like a melting pot? Do you want to enjoy each item on its own like a salad? Or do you want like the centrist approach that Stern takes? I want a perfect balance because, you know, it depends on the game.
    126:17
    You know, it's very cool in BSD, right? but it can get a little too crazy like on some JJP game. So I think I'm looking for a if I need to pick one, I think I'm with the political centrism. It's a nice safe answer Cale and one you won't be judged about for your political views by choosing. I'm going to give you another safe answer, my own version of a safe answer is I honestly like all three approaches as long as they are done well and artfully, and sometimes they're not quite often. Each approach has a time and a place. I think it depends on the game, what you're trying to achieve with it, what your audience wants. If you have, let's say, all the assets to a theme that people love and you want to make your players feel every moment of that theme, you know, like a Star Wars, for example, or a Harry Potter, for example, then for me, actually, you want a more restrict stacking so that you could feel the moments of it. But if you have a lot in your code and you want to show it off, you know, let's say like Pirates, for example, of the Caribbean, they don't have the assets of that game, you know, for example. There's no Johnny Depp on that game. And there, they have a lot of features, so they're going to throw it all at you, and then it's like open stacking.
    127:32
    Actually, Walking Dead pulled this off. It's an exception to the Stern rule, where Stern is usually moderate. But in Walking Dead, there's a lot of stacking. You can have multiballs and modes. You can have modes and multiballs. There's multiple multiballs that stack together. and it actually means that you don't feel individual moments in that game but you do feel the overall vibe of zombies killing each other over and over and over again and that's its own approach and so I think it can work in different moments and on the other hand if you just want more of like a classic risk and reward that pinball is all about giving players strategic choices of like do you want to craft the perfect stack or not do you want to take the multi-ball by itself do you want to bring in the mode all that stuff if you're really interested in score balancing and pacing, I think then you go for that centrist approach. That's my deep dive into stacking and why I'm saying that Dune has good on clarity because of its stacking. It sometimes can be at the expense of other things, like we're talking about here. I'll pause there. What do you say, Cale?
    128:30
    Well, you said I couldn't argue. Dune was a clear winner. You're allowed to argue now. Will you let me? Okay, I will. I'll quiet down. And maybe I just don't understand, surprisingly enough, your definition of clarity. But I don't see how Dune beats D&D. You know, I've played Dune a lot. I used to own a Dune. What was going on was never super clear to me until I watched Carl's stream of it. Now, when you coin up D&D, it almost holds your hand. Like, you know, hey, okay, let's start out, which it's just like starting a campaign. Let's start out. What character would you like to choose? Here's some attributes. Here's a whole map printed on the play field. Which town would you like to start from?
    129:25
    The modes are very clear. You make a mode shot. You can choose your mode, you know, get rid of the dwarves or whatever, chase the dog with the potion. and it's very clear. You can choose or you can pass and decide, you know, it lets you go where you want to go. You can choose to do the dungeon dwelling stuff, which is very clear, you know, like left, right, straight. You know, and the multiballs are very clear, the dragon multiball or the gelatinous cube multiball. You go into this one shop that is a shop where you can purchase things and it's very clear. You have this much gold and you can choose from these items.
    130:13
    I can't think of a game that's more clear than D&D. It is very beginner-friendly and kind of holds your hand through the whole game. Go ahead, Serge. Let's hear it. All right. I'm ready for an argument against that. Can I give a rebuttal? Absolutely. All right. You pointed to three, and I feel almost mean about giving this. I feel almost mean. This almost feels too ruthless, Cale, but I'm going to do it, okay? All right. You talked about three particular things, like choosing your character, and it gives you all the stuff. What does this luck 60% mean?
    130:48
    I'm going to ask you a series of questions to demolish the things you referenced. Well, you have 60% luck. It's clear.
    130:59
    All right. My case rests on that point. Let's move on to the next point. You talked about the multiballs. How many shots do you need to get into the gelatinous cube multiball?
    131:08
    It varies, I think. Doesn't it? It does. Right. How does it vary? I don't know. Should I even go for it? So here's what I'm saying. The gelatinous cube takes anywhere between two and eight shots depending on what week it is. So every week it changes, where some days, for one week, it's two shots. Oh, that's very cool. The next week, it's four shots. The next week, it's six or eight, and that varies between them. And it changes by week. So it's like you're playing, and you're like, wait, should I go for that gelatinous cube or not? I hit it two times. The last time I played this game last week, I got a multiball, but now I didn't. What's up with that? And isn't there like a percentage of like the first shot will start? That was an earlier choice, and then people hated it. So they changed it to like a change every week with sets of two like that. Now, I think anybody could nitpick certain things like you're doing. And I am doing it. When it comes with an all encompassing, like is something clear, like from the get go, like if you've never played pinball before and you coin up Dune and you coin up D&D, I think it is extremely clear about what's going on.
    132:28
    If you get good enough, you can go all the way to the back of this map. I mean, the map's like right in front of you. So you're saying people come up to Dune and they're like, oh, all I have to do is use my right flipper to choose a character and my left flipper to choose a town.
    132:43
    Versus like you play Dune and you just plunge. yeah well when Dune was in the arcade I'm just talking about real world experiences yeah Dune started off that I agree there was even very experienced players were like I really don't know what's going on you're right there I think you're I never heard that with GND I hear you but I think you're being colored by the early experience which is fair Like the early experience in the game wasn't a good one with Dune. The code wasn't there. But in D&D it was there. Fair.
    133:23
    That was a good one. We're still friends, right? We're going to make it through. I could just stop the stream right now. What happened? We don't have technical difficulties. Technical difficulties. All right, chat, what do you say as we go on to – Yeah, what do we have? Please explain – hold on. please explain to me how in D&D to avoid being in a city and all I do is travel to another city and once I get to the city the only thing I can do is travel to yeah, that's what you do go into a dungeon alright, so that's clarity, we're moving on to risk and reward so in risk and reward, oh we already did that song, I'm not going to play that song again Yeah, yeah. Risk and reward. Sorry, Cale, I'm going to give it to Dune again, and let me give him my defense of this, okay? And I know you haven't played this depth of the code because it was really early when it came out. Oh, but I agree with you. Sorry to interrupt. Oh, you do. But not because of anything I've played. When I watched Carl's stream, I clearly understood the risk and reward. I mean, it's like it's right in front of your face. Yeah, it's right in front of your face. I'll give you a few examples. I showed you the multiball earlier in Dune when he came to, for example, this was when he was playing the multiball and he had hit this captive ball, you know, for example. Right. And you have a few seconds to he's going to get it in there. And now you have a build phase with time remaining where you could hit this thing as much as you can versus drain and lose your ball, for example, and get out of the multiball. And so you could build it. That's one thing, for example. Or I'll point out another thing in Dune. After every mode, in every mode, there's two phases, phase one and phase two. And I was saying the dangerous thing about restricting stacking is it might make players avoid single ball modes unless those single ball modes were very valuable. And so they wisely made these the most valuable thing in the game by giving them two phases. and you get to decide at the end of phase one if you want to collect that 110 million or collect the jock pound in exit mode or continue for five times that value. And so it's like 5x if you go on to phase two, plus you get a perk from beating the mode. So they give you these kind of choices in the game. They even give you these press lit action button for worm hurry up. These are like play field multipliers kind of thing. and they're player-controlled playfield multipliers as opposed to, let's say, shout out to a little shade on King Kong where it's like stand-ups that let your 2X. And so usually you're getting them by mistake, your 2X playfield. You don't even realize you're in it. Here it's like you have to choose to use it. And so I'm going to give it to Dune because it has a lot of player choice that's based in risk and reward. Do you do the thing now or do you not do the thing now? Do you take that shot or not? In a sense, all pinball games are risk and reward, of course. And King Kong has lots of other risk and reward. Like, you know, there's different shots you can take in different modes that are worth different values. But here it gives you, like, very clear choices. Do you want this or do you want that? You know, it makes it very clear to the player, I think, and it gives you a lot of, like, huge risk and reward, like 5X in the, you know, second phase, for example. I'll pause there. Sounds like you agree, but what do you say, Cale? Yeah, I don't think there's any argument here. All right. All right, let's do it. All right, so fair and balanced. What do I mean by fair and balanced? So I gave it to King Kong, and I'll tell you what I mean by fair and balanced. Do a player's choices ruin another player's chances? If you pick a character in Godfather, you know, can you not pick that same character, you know, for example? Is the scoring so lopsided that it makes you ignore or time out modes, you know, for example? And I think a little bit anti-Dungeons and Dragons, for example, on this point. Like, everyone has, oh, go for that mode. That's the highest value mode, you know, for example. And if you're in that mode, you want to be out of it, you know? Like, there are some things you might avoid in other games, and not specifically Dungeons & Dragons. I've said that for a lot of things. Keith, in general, codes games that are fair and balanced. You don't avoid things. You don't time things out. It's not like, I don't know, Guardians of the Galaxy, where you might, I only have 10 seconds left, so let me trap the ball so I can start another mode or whatever. Do use the whole play field. Like, in King Kong, use every single shot of that play field. You're not repeating the same thing over and over and over again at all on that game.
    137:49
    And let's say, does the game reward you for nothing? Like in Guns N' Roses, you plunge and you're in a multiball. Like, that's sad. You know, like you have to earn your points in King Kong. Even in the multiball, the jackpots aren't even lit to start. You have to hit the drops to light the jackpots even to begin with. It's hard to get the multiballs, a lot of dangerous shots. You have to hit the spider pit, for example, to progress it. So, you know, for example, and then do you make the harder shots worth more? You know, like in Crossing the Chasm, where you can go back and forth on the upper flippers in King Kong, if you do, you get a huge exponential value increase to it. But that's a really hard shot to make, that little shot right above the side ramp. It's sort of this, like, weird U-turn shot. And it's really hard to make that shot. And King Kong just does all of those things and more.
    138:40
    And it's, you know, typical that Elwin will win these awards. He's a tournament-focused player, a scoring-focused player. where he knows how to make you use the whole play field and give you different shots for it. So I'll pause there. What do you say, Kel? No, you nailed it. I can't think of any argument against that. Okay. You win this one, Serge. All right. Fair enough, Kel. Fair enough. I appreciate that. All right. Next, we'll go on to innovation. And I'm going to further divide this, as I sometimes do, into best individual innovation versus overall innovations. yeah I agree that by the way Dune got its cash out from GNR and I would give GNR a good risk and reward there, Chad is mentioning and I buy that too do you want to continue the song or not for example or cash it in the thing I would hate about Guns N' Roses and I don't think they ever fix this is it doesn't actually give you a sense of what that value is if you continue going you have to go to your info screen and find the song jackpot value which is an arbitrary number that doesn't actually mean anything to, even if you find the number. So anyway, I digress, Cale, but to that point of guns and roses. Couldn't we go back even further to something like whodunit?
    139:50
    Oh, it's been a while for me in whodunit. Well, you can choose to gamble your point. Oh, the roulette. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's example right there.
    139:58
    All right. Innovations in code is what I mean. So I'm going to give it to Evil Dead for a very specific thing, which is, I can't believe nobody else has thought of this, but an action button ball search. So let's say you're in multiball and you're playing a tournament and you have one ball trapped up in the right lower flipper and another ball is stuck in the back of the game. If you hold down the action button, it will initiate a ball search and pop that ball out. Whereas in other games, Sterns, JVPs, you don't start a ball search because there's multiple balls in play and the flipper is holding one of them. What do you think about that, Cale? What do you say? I love that feature. I agree with you. Okay. I'm sure Stern has some kind of reason why they can't do it They should just do it. Everyone should do that. It's ridiculous It's such an obviously good idea. Everyone should do that. If you're not doing that, you're wrong That's what I was going to say Just like last week we had an issue on Jurassic Park where there was a ball stuck during multi-ball and the player had a ball trapped and, you know, it's not going to, yeah, you know the whole deal. I know the whole deal. Yeah, you have to take the glass out. You have to hold, trap the ball and all of that. Whereas all you have to do, hey, Abe Flips, thanks for joining us here. Shout out to Abe Flips. By the way, I want to give him a shout out on this one. I asked if Abe wanted to come on the podcast, but Abe's from Austria, not Germany. I apologize. And, you know, didn't want to do like a full interview, which I respect. Abe Flips has an amazing documentary on pinball skills. For as much as I talk about code, as much as deep dive as I do on code, And Abe does deep dives into pinball skills and does an incredible job on that. I think it's on his Patreon. And I watched it, and I recommend it. That's what I have to say. Cale, what do you say? Oh, absolutely. I was chatting with Abe just yesterday or the day before. It was a little controversy in the Arizona State Pinball. Oh, do you want to talk about it? Oh, no, we don't need it. That's a whole podcast within itself. All right, maybe we'll do that on a future podcast if we get approval to talk about it. All right. All right, let's talk about best overall innovations. In the end, I gave this to Harry Potter – or Evil Dead. I'm sorry. I misspoke. I debated myself, actually.
    142:09
    But you know what? I'm changing it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Evil Dead. This is like when Moonlight lost to whatever that other movie was. I'm sorry. Don't you wish the Oscars were like this? Yeah. I've been talking about it so much. It's actually Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah, that's right. No, they did that in, like, one year where, like, Moonlight won versus the other movie that I don't remember now. Or maybe Moonlight. They said it won, and then they had to change it at the last second. Look it up, folks. You know, whatever. I didn't love either movie. But that's okay. So now let's go on to innovations. And I'm going to explain why I'm choosing at the last second here Harry Potter, all right? All right. So it gives you six mega modes. I'm not saying I love every innovation, but these are innovations. They're modes that advance regardless of shots. It's a very weird concept. The mode has a huge timer on it. There are mega modes. Like, you pick which one of the six you want, and then they last for many, many minutes. And they just progress. And if you don't do anything, they'll progress. If you do something, you'll get more points for it, but you don't need to do anything to make the mode progress and to see clips from the movie. The clips should be better integrated. That's a different problem. But it lets you progress the modes regardless of shots. I don't think I've seen that quite like that before. Guns N' Roses has something similar where the song progresses, but if you don't do something, they will boo you offstage. There are six times more modes than you need to get to the mini wizard mode, and what I mean there is that in almost all other pinball games, there's modes, and if you play through all the modes, you get a mini wizard mode. Here, they give you six times the modes that you need. All you have to do is get through one of those mega modes, and you get to the mini wizard mode. You don't have to do the other ones. That's different from other games right off the bat. There's this Quidditch points thing, and they did a lot of unique things when it comes to the Quidditch points. They give you this huge bonus only in Ball 3 that's related to your Quidditch points. So you don't want to tilt in Ball 3, in other words. It just shows you how many points you've got in that game in this sub-game within the pinball game called Quidditch. Sorry if you're falling asleep, Cale. But I'm going to go through these other innovations. They gave you this other thing I never heard of, which is let's say you're playing four-player games. The player who had the most Quidditch points in that game gets an extra 40 million points at the end of the game. And so you could suddenly pass other people in a tournament from a very different way to score, in other words. So I thought that was interesting. This is a crazy thing they did. They have a setting for pinball versus non-pinball call-outs in the settings. So let's say what I mean by that is, like, somebody tells you, shoot the left ramp. Or they can tell you, go for the Quidditch pitch, you know. And so if you want to, once you know what all the shots are, you might want to be more immersed in the theme. You don't want to hear something like, shoot the left ramp, you know. And so there's a setting there for more theme-immersive call-outs, you know, for example. I like that. It's sort of what you were saying before about the display, that, like, you don't want a display to tell you the words, do this thing. You want it to show you a flag, for example. That's equivalent when it comes to these call-outs.
    145:09
    Variable kickback speeds. I don't think that exists. Like, let's say you hit the Yagov shot in F-14, it shoots back at you really fast the same way. But this shot messes with your head. They purposely programmed it to shoot back at different speeds so that you don't know what to expect each time. You know, that way from this Death Eater shot. And then some accessibility stuff. So, for example, for bad players, essentially, that if let's say there's this mini wizard mode that's really cool in the game called Battle of Hogwarts, and you need to play all four multiballs to get to it. But if you're playing 100 games and you don't get to this mini wizard mode called Battle of Hogwarts, the game will automatically, without you doing anything, change the rules. So now you only need three multiballs to get there. And if another 100 games go by, then it goes to two multiballs. So they make it easier over and over to play the game. They also did this thing with the QR code where on the same game, you and I could be playing, but you could choose easy settings, I could choose hard settings, or vice versa. So if, like, you know, Dad's playing with the sun, the sun could play on the easier mode, for example. Whereas normally games have different easy, medium, hard settings, but it's global. Here it's player, you know, differences. So I'll shut up there. Those are my many innovations, why I'm choosing at the last second Harry Potter. What do you say to that, Cale?
    146:25
    I have to agree with you. There are so many things in here I didn't even know about which are really, really cool. Yes. I did take the time here. By the way, I agree with Cat. Sorry, you go, Cat. You go, Cam. I apologize. Well, just the setting for pinball versus non-pinball call-outs, so cool. I had no idea that was a thing.
    146:42
    What really impresses me is the intentionally variable kickback from the Death Eater. I had no idea that was a thing.
    146:54
    Yeah, like if you're playing – Does it work? It works. Does it work is a good question. Honestly, that's a good question. I said yes, but I played that also at Ace Kogi, and it wasn't working. Yeah, that's what I remember. Everybody says that thing. Maybe a lot of people say that thing doesn't work, but maybe they're experiencing the variable kickback. Maybe that's a feature. No, the one I experienced just had a little dribble out of there, like a 70-year-old man getting up to use the bathroom, you know, kind of thing. But when it's working, it works well. That's what I was going to say. and John Reed out there, I actually agree with you by the way I'm not, I'm saying what's innovative it is innovative, it doesn't mean I like it and I don't by the way, John Reed, the mega modes for what it's worth, but it is innovative, I have to give it to them on that and they did it because they want to advance the scenes more on the other hand they don't show you enough of the scenes with the call outs, everyone's going to hate on me for that but it's true, anyway I like the game, clearly I like the game right, doesn't mean I don't have problems with it Okay, that's that. But you know what, Cale? I went to the trouble of looking at all these innovations. I thought I would tell you some of the other ones, these other games. So, for example, Evil Dead, which I almost picked, had that action button ball search, which I do love as the best individual innovation of the year.
    148:14
    Here some other things they did When you start a mode in that game it tells you what the grand champion of that mode is On all other pinball games it tells you at the end of your game and you don look it up at that point But you like what the grand champion for the score What's the best mode? What's the best multiball? Here it tells you while you're playing the game, so it gives you that extra incentive to try to beat it and get on the board. For example, a simple thing, but I like it. They have hidden mini wizard modes that are just these extra things that players don't even know exist and are really hard to achieve but are just there for fun. It's crazy that they program so much in the game that they did these things almost for fun. Like the video mode, for example, which is a huge, extensive video mode, probably one of the best video modes in pinball, and I hate video modes in pinball, but it's one of the best. And to find it, it's really hard to find. You're playing a mode, and there's a hidden shot that they don't even tell you about where if you hit that shot, it'll give you an audio tape, and then you collect enough audio tapes over the course of the game and then you get the video mode. It's just that type of thing. It's just crazy, to be honest, to do it. It's really cool that they would go to the trouble.
    149:21
    Boomstick, you mentioned it earlier. You need to hit two targets at once. It is the only game I could think of that you have to hit two shots at once. There are other games where you can hit two shots at once, like Terminator 2 multiball to start it. You could fire the cannon. It could shoot two stand-ups, but you don't have to. In this game, you have to actually hit two stand-ups at once I've never seen a game that has that. And then I mentioned it for death. It might literally have the most many wizard modes of any game ever made, and I give it credit for that. So that's my Evil Dead argument as honorable mention.
    149:52
    Any argument there, Cale? Well, I can add an honorable mention. Please do. Evil Dead Remastered. What do you mean? Because they've done something I don't think we've seen before where you just release the code, and then if you have a watermark that says pending licensor approval,
    150:17
    I think they should lean into that to just do whatever the hell they want. Oh, that's funny. Well, because you're like taking through. Walking Dead remastered. Sorry, you said Evil Dead remastered. Oh, I'm sorry. Walking Dead remastered. Yeah. Got it. I mean, like, why not just go like, hey, let's just do all kind of stuff in here and then just go pending licensor approval. So that opens a whole new world. Like just the stern coders in zombie outfits running around. You name it. Right. I like it. I'll give some shout-outs to King Kong. It might be the first game where zero jackpots are lit at the start of a multiball. I can't quite think of another one, but maybe I should be able to. But it caught my attention. That's the main multiball. You have to hit the drop targets to light jackpots. It also might have the first game with a separate flipper count for each flipper if you go to the New York City events.
    151:07
    You have like 40 flips on the left, 40 flips on the right, and you can use up the flips on one side before the other.
    151:16
    And so that's some stuff for King Kong. For Dune, we talked about the status menu overlay on the display. The pain box is a cool innovation. You have to hold down the action button and only play with one hand, for example.
    151:29
    They restrict stacking, which is interesting. There's barrel ball, which is like a stall ball on a mode in Dune where you could hold the – before when you start the game, you know, we play stall ball like usually every Tuesday night right at the bat. And this is a design, a mode designed just for stall ball. Changes the game entirely, and you're just trying to get it in there. So that is in Dune now? It is. I know it was in Labyrinth. It was in Labyrinth, right. Not quite in Innovation because they rated it in Labyrinth, but anyway. Anyway, that's that. All right. We're on our way. Kale, are you ready?
    152:01
    Yes. Where are we? We are pacing, a.k.a. the Elwynn Award. I've said his name a lot, but this really is his award. I'm naming it for him. There is nobody better at game design when it comes to pacing. And what I thought I could do here to talk about pacing, Cale, I'm going to bring in a fan-favorite segment of the Pin Pals show. Do you know what I'm bringing in, Cale? I have no idea. Well, Chad, you know it. You love it. It's Pinball Science Corner. All right? We have to have at least one per episode. That is a rule as part of our contracts, I believe. So here we go. King Kong will get it, of course, because it's the L1 award. It's Pinball Science Corner where the pin pals break down a pinball rule. Using sharks, they grab some science and fun.
    152:44
    It's the Pinball Science Corner. Come on, let's learn about some pinball. That's right, exactly. I was going for like a DNA, you know, thing in Jurassic Park kind of thing. Or like a Clippy logo. All right. So let's talk about – let's talk about – oh, we have from Pin Addict saying Hallows. Definitely Hallows is my number one pinball moment. It is a great moment, and I have nice things to say about it, I think, later on. But I really, really love that moment. All right. What do I mean by pacing, Cale? This is the science time where I show graphs. if you're playing King Kong after like 5 minutes you might have like 50 million points after 10 minutes you're like 150 after 15 minutes you're like a 400 so it scales exponentially almost that things you do in the game it's not just boring nothing like going up, it makes it more exciting as you go on and there's a lot of things they do Elwynn does to achieve that I could get into, but things like island treasures that make your treasure hunt more valuable and all sorts of things like that as you progressively go in the game, your success on earlier things makes you have more valuable features later on. And that's not an easy thing to achieve, and I'm going to give the – allow me to do it, I'm sorry – out there the worst example here. It's always important to show what is great example versus the worst, and I'll tell you what I mean. And for this, I will show in Venom, bring in Venom here. Dwight, as good as he is at lighting and moments and theme immersion in D&D and games like that, I just hate the pacing of a lot of those games, and I'll show you what I mean here. You've played Venom before, right? Yeah. In Venom, the traditional way you play it is, and there's not many ways to play it. Like, if you want to win, there's really one way to play it. You have to start Mayhem, and then during Mayhem, you have to build to get to Mayhem. You're at, like, three, four, five million points at that point, right? You're, like, very low. You do Mayhem, and then you do Carnage while you're in Mayhem. And if you do that, you suddenly get to, like, 500 million points. Then the multiball ends, and then you're at the wood chopping phase of the game, where you could play for 10 minutes at that point, and you go from like 500 million to 503 million points, because it doesn't unlock valuable features for you down the road.
    155:10
    So that's what I'm talking about when it comes to pacing as it relates to scoring. Any questions on that kill or argument when it comes to that? No, you made that crystal clear. If you really want to see a stream of this, I don't think I was able to get it yet because it's not on YouTube yet. It was on Twitch a while back ago. But Jason Zahler, best player in the world, in my opinion, of all time, was playing Venom against somebody. And he was at like 600 million and they were at like 800 million. And he did the thing. He did his mayhem and carnage. And then he's like, what do I do now? and all he could do is he played for like 20 minutes just backhanding the scoop trapping it to try to light all his lanes to get mystery awards repeated mystery awards to end up getting to relight his locks for example and it was just bad to watch i felt bad watching it you know like that that's pacing that's what i said like poor pacing i think this is the right way to pace games and i think that's the wrong way to pace games your mileage may vary. Anyway. That's pacing. But Cale, pacing actually means two things. It means scoring. Does scoring exponentially increase as you play? Which I believe it should. The next thing to say is events in the game. Can you get more events in the game as you progress? So if we look at King Kong, for example, which is great for this, one thing leads to another thing, but that also leads to this other thing, which also leads to that thing. The downside of this is clarity, but the upside is you're always close to something. You always have that feeling like, man, I was just one shot away from blank once you get to know the code. It's like the crazy person at the bulletin board trying to figure out who the murderer is. That's what an events graph looks like for all Elwynn games, and I mean that in a nice way generally. I think you could go too far with this. I think it could become too layered, so layered, and that's what I mean by the word layered is it's something that looks like this. You can get so layered that you don't really know what's going on. You just know things are going on. But I think it gives you the value of something else to achieve. If you look at Venom, it is not like that at all. Every game of Venom starts the exact same way over and over and over and over and over again. If you're playing it in, let's say, competition, for example. Every game of Venom starts with, okay, I light my locks, and then I get on my locks, and now I'm in mayhem, and then let me hit the captive ball to get into carnage, and now I'm done, so now what? I guess I should do other things. But every game starts like that. And that's what I mean by pacing when it comes to scoring and when it comes to game events. Nod goes to King Kong. Venom is not in this year's contention, but it would lose. And it is an example of bad pacing. Hopefully I've defended myself. Why? What do you say to that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you win this one once again, Serge. All right. I made the argument. That's my pacing. There's all sorts of things in King Kong you can do. You go for the island locks, for example, so that you have a two-ball multi-ball in your mode. You know, what are you stacking? What are you putting on top of each other? There's always something on top of it. You go for the climb, and the climb gets you New York City events and all these sort of things.
    158:13
    All right. Last award will be a quick one. It's a really hard one to say. What do I even mean by bugs? I mentioned as a criteria, you know, like it's the unsung criteria because, like, you know, you played Dune and you had problems with it when it first launched. All the nice things I said about it, you don't care that much necessarily about them. you're not being mean, but because it just didn't work well in an operator location. It had too many bugs. And so I have to think about it, you know, do I judge it at launch code? I'm basically judging it at launch code at this point, because a lot of companies will fix their bugs, except for, you know, the Galactic Pink Force, for example. But other games, other companies will typically fix their bugs, and then you can play their games. But I'm going to give the fewest bugs to Harry Potter, actually. It launched with near full code when it launched. Most J.J.P. games do. They're usually just missing the wizard mode, for example. And it really just has few bugs, and so that's why I give it to that one. But a lot of Stern games are similar that way. So that's my Bugs Award. Any questions on the criteria or hallowed 10 criteria award scale? No.
    159:17
    X-Men pacing, not great. There's a question from chat about X-Men pacing. X-Men pacing, not great because in terms of scoring, I'd say. I mean, you could argue. I was going to say that I think it's much better now. Now it's better with Sentinel. You know, when you get 35 Sentinels and you get into that mini-wizard mode, and that's worth a lot. And then it's also better with the Save the City multiball, which is, like, the most valuable one. Actually, it did get much better over time. Perks help with that. Yeah, it's actually pretty good.
    159:53
    It wasn't. I'm thinking about it when it first launched. It was bad, but it's pretty good now. still never going to be like Elwin is meticulous about these things about that feeling of always being next to something else in front of you okay last code awards to wrap up our huge award show how are you enjoying the award show so far? I'm loving this thank you so much for joining us alright we're going to talk about best launch code here this is actually a shout out to Kaneda he did this on his podcast I don't want to take it but again, that's going to Harry Potter. It launched with full code. It's like near 1.0, and that's, you know, like we have to give it praise for that. A lot of times you get this game, and you're waiting like a year for the code to come out, and you're sort of worried, like, is it going to finish? Do they care about me enough now that they've moved on to other games? You know, and like when you're giving somebody a 99% game, that feels good. So I give credit to that. Of course, in the past, they kind of screwed you. They gave you, like, 99% code on other games, but they never completed the 100% until, like, eight years later or whatever. That's like Guns N' Roses. I mean, not Guns N' Roses. I meant to say Pirates on J.J.P. But on Harry Potter, they gave you, like, 99% code. They've gone to 1.0. It's a full, complete game.
    161:09
    Kat and Brian, you're right. There are two. By the way, I winnowed it down so that I could get crazier next year. That was the goal. There's going to be more awards next year.
    161:19
    All right. we go on to best individual. By the way, here's the rules chart for Harry Potter. Not only do they do such a good job of launching the code, that they're actually able to launch with a flow chart, and you can print this out and laminate it. I think they do send you one when you buy the game, and I love that. I mean, it's obviously a crazy thing to look at here, but it's there if you want to learn it, you know? And I remember when Pirates came out. That was actually my first game, J.J. Peace Pirates. I bought it when it was cheap, you know, relatively, I mean, to what it is now. I bought it new. and it came with this flowchart and I printed the – like nerd I am, you know, I printed the flowchart, I got it laminated. I was so proud of it, Kale. It was my first rule chart that I memorized and it was a doozy to start with because it was like 22 characters and all these other things. But I digress. The point is that when you launch code, you could launch a flowchart. You could launch the rules. You could explain to people what the rules are and that's just lovely. That's what I say.
    162:12
    All right. Best individual mode. Here you might like me. I wanted to explain how I think about this, Kale. I will define a mode in a future episode. We've had disagreements, and actually, for fun, I've asked multiple different rules designers from the different manufacturers for their definition of modes. And I will do this on a future podcast, I promise, Cale. But we got some hilariously different responses. You know one, right, Cale? We got one from Dwight, for example, for an incredibly detailed response in particular. You know, I've heard from Ray Day. I've heard from others on this. And I'll put them together. I think it'll be a fun thing to talk about. What do I even mean when I say modes? But for now, when I say mode, I don't just mean any game feature, like a Stormtrooper hurry-up when you get by hitting the Stormtrooper stand-up in Star Wars. That I don't mean as a mode. I mean traditional modes. You get into a chair, the electric chair in Adam's Family, and it gives you one of the windows that's on the playfield there, you know, for example. Or you get in the Scoopin' Godzilla, and you have to pick if you're fighting Titanosaurus or Gigan or Ebera. Like that's a mode to me. Or all the character modes in Star Wars, for example. So that's what I mean by modes. Any argument there, Cale? No, no. I think it's clear. Or Beatles, right? You pick it from the get-go. That's right. You pick it from the get-go. And Catherine Bryan has a question.
    163:32
    What's the best way to get in touch with pinball nerdetry? I suppose it's watch this podcast. Is that right, Cale? Yeah. That's the way. That's a good way.
    163:40
    Go play on location, too. And go play. And, yeah, watch the podcast and play at Electric Bat Arcade or other locations, and you'll find those people out there. If you could believe it, might even be nerdier than me about it. I don't know. I'll leave that to you to judge.
    163:55
    Okay. I also want to take a slight digression, not my long digression, to unique versus generic modes. I can't give the award to anything that has generic modes. Generic modes means hit the blinkies or not. Do you hit just blinking lights? And I'll point out as a general rule that games that have generic modes have more modes, and that's certainly the case here. What I mean is, for example, you take Joe Katz from JJP, who worked on Harry Potter, or Ray Day from Stern, who worked on Star Wars, and they may take issue with my categorization here, so I want to defend myself first. Star Wars has over 30 modes. It has 24 character modes alone. And each character mode has unique clips and callouts. So in that sense, hey, that's a unique mode. A lot of effort went into that, and I don't belittle the effort. There's a lot of effort that went into that. But the rules for the modes are all the same. Every single character mode in Star Wars, all 24 character modes in Star Wars, have the same exact structure. They have blue shots and white shots. You have to hit four blue shots to progress through the mode. With the final shot, always at that look of luck on the left side, that completes the mode. The white shots only increase the scoring of the mode, the value of those blue shots. But the blue shots are the only thing you have to do. The clips change, but the rules don't. I recognize there are other modes in the game, like Java events and beta modes, and they have slightly more unique rules, especially the Java events. So it's not fair to call this a binary generic versus unique. But by and large, most modes in Star Wars are generic. And so I stand by that. Any argument there, Cale? No, not at all. I just want to answer Katz and Brian real quick. If you join our Discord, Serge has been there every day. If you go to electricbatarcade.com, go to the podcast link. There's a link in there for joining the Electric Bat Discord. True story.
    165:47
    And, yeah, a lot of people reach out to me in Discord, and I handle it so far, at least. I'm helping somebody give them, like, consult on their virtual pin – on their homebrew game codes. It's a lot of fun. I won't call them out unless they want to be called out. Anyway, next let's look at Harry Potter, for example, the other generic mode in this group. And I should give you the slide here. So Harry Potter has generic modes. It has six different movies to choose from, each with a dozen smaller modes. So you get like over 90 different modes in the game, mini modes. And, again, each one has unique clips and call-outs. And in that sense, they are, of course, unique. A lot of effort went into them. I don't want to belittle it. But, again, the rules are the same. You hit lit shots. The particular shots you hit might differ based on the clip. If it's a clip of Harry Potter going to the Diagon Alley, then you have to have the Diagon Alley shot. If it's a clip of a villain, you might have to hit the Death Eater shot. The shots vary, but it still just hit the shot. I can only give awards for modes to ones that are unique, and maybe I'll give the award, and that'll make it clear when I say unique modes. Are you ready, Cale? Yep, let's go.
    166:52
    Okay. And Drain Monster says they love Harry Potter with so much variety in their modes. I wonder if I ask them, what's their favorite mode? Can they answer it? That's my argument here. And maybe they will answer it, and they'll make me look foolish. But I claim it's hard to have a favorite mode in Harry Potter or one of your favorite character mode in Star Wars because the rules are exactly the same. But you're going to like my individual award, Cale. My best individual mode is D&D because they did something unique. It's not just, oh, hit the lit shots. There's a stealth mode in D&D where the guards will find you. if the ball hits the slingshot enough times. So the slingshots will trigger the guards. And that's like storytelling in pinball. You could almost think of this award as what's the best storytelling award in pinball? And that's storytelling. And stories are usually told in modes like that. So it's like you feel like, oh, I shouldn't hit the slings because there are guards there, and then more enemies will come out. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, well, you know I agree with that one. I know you would. That's my individual mode.
    167:52
    Modes don't just have to be hit lit shots. they could be a concept. They could tell a story and I think that one does. I don't think the character modes tell a story. They do in the clips, of course, but in the actual rules of the mode in Star Wars and the rules of the mode in Harry Potter they just progress things with clips. They don't actually, you're not feeling it in the shots you take.
    168:12
    Anyway. Best overall modes. Sorry. Oh, let me give the award. Let me show it. And shout out to Tom Graff who was a nice guy and I met him, him and his son Neil, over at Starfighter's Pinball Festival. and fan of our streams, I learned, Cale. Oh, cool. Which is awesome.
    168:30
    He's a legend. He is a legend. Technically, I left the network a couple of years ago. So this is a spy on Puck.
    168:37
    That's why I want to show him. Something must be going on in that kobold town. But, yeah, I think there's going to be an announcement tomorrow. Slings will alert the guards. Be careful. Here's your sling.
    168:49
    Joel's just being Joel. That's basically what it is. I want to show him. He's going to hit the slings, and I want to show what that looks like.
    168:59
    Is that sling going? And the meter's going up. People on the pinball network are great. Maybe I can show another few seconds. You know, don't dismiss anybody from the pinball network. And so now guard comes out, the kobold guard, and you have to kill him.
    169:16
    You know what I mean, Cal? Yeah. All right, so that's my individual mode. It's a great concept for a mode. Are you ready for the next award, which is Best Overall Modes? Oh, I can't wait to see what you've chosen. All right. I have chosen Evil Dead, and so I want to give an argument for it here with a bunch of – I won't show all the same videos again, but it has two independent pathways for the movies. You could pick Evil Dead 1, you could pick Evil Dead 2, and play through four modes from each movie. So it's a total of eight modes. Each individual mode is very different from each other with very unique rules. Each of them, of those eight modes, has a phase one and a phase two. Some have a phase three, actually. And they tell the story of the game while you're playing it in some way. In one of the modes, for example, at a random time, there'll be an alert that comes out that says, Evil has found you. And when that happens, you have to hide in the cellar as fast as possible. You have four seconds to shoot into the central cellar, or you lose the mode, for example. It has nothing to do with just hit-lit shots. There is that going on. but you have to think about and feel like evil is finding you. In another mode, Ash is evil, and you have to hit the evil shots to turn them blue, which is good. You know, these are the stories of the theme come to life through rules design. So that's my argument. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, I'm with you. They're all such great games with great modes. For me, I don't really have, like, a clear winner, but Evil Dead's a good argument. And here's the modes, by the way, in the back board here. of the game. It actually shows you like a jukebox like ACDC does. It shows you kind of what mode you're on and that's cool too. Alright, I won't actually show off. I actually want to play Evil Awakens, so I'm going to move over to that and I'm going to go ahead and select the mode.
    171:02
    Let's switch up here. Let's actually focus down here. Okay, if you look down here, this is what's up. So there's a target in front and you can see the scrolling lights. So I actually have to hit the Cheryl targets live. All right. Anyway, you get the idea. Mm-hmm. All right. So that's Evil Dead. Best overall modes. They put a lot of passion into mode design there. I saw the same in Beetlejuice, even early code already. They're thinking about how to make the modes mean something and feel like a story, not just feel like you're hitting shots.
    171:40
    Okay. Best multi-ball start. And might get some disagreement here. Kale, this is a multi-ball start. Here we go. All right. A multiball strut that's cool and feels cool.
    171:52
    One of some of the best examples we mentioned before, missed multiball, that's in my top ten. You know, for example, you hit the ball as it's floating across the screen, for example.
    172:02
    Or Adam's Family, the big call out. Here I'm going to give a tie to Dune and Evil Dead. I showed Dune earlier already, so I won't show the whole thing. Oh, the poppers, stuff like that? Thank you. and well, I won't show the whole thing. You get the idea, right?
    172:22
    All right, let's show Evil Dead. There are two I could show. Let's actually talk. Maybe I should have shown it to argue with you. Are you talking about where the worm grabs the ball? I am talking about it. Okay, yeah, that's great. 14, 15 minutes. Keep going, keep going.
    172:40
    All right, let's take that. All right, he's going to take it. So now you're going to feel it. In theory, if I can actually get control here. Look how the game state is going to change. There we go. All right.
    172:50
    Let's go make sure. Great music playing, too. Worm buttholes coming out, eating people alive. The idea here is I want to get to the super jackpot phase and then use my thop. Look how it's rising, by the way. The worm rises. Three regular jackpots. It's going to fall off on this ramp. Very cool. I want the outside ones, too, so I can get the highest volume. So you might not – it's hard to appreciate on a top-down view, but the worm is actually rising. You know, you're feeling it. Yeah. In person, it's something else. All right, good. No argument. Not so arguing there. Right, Cale? Right. All right. Let's do the other two I showed earlier. Let's actually talk about boomsticks. And I'm not going to play it again too much, but, like, you have to earn this boomstick in very theme-immersive ways. You have to hit the two shotgun shell shots. And then it goes ready, aim, you know, and it usually curses at you if the family mode is off. and then you have to hit the fire button to launch two balls out. I think that's a really cool start to a multiball. And I gave it as a tie because Evil Dead also has this cabin multiball, which I also showed before, where all those three balls are going to start, and then she yells out, and then they're all going to come out. Oh, my God.
    174:02
    That's where we're going. Here they come. Boom. All right, when you're in there, that's a big moment. Is that fair, Cal? Do you have another argument?
    174:14
    Yeah. Dragon? You're not going to believe this. No, I should have done it. You're right. Dragon. Yeah, I find it weird that it's overlooked. I know. No, no, you should find it weird. Watch. Well, because, you know, you have to make this one shot. You know, it's lit red. It's very clear. It's like, hey, you want to start this dragon multiball. You got to shoot this.
    174:38
    And then there's this call out, dragon multiball. And it's very thematic. But then, you know, you have time to think about your strategy. Because it's like, okay, do I deploy the shield right now? And then you go at it. It just – I'm glad you added it on there. It was the right thing to do. I was wrong to – I admit I've been overlooking it. You're right. Now, Tony, in your opinion, is it because it came out so early?
    175:13
    I'll give an opinion. But the opinion – I mean, you were just clearly wrong on the mech. Right. Yeah, I was clearly wrong on the mech. That's obviously true. I think a few things. I think that overall the layout is not as exciting as, let's say, King Kong or Harry Potter. I think that the code is really theme immersive, but it's a bit imbalanced on the scoring too. Like you do the dragon and then what? You know, like you try to get gelatinous cube, I guess, but there's a lot of pauses in the game. I think that there are good things and bad things about it. On that point, very quick, what do you do in a tournament? You know, where you don't have any save progress or anything like that. Yeah. Dragon multiball, right? The answer is dragon multiball. Whether or not you have a mode or not, you get dragon multiball ready. You're going to play the same way. Typically, you might pick the wizard, which has the longer shield time, so that you could do better in dragon multiball. And you also might pick the lower right town Arabelle offhand, because that has the potions for Nidar, retrieving potions for Nidar, and that's like the most valuable mode. And so you do that and then you leave and once you beat it, you don't play the dungeon in that. You go to another town so you could rescue the kobold miners. It's just like a very specific set of pathway that a lot of people would go through in that game. And plus there are people who don't – forget about the mech for a second. There are people who don't love the layout.
    176:45
    And what I mean is like you shoot the left lower saucer area, which is the shop. And then it fires the ball to capture it on it. So it just pauses the ball there, fires the ball to capture it on another magnet. That's really the only good way you can make those shots on the left. You could hit the orbit around, but it goes too fast to hit it. So I don't know. There are people who don't. I know Jamie doesn't love that, for example. Or you can do that shot. The inner shot? Yeah. It comes around, yeah, on the right side. And it's a more reliable feed for the magnet. I mean, it's a good layout. It's not a great layout. I'm not saying it's bad. It's not a bad game. It's a good game. I don't think it's a great game.
    177:23
    That's my take on it. Am I allowed to have that opinion? What do you say, Cale? Oh, yeah, 100%. And I think that's the real reason why it doesn't get the same love. But I think when you break it down as you are here to do, you make very good points. It is the best mech. It does have a great multi-ball start. It is a cool thing when the dragon fires you. Also, I played the pro too much, so I guess that biased me too. Yeah. All done. Nice. Yeah. we go on the battle continues we are at best use of multipliers so for me let me go through this best use of multipliers is oh you know what I did I want to show I have a 12 foot cliff to miss look at that ball no no he needs to hit it get out of there I want to give a show yeah We have to give a shout out to this and if you have not watched this stream, this was the first time Walt Wood visited the Electric Bat and we had the streaming rig set up and he comes up to me and he's like, do you want to see me roll Bram Stoker's Dracula? And I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, what's the deal? There's nothing in the code after like $10 billion or something? Sorry, Dustin Echoes. Yeah, there's – oh, I forget that too. I'm sorry. There's some bugs in that game. Obviously there was when Johannes played Daniele on it, but yeah. Yeah. But I think like once you get to $10 billion, it just goes back to zero. So you can literally roll a BSD. The impressive thing is he just comes up to me and is like, hey, do you want to see me do that?
    179:13
    Oh, yeah. And he pulls it off, and it's all on video right there. Right. Well, shout out to Walt Wood, and he does his own podcast, too. Really one of the greatest players of all time. He's always in the top 50, but really he's one of the greatest players of all time. Yeah. Like if you look at the IPA ranking, which is already really high. For sure. Even if you don't look – forget about that. He's really one of the greatest players of all time. It's just something to watch. Yeah, if you want to know another very notable thing about this exact same day, after he does that, he's like, do you want to see me beat Jurassic Park? And I was like, I didn't even know you could beat Jurassic Park. This was years and years ago. I was like, sure. So we set up the stream on Jurassic Park, and he goes all the way through Jurassic Park to where it says game over, and that was it. Yeah, he's a wild dude. It's tough to learn. As great as he is, I can't learn what he does. You know, when I watch, like, Keith Elwin or somebody like that, I'm not saying I could play as good as them at all, but I actually can learn what they're doing and the moves that they make. He's more sort of an innate force. You know, like, you can't really quite learn that. But credit to him. That's what I'd say. So, anyway, I thought I would show this because it was fun to show Walt, but also the missed multiball. That's what a good multiball start looks like, you know, if you want an all-time great one. All right. Best use of multipliers. Easy answer for me here. It's Star Wars. Again, follow the Empire. Ray Day. Again, shout out to him. No question for me. Ray Day is really super thoughtful when it comes to making you earn your multipliers. It also allows the game to exponentially increase in score in that pacing way I was saying before. So let's say you start a mission, for example. You start one of those side character missions. There's eight of those character missions, and they correspond to these eight lights at the center art, for example. I do wish they would line up better in the art, whatever, but they don't. You know, like this one is that and that one is like this. They don't line up, but eight little inserts represent eight different shots around the play field.
    181:16
    And so if you start a mission at a character who has already completed a mission, then the mode shots are worth 2x. If you start a multiball like Hoth or Lightspeed, and if you already played those missions, then if you played a mission, and let's say you played a mission on this shot, which corresponds to this shot, then jackpots on that shot will score 2x the value. If you beat the mode, you'll get 2x jackpot on that value. If you beat the mode, you'll get 3x jackpot on that value. So in other words, it makes you earn those multipliers. If you want to play a multi-ball, fine, but you might want to play a mode first, do well in the mode, beat the mode, and then play the multi-ball, and then you get 3x the value of that.
    181:57
    And so that's why I think he wins on that one. Shout out to Neil McRae in the chat, by the way. Neil McRae in the house. Good to hear from you. And then I'll say, like, why does this win over other games? For example, Evil Dead has terrible playfield multipliers. You cannot activate them on purpose. There are these hidden stand-ups near the pop bumpers that you get from a left orbit shot. And so you just have to hope that you randomly bounce into them, and then you start a playfield multiplier. What makes it even worse is that at the same time as you're hitting the stand-ups, you're hitting the pop bumpers. And the pop bumpers give you a bad award. They give you this thing called Glinda Tricks. So you have to hit the left orbit, which gives you a bad award, but also gives you a 2x maybe sometimes. You can't do it on purpose. Or like King Kong, for example, as great as that game is, the playfield multipliers are all on the stand-ups. And you could do it on purpose, but in practice, it's accidental. People are just getting to it, you know, multipliers by accident there majority of time. I don't love that. Here, this is very purposeful if you want to score higher. So shout-out to this one. I could say more about the multipliers, but I won't. There's like the ion cannon and pop bumpers and shot multipliers. I won't get into it, but the point is a lot of thought goes into it. Shout out to Ray Day. Fan of the podcast, actually. Yeah, this is a clear winner.
    183:07
    Yes. And so with that, I will go on. We're almost at the end, I promise, the chat. We're going to go to mission. When I say mission, you know, there's a bunch of M's in pinball. There's modes, there's multipliers, there's multiballs, and then there's missions, also called the side quests. These are things you do over the course of three balls to beat the game or to get to a mini wizard mode, for example. We just mentioned X-Men has the sentinel thing when you get 35 sentinel kills. But I'm going to give it to two here. I'm not copping out. I really believe this. Two get it. One is evil dead, sanity laughing. And I showed this earlier, so I'll show it. I won't show it again. I'm just going to mute the audio this time. So when he gets into this mode, all the mechs I showed it earlier are turned on. So now, like, you know, he goes crazy, and you have to silence all the mechs, and you have to hit them. That's really cool. It sort of reminds me of, like, Johnny Mnemonic, power down. You have to, like, turn off areas of the play field. Love things like that. Great involving mini wizard mode. Any argument there, Cale, on this mission that you get over the course of three balls by hitting spinners and captain balls? No, I don't think so. Have you seen this live? This one I have.
    184:15
    Cool. Let's try to do that next Tuesday after a league. Done. We have this game as well as King Kong, which is worth talking about. That's my other tie. So, yeah, this is super cool. I highly recommend it. You just basically, how you get it is you have to, there's a meter here. I'll show it. Wait.
    184:37
    All right, see this meter, insanity meter? Oh, yes. You build it up by hitting spinner shots and captive ball hits. And then we got the next one. I wanted to say King Kong. I'm going to mute this ahead of time. But you climb enough and you get to a New York City event to begin. And Elwynn and I forget who else coded it. Was it Skiski? I forget. But they put a lot of thought into the New York City events. There are three different events, window shopping, rampage, and break the chains. Is that what it is? I don't know. They all have different names. Three different types of mini wizard modes that you get to choose from and three different ways to play them. So there's this modifier here. It says use the left flipper to change. I could argue this isn't clear, but that's a different argument. It's a cool thing, which is use the left flipper to change the modifier. Use the right flipper to change the mode. So, for example, you could do single ball timed mode for 3x scoring. Or stage fright, that's the other one. He's running through the modes, and he's going to change the multiplier. You could do three ball multi-ball for 1x scoring. But a lot of people pick the limited flip count for 2x scoring. And so it's like imagine three different modes with three different ways to play them. You end up feeling like there are nine different missions, basically, that you can do. And they're all pretty cool. and that's why I give it the shout-out there and my tie award for mission. You get it by climbing the building, which is nice, too, because it makes you feel like you're King Kong climbing up, or it should make you feel that way at least.
    186:11
    Anyway, that's my claim. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think very bad in the chat is maybe giving a vote for Walking Dead Remastered for the zombie kill, I'm guessing?
    186:23
    For the best mission? Horde, yes. I said earlier that I wouldn't count it because I consider that code from 2015.
    186:30
    But if somehow we pretended they invented that Lyman was here, rest his soul, and he was here and he made Horde mode for the first time now, then that would win. That is one of the best mini-wizard modes or missions that ever was, and I highly recommend playing it and getting to it. And actually, didn't I get to it on stream, Cale? Shout out to me. Oh, man, that was incredible. Until what happened? Man, over at Retro Ralph's stream, we were playing Walking Dead. I was finally showing I know how to play pinball and not just talk about it. Oh, the stream ended. The stream ended. Yes.
    187:06
    Yeah. And if anybody watched that stream, what happened was Ralph was using some third-party software to schedule his stream. And in the software, you put the length of the stream in there. And we overshot that. As I always do. So while Serge was absolutely blowing up the game, we went silent. Yeah, I got to hoard. It was a lot of fun. Anyway.
    187:33
    All right. We're nearing the end. Thanks so much, Jason Bray. Nearing the end of our code awards here. Best action button use.
    187:43
    So how to use an action button. And I debated this. Let me give you the three debates, okay? Dune was pain box. So I'm going to show the Dune pain box. Shout out to Joel again for doing it here. This is where he's got the breathing apparatus and the whole thing. Oh, how can you not love Joel? You have to hold the action button down in the paint box in the movie or book if you're a fan. You have to hold your hand in the paint box, and then you only have one hand to use. And so that's equivalent. You have to hold down the action button and then use one hand to play, and you have to make one shot to save your ball. And it's very clear, Cale, talking about clarity. There's only one shot lit. Paint box, though. So let's go ahead, which may not be lit, though it's lit. Here it is. Can you turn down the volume on these clips? Or is it like all or nothing? Holding my box, I have to put down one hand. So I have to do this with one hand. And the whole idea is you want to get this flipper. And then from that flipper, remember, only one hand. You're moving one hand back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You want to hit the left ramp. That's how you survive. So you've got to rely on dead bounces and bounces. Get it over on that right flipper. if you do that, boom, you're proving yourself worthy and you're back in the Was that better audio, by the way? I lowered it. Yeah, that was a little better. What's so cool about this feature is that people at the arcade have tried to game it. With their gut? Or something. Or other body parts? The software will call you out. Yeah. Yes, it will, which is cool too. I'll give you my other honorable mentions here. Evil Dead with the I mean it's not a moment but it is Ball Search I still love that that might be the best action button use it's an innovation at least and then King Kong has a T-Rex mode where you have to bash the T-Rex I love this as I repeat somebody in the chat was mentioning that earlier now that I lowered the audio it's nicer than the other one fine fine fine I'll get the clip At some point. It always just happens, I feel.
    189:49
    All right, so that's my T-Rex. I could have gone either way. What do you say, Cal? What are you going to choose? Yeah, I know. I can't think of anything else. Man, that's it.
    190:00
    Like Dungeons & Dragons had to hold the action button for a ranged weapon, but that's not as exciting, you know? Yeah, and that's been, hasn't that been done before? It was actually done in X-Men originally on original code, and then they changed it, but they had that on Bishop Award.
    190:15
    Wait, Venom was before that. No, not Venom. I'm thinking of Mandalorian where you're holding it for the flamethrower. Yeah, but that one is a little different because you hold it, which is really ridiculous. Actually, it's a terrible, terrible implementation. And you have to hold it down. And if you hold it down, it will light all shots for 2X. Right. But if you hold it down half the time, it will only light half the shots for 2X. Correct. And for me, like – and most people don't know that. And so they end up holding it down half the time and then letting go. And it doesn't, unlike what you said in X-Men or original X-Men code or D&D, there it's you let go and it's an individual shot that takes care of it. It's like a boom button for an individual roving shot. Whereas in Mandalorian, it's like it lights all shots for 2X only if you hold it down for sufficient time. And I've seen high-level players make that mistake of not holding it down enough. Yeah, and what I really like about the ranged weapon shot in D&D, you know, when you upgrade your weapon, it scrolls slower, so you can more pick your shots. You can pick it more easily. Yep.
    191:25
    All right, Cale. We are now ready for our last award of this first inaugural three-hour Pen Pals award show. What do you say to that? Are you ready for it? Okay, so this is best code all around. All around, having said everything we just did for 20 other awards and all these individual things, what do I think is the best code? Quite subjective. Some of these less subjective, but this one quite subjective. Let me start by saying why I'm not giving it to Harry Potter. Can we start there?
    191:58
    Yes. I have a rule of thumb. I said it before earlier when I was talking about generic modes versus unique modes and how at least I defined mode and then generic versus unique. Just hit the blinking shots without any more thought than that. I can't ever give a code, the best code, to a game that has generic modes. I refuse to do it, Cale. I want people to give thought. I want every programmer to give me a lot of modes and to give me thought behind each one of those modes and what they do. And they do give thought, and I don't want to paint with such a binary brush here. They show you clips. They actually tell you what shot to hit is based on where the clip is in the show, in the scenes that are playing. But I can't say, like, man, did you play that mode? That mode's really cool when that happens. In D&D, I could say, wow, that's cool with the slingshot and the guards, you know. But I can't name a mode in Harry Potter that's like, you've got to check out when this mode happens, you know. There's nothing like that. So I will never award anything with generic modes. Let me start by saying that. That's why Harry Potter loses. I know other people have given Harry Potter its best. I love a lot of things in the code, and I think it's great in many, many ways, but I'm not going to give it the award for that reason. In the end, I will give it to Evil Dead, and let me tell you why, Kale. Let me make my defense, okay? Oh, man, I was scared. You were scared there? Yeah. Okay. Because I thought you were going to pick one game, and I had, like, a great argument against it, but.
    193:17
    Okay. Yeah. I chose wisely? You chose wisely. I'll give my last defense here. It has many moments. We talked about it with the Boomstick and the Cabin Multiball, and those are great multiball starts, but it also has the Insanity Laughing, and you have to turn off all the mechs in it, for example. It has the most depth of any game we mentioned. It has many, many mini-wizard modes. That gives you so much to strive for. Should you try to complete all the modes, if you complete two, you can get a Henry and a Multiball. If you complete four, you can get to the other one. But you could also play the other Evil Dead 2 movie, and then it gives you the Cheryl, and then the other mini-wizard mode. should you hit the hand so that you get to kitchen fight, or should you mini wizard mode, or should you hit the captive ball a bunch so you get to that mirror, mirror, sanity, laughing things. It has the best side quest mission I mentioned, best multi-ball starts, best overall modes, eight modes that are very different from each other, each of them with a phase one and phase two. It has a lot of innovation. We talked about a lot of that innovation earlier. And so that's why, for me, Evil Dead does the best job in code overall. for the year. And shout out to Spooky and Bug, who was on our podcast not so long ago. They do a good job. What do you say to that, Cale? Yeah, yeah, I agree. And from launch, they gave you a fairly well fleshed out game with not any bugs that I can think of.
    194:45
    I agree there. And I only have, Cale, one more slide to show. And you said I could do it, Kale, which is play the long version of our award show theme song. Are you ready? Are you ready for an outro? Anything else before I show the outro? No, go ahead. Okay, so we're going to do the outro, but you haven't promised to be quiet and enjoy the theme song, Kale. Do you promise? I'll be quiet, like I'm in church. Like you're in church. All right. All right, Chad, it's been a pleasure. This will take us out on the theme song, and then we can wrap it up. Thanks, Chad, for joining us on this first annual, hopefully more Pin Pals Awards, the deepest dive awards in all of pinball podcasting. Right, Kel? Yep. Alright.
    195:26
    It's the Pin Pals Awards show with K-Land 2 Watch as they go Ridiculously deep Too loud? There we go. Oh, I'm going to play it again. Sorry, Kel. Is that better now, though? I think so, yeah. It's the Pin Pals The awards show with K-Land search. Watch as they go. Ridiculously deep. Perhaps too deep. With over 40 technical awards. In all designed over the past year. Our audience asks you. Demands this level of madness.
    196:16
    Wait, Kale. there will be five different lighting awards. One in the play awards, one down the ward, and take the award. And, of course, at least 20 different code awards. If you obsess over pinball like we do, this award show will put you to your limit. Let's celebrate the past year of pinball.
    196:44
    It's the deepest dive imaginable. Thanks, everyone. That was amazing. I think we should do all these live from now on. We're doing it live. That's it. All right. Thank you for everybody joining us in the chat. This is cool. Of course, in the future, we're going to do a little more advertising for these lives. but this was the first time we were doing it. We didn't even know if it would work the way we had it configured. So it was just kind of like a let's see what happens.
    197:26
    But thank you so much for joining us. And don't forget, if you want to chat with us, join the Discord. Go to electricbatarcade.com. Click on the podcast tab, and that will lead you to a link to join our Discord where you can talk directly with the Pimpals.
    197:44
    Thanks, everyone. Pimpals out.