And if it pays out, awesome. And if it doesn't pay out, well, it's going to suck because that's $200. But that's way different than $20,000. And one of the big differences, I think, is a lot of these guys who are doing the pre-ordering in the pinball area is they have an idea. It's like I have an idea for a machine. And especially in the board games, when it comes to board games and tabletop games, a lot of these people is they've actually created it. The game is created. they might be playing it with pieces of paper and pennies with blocks glued on top of it as pieces but they're the game is done and is being play tested but yeah i mean you spend you spend some money you that much money when you're spending you know ten fifteen thousand dollars even five thousand dollars that's a completely different entity than if you just spend 200 if you're out 200 it sucks but you know it's 200 and the big thing is a lot of with so many of those games being already play tested they need the money for to actually print the game and do the art assets for a pinball machine that would be something more along the lines of having, we've got a finished white wood model it's all done, it's playable it just needs art assets and us to start building machines type issue right, and I think the other two parts, two points I should say that I wanted to note Where I have a problem with this is my third one would be that pre-ordering isn't investing. It's like Kickstarter in that no one involved is really an investor. The person sending in the money doesn't get any reward for the success of the project other than the ability to acquire the product. And essentially, it's an ability you would have had if they had gone about you as a consumer. if they had gone about the conventional way to raise capital, such as getting investors or going to the bank and getting a loan or however normal companies go and raise money. Pre-ordering under these circumstances where people are sending high dollar amounts for pinball machines means they're not getting any sort of investing benefit like profit share, but they're assuming all the risk for the loss. And so that leads into my fourth point, which is I just think overall the model does more harm than good. I've heard on other pinball podcasts and I've read mainly on Pinside, there are some pinball enthusiasts and they seem to, the sense I've gotten from them is that they think pre-ordering is actually good for the hobby of pinball, that it helps a boutique company start up and it spreads the hobby because it gets more machines out there and gets more competition in the industry and that all of that's a good thing. But to me, these ends do not justify the means. All of this would be possible. All of this, the idea of having a Jersey Jack and having a Spooky and having a Dutch and had they worked out a Zidware and a Skippy, all of this should have been possible via traditional investing routes. If a bunch of rich collectors want to back a startup boutique in exchange for shares in the company, then I have no problem with that. But if you're trying to form company and you want to use other people's money just to shift the risk off of you, but keep full ownership, I think that model is completely ridiculous. And I don't have a lot of sympathy for companies that decided that that was a smart route to go because they want all of the gains and they don't want to bear any burden. And I understand the motivation for it, but I don't sympathize with it. Overall, though, I think that pinball collectors who are the people who really got burned by Skippy and Zidware, I think they're suspicious of pre-order now so so that's good maybe we'll see the model die die a natural death due to these failures i think the big question is uh with jersey jack pinball because they've put out machines they put out machine number one machine number two is imminent they used pre-order for both of both of those i believe they've indicated that they're not going to use pre-order to do game number three. But I think that was also said quite a ways back. So if they don't, and they kill off the use of pre-order for their company, I think maybe it will go away. But otherwise, I mean, if there's someone who they're seen as the biggest player besides Stern, and so if sufficient numbers of individuals continue to put in pre-order money and are okay with those risks, then we'll probably continue to see other boutique startups look at it as a viable model. But I think it should go away. Well, yeah. And Jersey Jack, even with all of their little issues, have gotten to a point that it's different between saying, oh, I'm going to go ahead and give Jersey Jack some money because while it might be late, I know it'll come and saying, well, you know what? I'm just going to shift $8,000 to Bubba Bo Bob's big house. So pinball flippers because they said they're going to make a machine yeah well i mean with with jersey jack the thing is they they have always released so they've not collapsed and not delivered the games had they been the only ones doing pre are they in dutch for example and we see dutch get their machine out My disdain for pre it probably honestly it still exists just because I don like the I don't like these unconventional investing concepts where people start, because they're not investing concepts. You have people that don't want to assume risk forming companies and shifting it onto customers, and customers are falling for it. And that bothers me just conceptually. I don't think that's a proper markets approach to it. But, you know, people have the right to do with their money what they want. Had we only seen entities like Jersey Jack doing it, the model would – no one would have been burned. And people would probably be – I mean, really, in that case, it only comes down to are you willing to have your money, thousands of dollars tied up for years, yes or no? If yes, preorder. If no, don't. And no one would really feel burned per se. Anyone who's wanted out of Jersey Jack has been able to cancel their order and get their pre-order money. So that wouldn't have been – they've done it the best of any entity that I'm aware of. The thing is, though, that I think that their success in being able to get money that way inspired entities like Skit B and Zidware to try the same thing. And it cost people tens of thousands of dollars. and that I think it's done more damage to the pinball hobby on the collector side than whatever advantage people may think we're getting by possibly getting more boutiques maybe only because of this particular method of raising capital and our boutiques really the answer for pinball I know having more pinball companies is a good thing and I know a lot of these people are starting as boutiques but a lot of people seem to think that oh boutiques are great boutiques are wonderful boutiques are the way to go but do you really want nothing but a bunch of five six seven eight different people who might put out one or two machines or even just you know just do the one-off and have them do limited runs and it'd be a big great thing or is it something we'd like to see some these companies settle into a more normal release schedule where they're putting out machines, they're considered a pretty big to-do, and it's not just, well, we put out our 75 machines, or we put out our thing, or we're doing this one core project because we love this project only, and then the company's just going to dissolve after we finish this one. I don't know. I've actually never really thought about it like that. Perhaps that should be a topic for another podcast. That does sound like a good topic for another podcast. And with that, I think we should go ahead and take a next step over to video games. Yay. A far happier topic for us on this episode. On this episode. There are definitely going to be episodes where video games are going to get us into the weeds. Let's start out with a game that is actually out and playable as we speak, Firewatch. Now, Firewatch is a game that falls into what I consider a visual novel. It is not a movie. You're not watching a movie. You're doing stuff, but it's not really as involved. It's not playing Call of Duty. It's not playing Total Annihilation. You're not doing StarCraft or XCOM. It's more about the story and there's gameplay in it, but it's not as big. And I've played a lot of these games. I've played a lot of the Telltale games, and I've played some of the others. But Firewatch, Firewatch is special because unlike all of those other games, Firewatch made me feel and made me sit down and just stare when the game was over and I honestly believe Firewatch actually had a very positive message and a positive, I mean with the good things and the bad things and everything else in the story, I'm not going to give anything away but it is something that it affected me as a person and as a gamer and as a player it was like watching a great movie or reading a great book where you finish it and when you're done you're just you can feel things are different and i was surprised with this game and this game being like this and just how good it was and how it affected me well i've not uh played firewatch i actually i've heard it uh come up a number of times i've only heard good things i actually heard them discuss it on podcast unlocked which was interesting because podcast unlocked is an xbox themed podcast and firewatch is not available on the xbox and most of their discussion was lamenting the fact that is not at least not yet out on xbox and that they think it should come out there because it's such a good story it seems to me that quality storytelling games are are enjoying something of a fad in fact fads maybe not the best word to choose but yeah it's you know there's a resurgence there's a desire for it i i credit telltale it seems like when they released walking dead the the first the first season of walking Dead that really ignited a desire to have games that aren't focusing so much on gameplay, but rather are hinging their success and popularity on having a compelling, meaningful story. And I like that there are other companies doing this, doing this concept, but not doing it in a cookie cutter way that is just like a telltale game. Because all the telltale games, they have different themes, like the Game of Thrones is very dark, and thematically it really feels a lot like the show. whereas Tales from the Borderlands feels very silly and zany. But structurally and how it approaches and how the games play, there is the telltale style. But there are other ways to do this sort of visual novel or adventure game storytelling. And so my overall feeling on the style, I have nothing negative to say about Firewatch itself, but I have mixed feelings on the style. And the reason why they're mixed is generally, I really like the stories that come out of this style. I really do. And I don't want to go into the debate about are video games art or not. But I think when you have something that's structured, when you have something that's very scripted, that rides the line closest to being able to be art. And the reason is the whole thing about art is an artist is able to put out an image, put out a concept. How you maybe interpret it is, of course, up to the individual. However, one can always say, well, the artist had that intention. And you and I have had these discussions before with, you know, when people are trying to, like, analyze literature and such. And it's like sometimes a blue door is just a blue door. Well, the artist, the author, in the case of a book, they know that. They'll know whether or not the door was blue because it meant something or the door was blue because they said the door was blue. And so there's an answer to that. The issue, of course, with video games is that when you can play them, you actually have control within the medium, and that means you are doing things that the artist didn't want or didn't foresee or whatever. So it's just different. So generally, I've always sort of avoided the idea of games as art and willing to weigh in on it or not, because it's not just someone or a bunch of collaboration like a movie of putting out something. And when you watch it and I watch it, we see the same thing and how we interpret may vary on our personal circumstances. But since we play these, we have our own way of going about them. well in a game like call of duty but in games like this or games like telltale where it's structured and you're always going to hit the particular dialogue choices and whatnot they're able to tell a more compelling story because there's a lot more structure behind what's actually valid what's actually an option whereas if you're in fallout 4 totally open world and that's why we see game glitches and everything all over the place because it's just so massive so that's the positive for this style. I think the negative is just because they're basically interactive audiobooks. I almost can't even call them games. To me, it's like, well, okay, I really enjoy them. So, and you put them in consoles or on the computer and you play them. So, you know, I think technically they are games. But when I think of things like Game of the Year and stuff, I always have trouble choosing games that are like this because whereas I thought they told me a really good story i almost can't say i played them it's more just like i experienced them i don't know that makes any sense but you know it's always a sort of my mix on that but overall i'm glad they exist and i i really enjoy them so i'll continue to play things like this and i'll just have to watch for a steam firewatch sale i think yeah that makes perfect sense and i said i i that's why i like to consider them a visual novel is kind of how is how i see them um i know visual novels have that whole connotation because there's a lot of games out of japan that are visual novels and are very on their own special thing but this that's what this story was i mean it was it was almost it was like more more like a choose your own adventure the old choose your own adventure novels it's like that uh you get to choose how your answer and how you deal in situations and there's only so many choices and they only have so much of an effect on the story but it does make changes throughout and just in this particular one i mean i love tales from the borderland i haven't finished it yet and that's just because i haven't got the time to sit down and finish the last couple chapters uh it's funny it's a lot of fun walking dead was very good and it it definitely did the tug at the heartstrings thing but firewatch was just it's the same but different it feels like a much more mature version of those stories uh the art is beautiful it's not a hyper realistic art but it's not the super cartoony art it it was going for i'm not sure i'm not i'm not sure what you would call it i mean it's kind of cartoony but it's very almost abstracty but it's beautiful and there are some scenes in the in the thing that you You just want to sit and watch. You don't want to move. You don't want to continue the story. You just sit there and watch what's going on because it's just pretty. And the way the story hits its beats and this and that, and it's not one of those things where it's not an all. It's a twist type thing where something comes out of stuff. You can see what's coming at times, and sometimes it's a thought in the back of your head that, oh, maybe this is what's going on. Oh, no, maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. It keeps you going back and forth. It's really the story, the very story of it. It's very much about the human condition, and it's very much about you as a person and your interactions with other people. And it's just, it hit me for some reason. It just hit me beautifully. I've actually, after I finished playing it, I considered playing it to make some different choices, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. So what I did was I sat down and watched Let's Play of somebody else, and they made different choices. and that was interesting to see the changes, what changes were important, what choices weren't that important, and to see how their story differed from mine and to see the things I found that they missed and the things they found that I missed in the story and even watching it was beautiful. I mean, it's definitely, I would say it's the number one of the games I've played, if I'm going to consider it a game, I would say it's probably better than XCOM. XCOM took more time. XCOM was much more of a game. But at the end, when I finished XCOM, I didn't sit down and go, wow, that was just wow. And Firewatch did that for me. For me, Firewatch was an experience. It wasn't just a game. It was an experience that will have great, I mean, I can tell you right now, the next time I play a Telltale game or any of these other visual novel-ish type games that come out, they're all going to be compared to Firewatch. It is the bar. Is it better or worse than Firewatch? That's the bar from now on. So everyone go out and get Firewatch. It has Tony's seal of approval. Well, let's go ahead and transition to another video game topic, one that is much more conventional in its gaming nature. But I wanted to talk a little bit about Titanfall 2. Titanfall is a first-person shooter, and at least initially was an Xbox One exclusive. This one, though, will be multi-platform. We've known that for a while. That's going to come out on PC and PS4 in addition to Xbox. However, information has come out indicating that it looks like it will be getting a winter 2016 release, so we should actually see it this year. I did hear a reference, apparently in an interview, someone had indicated something about magic being involved in the game, And that's – I don't know what's – the game is very sci-fi. It's a first-person shooter where you get in and out of mechs. And so otherwise, it kind of plays like a blend of Brink, which was sort of a parkour-themed game, I think terribly executed, but it was a good idea. Call of Duty, which Respawn Entertainment was known back with when they were with – they were Infinity Ward, essentially. the head honchos as i understand it and they broke away and quit working on call of duty and titanfall was that you know one of their their big first game and uh anyway so the game's a sci-fi concept wrapped around a war shooter so i don't know what the magic thing that i heard reference of was i'm hoping it's just gonna be tech stuff i don't want no harry potter sort of magical spells going on in my Titanfall world. Expelling Mechis. Yes. All right. Well, that one might be worth it. But anyway, the big news for me, though, regarding it was that Titanfall 2 will have a single player campaign. That was my big complaint with the first Titanfall. Titanfall was not on my radar. It's just the price on Titanfall fell through the floor really quick. And I picked it up. And actually now all the Titanfall DLC on Xbox One is free. It's been free for a long time. The game itself is pretty cheap, and it's fun. It's so competent in so many ways. I mean, again, coming off of Brink, which was my only other parkour shooter game I ever really played, it works in Titanfall. So I really like a lot of the mechanics that are behind Titanfall. But when you played it, you had to kind of get the story from it. There was something akin to a campaign mode in the multiplayer, which kind of told you they're almost vignettes. vignettes there were little segments at the start and end of these of these campaign maps that would tell you a little bit about what was going on but you know when you joined you didn't know what map you're going to start on so you'd often experience the story out of order it was just it was kind of a mess and there wasn't much to it where which but they've got a they've done enough world building that you think oh well this should actually have a mythos this should actually be a world that feels lived in like halo so the the single player was a was my big complaint uh about titanfall one the other thing is um i have so i have decent hopes for this the mech suit use was was well executed so not only the parkour elements but the mech suits that kind of function like vehicles but you could have them operate independently of the driver so you didn't have to be in them to be useful and so that coupled with the parkour i think gives them a very uh unique segment of what I call the bro shooter market. I'm not a big bro shooter player. Battlefield is my game of choice within that subgenre, but Titanfall has been the one I've put in the second most amount of time in, and so I'm really hoping that it does well. I obviously did well enough that they greenlit it. My understanding is that the budget for this version, Titanfall 2, is higher now. It's actually been raised above what it originally was assigned for a budget i'm you know hopefully it's not like a movie where they just have to start throwing money at it because it's not good and they're trying to fix all of that i'm just hoping that they really really want it to be successful and so they've had to expand the budget because of the single player and all of that but i think that titanfall was a a game that maybe didn't get as much due credit as it should have it's hard to say that year was kind of dry for xbox it was his first full year and so titanfall really stood out in a lot of ways and i think it did get a lot of attention by gamers but its player base doesn't seem to have held up very well i was in the game less than a month ago and the number of people in the various sessions were not particularly impressive it wasn't dead it wasn't a barren wasteland but as competent as it was i would have thought it would have had better legs than what seem to have and i'm hoping they can take those lessons learned and actually make titanfall 2 a triple a release that's worth buying and playing for long term yeah i never played the original titanfall um because i don't have an xbox one obviously and by the time it was got any releases on a pc or anything it was done and gone it wasn't something i worried about now the pure multiplayer aspect that's becoming more common to see a lot of pure multiplayer games out there and I've never been real big into them. The only pure multiplayer game that I put serious time into would be Team Fortress 2. And the next game coming out that's a pure multiplayer game that I have interest in is Overwatch, which is Blizzard's take on Team Fortress 2. And I don't know if that's just how I am. I'm pretty certain it is because I played tons and tons of multiplayer Call of Duty, the original Call of Duty. I was playing the original Call of Duty when they were up to, like, Call of Duty 3. And when Call of Duty Modern Warfare came out, I was still playing multiplayer of the original Call of Duty. And that kind of gives me hope because, I mean, the original Call of Duties and Call of Duty 2 and the original Infinity Ward group, if they're the ones putting this game together, I love their games. I love their single-player parts of their games. I love their multiplayer. And if this game is like that, but with the added joy of mechs and jumping from building to building and doing all that crazy pseudo-sci-fi futuristic bionic commando type stuff, I think it could be a lot of fun. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one as we start seeing beta drops and as we start getting the early A reviews and stuff come this winter. Yes, we will see how well it does. I think the issue regarding the single player and the multiplayer only, I mean, for me, I want a story so I have something to kind of get invested in. And I don't tend to favor multiplayer in general, and that's just my play style. I think the trouble that a lot of multiplayer-only games have is how are people supposed to be attached to the franchise if they haven't experienced anything in it yet? And so I think that's why maybe a lot of them don't tend to do all that well. It's hard to say. In a lot of ways I don really care whether they do well or not I just ended up trying this one because it was really cheap and so i i looking very forward to seeing if they make some significant improvements to the second one but for titanfall one was a i think a very good first time effort anyway yeah good one to keep yeah and that's the thing i know there's been more and more you hear more people clamoring they want oh i just want a multi-version player of this game i just want to play the multiplayer i i mean uh global offensive has some of the highest consecutive online player number of players constantly and that is just a modernized version of the original counter-strike that came out you know years and years and years ago and that's just pure multiplayer and it's the same map that they've been playing for over a decade but for some reason that has resonated with people that is is this huge popular thing uh the call of duty games the battlefield games They get these huge numbers of heavy multiplayer stuff. And while I don't know, I think maybe I'm too old to play Twitch shooters. Maybe that's what my problem is. I can't handle Twitch shooters anymore. I don't know. I mean, you can always just die. Well, yeah, I do do that a lot.