Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, March 20th. It is episode 163. I am almost TPF bound. You are. I thought you were going to say you were schmog. I am Smaug. Okay. Right in. Go to camperspodcast.gmail.com and complain about the Smaug impression. That did not come from me. And I'm Dennis, and I'm almost also TPF bound. And we'll talk a little bit about that later on in the episode. But here we are. It's, as you noted, episode 163. We've been at this a very long time. And so people are probably used to the fact that we do introductions at this point. So what's been going on? Have you played any games? I've played limited, very, very limited games. I have gotten back into reading a whole lot. I mean, I always read a lot. But I mean, I've read, in the last two weeks, I've read four books. Oh, okay. So I've been, I have kind of, we had a conversation about what audiobook we were going to listen to on our way to TPS. Yes, we did that a couple weeks ago. A couple weeks ago. And one of the things is, when we were talking about it, we talked about stuff that was too long for the trip. Because our run, for those that don't know, it's about 16 hours, roughly. Right. But we talked about maybe hitting some of the old political stuff, like Hunt for Red October, the old, what do they call them, military techno-thriller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that got me thinking about it, so I started reading old military techno-thrillers. I've read, I've reread Flight of the Old Dog, which is weird because it's from 87, so the technology that's all the super cutting edge secretive stuff is just insanely out of date. It's like a cell phone. They didn't even have, I mean, it was written in 87. It didn't even have stuff that was that advanced. It had like, oh, our navigation computer loads from a cartridge. Ah, the Atari. Coming to life. The GPS can get our position accurate within a hundred feet so yeah no it it's just stuff like that yeah total aside uh but it ties to you so i bring it up did you not and maybe i'm misremembering it was some friend of mine years and years and years ago for a city government did a summer job going around and gps tagging yes was that you i've done that okay that was one of my that was one of the things i did in the late 90s when i was working as a seasonal worker for the city. Okay. And that was back in the day where it was you walked out and you're like, oh, here's a water valve. Yeah. And you set the thing up on top of the water valve and the big GPS thing, and this was like 98, 97, 98, and you hit all the buttons and it would start tracking and then just sit there for five, ten minutes until it locks it down in strong enough, and then you save all the data and then you go to the next one that's like three inches away and do the exact same thing and then wait for another 10 minutes before it logs it in. I bet it reminded me of that. People nowadays probably don't think about the whole arduous process it was to start tagging the location of everything. It didn't just automatically become magically tagged in Google. Yeah, no, it was a huge thing. And actually, I mean, I work with the city currently, and the city has an entire Janos Kiss group. And they actually came through a couple years ago because we had a whole bunch of construction done and a bunch of new pipe laid with some new valves and some new manholes and stuff. And they came through to update with the new stuff. And they would set the pole up, and they'd hit the button, and they'd stand there for about 45 seconds, and then they'd walk on to the next one. And I'm just sitting here going, oh, man. It used to be that you would get like 15 or 20 items a day sometimes by the time you drove from one site where you get three or four things and then drive a couple blocks. You'd be like, that's just amazing. I mean, you grab like eight things and then go to lunch someday because it just took so long. Because if it was cloudy or something, it would take forever to lock in. And it was just, yeah. Okay. Back to your answer. Sorry. Sorry for the. But your techno 80s thriller stuff reminded me of the 90s. Right. Well, and that's the thing is I've been reading some of those old military techno thriller things. And then I found that there are some modern versions of it. and I started reading a series by, it's a pair of former Navy guys who write, who have a series that's like, they've got like seven books out, that it's basically like the modern version of what the old Jack Ryan books and stuff were. And they've been really good. So we'll see how it finishes. I've only finished, I'm only like halfway through the second one. Well, your book selection for our pinball trips has been pretty solid overall. I'm trying to think. The weakest one was probably Double Vision. Yes. The second Thrawn book. And I found out since then there is a third Thrawn book. I liked all the Thrawn parts. Right. It's just the Vader part was so bad. It was so terrible. It was so bad. And there is a third Thrawn book, apparently. Oh, okay. So that is an option if we want to switch up the plan. It is under the drive time. Let's stick with the current plan. Okay. Next time we can do Thrawn 3.0. Yeah, because I didn't realize there was a third book until. Yeah, we have to figure out what more is needed. Before it joins the Rebels. Yeah, before it's on Rebels. Yeah. But that's basically what I've been, besides the normal stuff. Yourself? I do have gaming news. So as I projected that I would from our last show, I did finish Yakuza Like a Dragon the day after we recorded. so I was pretty close because I was in the finale chapter finale so from there I went to move on to Train Sim World 2 which was a game I got for my birthday it's too hard, driving trains is too hard like how? well look, it's not like you just start the ignition and turn on the there was, I'm talking the tutorial so I was in a train yard this is like tutorial in the sandbox number five or something. And I'm supposed to go and pick up some cars and then deliver them, I think, back at the train yard. No big deal. So they start you in the engine already running, but it's like I turn off the brake. I make sure the secondary brake is off. I turn on the throttle. I make sure we're not in neutral, but we're in forward. The train is not moving. I hear it getting more and more power as I turn the throttle up more and more, but it's not moving. So I'm like, oh, wait, we're dragging a second engine. So then I go back and I turn off all the brakes on that. It's still not moving. There was another switch on the little side. You're actually in like the cockpit. So I'm like there and there's like a little switch where I had to move it from 24 and 16 to no cars. And then it started to move. I don't know why I couldn't move when it was set for some other mode. And then it was just going along and I hit another train. And they didn't tell me, they have not taught me how to know where there's another train on the track. We skipped that lesson, apparently. So this is like the train version of DCS. Yes. Okay. Yeah. And when I put it on my list, in my defense, I thought maybe this was like a railroad tycoon. Right. So, but no, it's, you're going to learn how to, and I went online to look for help. because you're going to learn how to drive an actual train. They have a bunch of realistically conveyed engines of all these different bullet trains, passenger trains, freight trains, steam locomotives. I haven't tried any of those because I can't even figure out how to work a basic diesel. So I go online to figure out what am I doing wrong. Someone else has said, yeah, my train won't move. So I'm like, I'll click on that. That's probably the same problem I have. And the first person responding is, you didn't tell us what engine type. You didn't tell us what the grade of the slope is that you're on, and you didn't tell us what your conditions are. Are you already – like, what are we – are we starting from a cold stop, or is your engine warmed up? And I was like, close. And I was like, that goes on the shelf. You know what? Mistakes get made. As you have said on this show, I've never done mistakes get made, and I think I probably will not be getting any more achievements in Train Sim World 2. Maybe I should start with Train Sim World 1. I can recommend you eventually some other more Railroad Tycoon-like games. I have a couple of them. Because I do have a Railroad Empire game, and I probably should go back to it. I got stalled out on a mission, but I know what I did wrong. Right. So I figured that out. I just want to build a Train Empire. I don't want to wear the little hat. Does that make sense? Yeah. All right. So after that, I started and finished Oxenfree, which I'd had Oxenfree for years. It was like a free game at one point. And I'd always heard really good things about the story, and it was. It was an interesting story. I don't know if I'll replay it because I don't think there's a lot of replayability to it, but I did miss a lot of the collectibles and stuff. But anyway, I did all that in one day. It's a pretty short game. I think it took less than four hours-ish, maybe. So I did that. And then lately I've been playing a roguelike with some RPG mechanics isometric shooter called Nerovoider, which you basically get a little mech. You go around, twin-stick shooter. It's kind of like the alien twin-stick shooter games we played in co-op. And this supports up to four-player co-op. But you just go through and it gets progressively harder and, you know, randomized levels basically. So I've been playing that. I've been doing like there's a daily challenge every day. So I've been working on that. So that's what I mostly played, especially the last week. Except yesterday I started Strider, the Capcom. Like the hear you, hear you Strider. This one's just called Strider. It was, I think it was, I don't know if it's the latest, latest one, but it was released with like the PS4 and Xbox One. So I've had it for a while. I think I bought it when it was on sale and I never started it. But how could you do that? But I've been watching. Yes. Yes. So, but I've been watching a YouTube series called What Happened? Mm-hmm. Which is a guy, he's, I actually found it on a movie, but he mostly does games of a Metroid Other M. What happened? Yeah. Capcom cross-checking, what happened? Like, basically, usually bad games. Right. Like, what made games bad? So, I've been watching that. And Strider came up in one of those, and I thought, I think I have a Strider game I never started. And I'd never played a prior one So I've been going through And so far it's been relatively easy though I was dying left and right To a boss this morning Who I tried to do before our pinball tournament yesterday And couldn't finish Finally got through him So I did all that And we had pinball tournament at Pizza West yesterday You won your money back I got my money back So you did very well I think I tied for 9th which we did four strikes, so we were there quite a while. I think you were tied for 10th. I was tied for 10th. You were tied for 8th. I looked this morning because I was curious who ended up winning. I saw on Facebook that Jason ended up winning, unsurprisingly. We had a lot. Actually, there's a topic that's inspired by some discussions we had there about the quality of games today that we're going to get into in the pinball segment. And then finally, also related to pinball, last week I did the pinball show with Jason Knapp of Knapp Arcade because my usual co-host, Zach Binney, has taken a month hiatus through March. Sabbatical. Yeah, sabbatical. So while he's out researching Lafayette or whatever he studies in his spare time, I thought, okay, well, I'm going to keep my usual every other week schedule. and I'll do the editing and stuff and I'll just bring in guest hosts. So that was the first one. I don't know about the second one because that's going to be at TPF. Yeah, that'll be a little. And every time we recorded an expo and that's the only time I've ever pulled off a recording of a podcast at an event. Every other time I have been way too tired. Right. But expo, there was nothing to do. It sucked so much that we had points like, what do you want to do this for? Do you want to go and play the same 10 non-broken games? No, let's just record. Yeah. A cast of stats. It was a lot better use of time. It's like, how much time can we kill until we go find food? That's basically it. So speaking of finding things, I think we've found ourselves now in the pinball section. And at first, I didn't think there was going to be a whole lot of content. I don't think most of these topics will take too long, but we do have a number of them to touch on. And the first one I want to start with is Multimorphic and their new Weird Al game for the P3. So yesterday, which was Saturday the 19th, 2022 for those listening way in the future, this was when Kevin of Buffalo Pinball was doing the live stream reveal of Weird Al. It had not – we'd not seen – we'd only seen trailer stuff. We'd not seen any real gameplay. So the problem for us, Tony, was we were in the midst of me taking 10th in a pinball tournament and you taking 8th to actually watch this. So I didn't see it live. However, I did take some time this morning and watch a small section of Buffalo Pinball's archived video on Twitch. You know what we should have done? What should we have done? Nobody would have minded is if we'd taken over the TV at the venue and streamed it to that TV instead of the final four or the March Madness. Yeah. I'm sure nobody would have. I didn't see anyone look up at that TV at March Madness except all the time. So, yeah, it would have been great. It would have been great. So, again, these are just some quick first thoughts I had from watching. And I did not watch a whole lot. made 10 minutes on the top end probably. But I watched a little bit of Kevin play and I watched a little bit of Colin MacAlpine who helped do some of the rules design for it. He's a very good player. So I watched some of that. So my initial takeaways would be one, the song and mode integration is excellent. Like they've really chosen the modes around this. Every song they went into clearly tied to the mode. Like, yeah, there was like a, there's one of the songs. I don't remember the song name, sorry, but about like a corporation song. And so there's like a thing with stocks and you're trying to sell stocks while the song is going on. There's the one where My Bologna, I guess I should say, where you need to go and build the bologna sandwich is the mode. And there's one I think about being stuck in traffic or something and you actually are trying to move your car into different lanes while that's going on. So very well thought out, like, how are we going to make a mode around the song? Right. It was really, really clear. So that was really strong. Something I had not realized, that really steep ramp, I don't think it's the far right ramp. It's like the center right ramp that goes up. It's like, okay, how clean of a shot do you have to do to get a ball to elevate that far? They have a magnet to help it. Okay. Because I remember we talked about that ramp looking kind of. Yeah. Is that going to be a clunk fest? No one likes it when you can't get up a ramp. Now my alternative question is, does that mean that ramp is too easy? Right. But I don't know. Step shots should be easy in my view. There should always be a mix of easy and hard shots, ideally. I love the hamster wheel, like watching it spin with the ball locks and stuff. I just thought, and I could tell that from the trailer. It was really, really cool. It was a standout. It stood out more than the moving camera did to me, whereas in the trailer, the camera really caught my eye a lot. But the hamster wheel was pretty cool. You know, I don't, with my very limited viewing, I did not get a good sense of the practicality of all the flippers, like especially the two side flippers. I didn't get a good feel for how often you need them or if you should ignore them. The upper, upper flipper, the fifth flipper, that got used a lot on the bologna one, for example, because it's up there that you're trying to build the sandwich. but it also kind of gives me some vibes of the flipper on Rob Zombie by the chicken bucket or whatever, where it was like pretty easy to keep on there and do your loop or whatever. But again, maybe some of the other, that was only one little, and again, even Colin was falling out of it. So it wasn't, I don't think it was as easy as the Rob Zombie one. Cause I like with Rob Zombie, I could do double digit loops and I'm terrible. So, so, so just in terms of a standout thing. And then finally, the animations on the main screen phone game. That's pretty standard. Yeah, it was. Just for all pinball, anything with the screen, it's always... Some looked better than others. There's one time when I think Kevin was in a mode where he was trying to repair the hall, and there were these tools flying across the screen. I thought that looked pretty good. The baloney, and they put the baloney on the main screen to see how far your sandwich went. Very phone game, but clean. The Weird Al is like a paper puppet. I did not think that looked very good. And I didn't care for the one where you're changing the lanes on the cars. You look at it, and it's like, okay, the money went to the license. Right. Which, again, fully animating, I mean, it's something that I think we've talked about quite a bit. Sort of like JJP sort of set that standard on screen animation, and it's not even that big compared to the whole play field. I remember seeing a lot of stuff from Stern, and I know they're dumping a lot of money into it, and it's still like, yeah, we come from video games. Right. So I'm used to better, would be my statement. We're spoiled. We are. Because it's not fair to compare this to a AAA game, but I can't help but do it. If you're emphasizing the screen so much, I can't help but say, I would like to see more, I guess, if I were to. But the main thing, as I've always said with any traditional pinball is, it's not about the art. It's about the gameplay. So that's really what it needs to come down to. And it looked enjoyable. I don't know until I try it if I would think it's more fun than a heist or not. I don't know. Heists are so fun with the crane. It is. We'll have to see at TPL. Heist was really enjoyable. Which, that's not a problem to have. It's a good thing if you're like, I like Weird Al, but I really like heist. It gives an added reason to want to Maybe get a P3 Because that'd be two games that you really like For the price of Something Don't make me do the I don't know what the math is Adding the heist module And the Weird Al game So you're at over 11,000 with that And then it's Is it under 2 to get the heist module? So it would be about Maybe two Stern Pros Roughly Okay. I think it's less than two retail Stern Pros. I'll round it. I'll say roughly two Stern Pros. We'll get you two multi-morphic games, but once you... Modules. Right. But then you got the other games that work with modules. They're much cheaper, and you can get those in. So throw in a few of those as well. So anyway, so that was the... You didn't see any of the video. No, I'm going to go clean. I'm going to go to TPF clean. Yeah. Make my own... You make your own... Get my own first impressions. Yeah, well, yeah. Until I play it, I can't really judge. And that's why I'm not really talking a lot about the shots other than watching which flippers got used. Right. Which, again, there have been other games where you'd think maybe a third flipper, for example, is integral and people might ignore it. My strategy on Doctor Who when we played in tournament was I'm not using that third flipper at all. I'm just not going to do it. Not going to do it. Thousand points of flipper life. So let's move on to Haggis. Now, this one was a surprise. And I have a link to a NAP Arcade. He has coverage of this that I saw this morning. Fathom Revisited. Boom. Finally, a gameplay reveal. Now, the reason I say finally is I have not been waiting with bated breath for the 2.0 gameplay. And this involved 2.0 code. Right. Because we all know Fathom. Yeah. Because Fathom is from 81. It's Fathom. Almost as old as us. Almost. The issue has been that, and this has been mostly on Pinside, but Haggis has been really quiet about Fathom. It's way behind schedule. Everyone knows that. But a lot of people, or at least a few people, have been frustrated by the lack of communication on what's going on with the Fathom build. We know they're still building games. In fact, Haggis this last week, I think, or week before, had a huge shipment of kelps arrive, I think, in Europe. So they're building stuff. But everyone's like, but where's – yeah, I'm revisited. It was supposed to come out in the summer. Right. Last summer. Not this summer. Right, right, right. And those no lies have been all acknowledged. So it's not like it's been radio silent. But this was a company that, if not prided itself, at least was very heavily involved in doing a lot of updates. And that sort of stopped. Well, this update came out. And so Martin Robbins, who's been working a lot on the rules, and there was another individual as well, were on the video. I only watched about five minutes of this just before we started recording. So I saw a little bit of it. It's up on YouTube. And the article Jason Knapp's site has that I'm linking to, it's embedded. So you can watch the video there. In terms of the 2.0 stuff, some interesting things. Unsurprisingly, more depth to the code. Why else? Why would you do a 2.0 if you didn't? Exactly. So they have incorporated several multiballs and modes And one of the so for example there like a Lagoon multiball which I believe I saw a little bit of that Martin talked a bit about how there are mermaid battles I think they refer to those as the mermaidens. I'm wondering if that's a play off of the combat. What were those? The mermaidens from Greeks? I don't know. I'm guessing. Martin can clarify if he ever hears this episode. So there's a mini wizard mode where you fight the mermaid queen, which I guess you can battle the mermaids and get to her. But there's also another way to get to her and a few other stuff, a few other items. So way more to do than on traditional Fathom, which was mostly about locking balls and trying to get your multiple balls. Exactly. What I will say in terms of what I saw and Martin was while he's playing, he explained some of it. And they know they weren't going to show everything. So, like, they showed how to activate one of the modes, but, like, they weren't going to show you how to beat it, for example. And that fits with Martin's philosophy. I know he, as a player, doesn't tend to like to watch gameplay video before he wants to, like you, he wants to go in pure and try a game. That's how I prefer to do it. Yeah. So then that's his style, too. But anyway, so I watched a little bit of the Lagoon multiball and stuff. But the thing, I don't want to talk about the modes too much. People can check out the video if they want to see that. All right. The lighting effects, really impressive. When they're talking about the game, it's in attract mode. And it's bathed in blue and they've got a lighting effect that makes it look like it's underwater. That's cool. It's pretty cool. And I thought my only concern initially was, now surely they're not going to make you play like you're underwater. Because this is like blue. This is like too much blue. But I'm like, no, no, surely. We've come so far since LEDs first came out. And no, as soon as that. Oh, all the things. All the purples, all the clown vomit. As soon as the ball was plunged, white GI. And you can see the art. Nice. So you're no longer under the water. So that was a standout. They put in effort into those lightning effects. Another thing, the sound, really interesting. If people like TNA's Electronica sound package, listen to this and see if you like this, would be what I would suggest. Now, I know Martin, I wonder if he weighed in or had heavy influence on the sound package because he's a big electronica fan. This is almost like a lo-fi electronica in the bass game. And then when he got into, I think it was Lagoon Multiball, it kicks up into like heavy beat sort of electronic music. That's cool. So it's got sound. It's got sound. I think the spinner, one of the spinner sounds is very throwback kind of to the traditional, but it sounded like maybe it was modified to sound a little cooler. But overall, just the visual change-ups with it, I can see where people would want to have the upgrade. And had they not, like, if they weren't sure, like, it looks way better. It looks really modern. Well, see, and that's one of those things that I think for any of these whole 2.0 type thing is the whole, that's the more interesting thing to me is doing what you can do with RGBs and the sound and all of that. Because some of the games are already good games. And some games, I'm always leery about new code because it could break it. It could take out what's fun. but just the simple being able to make it prettier, that's always accepting. And as I, and I, I believe that this was confirmed way back when they were doing the initial announcements, the, the, the revisited LE versions with the 2.0 code, you can still play the original kit. Right. So you have that option, which is something that I, I've always sort of associated with 2.0 kits. So let's go into that. Cause initially that's what I thought was going to be the big news item. And it's a weird way to describe it because it's all kind of like scattershot in terms of what's going on. But holy cow, it seems like 2022 is the year of the 2.0. 2022 is the year of the 2.0? Why couldn't they have all been announced on 2-2-22-2.0 day? Because some of them are before 2022. On Taco Tuesday. Yes. Taco Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. Day. Yeah. After the tournament, I was still hungry, and I thought, I'll just stop at Taco Bell and get a three-pack taco. Yes, tacos. I think I waited in line 30 minutes. It was, I don't know, like some kid's soccer game got out at 8.30 or what, but, oh, they were apologizing to everyone. They were so slow, and I knew it was going to be bad when I saw the line. And you stopped anyway? Yeah, because I'm fundamentally stupid, Tony. I was going to say, why would you? There's literally like nine taco trucks near the Taco Bell over here. They were probably close. It was almost nine. It was almost nine. And by the time I got my tacos, it was almost 930. So anyway. I was asleep by then. I should have just gone home and made some pizza rolls, but I didn't do it. Are they taco pizza rolls? No. They're whatever. They're not normal. I don't have toasty. I don't buy fancy pizza rolls. I buy cheap ones. But they come in one flavor. Best choice pizza rolls. Yeah, basically. Basically. So in terms of the 2.0 kits, now, we know from years ago, before all the controversy with the Big Lebowski and their inability to keep their promises, Dutch Pinball had Bride of Pinbot 2.0. That's what put them on the map. Didn't they also announce a 3.0 at one point? Yes. We don't talk about 3.0. We don't talk about that. I don't remember what episode it was. All I can say is if you go back, Tony was not kind about it. I remember that. You were very not kind. The biggest thing I remember about Bride of Pimbot 3.0 was, and apologies to whoever worked on it, but the art was horrific. Horrific. I mean, horrific. It was like, why would you do this? It's like that thing where the person tried to repaint. Yeah, like, oh, I'll do a restoration. on this cost of the art review. And they said, you know, they just hit it with a smear tool. So for a long time, that was the 2.0 kit that people knew. Right. It was Bride of Pinbot. And I, you know, I think there were, and it was really liked. I've played it before. I still think Bride of Pinbot's not that good of a layout. So I don't know if you can really save it with code, but it did give you a lot more to do. And there was hopes at the time that maybe Dutch would focus on doing more 2.0 kits. Well, they aren't, but others are. So the one that people have been talking about for a while now is the Funhaus 2.0, which is being done by Pedretti. He's doing the build on that, which is an Italian manufacturer. But that Funhaus 2.0, Rudy's Nightmare, that's the – I don't know if you've seen anything on it. That's the one where they have a picture of the hot dog, and he's got mayonnaise on it. This is how I always explain the game to people, which I'm sure is completely unfair, but it's my show. I can do what I want. It's already It's Funhaus 2.0 So my interest level is already Not very To me, Funhaus is a way better game Than Bride And both of them used that new WPC board set They're not DMD games But they weren't System 11 They moved to the new board set And so I always thought that's why They had the potential to give it a DMD And do all that Anyway, it has some gameplay out now I've not seen it like I've not gone and watched it yet, but I've been hearing good things from Funhaus fans. So there's that 2.0. Now, in addition, there's now been news that a Tales of the Arabian Nights 2.0 kit's coming out. Not by Dutch and not by Pedretti. This one's being done by Mirko Playfields. And I have a link in the show notes to Nap Arcade's coverage of this. Now, on Penn's side, this one's getting raked over the coals not because of the 2.0 kit mostly mostly it's because murko's who does jersey jack's playfields which are chipping and pooling and falling i mean right remember the wonk on location that looked yeah like it had it had been maybe put 5 000 plays on it because it had all sorts of stuff going on people are mad so part of the that is people are mad that Mirko is in this thread promoting this game that they're doing, and he's not addressing any of the stuff about the playfield. And incidentally, there's going to be a seminar with Mirko at Texas Pinball Festival, I assume solely to talk about this and not talk about playfield issues. That could be an interesting one. It could be. Let's see how that Q&A goes. Yeah, will anyone say anything? Will they photograph him from behind? Like what happened with Kevin Kulik? You never know what cutting edge things people will do from Pennside. So that's most of it. However, there was someone who went in who took issue with the entire project because it uses FAST. FAST is one of those like homebrew frameworks. That's what Fathom 2.0 is using is FAST. Okay. Well, I guess as near as I could tell from the discussion in that, as much as I could call it a discussion, it was almost a rant really. This person was furious that I guess the home brewer had been on the P-Rock forums, and he was saying this guy's unethical because he's moved it to fast to make money. Now, my understanding, the Bally Williams pinball licenses are controlled by PPS, or Planetary Pinball Supply. My understanding is PPS is mandating that these kits use fast, because there's probably some licensor deal where they get a kickback every time a fast board is sold or something. I don't know how much of this is like a circle the wagons fanboy thing and how much of this is that it truly was unethical because there weren't a lot of other people piling on the decision to shift to fast. But I also don't understand what happened on the forums and how much help came. I get the argument, though. All these people involved with P-Rock helped with the development, but it now moved to another board set. And I don't know what is the message, and you didn't sell it on the – because it wasn't ever a P3 module. So it's separate from that. I don't know. Like there's – I mean, but the thing is, if it's required by the holder, the license holder, to be on a fast, then it could have never been on the other system. They could have never made it. It would have just been – Right, never been commercial. Yeah. And this person's argument might be, then it should have just stayed homebrew. It was difficult for me to follow because I don't know the context, like how much assistance was rendered and how many – it sounds like this was going on for years. I hadn't heard anything come out of Mopimorphic like they thought that this was like – wasn't a fair play or something. But I don't know. I mean because it might – it could look bad if a company were to say, well, this is kind of not nice. And then you look like you're trying to stomp out some little person's chance to finally have something go commercial. I mean, so few homebrew things get to go commercial that you really want to take the pillow and smother it in bed. Yes. Yes, they do. Certain people do. It's literally the type of thing they look at. But I don't want to dismiss that they're – one could have a fair ethical concern here, and I don't want to just over – because I don't know how much – like, if you did have a whole other company helping you and then you walked away from them, I could see what you're getting. But was there a contract? or were you just on forums and people were talking to you and helping? Yeah, that's it. I mean, if I don't finish something after getting people helping talk me through it, does that mean that there's an issue with them? Look, I... It's weird. I could see it a variety of ways. My thought, or let's not even go with my thought. My thought doesn't matter because I'm not buying this. I'm not buying any of these kits. So based off of the thread, most people did not care at all where the home brewer started the development and where they finished the development in terms of which board got used. Like, I'm going to say no one cares. Someone cares. Most people don't seem to care. What they do care about is that why is this deal with Mirco? And why is Mirco doing the production? And they care that Mirco is making money. They may not care that PPS is making money. They may not care that Fast is making money. They care that Mirco is making money and they don't like it because they don't like the idea that Mirco has been, in a lot of people's view, getting away with impunity, turning out garbage playfields. And here's another thing. And people will buy it because it's the only source. Right. And but what it does beg the question why I want to have this discussion because I don't I also don't really care whether or not Mirco makes money. Like, to me, whatever's going on with the playfields with Jersey Jack, that is a Jersey Jack problem to solve. Correct. If it's Mirco's fault, JJP needs to make Mirco fix it. It's not our job to worry about Mirco screwing it up. Now, if you're ordering repo playfields from Mirco and they're garbage, that's another matter. But it's the manufacturer's response. I don't buy the game from Mirco. GNR does not come from Mirco. It comes from JJP. It's JJP's job to address it. That's how I see it. Right. But this, what in the heck is going on, Tony, with the 2.0 kits? Every single one is, I guess, licensed by PPS, and every single one is by a different manufacturer. It's weird. I'm not saying they're all named 2.0, but that's how they're all seen. So Dutch Bride, Pedretti Funhouse, Mirko Totan. And, oh, incidentally, there's another one. I also have a link to Nap Arcade. Oh, God, we're practically the Nap Arcade podcast. I'm linking to him so much. But he's covering all the news now. So link in the show notes to this. There's a Whirlwind 2.0. I guess it was at a show. I don't know. It was the Louisville show. I don't remember from the article. But it was shown off recently. DMD version of Whirlwind. So, hey, you can do System 11s. Or you could think about doing System 11s. According to a thread on Pinside. In fact, I think it's the same thread as talking about the Mirco Totan one. Planetary Pinball Supply purportedly has sent a cease and desist letter to the developer of the Whirlwind 2.0 project and if I remember what Knapp said the person who developed it I believe is the one who has the handle Apple Juice on Pinside who was the coder behind Magic Girl who got stiffed on all that work and obviously never got his working game, he never got one of the ones that got made by American Pinball either, though. At least not given to him like his contract said. So anyway, poor Apple Juice. But, I mean, yeah. So, yeah, the report on that is, okay, well, I don't know what board set, Fast, P-Rock, something else was used for Whirlwind, but the idea is, okay, this has been done, at least so far, as a homebrew, but PPS doesn't like it and is sending a message. I don't know how legal the cease and desist is. I'm not saying it's illegal to send the cease and desist. I'm saying I'm not sure, given its status as a single game that someone has developed, I'm not sure he can actually stop its development if it remains a non-commercial project. But my guess is that this is PPS trying to say, you know, you're going to come to us if you're wanting to actually sell these kits. Right. Now, whether or not that's true gets more nebulous because it depends on what assets are used, what's shown on the screen. And it's sort of like when I did my my chat H code for Jurassic Park Data East. You never downloaded the code for the for the pinball machine. You had to download chat H's unique developed code. You then had to get a data used to ROM from data East, which was freely available. And then you had to use a program and merge them together. And I assume that was to keep it completely legal so that he was not selling Daddy East. Well, he wasn't selling this stuff at all, but it was a keep like totally separate. It was super smart. So, again, depending on what assets are unique to this and what it is as a kit, there may not be anything to actually warrant a legal cease and desist. But they have chilling effect. So I mean, yeah, has a chilling effect. So anyway, so those are but I'm going to count it. So we've got Bride, Totan, Funhaus, and Whirlwind, all in various stages of develop and, at least three of them, commercial monetization. What do you think of all these 2.0 products? See, I don't know about the commercial monetization part of it. I can see where some people would really like it. I think it's a great idea in a lot of ways. the thought of taking a classic game and just kicking it up a little with the light, you know, light changes, sound changes, stuff like that is really attractive to me. So I like the thoughts of a lot of these projects. It's just with the, when it comes to licensing and everything, it could be a pretty hefty issue when it, when you're looking at the backside and trying to actually sell kits to other people, where if you're just working on a special project for you, just yourself, just to modify your own personal whatever, that could be, I mean, to me, that's just, that's no different than swapping engines in your car or doing, or getting a different paint job or something. That's just, that's modifying your own thing. As long as you're not selling it, it's not a big deal. Yeah, and I mean, they're kind of neat, the 2.0 kits idea. It's not something I've ever really thought like me commercially about. But all these games, there are only a finite number of them available, obviously. And all these games are expensive. Like, what's the cheapest one? Bride, maybe? I don't know. I haven't priced them in a while. Fun Houses have been going way up. I think before even this project was announced, Totem's always been super expensive. And Whirlwind, I think, is the most expensive System 11. It was, I believe, the last one they did. And for a lot of people, it is the best one. So, yeah, I mean, I'm fine with the idea. I just, especially when I look at like the sniping about the projects and stuff and the cease and desist and stuff, I'm like, I don't know if there's really enough money on the table with all of these to get this worked up about it all. It seems a little like we're not talking millions here. No, but I think you'd be surprised with how willing people are to throw money at stuff like this. But learning about the – the most interesting thing to me was actually learning about the PPS relationship with FAST and whatever deal they've made and then mandating all this stuff coming on. This explains why Haggis shifted to FAST for Fathom Revisited. It does. Because they were using P3 Rock for Kelts. And I was like, why would you – and I talked to someone I know who develops on the multimorphic stuff. And I was like, why would they like why would they shift to fast? Like, is there a honestly, I thought maybe the fast boards were just cheaper. I but I never priced it like I don't know how much you pay when you get them in bulk. Because and my reason for that was only because that's what Ben Heck in an interview had indicated why Spooky switched to his Pintar board. That was to save money. But that's not a third party board. He developed it. It's not turning to a different third party, you know, like going from one third party to another. Same thing with American Pinball. I believe they're still using P3 Rock, but they have indicated again in interviews that their intent is to go to their own boards. Well, Ametron owns them. There's the brother company or parent company. I think they flat out own them now. They make boards, so it makes sense. Like those make sense. When you have first party capability, it makes sense. I don't know why someone would have moved from a multi-morphic board set too fast unless there was like tremendous savings. But now it makes sense because, like, oh, wait, they had to make the deal with PPS to get Fathom as a license. Right. And the same for all the rest. So they're saying, okay, if you're doing all this stuff, you're going to use FAST. That explains it. Anyway, so that was the most interesting part to me. All right, we're through all the main news stuff, so we just have a couple other items before we go on to our very, very meaty video game section. First is, as we noted, Texas Pinball Festival. We are getting ready to go do that. We're less than a week away, Tony. I'm ready. You're ready. I just need a... I just need another break from life. It's been six months. It's been 84 years. It's been six months and it's like, I need to shut down. Normally, I feel like I can go like a year between vacations, but it's just, I'm just. It is. Combined with legislative work, which is never a high point of my job, and I've just had so many meetings. Anyway, I'm not going to whine about it all. It's just been a lot of stuff, and I'm just sick of dealing with all of it. I just want it to be done with. I can't wait that long. Just take a little break. This is not the ideal time. Ideally for me, TPF would have been two weeks later in April when there is no. Our legislature is on break in April. That's not how life works. I'm like, I'm doing this and my board didn't object. That works. I'm ready. I downloaded 20 hours of sea shanties for us. Yay. So when the audiobook's over, sea shanties the rest of the way. So for those that listen and want to talk to us, we're pretty easy to engage with. We're usually just walking around somewhere at the event. But just for some information, Tony and I will get in on Thursday. We've done this ever since the first TPF where we got in on Friday, and we were so exhausted from the drive that we didn't want to play them all the first day. So we get in Thursday, and so we'll be there through Sunday. In terms of swag when Tony got here this morning I was watching TV separating stickers I have EGP stickers that we be able to hand out and we should have lapel pins I call them lapel pins. Yeah. Yeah. Pins. People like them pins. I hope they turned out as the image showed. So they're supposed to arrive tomorrow, so Tony and I have not gotten to look at them, but I've ordered 100. So I'll bring some of those, and we'll see how it goes. so I don't really have a lot of TPS swag. I think I might have a few stickers that Zach sent me a couple months ago for that. But EGP stuff, that should be okay. Nothing super fancy. I don't think I want to bring the mouse pads. I still have a bunch. You still have mouse pads? I still have mouse pads because they were so cheap to get. I don't think I have any magnets left. There we go. I do have magnets. You do have some magnets left? I do have fridge magnets. Because I had a few. I had a few left. I think they're under the mouse pad, so I didn't see them. I know I have a bunch, though. So we'll have some stuff. We'll have some stuff. The final thing I wanted to talk about before moving on to video games was just because when we were at our pinball tournament yesterday, one of the items that came up, at least with a small group I was talking to, was about just how good games have gotten lately. Actually, we were talking about Stern games. Right. To be blunt. Well, there are no other games lately. There has been no other games lately. But we were thinking comprehensively. It's like what's really stood out since them bringing Elwynn on board, but a lot of this about just how good the rules have gotten, how rare it seems to be to have a true total garbage layout, that sort of thing. And so one of the things I thought would be interesting for us to do would have been to go over with the Pinside Top 10, which is not perfect, but an interesting metric. It's a metric. We use it for a lot of stuff. Yep. about what's in there because what I remember when we were having our conversation was I knew that the Pinside Top 10 has very much become more modern now. Whereas for a long time, I felt even when really good games were coming out from like a rules and gameplay perspective, those 90s Williams games were like holding on tight, like bent down like a rabid dog, not willing to let go. and it's sort of like what i thought about was wait a moment let's check the way back machine and so i did so let's actually pull some figures in because when i first got into pinball that's like 2012 the pinstripe top 10 was like all bally williams all dmd with the exception of like lord of the rings and i think maybe simpsons pinball party we're also on the top 10 so you had two kind of modern sterns i say kind of because they were all pre-20 of course i was that was much past 2010. I just feel that way now because I'm old. But everything was just really, really Bally Williams and they just held on super tight. So let's go ahead real quick and say in terms of the current top 10, and we're doing this on March 20th, 2022. Here's what they are. Number one, Godzilla. Number two, Rush. I think that's only up there because of recency bias. Yeah, I think so too. But we'll see. Three, Medieval Madness. 4. Attack from Mars 5. Deadpool 6. Jurassic Park Stern 7. Iron Maiden Legacy of the Beast 8. Elvira House of Horrors 9. Monster Bash 10. JJP's Guns and Roses So, there are only three 90s games in there. Medieval Madness Attack from Mars Monster Bash Also interesting to me, there are three Keith Elwin games in there. Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and Iron Maiden. His only game that is not in the top 10 is Avengers, which is at 15th. Yeah. Overall, I mean, I don't agree with all of these as top 10 games. I definitely don't agree with all of these as top 10 games. But as we see, these are all really, really modern. I mean, when you set aside those three, not only are these modern, Like, these are all, like, after 2015. Modern. Right? I mean, when's Iron? Iron Maiden was 2018. Is that the oldest one? Because Guns N' Roses was 2020. Elvira was 2019. Jurassic Park was 2019. Deadpool was 2018, which is the same as Iron Maiden. Rush is this year, 2022. And Godzilla was last year, 2021. So, yeah, all this stuff, not counting the Bally Williams stuff, is 2018 or newer. And while we see games get in the top 10 with the recency bias thing, that usually sorts itself out over like a month or two. Right. Like Halloween was, you know, I don't know if Halloween was, but a heist at one point was in there. That's why I think Rush, I don't, Rush may stay top 10. I just don't think it'll stay at number two. This is the guess, though. The rules are pretty popular, so we'll see. So now let's go back, but let's not go back to when I first got in the hobby. We're going to go back to December 2016 because that was one of the Wayback Machine snapshots. Here's what they were then. Number one, Medieval Madness. Number two, Twilight Zone. Number three, Monster Bash. Number four, Attack from Mars. Number five, Lord of the Rings. Number six, Addams Family. Number seven, Metallica. Number eight, Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure. Number nine, this was before they combined all the game types. Metallica Pro, the first one was Premium Elite. And number 10, ACDC Premium Elite. So that is six Bally Williams games. So it was over half. And this was when we were starting to see good games come out. I mean, Metallica, all-time classic, ACDC, all-time classic. Interestingly, those aren't top 10 worthy anymore, according to the current top 10. but they're still thought of very fondly by people. And you have stuff that obviously that, that fell out. I mean, Twilight Zone. I mean, I was joking with a, with one of our area players named Jason, uh, cause he knows I don't like Twilight Zone. I've always thought it was exceedingly overrated. And I can, I look back at this. I'm like, holy crap. I do. I'd say I can't believe this, but I remember when Twilight Zone was top three. And I was just like, why? Or our Adams family, two-shot game. Why? Because it was the game everybody knew. Nostalgia. It was the game everybody knew. Do you think that the current top ten is more accurate than this 2016 top ten? What are your thoughts just on what is best anymore? Tell me, Conan, what is best? What is best in life? I do, honestly. I think we're getting past the point where the nostalgia and the bias of the past is starting to be overridden and there, and people will acknowledge there aren't good new games because I've met, I've met pinheads that don't acknowledge that there has been a good game made since, you know, 2000. I mean, they're out there. I've spoken with them and there's a lot of people that held that view for a long time. And I think it's definitely drifted away. And we're definitely at a place where modern games can stand out and can be considered up there with the older games. I don't think it makes the older games less. I think that they have a very different feel. I think the feel of a modern game and the feel of a 90s game and the feel of an 80s game are all very different. I think they all kind of reflect their time frame and the way people played at that point in time. Yeah, that's a good point. And one of the ways, I won't say that the top ten is necessarily all defined by this, but what it reminds me of is when I first got in the hobby, one of the biggest complaints that I knew people had with Stern versus Bally Williams was the flipper field. there are a lot of people that would say i really like how bally williams flippers feel and i don't like as much how the sterns feel i feel too snappy they're like too powerful it's flipped now now practically everyone i know and myself included actually i was always like this i love the snappier feel of what data east did with their flippers and stern currently does with it but anyway now i hear people compare everything to stern flippers and uh coil stops getting shredded aside that you almost immediately need to replace in some games, people tend to say, I like how Stern flippers feel. And they get more annoyed with, like, the Jersey Jack flippers because they feel mushy. Or American Pinball, same sort of thing. Right. And they're not necessarily mushy flippers. It's just a different – when you're, like, using Bally Williams' mix, they're going to feel like Bally Williams' flippers, and they didn't have the same style. They didn't have the same feel. but so many people have played sterns now that it's like it's not how it was where when i first got in and even though we saw more companies like jersey jack coming into play and stuff it was a lot of people came at the hobby from their experiences in the 90s and everything was compared to that golden age and we finally it seems reached enough production demand interest whatever that we're in a new golden age even if the production isn't as high as it was in the 90s right we are now in a new resurgence and so many people have played the new games it's not people coming around all the time remembering the old games it's the people that come in going oh okay let me try this adams family oh well what's your past experience oh well i played russian gnr yeah they were seeing a lot of people who don't have the experience from the 80s and the 90s they never had it that for them pinball now is this is their first taste of pinball now let me kind of aside because this is it's true across both of the top 10 snapshots we looked at but let me contextualize it more specifically for you do you still think attack from mars is the greatest pinball machine that has ever been made right this second yes because that's the second we're recording in. Yes. But I will be honest, there are a couple games out there that the more I play them, the more, if I was given the choice between the two, I would take them. Right, a Pinbot 2.0? Oh, okay. I mean, there's no... I really, really love Godzilla. It is a game that I could sit down and play continuously. I love that game. and I would, I mean, it's a game that has a definite ability to me to take attack from Mars from my favorite spot because attack from Mars is a game that I consider a lot of fun with a lot of fun call outs combined with a theme that I find very enjoyable and hilarious. And Godzilla is the exact same thing. and as I get more playtime on it, I really enjoy the gameplay a lot. So, and it takes the other, and that's the thing is not a lot of games tick all the boxes with me where I consider them fun gameplay and I consider them wonderful themes and I really enjoy their art and their call-outs. Most things have something missing. for me personally on one of those things. Both of those games hit every single one of those boxes for me. So, yeah. Okay. Well, that's it for the pinball section. That's all I had. We had a lot, apparently, according to the record time. Well, we can segue to the video game section where we can open with pinball news on the video game section. Yeah. The pinball FX, we've not talked about them. We've not talked about video pinball in a while. But they have put out a new table. Wow. They're getting some pushback on it. What? No. They have put out the Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure. Pretty popular. That was in that 2016 top ten list. Popular game. A lot of people like it. But they're getting some pushback because they're pricing just that table alone at $15. Hmm. that's pretty high for one table DLC. Yeah. In my view. Right. Well, the thing is, is they put out a lot of tape. Normally they'll put out like three. Yeah. Usually a three pack for 10 bucks. So it's for a single table at $15. They're getting a little pushback and some, some, a table that required no creativity on their part. Cause it already was designed. Exactly. My assumption, it has to do with licensing. Is. Okay. Well, you know, historically when pinball arcade had all the Williams stuff, They had to do all those Kickstarters to get, like, T2 and stuff because they couldn't afford the licensing. And my guess is that's what that was. We did have a whole bunch of emails. I just wanted to do that crossover. That was a good crossover. Because it crosses over very well first. You never misread the one note like me where I skip lines. Oh, yeah. I've never done that except for, like, all the time. No, no. Never. Do it. Write in and complain about that. I think that emperor was a 7 out of 10. But write in and collect your cameras. Podcast at gmail.com if you think it was a 6 out of 10. So, yes, we did have a few emails. One was Chris Chandler. He's written in a number of times. Former Deep Root correspondent for the Pinball Show, you did not know. And you wouldn't because you never listened to the Pinball Show. There's a Pinball Show? There is. And there's also one that Zen does on YouTube called the Pinball Show. and when you search on google zenz pops up first guess we just aren't that good um so anyway he emailed uh one email he emailed a couple times but one of them was denoting that the pc version of resident evil have you played resident evil 8 yet no okay well apparently there's a mod for the pc version and you can change it so that all the zombies of the game become barney's dinosaurs and I've included a picture that he sent us. And I do agree. It is horrific. It is horrifying. Because it's so dark, but they're, like, throwing their heads back and stuff, and their teeth are there. That is one of the things that I love about gaming on the PC is the modding communities and all of the mods you can. Like, the Skyrim mod that changes all of the dragons to Thomas the Tank Engine is just hilarious. and there are just amazing mods. There are Fallout mods that do amazing things, but this is horrifying. This is. This is so, I mean, there's awesome mods, there's scary mods, there's like mods that change the game completely. This is all of that. It is awesome. It's an awesome idea. It is horrifying. And the only, yeah, it is. That does remind me, I don't remember my very first mod I ever did. The one I remember the most vividly was back in the 90s, and we would have LAN parties, and we would play group games of Warcraft 2. Yes. I changed a few of my sound files out, and one of the ones I changed to was every time a boat sank, it would go glug, glug, glug, glug. Right in if my glug, glug, glug didn't sound appropriately like an actual bathroom drain glugging. That's basically what I did. I made a few other ones a little bit different Another email Blueberry Johnson He's most famous on Pinside for being the Deep Root Super Sleuth That's his official title I think But he did write to us saying that he's a big fan Of a roguelike called Wazhack And asked if we were familiar with it I am not but I thought I'd bring it up I'm not but from the email I actually looked it up And it looks pretty cool but I've not had a chance To play it as of yet So I'm going to give it a shot. I threw it on my wish list, and I'm going to grab it, and I just haven't had a chance yet. We had another email, this one from a Michael W., who wrote to us asking about Divinity Original Sin 2, and if either of us had played it or had any thoughts on it. I have not played it, but I do remember hearing about it when it came out. It was on consoles as well, but I never looked further into it. It never caught my eye. I never played any of the Divinity games. Yeah, and I don't think I played the first one either. probably why I had no interest in the second because it didn't leave a bad it wasn't one of those where I was like oh yeah no I tried that and I don't want to play anymore in this series then Ben M wrote into us and he brought up a past discussion we had about loot boxes and this is a portion of the email that he wrote but I thought I'd read it out here trading cards aren't gambling per se because you have the ability to trade for what you want Let's take pinball for a moment Are mystery awards considered lootbox-ish? Is there an amount of skill that is involved in procuring a result? The defense of mystery scores is that players have to change and adapt their strategy based on said result Could the same be said of lootboxes? If the box was gained through skill or by purchase, does the resulting strategy still stay the same or does it change? Gambling is a percentage of winning or not The assessment is correct, made by ESRB gambling is the complete chance of winning or not but in this case you are still getting something so he wrote it in a way it wasn't really clear to me initially but i think going back and re-reviewing his email my sense is he was pushing up back on us a little bit on our loot box conversation because to him it's not gambling if you get something out of it and every time you open a box, you get something. It just might not be the something you wanted. Right. And I can see the argument. I know as I recall, there are several political bodies that are counting it as gambling across the world. And they're modifying laws to make it qualify as gambling. But I can see the argument that it's not gambling because you are receiving something. I think the bigger concern is that it's more predatory, especially those games where it is hitting younger. So kids are, you know, spending lots of money, not money they don't necessarily have or stealing mom and dad's credit cards to do that, which is a whole nother set of issues. I'm not a fan. I mean, I don't like loot box. I don't like my, my, my, and I didn't, I mean, my wife and kids, they love those little mystery pack box things where, oh, there's a bunch of stuff in here. And one of them might be this specific little fun, cute thing. I, I hate stuff like that. I just, it's one of those things I, I, I would be more okay with them just having a cash shop where it's like, I want this gun and you can buy that gun. Yes. when it, and the way I would describe from my perspective is, and I, yeah, I get where he's coming from and he does have a point, but I think the, even if it's, I mean, there's still an addiction angle we see with some of it and I'll explain it, I'll explain it a little bit different, but first let me go through my thought. I'm okay with loot boxes if they're cosmetic. Like I don't, I mean, I don't love them, but it doesn't offend me. Like Overwatch letting you loot rocks for skins and sprays. Right. Whatever. It doesn't impact the gameplay. Where I have a problem is where it impacts the gameplay. One of the biggest games in the world right now is Genshin Impact. Yes. People who have the best stuff are whales and only whales because you have a statistical chance of getting a particular character or a particular weapon and if you don't get one, if you don't get what you needed, if you get a dupe, it doesn't have nearly the value as getting the new thing you wanted. Right. And so the example case in point I would give with someone, and I read this, this was on Reddit. I read this probably last year at some point. It was a phone game. And they were playing, and they loved the game, they loved the theme. And it worked on this loot crate sort of thing. Every time they would do a draw where they'd spend their money, yeah, they'd get something. So you could say, okay, well, it's not gambling. They're getting something. But it'd be a special event. There's one new character with a special event, and you're told the odds of getting that character. Be like, oh yeah, you have a one in 10 chance of getting the character. And this person, because gambling, people can have an addiction to it, would do these draws. And what started as a, yeah, he spent 10 or 20 bucks, and then he spent a few hundred, and then he didn't get a character he really needed, and the next thing he knew, he spent $1,500 drawing and finally got that character. and then later they needed the complimentary person. Obviously. And the next thing, he was $20,000 in debt to a phone game. Right. Now, that's the issue because those characters impacted gameplay. It wasn't just the, oh, yeah, I'm trying to get the pretty, pretty outfit. It was, this character will make my life easier or I can't progress in the game with my current characters. I tried. You need these characters to win if you want to be at the top end. That's what this stuff does. This is where the blowback on things like Battlefront 2 came from. It wasn't being able to put a weird costume on Vader. It was to have Vader, period. Right. And to open a crate and get a stormtrooper? Okay. Yeah, you did get something. But that's not the, they know why people keep paying. It's to get the main item. That's the problem. Right. And I agree with that. And anything in my mind that affects gameplay, be it a game where you get XP boosts or where you can buy better stuff. Case in point World of Tanks gold ammo Spend real money on gold ammo It has better penetration better damage stats than anything else you can get in the game So when you having problems with something you flip over to your gold ammo and ram some gold into it So you're literally smashing your opponent down with cash. You're killing them with cash. And any game where you get a bonus by spending actual money, I have a problem with. That doesn't mean the games are necessarily bad or the games aren't fun. I just don't like it. And it gets really bad because some games, like you were talking about, take it to the point where if you do not spend money, you cannot get any better. You cannot advance. You have no choice. In some of the games, spending money makes it easier, but it doesn't make it impossible to go farther. Right. and in terms of Ben's comparison to Mystery Awards in Pinball I do agree they are loot box ish except once you're in a game you can shoot the mystery shot as much as you want and you don't have to put more coins in the coin box right that's one thing and second even all the way back to the 90s you could go in and configure a number of these games so for competitive play to standardize or turn off the mystery feature so like Attack from Mars the most common code people have is where you only get points. So you like the thing and the loot box becomes what you've said, the thing in the shop you pay for. You own the thing, you get the 25 million points or whatever. Or some of the other strategies are every time you get something different, but it's all tiered and sequential. And that's how competitive players want it. Because no, it isn't fair to have the same shot be worth more for one person than another if they didn't do anything special. Right. Can you imagine a pump and dump tournament where you can go through and as you put – while you are actively playing, you can plunge more quarters into the machine to get various bonuses and get to – It's like, oh, I'm doing real good. I need quadruple play field score. Drop a quick 50 cents in the machine. Or all those put in the extra money super pins that Williams did. Like when we're at Todd's house, we don't get to activate the buy-in feature and get one more ball. but it offers it to us. I mean, even in that, where people don't do the configurations, it can be horribly unbalanced. I remember one time we were doing the, one of the things in a tournament we've gone to before is everyone there can enter in and you play a game and the person who scores the lowest is eliminated and you go to another game. It's a really fun format. I love the format. It is time consuming. Yeah, it is. But they don't go and reconfigure all the games for that. So one time I went in and I hit the jackpot, the progressive jackpot on taxi. I was like, I knew I wouldn't be eliminated. The jackpot was then garbage after that. I was like the third player to play it. So I had an insta-win based off of a crate of mystery. Well, I mean, it wasn't a mystery. It was on the screen. But you see, it was progressive. It shouldn't be. Same thing why when people have Stern Jurassic Park, the topper multiball mode is turned off competitively. Because you spell it out across multiple games, and then it puts you in special goat mode. Right. So, yeah. But thanks for writing in, Ben. Those are our thoughts. We ain't done yet, Tony. We're almost done. So many emails. Yes. One more email. As I noted, Chris wrote in a second time, and he sent us an article, which I do have linked in the show notes for people that want to read it, Regarding Studio 369, which has generated $15 million in a private token and NFT sales for their mech game Metalcore, which I thought I would bring up with you because I know you like mech games. I do. But Chris included this quote from the article in his email to us, which was, We are gamers ourselves and will deliver fun and rewarding gameplay in this new business model that integrates NFTs with proven game mechanics. Yay. I didn't say yay, but I'm adding that in. What are your thoughts on this? $15 million, Tony? This better be the best mech game ever. I do not. $15 million. I mean. Holy cow. I still don't understand the whole NFT thing. It's not something that I – I don't understand where people have this giant interest draw, but – I looked online. I don't know. Every person's mech is going to be an NFT. The guns, I guess, are going to be NFT. Everything is an NFT. The boulder I'm going to hide behind is an NFT. I don't know. I honestly, I mean, I just 100%, I don't know. I don't understand the draw. I mean. Is it gambling? Is this, this is the vibe I get from the crypto bros, is I don't know anything about investing. I just know all this stuff is going up right now, so I'm going to throw money in it in hopes that I just make a bazillion dollars. I, you know, it could very well be just, and all because of that weird Bitcoin thing. Bitcoin was never – I mean back when I – because my brother-in-law was in – had Bitcoin like over a decade ago. Right. The whole idea, which I never was a huge fan of, but the whole idea was a non-fiat, non-government-based currency, not something speculative. Right. It's supposed to be stable. Currency should be stable. You don't want to invest and get – and the thought was what if you had money – what if your money was in the ruble right now? Right. It would be in the rubble is what it would be. So some currencies like the U.S. dollar are relatively stable. But the idea was if something – the government can manipulate the value of the dollar, like the Fed, by choosing what it does with interest rates. Right. And if they allow inflation to run rampant, the dollar's value will go down. So the idea was a currency that the government couldn't meddle with. It would all be on algorithms and stuff. Instead, we've got people who are scorched-earthing the environment with all these farms, you know, with these huge energy draws, mining this stuff. I just, I don't, anyway, I'm whining. So, yeah, that's my guess. It's all become, like, people saw what happened with, like, GameStop and stuff, and now they're like, well, maybe we can do that with NFTs, too. Maybe. I mean, I can understand that the GameStop thing was a real stock. That one made – I mean it was artificially inflated, but all's fair with market manipulation. That was different. You understand what's going on. People can do an analysis and go, this is an overvalued stock, and you know what you're getting into. I don't understand the valuation on NFT. I don't understand any valuation at all. It's a Digi product. You can't play it. I mean in this you can except why do they have to integrate it with proven gameplay mechanics? Why can't I just buy a game with proven gameplay mechanics? Because they wouldn't get as much money that way. I mean, $15 million, this is going – I see why so many companies now are like, let's just do this and then not set up our Minecraft server and just go away with the money. Well, and if they're doing this, I mean, they don't have to go kickstart the Kickstarter route. No, you don't have the controversy in the Kickstarter and not making your deliverable deadlines. Right. You don't have the blowback of the, well, how much DLC do I have to buy? Do you want the loot crates? I'm waiting for Star Citizen to start NFT-ing everything in Star Citizen. I'd say don't give them any ideas, but I'm sure they've been thinking about it. I bet you someone has blueprinted that out if their typical fundraising strategy somehow stopped making them money. Right. Which so far has not been a problem. No. All right. You've got other stuff that isn't email. I do. Thank you everyone who emailed us Yes thank you very much I was asked By a couple of different people About some games I've talked about in the past I don't have this in the notes but since we had so many emails It came to mind We really had a lot I've been asked about like Hardship Or yeah Hardspace Shipbreaker A game that I have talked about last year And some of the year before It was an early access game that I was playing a fair amount of and someone was asking me about it and I let them know and might as well share with everybody else. I haven't touched it in a while. The game is all really fun but they put out a new patch in December but at the same time in very early January they put out a note about it that they are planning to move out of early access and have the version 1.0 full game ready to go this spring. So I decided I'm just going to wait because when that goes active, the whole story will exist. Most of my playtime with the game was from before there was any story, when it was just the mechanics. And then I played the patch that had some of the first part of the story, and it was very enjoyable. So now I'm just going to wait until I can play the whole story. But I've had a couple people asking about that, and Satisfactory's had massive updates lately. Tons and tons and tons of massive updates, and I've just not really touched any of it because I was playing other games or doing other things and Satisfactory is one of those games like I do with a lot of games when I get involved I get completely involved and I play only one game for hours or days or weeks sometimes at a time and I've just not slid back into it yet so I've not tried any of the new stuff there so going into the actual news I'm going to talk about New World, as you might recall, Amazon dropped New World back in the fall of last year, and it was a huge hit. Everybody was talking about how it's the new greatest MMO, and it's going to destroy all the other MMOs. And then after a month, it kind of went away. I had a message from Nick, Solid State Pinball Supply Nick, about he asked me if I was playing New World because he thought maybe one of us was from our prior coverage. I said, no, we talked about it extensively. Yeah, we talked about it because it got huge. It blew up so big, and it was well-reviewed, but as a lot of those things had, it had no defined endgame, and it dropped off. Well, they put out a big set of news talking about their plans for 2022. They're adding multiple new endgame events, including one to close out the main storyline. They're adding new weapons. They're putting together 3v3 PvP arenas, adding leaderboards, all sorts of new lesser content, not just end-game content, but other standard content throughout the game. So we'll be interested to see if they can re-energize their player base. Because like a lot of these games that have a lot of hype real early, they just kind of fall off. and sometimes they recover, but not, I'd say less than half will they recover. I don't know that they'll ever recover to where they were when they first launched, but they might come back into a pretty solid gameplay state as long as they don't have any major issues. So it'll be interesting, though, to see, considering the hype, and how many people already own the game now. Right, right. If they can make enough changes to bring people back. because as you recall, we talked not that long ago, a few months ago, about how they were closing and how many servers they had to close down because their player base had dropped off so bad. GranTurismo 7 getting great reviews for its actual car driving, racing stuff, but they had to do an emergency maintenance. They pushed a patch on Thursday, and immediately had to go into emergency maintenance because they found an issue when they pushed the patch that was like destroying people's saves. Oh, wow. What was the last game we talked about that did save destruction? Was it Cyberpunk? I think it was Cyberpunk. Oh, yeah, you could over, it'd get too big. Right. The save would get too big and it would corrupt. That's what would happen. Well, this was, but in this situation, when they pushed the emergency repair to do it And to protect people's saves, they brought the servers offline. Gran Turismo 7 is an always online game. So for 30 hours, nobody could play Gran Turismo 7 like the week it released. Ouch. Which is one of those, hey, I understand. I think it was the right choice. But in this day and age, that translates into review bombing. That's right. That's what we do. That's what we do. We go, I'm going to bomb your review. We review Bob. There are points where it was one of the lowest rated PlayStation games of all time. Oh, wow. Because it was inaccessible for 30 hours. And this is the kind of problem you're going to get with the always online portion of games where they just kind of, you have to have a server connection to do anything. And that will be, we'll see how well they bounce back. I haven't played a Gran Turismo since Gran Turismo 2. It's a bit too real. Yes. It's like Forza Motorsport versus Forza Horizon. Forza Horizon is an arcade-y style. Forza Motorsport is super serious racing. Right. It's like I've been playing SnowRunner. SnowRunner, lots and lots and lots of fun. American Truck Simulator, no. European Truck Simulator, it's not. You don't know how to get the second and third brake off. in time with the steep grade and shift gear properly. It's why I play Ace Combat and Wingman. Not Flight Simulator. But not DCS or Flight Simulator. There's a level in there that I want, and it doesn't necessarily require me to build the cockpit of an airplane around me with physical switches to fly the airplane. As interesting as it is, and as much as I actually love watching people play DCS, There are some groups out there that do a lot of fun things with DCS, and they're a lot of fun to watch. The actuality of sitting there and watching someone do a 20-minute ground pre-flight startup to take off to play a game, I can't do it. I can't. I don't have the time. There's no way. So, yeah. I mean, I've seen people real-time DCS stuff where they're spending 15 hours playing a mission, doing mid-air refuelings, and literally flying. I've seen people do the same thing in Microsoft Flight Simulator where they literally do a cross-country flight that's like eight hours, and it's them sitting there for eight hours flying the airplane in a straight line. And it's just like, I can't do it. Great for you. I love your guys' ethic, but holy crap, I just can't. Overwatch 2 is entering closed beta. Yes. I think this has surprised people. It surprised me. I figured we wouldn't see a closed beta for Overwatch 2 until mid-summer. But they have a limited closed beta that they are taking sign-ups for now. People can sign up for it on the website. The planned starting date is April 26th What they've done is They've separated the PvP and PvE mode So they can do the PvP And do the beta testing On the PvP I'm assuming the PvE is the stuff that's Really not done Because we know a version of this Is what's going to be running The Overwatch League this year Yeah, they've had to prioritize the PvP Because that's what they were saying It has been in alpha testing With pros and with developers. There was a thing earlier this week where XQC clicked the wrong icon and accidentally loaded into Overwatch 2 on stream. So we'll see how it goes. Last time we heard, they still weren't planning on having Overwatch 2 out in 22. Yeah. I mean, it's made me interested in watching the league. It does. My interest in League is higher now than it was But I'm still not I'm not that Interested in Overwatch anymore So Elden Ring We talked about it last time Just released was doing huge 12 million sold That's massive I've been talking to people Who play it and some of the guys at work have played it and they enjoy it. And some of them are not Souls games fans and they're enjoying it. So I think it'll be interesting to see how big Elden Ring actually gets. They're already talking about the Elden Ring franchise, which is no surprise to anybody. Not with sales. Not with sales like this. You pretty much have to. You'd be... If you ran a company and they're like, well, we sold 12 million, we should make another one. And you said, no, I think we're going to go on to something else. I'm pretty sure you'd be fired. Though apparently speed runners already have any percentage runs down under 30 minutes. The fastest I've seen so far was 28 minutes. I didn't watch the speed run. I've just seen the score because it's a game that I've had enough people talk to me about that I have wishlisted it and I'm considering it. I have such a hard time overcoming that. I'm just not a Souls game person. Right, and after my experience with Sekiro, which I really struggled getting into Dark Souls 2, and I just don't know if I can put myself through it again. That's why I wishlisted it, but I'm not pulling the trigger, because I cannot spend $60 on a game that I think I might hate just because I hate that style of game. So it's just there. Elite Dangerous, I'm doing this on purpose. I'm not skipping something in the notes. I'm just moving them around. Elite Dangerous had a problem last year when they released their newest DLC. They had to push back the DLC launch on consoles while they concentrated on fixing all of the problems on PC. And there was a lot of ill will because the DLC was pushed out because the higher-ups said, put it out now, even though it was nowhere near done. What happened? Yeah. There you go. Yeah, there it is. and they've been working on it and they've been fixing it, and it turns out that they've made the decision that instead of now going in and finishing, now that they've got the PC version working, instead of making it work for the consoles to push it out, they're just going to abandon consoles completely. Not just the DLC. They're completely abandoning the game on consoles. They're not programming for consoles anymore. There will be no more updates to the consoles. Elite Dangerous is done on anything except for PC. So I don't know. I know PC is their primary play zone. I don't know how many people played on console, but that's kind of big to just chop off one whole section of the market. And the last thing I have is you might remember in 2020, there was the big to-do with Twitch and Dr. Disrespect. that they hired him exclusive, tons of money, and then permabanned him, and nobody knows why. Well, last year, he apparently found out why, and he launched a lawsuit because of it. I remember hearing, I think we talked about that. Yeah, we talked about that, too. That lawsuit is now over. And the legal dispute was settled with neither party admitting wrongdoing. and that's all we know about it. Yep. And that's probably all we ever will know about it. Have no clue what it was about. But they settled it. Nobody on the other side admits wrongdoing and they're walking away. So that's just an interesting end to that whole giant thing. Sorry, I did that. I liked one of your Instagram things you sent me. this is just trolling the grams while I'm tired yeah I'm just ugly sorry so it's interesting just to see how that changed I'm like everybody I think I'm curious what caused it because it was such an out of nowhere drop I mean I can understand getting rid of Dr. Disrespect because quite frankly I've never liked him I think he's one of those people that personify the bad streamer. I think he's one of those that gives the streamers bad names. But he's hugely popular. And a lot of those type of streamers are hugely popular. XQC. XQC, for example. I don't follow or watch any of those streamers because, like I said, I'm not fans of that kind of streaming. It is, for them to have put so much money in and then immediately permabanned with no word other than just it's over is weird. And just the curious part of me wants to know what in the crap that was. I'd kind of like to know what the settlement was. Yeah, it would be nice to know. But since it was settled, that means there's not going to be any open court records or anything like that that can be seen. Yep. They probably NDA'd them. I'm sure they're both NDA'd. But that's where we are. That's the quick little video game tidbit this time around. Other than that, for those of you going to TPF, I can't wait to see you. Yay. Yep. And those that aren't, we'll do our post-TPF episode about a week after TPF, basically, because we'll be back in two weeks. Right. And so just take care, everybody. We'll talk to you later. See you.