BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebiss aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan G'day everyone, how you going? I'm doing, I guess okay You guess okay? Well you know what, I'm in pain This side of my face Feels like, and for the past week Or more, feels like somebody just socked me Because my TMJ Decided to go, hey remember me Your TMJ is? Lockjaw Oh, right So if I go too wide, ow It pops and hurts and it's just because I apparently ground my teeth really hard one night and woke up with this and it won't go away. Oh, man, that sucks. Yeah. So what can you do about these? Just take painkillers? Currently just popping Tylenol, hoping it was going to go away, trying to find a bite guard that will work and maybe relieve some of the stress that way. Unfortunately, the one that I tried last night, When I went to go mold it, you boil it, and you put it in your mouth and bite into it. And I bit into it, and it still was like hard plastic. So it didn't mold at all. It didn't mold at all. So that sucked. So, I don't know. I'm grinning and bearing it so far. Do you think that someone just needs to punch you in the face? I'm telling you, it feels like my jaw is dislocated, and yes. I'm just like, uppercut you. Ryu needs to come over to your place and give you an uppercut and just back into place again Jared I noticed something last podcast and I don't know how long it's been there but I went Jared's got a gamer chair oh yeah I do it's pretty good too I'll slide sideways so did we get a sponsorship that I didn't know about no this is just from Costco man I had this really bad and bad ergonomic chair from Ikea, which I picked up with the standing desk. And it just turned out to be really uncomfortable. So I saw these down at Costco for $199 Australian. I went, okay, I'll have one of them. And it's pretty, pretty, pretty cush. Yeah, it looks pretty cush. And, you know, I see all these other YouTube, YouTubers with their gamer chairs. And, you know, if you own a gamer chair company, and would like me to be sitting in it, I'd be happy to. Just putting that out there. That's right. Well, you know, if we can get Onyx onto the case, this is what this one is. Yeah, it'll be all right. So these ones are good. It's got like a headrest and like a lumbar support as well. Yeah. And you can take the armrest off as well, which I have, because they sort of like, they're designed, it's definitely not an office ergonomic chair. So normally with an office chair, your arms are sort of like that. But with a gamer chair, your arms are actually like this. So you can actually do WAST and mouse. So it's designed to have a really wide desktop presence. But yeah, normally with an office chair, you can tilt the armrest pads in so that you're actually in type. And this one wasn't doing that, and it was sort of contoured pads. so I had to take them off because they were just uncomfortable to use when I was actually doing my day job, which is why I got the chair. Because I'm definitely not an elite YouTube streamer and gamer. So I'm living the dream through the chair. I laugh at how many of these things are in everybody's videos, and I always just am thinking, I'm like, is everybody just buying their own, or is everybody just being sponsored by these chair companies? But the problem is that from a sponsorship perspective, it's bad, because my head's right in the way of the logo, right? So, like, it's like... Well, I was going to say, see, the problem is you're not doing what I'm doing, which is slightly sitting on an angle. Yeah, see, if I was like that... It might be there. I'd be really on an angle, though. That'd be really awkward, wouldn't it? Oh, look, I'm wasting and mousing. Well, see, if you face that direction, right, and then I face... If I face this direction, then it would look like we were having a conversation with each other. Hello, Chris. I can't see you. Have fun. Yeah. So, hey, surprise folks. We're doing a podcast this week. Yeah, special. Yeah, we weren't planning on doing this. I haven't even got the audio from the other one out yet, but we can probably talk about why that is. We will talk about the why that is. like I said, it was rather a surprise. Midweek, we kind of went, oh, hey, we should probably do one of these. But... Everything is exploding. Everything's exploding, yeah. Yeah. Console Wars 20 or Cabinet Wars 2020, folks. But you might have also noticed during the week, if you follow our YouTube channel, that these little mini blockades popped up. And something we're going to be trying for the next couple of weeks definitely uh which is basically scrunching down the full-size podcast into bite-sized nuggets of you know probably 12 minutes or less because there's been a few people that have left messages to me basically saying hey i hate having to search for something through your podcast or i'm not in the habit of spending an hour watching these things, but if it was nice and short, then we'd go. So, last week I did the experiment where I basically broke up the entire podcast and posted it. That's not necessarily going to be the regular thing. Right now we're trying to figure out what segments you guys are actually interested in watching. Like, for instance, do you care about this whole opening? I'd say probably not. Probably not. But you never know. We like it. We like to talk about stuff and things. but probably no one else really cares. Which is why we like to break it up. Exactly. Exactly. So we're looking for feedback, folks. Is there... Are you fine with it just broken into little chunks? Is there more to it that you would want added on? Graphics or, you know, background music? I don't know, whatever. Because they would be obviously edited. Do you want to do any... This is what I was doing on Twitch. Yeah. And we're not... We're going to step away from Twitch for a little bit. just because we've been having so many technical error guides. Even today, it was trying to get Jared's audio up. Yeah, which was no fault of Twitch or no fault of OBS or anything, like the usual suspects are. This is just completely at my end. Windows just decided to ignore my audio interface that I've got, and I don't know why. So I just switched over to Mac, and everything works because Mac. Yeah. So the idea is basically we're going to be doing this for the next, I don't know how many weeks or how many podcasts that we do. We're trying something new. The idea is going to be that once we're done recording here, we're going to upload it to YouTube as fast as possible and then set it up as a premiere so that then I will be in the comments section live while you guys are watching and you can comment with me and chat. And we did it last week. And lo and behold, Mel popped in and even made some comments from Zen. So it's a different way. You're not directly interacting with the show, but yet you'd be still interacting with the show because then those comments would be saved to YouTube. YouTube, which is probably more valuable because the thing is at the moment it gets saved to Twitch, but no one sees it. Yeah. Whereas you're on record when you're on YouTube, and some people may like that, some people may not. So, you know, we'll see. Yep. So again, that's what we're trying. We're trying to change things up. Obviously, we're looking to grow the audience. The audience that we do have is very loyal. I mean, man, we post a video, this podcast, and probably about half of our subscribers watch it within the first day. Yeah, which is so awesome. It is. That's incredible. We just want more subscribers. Exactly. and why might you think that we want more subscribers because we would love to be able to cover more content but unlike with all these cabinet stuff and yeah this is where we're going today folks once again with all the cabinet stuff if you actually want us to physically try and deal with these things well we kind of need more viewers so that then that can we can actually monetize from YouTube and that we can actually buy these things and you know more viewers money doesn't grow on trees yeah money doesn't grow on trees unfortunately so we have to get it somehow we're even we're even thinking about maybe finally after all these years opening up a Patreon we just don't quite know the details of what we would do for that because I don't know about bonus content that we even have any well look you know if you if you become a Patreon you'll absolutely get the pre-show warm-up absolutely you'd get the pre-show you'll get you'll get that pre-show warm-up so that we're not totally sure you're actually wanting it but you'll get it it's a very exclusive benefit yes okay so what do you say folks we dive in with hey volume six came out yeah yeah it's out yeah it's out and people have had a chance to play it and enjoy it a little bit and one thing that i noticed was because I haven't been playing the mobile app, because I may have mentioned this before, I typically play the mobile app just to earn table parts. And once I've earned all the table parts, then I don't really have any purpose of playing the mobile app anymore. So, bam, here we go. Limited time event popped up, 14 days, where basically I think it refreshes every six hours or so. and you're able to do these challenges, you know, so five-minute survival or one ball, and your reward is table parts for the new volume. So in five days, I've already got all three of my tables up to two stars. That's pretty good. Yeah. So what I forgot and I'm realizing is that the reason why I like the challenges, not so much the one ball, but definitely with the other two, is it's unlimited balls. And therefore a table like Space Station becomes so much more or less frustrating while I'm still trying to meet a goal, but I start actually learning the shots and learning the table. So whereas I was saying that I didn't think I liked Space Station at all, it's growing on me now. it's it's one of those sort of tables that when you walk up to it it's not really that approachable is it no um it you know it's hard to get that ball under control and it's it's hard to sort of get your head around what you need to do because the the one thing that's probably you know as you as it grows on you an advantage to the table is that the the way you actually lock the balls it's actually for its era quite quite complex like you know you've got to shoot a shot and then it diverts it around the back and that's sort of a bit of a surprise when you first play it and then you know you've got a shot that um you know shoot behind the the top rollovers and it like sort of shoots it down a rail into the front of the playfield like it's the balls really do go everywhere on that table so and i still have yet to figure out where the scoring is on it um it's not exactly obvious as from what i'm gathering but i also haven't sat down and you even someone just read the apron card. The scoring on Space Shuttle is really in multiball and get your jackpot. And it's not a big jackpot either. Like it's, you know, I think about maybe a couple of hundred thousand points. But, you know, on that table, it makes a difference. So you've got to basically get the game into multiball and then you've got to relock the balls as it's telling you to do. And then once you've relocked the balls, that'll also get you the table achievement for that title as well. So you get the jackpot. Getting the jackpot gets you the table achievement for Space Shuttle, which I've done. So, yeah, that's really where the points are. Everything else is pretty much chopping wood, really. Which is where it becomes very difficult in survival mode because if you blow it like I do all the time after locking the balls and not getting a jackpot, it's hard to beat survival. It really is, yeah. It's such a low-scoring game that you've got to keep the score flowing. Otherwise, you're dead pretty quick. The other two tables with Dr. Dude, I'm realizing that I used to rag on Dr. Dude as kind of like, who really likes this table? And then I realized that it's just because I didn't really care for Party Zone, and I kind of equate the two with each other, and I do really like Dr. Dude. Dr. Dude's a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun. But yeah, I think the thing I'm finding with Zen's version of it is in just regular Zen physics mode, it's a bit drainy out of the center. So when you shoot the ball up the middle, it rattles around the pop bumpers. It almost feels like there's – it's not a railroad because Zen doesn't do that, but it almost feels like a railroad, but a bad railroad in that it'll just drop down the middle of the flippers every single time for me. I had to do it five times in a row. I didn't even get a flip on the ball. And it was just, yeah, but in the classic physics, it doesn't. I'm kind of having that with Space Station. When you do lock the two balls and they eject again out the middle, this is on mobile, so technically Zen physics mode, a lot of immediate center drains with no chance of you hitting it with the flipper. I haven't experienced it on mobile yet. I sort of I kind of gave up a bit on the mobile it's not really for me but yeah I'd imagine that also coupled with the fact you can't really tilt on mobile either makes it hard so yeah it makes it hard but I've never been much of a nudger anyway so it's not like I'm really missing much it's true I don't really tend to nudge that much in Zen maybe if it's like if it's going to be a catastrophic drain or it's around the outlet Right, yeah. If it's completely obvious it's going to go, then... Not on mobile do I ever, but when I'm playing on my PC, that's when I'll actually nudge it. But I see other players, like, you'll watch their streams, and they are nudging non-stop. It's like this. They must have it down, like, I think you can set the tilt sensitivity down so it will really never, ever register a tilt, but it will still nudge the ball. So you can do, like, a full stick movement. and it'll only just move the table a little bit, and you won't get triggered. So I think that's how they set it up. So I'm curious what people are thinking of the enhanced visuals. For my money, Dr. Dude wins. Space Station can take it or leave it. Obviously, in multiball, when you've got the space shuttle flying around, it can be a little bit annoying blocking the side of the ball. And Funhaus, I don't like the enhanced at all. No, not a lot on Funhaus that I really enjoy. Space Shuttle, I think it really does take... That's the actual space station. Sorry, space station, not space shuttle. I know. The space station area. So easy to switch between the two. But yeah, the space station area where the diverter mechanism is, it's pretty bland on the real table. And having that nicely rendered space station spinning around, it actually does add to the aesthetics of the game quite a lot, actually. the shuttles floating in the air as I said way back when when we were doing the beta testing on it I did provide feedback that they do obscure the top lanes if you have a certain view angle on but if you're playing in portrait mode on your PC and you've got view 1W or something like that it's not an issue but some console folks when it comes out on console may find that there's some view angles where enhanced mode, you are blocked at the top there. So yeah, just find one that feels right for you and do a bit of experimentation. Yeah, I'm curious also to know, and I've seen some people already dropping feedback, but there were those that are unfamiliar with this era of table completely, never having played it in real life. Never seen it. Yeah, never seen it. And we're worried that these were going to be boring and not a lot to do, not deep. And so I'm curious, once people have given them a shot and played them a significant amount how their opinion changes if at all or do they just go eh don like these at all Yeah it going to be interesting because this is not a typical game that the Zen audience would probably be used to, like a typical Zen audience, like pre-Belly Williams. So it may be a bit of a shock to them. But like I said, this whole era is very much, it's not about starting modes, it's about aiming and shooting specific targets. It is, and it really boils down a lot of the time to multiball. That's what they want you to get to. Yes. multiball in these games is almost considered the wizard mode because it's hard to get to in some cases. Certainly in Space Station it's not. It's pretty easy to access it, but in Doctor Dude it takes a bit of build-up. and you've got to shoot the ball around a fair few things to get the two ball multiple started in dude mode so it's risky to get it going and they are drain monsters this area of table. Which is what I like about Dr. Dude not being the drain monster but the needing to shoot a variety of shots it's not just the one ramp table or like do these drop targets and then shoot the ramp you know. It's good because you are exploring the table that way and actually the way you explore the table, all the shots and geometry change as you play through it. So it does keep the table fresh, I think, from that perspective, because you are having to explore the table and shoot around at different angles. It's definitely a marksman's game. You've got to shoot around and be accurate in your shots, otherwise you'll break and you'll die. Like I said, I'm excited. I think they did a, as usual, fantastic job with the visuals. the score displays happily work wonderfully in cabinet mode I can really see the effort they put into those score displays the way that they've, I don't know how they've done it but they've integrated the view selector into the score display that's another level of integration altogether that's outside of the ROM so yeah I knew I was a visitor so that's it There's where I... We're scheduled at the moment to have Mel from Zen. He's the COO of Zen Studios. He's scheduled to come in with us next week. And hopefully he can shed some light on those technical difficulties of dealing with the display. Because clearly if they were able to integrate... View displays. things that are completely Zen-centric and were never in the ROM to begin with. If this is the reason why it's taken so long for them to do it, then okay, I will let them off. Because that is... I just don't know. And that's not to say that this release was... It had a lot of problems on day one that they were quickly trying to address. But for me, the game was crashing right off the bat. Couldn't even get into it. And it had to do with me in cabinet mode going full screen. And the only way around it was to go full screen windowed. And then it worked. And then they fixed it within a day. And the next day it was all fine and dandy. But there's some audio issues with the audio slider. that and it might be I don't know if you were the one that mentioned it or somebody else mentioned it but it might just be because there weren't three different parameters of audio on these ROM sets it was sound effects were tied into music effects yeah there was all just one stream basically it was just a massive MIDI stream just being pumped out to the speakers even to the point that this wasn't loaded up into Steam until the day of. Usually it's preloaded and it just needs to be unlocked and it wasn't loaded until the day of. Yeah, they literally got the keys to us on zero day. For the evaluation keys for the actual production version which is, we've never had that. It has been probably a week before so you can actually start streaming it. Yeah. Day zero, these keys were available and you could tell that they were really stressed out getting these things up. So, yeah, it's... But I just know I'm excited for whatever comes next. I'm assuming that we're going to get some more alphanumerics next. I think they will want to capitalize on the investment to date and they will probably start releasing alphanumerics pretty fast now. Yeah, and now that they've got the kinks worked out. I think they do, yeah. So they've got all the actual engineering side of the thing worked out now. So they should be able to go back to regular cadence now and start releasing more tables faster. So, yeah, I think so. More, faster, more, faster. That's right. I think it'll be good. I think we're in for a steady stream now. That's my pick, I reckon. Here's hoping. Okay, moving forward. the reason why we needed to actually do the podcast this week. Because we were going to save that volume six stuff for next week. But why did we need to come on this week? Well, we needed to come on this week because AtGames finally released their info on the Legends pinball cabinet. They did. And we have now at least a render of a picture. and we have specs and price and tentative release dates and all that. So this is where we're going to dive in a little bit on this, and then we'll dive into something else afterwards that just amused us to no end. Okay, so the Legends Pinball cabinet render that they had, and I keep on saying render because this isn't the finalized product, but you can bet it's probably very, very close. Pretty close, yeah. Pretty close. And just for the sake of doing this... And why is that still showing? Go away. There it is. So there's the four cabinets. So last week we showed you this also, but we have the Guns N' Roses cabinet in there. This week we have it with there. So price point on Legends Pinball is $5.99. And then $4.99 for the Marvel Pinball cab from Arcade 1-Up. well played games with their Zacharia pinball machine at $4.99 and then Haunted House from well not Haunted House the Gottlieb 12-in-1 from Toy Shock is at $3.99 although when they come out with their 2.0 version I think that's going to be up near $4.50 or maybe $4.99 also we just haven't really heard anything about that no they're keeping very tight-lipped about what's going on there i haven't heard any anything in all the facebook forums that i've been sniffing around in so yeah nothing on that yet so the some of the things to be aware of with this uh cabinet um it is almost a full-size cab compared to a regular pinball they're uh saying that it's 80 to 90 percent full size It's certainly taller than the other cabs, larger dimensions. Part of that larger dimension is that they're using a 32-inch monitor instead of a 24-inch monitor that the other three are all using. They're also using in their back glass a 15.5-inch LCD monitor. Nobody else in this group has a video monitor. Their arcade one-up obviously has their DMD monitor, but it's not meant for displaying cabinet art, by the touch of the imagination. No. That's kind of the primary difference for the reason for the size. All right, now let's go ahead and zoom in on this thing. So, give you a little better look. Things to note. Obviously, not a sunken playfield. it is using a piece of glass over the top they made that as a selling point actually seems like Arcade 1-Up is the only one that's using acrylic and there's a question that I'm going to have to ask is can we replace the acrylic with our own piece of glass if we want to that would be a, I hope that that kind of a mod is allowed because then you just go over to Michael's and the Aaron Brothers inside and say hey, cut me a piece of frame glass and voila done, yeah The other thing to note, that gigantic apron in the front. It's pretty hard to miss. Pretty hard to miss, but you'll notice there is a little D-pad on there. That's true. That is for, obviously, some navigation purposes. And from what we're hearing, that whole apron will be removable and be replaceable at some other time with arcade sticks or trackball. because this is a multi-cade machine, not just pinball. That's right, yep. I wonder where we've seen that before. That seems really familiar. Like this swappable control panel thing at the front. I'm sure I've seen that somewhere. Might be this company, I don't know, Ardvark? No. No, no. No, they are in Australia. Oh, yeah, Arcuda. Arcuda. That's the one. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Hmm. Moving on. Moving on. There is a plunger there, obviously. And you'll notice it's got the two sets of buttons. So I'm assuming that one of them is for nudging, although apparently this does have an accelerometer in it also. Yes, it does. I find it interesting that they're not promoting the accelerometer action or the fact that they say that they do have haptic feedback, whereas Arcade 1-Up is making that a huge selling feature. So I'm kind of curious to know how these two are differing with that respect. I have a feeling it might be the degree of haptics, because it sounds like I think the Arcade 1-Up cabinet has really deeply integrated haptics from what we've read and heard. yeah and i've got a feeling that this might be less so because it's really hard to integrate deeply with haptics when you don't actually have a custom bit of software written to integrate with the haptics very deeply correct so yeah i think it'll it'll be there like you'll feel bumps and stuff but it won't be to the degree that you'll get on arcade one up and then of course you've got the uh four buttons on the front which uh obviously are for probably another purpose of navigation within this. Let's go ahead and then throw up a comparison of the two. So somebody complained that my Photoshop job on the other one didn't show the M2 scale. So I tried to scale the table legs. I'm assuming the table legs are the same. Obviously, it's a slightly different photographic angle for the 1UP Arcade, but I think that gives you a sense of at least the height that there is definitely a height difference i think the height on the legends pinball i'm trying to find it here it's 67 inches high whereas the arcade one-up one is 56 inches high so it's a full foot taller yeah um thing that i'm really looking at with this render and yes this render take that or leave it but the that front panel area um on the at games cabinet is it's just really angular um and you look at the render on the um arcade one up cabinet and it does have slightly curved edges on it like a real lockdown bar should and i'm just wondering if the final product from at games will actually address the the edginess to that area because that's not going to be very comfortable playing i'm also a little bit um surprised with the act games cabinet in that the the corners the front corners of the lockdown bar actually play a pretty important role with tilting you actually need your palms in the position of the corners um to to be able to tilt the machine properly because you need that sort of fulcrum point um that you can push against so if you're only resting your arms essentially either side of the cabinet without any sort of horizontal movement points that you can anchor onto it's gonna be really hard to tilt this thing so um that will be a factor in play as well which i'd like to follow more closely yeah i uh i think looking at the two of these I don't like how steep the angle is of the Legends pinball. Apparently, they've said that it probably is not going to be that steep of an angle. But I... You look at the Marble one, it looks like a pinball cab. It's got the front door. It's got the proper amount of material depth. And I'm sure that when they were doing a full-size... I mean, if they're doing a practically full-size machine there, just trimming off six to eight inches off the bottom probably saves them quite a significant amount of money in materials. But it doesn't look as much like a pinball machine as the OEM. And then I really do like the sunken playfield on the Marvel cab. It's something that VP cabs did on theirs. machines also and i think it just sells the pinball look um i like that a lot yeah the other thing like it does give that little bit of depth and it does it makes it look less like uh an em or a early solid state table with the playfield right at the top yeah um as well but even even those i mean and i know that the the the the cab modes of a lot of these well i mean like zen is rendering the the mirror well not the mirror blades but the, what do you call that the sides of the of the cab. The insides of the cab, yeah. Yeah, so I mean that might wind up looking a little weird on the marble cab, having like a double depth kind of thing going but I think it does help sell the 3D aspect The main thing though that I can't get past. The thing is the thing is they may not even have those views in there they may actually be remember they have custom written the software for this you can guarantee that they probably won't even have that in there it'll just be focused on the play field but you might even see the character effects in there looking up at you because remember that's a that's a big thing that a lot of the our other friends of the show talked about in cabinet mode where the the the actual rendered characters aren't looking at you they're looking at the front of the play yes they are so if they adjust that as well I mean, if they've had to do everything else they may as well adjust that as well and have everyone looking up at you, addressing you as the player that would be pretty that would be better than having any sort of side art or anything like that. Speaking of art, I'm sorry but that artwork on the Legends cab is hideous. It's not great. It's a problem that I have in general with multi-cades they try and throw on like, look at everything that we have! And you just get this hideous collage that is an eyesore. It's a bit of a vomit. Yeah. It's terrible. I'm sorry. It's just god-awful. And the funny thing is that some people are sitting there going, oh, well, that's okay. You can just re-skin it. Well, I'm sorry. What if I didn't want to pay more money? Yeah, just give me like a just, yeah, with the other Legends ultimate cabinets. They're just black with the Legends brand on it. There's a few icons on it, but they're all sort of just like the icons from the games, just sort of laid on in a stacked form. Wasn't that what VirtuaPin was doing also? I think so. Why wouldn't you just go with something simple like that? I don't know. It seems unusual. it does but then again maybe it'll you know look perfectly fine next to your other multi-cade full-size cabs um it may be fine yeah or you know maybe you just take out the box go and then just focus on the games you know because that's the thing as well you know because the thing is if you have this wedge between other things you won't even see except for you'll still see that apron which you well still more vomit that is the render of the apron. That is true. If it's going to be a swappable control panel, then that will really not matter. That's just essentially a dummy placeholder, not so much a placeholder image, but like a essentially a shield that you'll most likely replace with a control panel anyhow, so it doesn't really matter. So what other things should you probably want to know Like I said we said that it apparently has they saying that it has haptic feedback that it does have an accelerometer. They're saying that it's going to be running in 1080p at 60 frames per second. We know that the arcade 1UP cab is supposed to be running at 60 frames, but I don't know if it's 1080p or 720p. That I'm not 100% sure on. Like I said, the Legend Spinball has the glass as opposed to the acrylic. And then you've got the size factor. Both of them have the adjustable legs, which is just the little footies on the bottom that will basically give you two inches of rise. Yeah. For that kind of purpose. And then you get all the other stuff. So here's where, this is what Legends Pinball was really touting. This is, if you're familiar with their product, if you have their Legends Arcade, then you're familiar with their BYOG program, Bring Your Own Game, the ArcadeNet. They're basically creating an ecosystem with which it doesn't matter if you have the Legends Pinball, the Legends Arcade, the Legends Gamer controller. They're all going to be able to kind of communicate with each other. You're all going to be playing on the same leaderboards. You're all going to be having that same kind of interaction, more or less. It's not going to be you just, oh, I've got the pinball machine, so I can only communicate with other people with pinball. They're creating their own tournaments and leaderboards. So that's all kind of interesting. the game the Legends Pinball comes packed with currently it's going to ship with the 22 Gottlieb tables now I made the mistake of thinking of those 22 that the Album G's were going to be the ones dropped turns out nope those are in the two tables that are not going to be in Big Big Hurt which is the baseball one, and I think that's the only licensed table of the batch. Which kind of makes me go, hmm. And then, for some unknown reason, the EM version of El Dorado, and instead you get the solid state version El Dorado City of Gold, which me and Jared both think is the craptacular version. It's the worst. For so many reasons. Well, you know what, I had to remind myself of those reasons today so i went ahead and i loaded up pinball arcade and i first played a couple of games of el dorado and i'm like i like this yes it's an em but it's really a shooter's game you're really uh having to aim for targets and the ball moves at a nice leisurely pace like an em should i'm like cool i throw in city of gold which is in case you folks don't know is the absolute exact same playfield layout. Everything on it is identical. Yep. It's got the most annoying sounds in the world. Oh, it really does. They changed up the rules because of it being a solid state and it could remember certain things, but there are rule changes that I personally don't like, mainly because all the drop targets along the back, every time you lose a ball, they all pop right back up, whereas the EM don't reset. And it annoys me you lose a ball with only one target left, and all of a sudden, all ten pop back up, and you're like, oh, all my progress. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah. And then it also plays super fast. Way too fast for that play field. And I don't know if the solid state played that way, like if all of a sudden they ramped up the strength of the flippers so they could also rake it farther. I don't know. There's just nothing that I like about that one compared to regular El Dorado, so I'm kind of sad that that's the one that had to go. Yeah, it is disappointing. They just don't... It kind of shows that they don't get the finer points of pinball, and they look at... I reckon they would have made the decision, oh, what's more modern? Right. Is the EM more modern, or is the solid-state one more modern? Oh, we'll take the solid-state, because that'll be better. Yeah. Not necessarily. Yeah. But, you know, maybe it's just us who likes the EM, and everyone else loves the solid state, but I don't know. Could be. Could be. The other thing that – so those are going to be native to it. When the Taito stuff comes out, they say those are going to be downloadable and native also to the cab. Why is native important? Because, obviously, then you're not dealing with any latency. which is where I question the next thing you have the ability to stream your games into the cab and so they're advertising with that that if you own Pinball Arcade that you can stream all of your Stern Tables also into it yes, Steam only Steam only, yeah here's the thing remember folks Pinball Arcade didn't have cabinet mode what you're streaming is going to be landscape mode there is no official cabinet mode unless you had the arcuda cabinet yeah um so if you had the arcuda cabinet and paid for the arcuda cabinet then i guess you would be able to stream that maybe but otherwise for most people didn't buy that uh so you're going to be playing cabinet in cabinet mode with portrait or excuse me with landscape i don't know how that's even going to work i i don't know it's not gonna look good it's not gonna be great i think that's what it's gonna be maybe maybe you'll be playing that up on the backbox 15 and a half inch screen instead i i think that's probably the only way you're going to be able to do it uh unless they've worked out some way of like flipping monitors or something but I just don't see how that's going to be possible something else to keep in mind too all these cabs are apparently going to be running some version of Android of these games again we'll confirm hopefully next week if that is indeed true if these are upgraded Android ports from Zen or what the deal is but definitely for the Farsight tables on the ad games cabinet they're 100 the android version of those um they also are saying that they're going to have the ability to stream vpx games and they're going to have a few of those automatically streamable um they're not licensed at all they're user-created ones but from the pictures that I saw, there was no rhyme or reason as to format. Like, some of them look like they're cab mode, some of them look like they're landscape mode. That'll be kind of interesting. So I think basically it seems, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jared, but my perception of Ant Games is they're appealing to the multi-cade crowd. Those that are grabbing their titles from not always the legalist of sources. They're the sort of people that the people that I think are using or favour at games are the ones that want to essentially have a little bit more flexibility in what they play and where they get those titles from. Right. And it may yes, of course you can get those titles from not so legit sources but at the same time you can also obtain them through stores and stuff like that. So rather than having a product that's just through one ecosystem or one stream, I think AtGames is about that little bit of extra variety and a little bit of extra consumer choice in where you get your things from. Yeah. And like I said, this is also going to be able to play not just pinball, but they're saying you can stream any of the games. Okay, let's do it. Yeah. So it was almost kind of doing a little bit of Steam's big picture mode, I guess. A little bit, yeah. When you had the Steam box. See, I kind of like the idea. Like, I do like the idea of streaming some titles to that vertical screen. So, you know, vertical shoot-'em-ups are going to look great on this thing. Like, if you put a controller in that lockdown bar area and you start playing things like Dajongapatch or, like, Raiden or any of those sort of vertical scrollers, it's going to look awesome on that screen. Yeah. Like, it's going to be wicked. but that's sort of what Arcuda was also aiming at as well. They were looking at that multiple destination style ecosystem. Now the million dollar question though let's say you go ahead and do stream pinball to your cab is there going to be latency? I've got an answer to that because I reached out and the answer is yep there is a little bit of lag. If you don't want the lag, you're going to need to hook this thing directly up to your PC via HDMI so that you don't have any lag at all. So that's kind of an issue. Yeah, rather. So, yeah, that will mean that really, I think most people accept that if you want to play pinball, you're not going to be streaming this. you're going to be connecting it somehow up to an existing piece of hardware. And, you know, you do have a number of ways of doing that. HDMI, of course, for video, but you've got the Bluetooth support for the way you connect up your PC to what is essentially a controller with screens, which is the AtGames cabinet. Or you can go direct to USB. There's a number of different ways you can get your controller set up. And then you may have to go through and remap in the game. so there's that as well so you may be saying to yourself hey for 50 bucks more why wouldn't I buy the at games legends pinballs because then hey all of my zen tables could be brought over and I could just play them there I wouldn't even have to bother with that oh but guess what you'd be wrong yeah you'd be wrong that's a nice idea But, yeah, there's a little problem, and it's called the EULA, isn't it, Chris? Yeah, so as soon as the announcements were made with this, Zen went ahead. A number of swift actions. Yeah, Zen went ahead and tweeted out a little something, and I'm going to share that with you all. Let's see. We're going to go over here. Hey, look at those. Well, we don't need to see that anymore. What we do want to see, though, is this. this little tweet stream. This little tweet stream. So, Zen writes, to our DIY pinball community, Thread, we thank you for your continued support to help our games, take our games to new heights through your innovative creations. We wanted to let you know we will continue to make our games available on a case-by-case basis for your inventions, but we'll draw the line on any non-approved commercial platforms as they may be in breach of existing EULAs. For which I immediately hopped on said in other words uh don't put fx3 into cabs that earn money or don't put into cabs that don't have a license with you because hmm were they talking indeed about uh at games here and the response then from mel entirely and unequivocally directed at at games gaming and i know they see this and know what i am saying just in case you were wondering uh that left nothing to be uh to be questioned it was like slap yeah this is directly at you this is an open letter basically only to you and then and then it even gets better because after i said uh thanks for qualifying or clarifying um mellow continues if there's any question about it at games is not very smart that's all i said they need to put some ice on that burn because yeah that's that's a solid bird that's that's they're not stuffing around no that was it's like hello so clearly then went hey competition or not no we don't want people doing that competition is great if they play by the rules they play by the rules and they said that all along remember our interview with uh john d and mel ages ago when we were talking about um cabinets in general and they said you know it'd be really nice if everyone just played by the rules and that was way back then so they knew all the way back then that this was probably going to be a problem yeah uh so here we are and they had a prepared statement ready to go as soon as they saw the news they would have been sitting on this until such time as they announced and if i'm not mistaken currently the only people that have license with zen would be arcade one-up and vp cabs um i don't know if they're still available that full-size virtual cab other than VP Cabs. I can't remember what it was. Was it Vertigo or something like that? Yeah. They had the Vertigo cab? No, that VP Cabs has Vertigo and has a regular full-size. But there was one other company that was making it. And I'm not 100% sure if that still is in existence. We can clarify that with Mel also. Yep. But yeah, so me and Jared decided maybe we should take a look at the old EULA and see what it actually says. Put on your lawyer caps, folks. We should caveat this discussion right up front saying that we are not lawyers. This is not an official analysis of the EULA for at-games benefit. We're really good at speculating. So what we did is we dumped the EULA into a Google Doc and we started looking for key terms like non-commercial and other terms like that. And there was a fair few mentions of non-commercial in this EULA that you all sign when you start playing the game. But none of us ever read. So now, by virtue of this whole conversation, you now get to look at the pertinent parts of the EULA with us to get a little fireside EULA chat. So here we go. Here we go. This is not what you were expecting, probably. Hey, look at that. It is the Zen Eula. Well, let's just skip through some of this until we actually get into something. Oh, hey, look at this. Licenses. Software license. Particularly, one copy of the software for your personal non-commercial use for gameplay on a single computer device or gaming unit. Hmm. Hmm. So. so one computer on a single for use on a single computer device or gaming unit now obviously if you're using steam you can use steam on multiple computers but you can't use steam at the same time on multiple computers it's only ever one at a time so yes you could have the software loaded on your laptop and on your own pc yeah but you can only play the game on one device Exactly. So that was the first thing that stood out to us. Let's keep on going here. Then we get here to, oh, service license. There is the idea of non-commercial use. And then the licensing terms that we accept is that the installer otherwise uses software and or services and ends on the earlier date of either your disposal of the software and or services or ends termination of this EULA. your license terminates immediately if you attempt to circumvent any technical protection measures used in connection with the software and or services, or you otherwise use the software and or services in breach of the terms of the EULA. So, and again, if Xen has put in factors that don't want it to be streamed or transmitted to some other device, and you choose to do that, then you would be in violation of the EULA. My understanding, now some people were saying, how is it that at games would be in violation? And I don't think any of this is necessarily at games being in violation. I think it's warning that you, the user, could be in violation. And you may be asking, well, how is Zen going to ever know that I'm in violation of this? Well, one of the key features of at games is the ability to stream directly off their unit. for content creators. And I imagine that would be a giant red flag. There's actually a clause in the EULA, which we'll get to, directly aimed at creating your own content from the game So let roll down to that let let keep on going folks here we go more more more let down further we haven even got past the first couple of pages no we haven't okay let's see what this says you shall not use the zen services in any manner likely to cause confusion or doubt in the mind of the public as to the ownership and control thereof or in any manner that does not make clear the zen services are owned and controlled exclusively by zen and it's licensors so again heavy emphasis on licensors licensors licensors being vp cabs being arcade one-up yes not being at games so as far as we're aware as far as we're aware so if you are causing confusion in terms of what we're offering fx3 on this cabinet it's fully supported oh really hmm yeah and where where some of the act games announcements got into trouble was where they said yes you'll be able to stream zen to it yeah uh i thought it was interesting that at games specifically said you can play bally and williams titles so long as you own them prior on Pinball Arcade. But I thought, I was like, I wonder if the mere mention of the Ballet in Williams, that they're not even allowed to say that. That's confusion. Because, you know, the license holder currently is Zen Studios. Yes. So, you know, that's, again, a point of confusion. And AtGames is planning on doing leaderboards. and they gave a number, I think it was 38 tables that will have the leaderboards on them. And if you do the math, that's all the Stern and all the Gottlieb, none of the Williams and Bally's. So obviously they knew enough not to go that route. But anyway, let's dive some more. Here we go. General licensing conditions. You agree not to commercially exploit the Zen services, distribute, lease, license, sell, rent, lend, convey, or otherwise transfer or assign the Zen services, any copies thereof, or any passers-use names of Zen services without the express prior written consent of Zen set forth in this EULA, and for online use or on more than one computer or gaming unit at the same time. Again, that's kind of, that's general legal talk that we figured, but hey, any commercial use is prohibited, blah, blah, blah. I think that... You can read it. Like it's basically saying anything where you're getting money for this service. So don't put it onto a cab that can accept quarters. Yeah, don't. Unless it's been explicitly discussed with Xen prior to doing so. Exactly. Kind of like the machines that they're putting into your Dave & Buster's. Dave & Buster's. Yep. So, again, that's just kind of the general, I'm sure that everybody's EULA looks exactly like that. User-generated content. Here we go. you represent and warrant that any user generated contract you provide does not and will not violate any third party intellectual property rights. That right there. Again, third party, there's arcade one up. If you're streaming and it's not being using theirs or steams or PlayStations or Xboxes, you're going to be in violation. then you may not upload or post any user-generated content that infringes the copyright trademark or other intellectual property rights of a third party nor may you upload any ugc that violates any third party's right of privacy or right of publicity again who knew all this was in here back in i think this is from 2014 yeah 2014 2015 dang lawyers they cover their bases don't they They don't muck around. They don't muck around. Keep on going, because at some point it's going to make sense why this actually affects you. Ah, here we go. Zen may suspend, terminate, modify, or delete any Zen account at any time for any reason or for no reason. Because you don't actually own the software. You are leasing the software. That's like the very first thing that the EULA says. you're leasing it. And so at any time they can go nope. See ya. So again, this comes down to if you are publicly making it obvious that you are playing this on something like the Legends Pinball and Zen finds out, they can go you don't have rights to play this game anymore. And he yank them. You have breached your Euler and no more. This is why you can't have nice things anymore. more more more uh famous and virtual any and all virtual goods are licensed to you on limited personal non-transferable non-sub-licensable and revocable basis and limited only for non-commercial use again that's kind of standard um what you'll find in these things scrolling down some more blah blah blah see there's this yes i actually read all this i can't believe i read all this it gets painfully boring and it's different it's very interesting because that's all in capitals and the rest of it's in sentence case. So that's unusual in itself, right? Terms concerning platform operators. Provided that you comply with the terms of this EULA, you are acquiring and Xen grants you a personal limited, non-exclusive, and non-transferable license to install and use the Xen services on authorized devices for personal, non-commercial use. That's basically saying that when you say, hey Xen, I want a cab mode, and they ask for the photo so that you can show them what you plan on playing this on, that they have the right to go, yeah, we're cool with that, or no, sorry, not that. And as Mel's tweet said, specifically, yeah, we're aiming this directly at the Arcade's Legend. The Legend's Pinball. Okay, we're almost done with all this lawyer talk. scrolling down, scrolling down where is the next batch of fun at least I think there's something else, oh no, you know what, we reached the end how about that, that was it that was it, so there you go, it wasn't that bad was it folks you were thinking oh Euler, gee oh hell I hope Jerry puts some skip marks in this segment but no, it's interesting to read it because who really actually reads the Euler I certainly don't when I sign up for something because, you know, usually you don't need to worry about the license agreement unless you plan on doing something dumb or something wrong. So if you're just playing the game for your own personal enjoyment, then you'll never be in breach of it. But if you're doing stuff slightly on the edges, then you might want to just reread that EULA. I mean, the short and skinny of it is, Zen is not going to grant you the cabinet license. if you are taking a picture of this and saying this is what I'm planning on playing it on. Just know that straight up. Not going to happen. For you people that are streaming and are streaming your content and it's known that you're using the Legends. The streaming functionality of Legends. That's a no as well. That's going to be a no-no as well. And I'm going to tell you right now, Zen is, and believe it or not, Zen ain't the only one that's monitoring a lot of these announcement videos and podcasts. We said it. It's a game of chicken right now and everybody has now put their cards on the table and everybody is paying attention to everybody else. They want to know what the pricing is. They want to know what the release strategy is. They want to know what the pros and cons of each are in comparison to their competitor. They're basically looking at all the announcements and it would be silly for us not to suggest that they were going all right what's our gen 2 going to look like but that's what they're doing right now they're going if they haven't already started which would probably be naive of me to think they're definitely going what change to the build materials do we need to make to remain competitive with gen 2 and i even saw on uh retro ralph's youtube uh it's like i think it's a arcade one-up weekly anyway they had john d on and uh they specifically asked him about hey what do you think about you the competition, specifically the Wi-Fi capability of being able to download more games. And what John had said was that, look, this is our wave one. We think it's going to do good and may result in more. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Just like complete brain fart there. Yeah, it may result in other cabs coming out. And maybe those will have Wi-Fi, he said. But these cabs do have a micro-USB port on them. Previously, they were saying that they started installing those in all of the arcade one-up cabs for the purpose of, rather than having to send out new boards, they could just firmware update. Firmware updates. Yeah. And that if they came out with, say, another Star Wars cab that now you could download the remaining Star Wars tables on them, that via USB you would be able to do this on the Gen 1. one yeah which and this is you know question for whenever the next time we get john d to actually grace our presence but would it be a situation where you bought the star wars cab and it would just be the reigning star wars tables that you would be able to download and if you bought the marvel cab it would just be the reigning marvels and then if you bought the uh attack from Marscab, it would just be the Bally Williams. Or would it start being you could just buy pick and choose and have it be a giant multi-cade? I think they need to keep it on brand. I do too. I think it's going to definitely be on brand. Yeah, they need to do it for the licensors to make them happy, I think. He also mentioned that they are trying to hammer out a deal with Universal. So, hopefully that goes through so that they can get a new Universal cab out there. my hope would be that they hammer out a deal with Fox so we can get an Aliens cab because that's what I would want wouldn't that be nice that would be pretty special I don't have a lot of confidence that we'll ever see a Zen Originals cab I just don't think there'd be demand for it they need to do a lot of work on those old tables as well to make that something that I would actually want to pay money for well but it's also something ok so there turns out to be and we're learning this I again learned it from that same thing from Retro Ralph. Arcade 1UP makes the cabs and presents them to the retailers, and the retailers go, yeah, we want to put that in, or we don't think that's going to sell. And then that winds up surprising retailers. So they were talking about the Golden Axe cab. Retailers were interested. They threw it up on the Arcade 1UP website for sale there, and blew them out. And then the retailers went, you know what? Maybe we do want those. Yeah, we would like a little slice of that pie, thanks. And not only did they then say, okay, fine, you can have that, but then they wound up being $100 more because that's the fee that a retailer charges. So in terms of the pinball cabs from Arcade 1-Up, the the Marvel pinball is going to be GameStop and I think Best Buy Star Wars is going to be Walmart Attack from Mars is going to be .com only from Arcade1up I have a feeling that the Attack from Mars table is only going to be $500 instead of the wait is that what my price point is? yeah 500 instead of the 550 why do you think that? because they're not having to retailers are not having to get their cut oh okay right yes right that makes sense so we'll have to see get your pre-orders in if you're really down for that we'll find out exactly when that's all from what I've been reading online that's the one that everyone wants anyhow. They want these Belly Williams tables. I'm torn. I'm torn because honestly and this is me basing it off of the idea of me having this Street Fighter 2 cab there. It's not something that I ever wanted to play on my PC so I didn't have. It just didn't interest me. But having it sitting there right there, it interests me. when I play Zen I always go straight to the Ballywilliams tables I don't really play much of the other stuff but if all of a sudden I had a cab that was nothing but marble tables I'd probably all of a sudden find myself playing a lot of marble pinball so you reckon it would actually draw you into that ecosystem that you just don't normally gravitate towards but then there's the problem of I like the Star Wars cab better because I think it's more timeless in whatever room you put it in but I don't like the Star Wars tables as much as I like the Marvel tables. But ultimately, yeah, I too want the Bally Williams one more than anything out there. Because it's just got the street appeal. Like, you see these in arcades. Yeah. So you don't see the Marvel and you don't see the Star Wars tables anywhere, apart from probably Dave and Buster's. only by virtue of Zen putting them in a cabinet there. But, you know, if you were able to get these tables in your house on a thing that takes, you know, next to no time to warm up, like, that's what I'd be wanting in my lounge room, really, on a long-term basis. I'd probably also enjoy, like you, getting the marble tables and actually just having them there just so I could switch on and play. And I can guarantee you that my kids would also really like those tables being accessible to them as well they would have a ball yeah so you know there's in classic arcade one-up style it'd be a threesome for sure you'd have to make room for three right so yeah so there's uh you may be wondering why uh our cabinet wars 2020 didn't feature the toy shock and well-played cabs um honestly i think it's a different class those are more aimed at kids and not adult kids. Not big kids like you and I. But clearly, all four of these are going to have their specific customer base. I don't think there's any question about that. So, it'll be interesting to see what transpires. But like I said, we're planning on having Mel on next week so we can... Now that we've had our we're not lawyers but we're going to go through the lawyer act uh talk maybe mel can clear up some of this and make it clear as a bell uh yeah probably help us you know undirp some of the interpretations that we actually made from that year because i'm sure i'm sure we're wrong on some of the points here but it's our best guess as to based on the twitter conversation what that you know what they might have been in breach of allegedly uh that being said if you our fine listeners have any questions that you would like us to bring up with Mel next week. Like I said, it won't be live again. It'll be us doing pre-recorded and then posting it up to YouTube. So you won't be able to ask him live questions in that fashion. But if you want to, if there's anything in particular you want us to approach, an angle, I know we tend to cover a lot of the things you guys were going to ask anyway. But drop us a note. Go on to our Twitter, at Blockade. Lend us any clue of what it is that you want to hear from Mel so we can pass that along. Give some questions with notice, basically. Exactly. We'll try and get them answered for you. Exactly. You can also obviously email us. Our email is in the link below. And yeah, should be good. Should be awesome. Yeah. Number one, it's really and us that have Mel and John on. They make conversations flow generally pretty well with them both on, so it's going to be a good show. Wait, are you saying that we're going to have John on too? I don't know. Are we? Hopefully. Last time we asked for Mel and Alston, he brought John along, so maybe he'll bring John along again. That's right. He just dropped in, didn't he? We really hope we can get him on though. I hope. That'll be awesome. It was really awesome to have him on. We'll have to see. Hey John, do you want to come on the show? Come on the show. It'll be fun. Just like old times. We'll ask you some EULA questions. Yeah, you'll love it. EULA love it. Don't go there, Jared. I'll go there. I'm full of puns. That's what the services offer. So there you go, folks. That's what the plan is. That's what we'll be back next week, obviously. And it won't even be full of Jared's favorite things. Stuff and things. It'll be actually real content. there'll be definitely things yeah and we'll just stuff it alright until then folks we'll stuff it full of things buh-bye see you next time buh-bye