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Episode 74 - Beatles BlizzCon

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 29m·analyzed·Nov 5, 2018
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Eclectic Gamers analyzes Stern's Beatles pinball announcement with skepticism about pricing strategy and throwback layout choice.

Summary

Dennis and Tony discuss the newly announced Beatles pinball machine from Stern, a limited-run (1,964 units) re-theme of the classic Sea Witch layout with cosmetic and minor mechanical upgrades. The episode covers production details (three tier editions with no gameplay differences), pricing uncertainty for premium tiers, song licensing approach, and community reception concerns about the throwback design and premium pricing strategy.

Key Claims

  • Beatles pinball will be limited to 1,964 units total: 1,614 Gold, 250 Platinum, 100 Diamond editions

    high confidence · Dennis cites official Stern details, notes cute year reference (1964)

  • Gold editions are expected to be priced around $8,000

    medium confidence · Dennis states 'most reports' suggest this neighborhood pricing for gold tier

  • No gameplay differences exist between any of the three tier editions

    high confidence · Dennis explicitly states this early, Tony reacts negatively ('This hurts already')

  • Beatles layout is Sea Witch with modifications: additional spinner, added magnets including spinning disc, new shot behind left drop targets

    high confidence · Dennis provides detailed technical breakdown of changes

  • Song lengths in Beatles are tailored to mode length, varying based on mode duration rather than full-length tracks

    medium confidence · Dennis attributes to Joe Kamikawa statement; explains licensing cost rationale

  • Game includes eight specific songs: Hard Day's Night, Can't Buy Me Love, Ticket to Ride, All My Loving, Help, Drive My Car, It Won't Be Long, I Should Have Known Better

    high confidence · Dennis lists songs explicitly from official information

  • Distributors will set their own pricing for Diamond and Platinum editions based on order block allocation

    medium confidence · Dennis explains distributor flexibility model; unsure of exact allocation breakdown but estimates groups of 10

  • Coin door inclusion is optional and depends on customer request, not standard default

    medium confidence · Dennis attributes to Joe Kamikawa; pricing for coin door inclusion unclear

Notable Quotes

  • “Oh, man. This hurts already.”

    Tony @ ~21:00 — Reaction to learning no gameplay differences between tiers; signals concern about value proposition

  • “I don't like the way they're going about that. They just need to, whatever the price needs to be, they just need to let the price out there.”

    Tony @ ~24:00 — Critique of Stern's opaque pricing strategy for premium tiers

  • “You cannot, for a broad set of people, show them something this flat, this Baron and convince them that it's worth more than a pro.”

    Tony @ ~28:00 — Core concern that throwback aesthetic and flat backglass design undermines premium pricing

  • “I think Stern's experiment on seeing if by basically passing the buck to the distributors and saying, we're not going to announce an MSRP on those two models.”

    Dennis @ ~25:00 — Interpretation of Stern's distributor-driven pricing strategy as risk mitigation experiment

  • “If coin taker price is too high, they're just going to be sitting there with diamond editions that don't sell. So they'll eventually have to tweak the price.”

    Dennis @ ~26:00 — Explanation of how distributor-set pricing provides Stern flexibility without public MSRP commitment

  • “I think that Diamond Edition Beatles games sell for less than $15,000 that's what I think is going to happen”

    Tony @ ~27:00 — Prediction that premium tiers will not achieve expected secondary market values

  • “I kind of think that's what this is going for. And part of the reason why I assume they picked Sea Witch, besides that look, is if this is also an experiment to see if there's demand from people who want the classic Sterns remade.”

    Dennis @ ~29:00 — Theory that Beatles serves as test case for classic Stern Electronics remake demand

  • “Every change they've made to the Sea Witch layout I think is smart.”

Entities

Stern PinballcompanyBeatlesgameSea WitchgameDennispersonTonypersonJoe KamikawapersonZach SharppersonJeffpersonNick BaldridgepersonNick Schellperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern employing distributor-driven pricing flexibility as risk mitigation to avoid public MSRP commitment that could result in warehouse inventory issues (precedent: WWE LE)

    medium · Dennis analysis: distributor pricing flexibility allows Stern to adjust without publicizing MSRP, avoiding 'stuck with WWE LE' situation where public knows MSRP and won't buy at discount

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Skepticism about Beatles machine's throwback aesthetic (flat, dated look) justifying premium pricing tier positioning for broad market audience

    high · Tony: 'You cannot, for a broad set of people, show them something this flat, this Baron and convince them that it's worth more than a pro.' References Total Nuclear Annihilation as precedent

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Beatles machine positioned as gateway/casual-appeal title targeting non-pinball audiences (Beatles fans), with Sea Witch layout chosen partly because its plain aesthetic is less sacrosanct than Stargazer

    medium · Dennis reasoning: 'Sea Witch is a fairly ugly game, so re-skinning it isn't going to offend a bunch of people. Re-theming Stargazer would just piss the world off'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Sea Witch's original layout had limited compelling shots (primarily one spinner and upper drop targets); Beatles modifications (additional spinner, magnets, new super jackpot shot) represent smart improvements

    medium · Tony: 'Every change they've made to the Sea Witch layout I think is smart.' Dennis agrees on specific mechanics improving playability

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Beatles machine design philosophy appears to target Beatles fans and casual players rather than pinball enthusiasts, similar to Jetsons positioning

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.270

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, November 4th. This is Episode 74. I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. Okay, I think we remember who we are. No, I looked up from my notes to you just as I said it. I about said Dennis, and I'm like, no, no. You sounded hesitant. I decided to be hesitant as well, but we are who we are. I am Juan Carlos Rodriguez.
0:46
I can't remember the rest of the quote. Well, do you remember what's been going on for the last two weeks in your life? I've been sick. Have you? I've had the mad bird SARS. It's just like it's been like a chest cold For the first like week or two I feel better now than I did when I had it It's just I've got a bunch of garbly Stuff and I'm horking stuff up So I apologize in advance If we don't get the magic Of editing to stop all of my coughing And if I sound weird it's purely because of Biology Well I had the Some sort of Illness I picked up when I was down In Arkansas so So, well, banjo music. That was my last weekend. And when I got back, I wasn't feeling great. And then Monday, I felt really bad and lost my voice on Monday.
1:40
And basically got it back Friday, mostly. Mostly? Yeah. I took one sick day. I had two days off of work anyway. And so I took a sick day on Wednesday. and then I went in on Thursday. I left two hours early, so I stayed most of the day.
1:58
And they were just tired of hearing me. They were just like, quit talking like this. Give us what you want. Your voice still has that nice low rumble. It's like we should be doing the late night radio romantic hour thing going on. Oh, yeah. I don't know. A lot of people who listen to podcasts hate vocal fry. Well, they're going to have to put up with it this time. I'm not doing it on purpose. That's just my lungs going, hey, we're full of fluid. So outside of illness, let's see. I got my last garnishment payment yesterday. Congratulations. So that's been electronically photo deposited and looks like that was properly processed. Yes, well. So my plan is I'll probably head into work late on Monday and turn in the documentation to the court saying that the judgment's done. Yeah. So that can be out of the way because I think now that I got the confirmation that it's being processed, I think I'm in the clear. I think the check will clear anyway. The last one did, and this is much smaller. So that's out of the way, so that's good. Mentioned Arkansas. That's where my dad's side of the family is. So I went down to see my grandparents because they're in their 90s, and I hadn't gone down for two or three years.

Tony @ ~32:00 — Acknowledgment that mechanical modifications to base layout are quality improvements

Sea Witch (Stern Electronics)
game
Quicksilvergame
Stargazergame
Total Nuclear Annihilationgame
Jetsonsgame
Monster Bashgame
This Week in Pinballorganization
Spike systemproduct
WWEgame
Batman 66game
Slam Tilt Podcastorganization
KC Game Conevent
Pinball Expoevent
This Week in Pinball Podcastorganization

medium · Dennis: 'I think it's targeting Beatles fans... I think it's a fairly, kind of like how Jetsons was designed to attract a certain type of person.' Tony: 'I don't think Stern's targeting pinheads with this'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Beatles music licensing constraints historically required snippet usage rather than full-length songs; Beatles pinball implements time-based mode structure to manage licensing costs

    medium · Dennis: 'part of the challenge historically with the Beatles licensing has been full length songs are very very expensive... song length is tailored to the mode length'

  • $

    market_signal: Beatles diamond edition secondary market pricing predicted to underperform expectations, settling below $15,000 contrary to premium tier positioning

    medium · Tony prediction: 'I think that Diamond Edition Beatles games sell for less than $15,000 that's what I think is going to happen' based on throwback aesthetic and flat art concerns

  • $

    market_signal: Growing market concern about Beatles premium tier pricing strategy; Stern declining to publish MSRP for Platinum/Diamond editions, instead delegating to distributor discretion

    high · Tony: 'I don't like the way they're going about that. They just need to, whatever the price needs to be, they just need to let the price out there.' Dennis interprets as risk mitigation experiment to avoid warehouse inventory issues like WWE LE

  • ?

    announcement: Official announcement of Beatles pinball machine with confirmed specifications: 1,964 unit limited run in three tiers (Gold 1,614 / Platinum 250 / Diamond 100)

    high · Dennis provides official production numbers and tier breakdown from Stern sources; notes cute '1,964' reference to Beatles formation year

  • ?

    product_strategy: Three tier editions (Gold/Platinum/Diamond) have no gameplay differences—only cosmetic art package and trim variations

    high · Dennis explicitly states early: 'there are no gameplay differences between any of the models.' Tony's negative reaction ('This hurts already') signals community concern about value differentiation

  • ?

    product_strategy: Beatles pinball represents potential test case for Stern to gauge demand for classic Stern Electronics remakes at premium pricing

    medium · Dennis: 'if this is also an experiment to see if there's demand from people who want the classic Sterns remade, and trying to test and see price susceptibility'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Spike system is bus-based network architecture (ethernet cable) rather than traditional point-to-point wiring; more aligned with modern networked systems than legacy pinball methodology

    high · Dennis wrote technical article on Spike for This Week in Pinball; obtained technical details from Stern engineers via Zach Sharp; describes as 'very different' and 'more computerized'

    • 3:16
    And gaming-related issue, when I was down there, one of my cousins, his oldest son, who's nine, is living with my aunt and uncle now. And that's a whole story that I'm not going to go into.
    3:30
    Not that whole of a story. But there's a whole – I mean, he works out on an oil rig. So he lives in Missouri, but he's out in the Gulf. Yeah. And he's been staying, the kid's been staying with the stepmom, who's his current wife. But I don't know, there were issues or whatever that she wasn't, she's got two real little kids also. So anyway, so everyone's all upset, though. Let's just put it that way. Everyone's all upset because of what all's going on. And I'm hearing all these renditions of everyone's particular side of the story. But one of the things that I picked up on was that, you know, so here he is. He's now living with his grandparents. This is the second time it's happened, too. I don't know for how long. My sense is long term.
    4:14
    But he didn't have his PlayStation. And I thought, oh, he wants to play video games, but he doesn't have anything.
    4:24
    So I bought him a Switch. Oh, look at you. Because grandpa and grandma don't have, they have dial-up. wow and my grandparents have no internet i know that is in no way shocking so i thought well let me get him something because he's clearly a gamer but he doesn't have a he didn't get to bring any of his consoles or anything with him they're like not his anymore so or they weren't ever hit yeah they were the families i don't know what so i went to walmart and i bought that and i bought super mario odyssey and breath of the wild and then as he was over there reading my grandparents gave him comic books, like 1960s Superman comic books. That's what they had. So he's sitting there trying to read his little comic books. And I said, okay, well, I was going to let you finish reading those, but I got you something. And he was pretty excited because I thought he probably knows what a Switch is, but I don't know for sure. And then I sat there and Lem talked to me about video games because he was like, you know all these characters? Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal. and afterwards he didn't want to leave he didn't he still it didn't register that it was his switch i don't think yeah until my dad was saying well you know the game's going home with your grandpa and grandma he's like oh oh i can go then i i i think he just thought i was letting him play it like no it's it's yours it's think of it it's a christmas present because And he started saying stuff like he wanted to pay me back. Like, don't worry about it. It's yours. And didn't say anything serious the entire time, except he said, you know, you're the only one who understands me. Like, yeah, I get that a lot.
    6:06
    So I did that. And I have no link in the show notes. But earlier this morning, this is why my voice is extra fry-ish. I did another This Week in Pinball podcast. so we'll beat that out but episode 22 will be with me we talk about pinball really i'm surprised so we'll see how it turns out it's not in top vocal form but it's just like we got up got up early started doing the recording so zach's just like when are you recording with tony i said i don't know probably around noon and he goes okay i think we'll be done by then I hope so we started at 8 oh jeez so wow so that's it for me yeah I'm so you have the SARS I have what we call the CRUD you have the CRUD I have the Madbird SARS yeah no I've been most of my stuff otherwise is just I've been playing the same games I've been the blue pinata that is Diablo 3 and I've been playing a couple of the older games all stuff I've talked about in the past lately and the only other thing is the joy of being on call.
    7:20
    I'm not on call for one week this month because we got between some people with some medical leave and one of my coworkers has left us. It means I'm on call for the entire month. The only reason I'm not on call for all four weeks, I'm only on call for three weeks of the month, is because my oldest daughter, whose birthday was yesterday, and she's now 11, will be running in her fifth 5K next week. So I was able to get that. I was able to trade that phone off. Oh, yay. So I don't have it for one week this month. And then the rest of the month through all the holiday and everything is going to be me going to work seven days a week for three weeks. Well, I guess we'll just be hearing about work again and again like every time. I don't talk about it that much. I just use it Not enough. I just use it. Everyone who writes in says, why does he always talk about work? I don't go into depth on work. It's just like I couldn't play video games because I worked and then I slapped. Right, right. Yeah. I haven't felt well enough to do one. I played some Gems of War. I haven't been playing any of my other games. I streamed some Sharky Shootout yesterday. I haven't felt good enough to stand. I didn't go to pinball tournament on Saturday. I was just like, I don't want to be around anyone. I don't want to be out there. So it sucks, but it is what it is. But speaking of is-ing what it is-ing, we're going to go into pinball. We're going to go into the pinball news. Because we have not – there's not really a ton to talk about. But there's a little bit because, obviously, we're post-pinball expo. So you wouldn't expect there to be a lot of heavy news. But we do have a new pinball machine to talk about. But before talking about that, I want to hit on KC Game Con. KC Game Con, the 2018 pinball championship on December 1st. You and I are the commentators because we are the best they could afford. Exactly.
    9:17
    That will be streamed on twitch.tv slash eclectic underscore gamers. But if you want to actually play in the tournament, there are still spots open. I believe registration is limited to 48 individuals. There is a link in the show notes. So if you are going to be in the Kansas City area on December 1st and you want to play in an all-day pinball tournament on the Missouri side for Missouri fake points, I have the link. You can go. You can sign up because there's no cost to attend KC Game Con, but there is a cost for people to play in the tournaments. That's just how this eSports event runs itself. So there will be a few games on free play, though. That will be my first Saturday without a phone. Yes, but that's December, so it's still true of you saying that it's not November. That's December. I know. I get to go. You layered your way through that. I can't wait to see how happy my wife is that I turn around from being on call for the entire month, including all of Thanksgiving. And then the first day I'm not on call, I leave early in the morning and say, I'll be back maybe before tomorrow. Now, she could watch you, though, on the TV. She does know you're a star, right? She, well, there's a reason that we record in person. And only half of it's because it's a lot easier when you can actually see each other and react to each other. Just as you gleam so bright, she just could not stand to look up. Yes, that's exactly what it was. One does not look into the sun. And it has nothing else to do with the fact that she got so angry because she had to try and be quiet and keep the kids quiet because my setup is in the kitchen. All we ask is for people to be quiet for two and a half hours. I know. You wouldn't think it would be that hard to keep an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old quiet for two and a half hours. But apparently, it is. Well, I guess for some people it is. I know. Oh, well. Well, we worked around it as best we could. I keep telling her I expect better. Yeah. And then I sleep on the couch. Yeah.
    11:10
    Are you trying not to laugh or we're just going to cough this whole episode? We can't laugh. No. Must stop laughing. We can't be funny this episode. NPR face.
    11:23
    Welcome to Morning Blend. That's good coffee. I'm your host, Dennis. Today we're going to talk about T.S. Eliot and why he couldn't capitalize any of the letters in his name.
    11:40
    All right. Another thing before we get into the Beatles, which is the new pinball machine I was referencing earlier, the spike system that Stern's using, including on Beatles. Yes. Boom! So This Week in Pinball ran an article I wrote up per Jeff of This Week in Pinball's request on the Spike system. So I've been kind of chipping away at that, getting information from Stern Pinball to sort of explain how it integrates. It's very different. It's more computerized in the sense that it's a bus system. We just plug in a network cable. So it's much more how we kind of think of network systems versus how pinball was usually done. And a lot of that information wasn't on the usual resources I would turn to, like pin wiki or even articles when the system launched with WWE didn't really go into it in depth. So Zach Sharp, who's the marketing director with Stern, gave me a lot of that information. Once his engineers could give it to him, he's like, I don't know any of this stuff. Like, that's fine. We'll get it figured out. And there was some of the older system stuff that I also, I couldn't find a lot on the Sam chipset. So he got me that. and some stuff on White Star, which I was able to have a secondary source on. But anyway, so that's out, and I'll have a link in the show notes if anyone really wants to read about a board set. I read the article. I don't read all your articles. I read this one. Oh, that makes me – I don't know. I don't feel it was my best, so I'm maybe sad that you didn't read maybe my better one.
    13:13
    What was the last one that I didn't read? Well, if you didn't read it, how would it stick in your head? I think it was the one you did where there were like three of you working on it. I skimmed it.
    13:27
    Oh, that's a long one. Yeah, I skimmed that one. Did you see the little time estimate that would take over an hour to read from the site and that made you go, no. That didn't make me go, no. Because you read much faster than that estimate. Right. I don't. I just. That was on the history of gambling. Right, which was less interesting to me than a lot of the others. It's also not a big interest area of mine. I was asked to participate in that one. And so it was very much a learning experience, but I felt I was the least helpful of the contributors. Yeah. But you were the one you felt were. I focus like on the company perspectives and stuff. But I mean, because that was Nick Baldridge, who does the EM and bingo pinball podcast. He knew about all the different types of those gambling devices. So he wrote that whole segment. And then I split with the professor who I worked with on the Ted Zale article a lot of the history on what the various state and federal laws going on were. But his segments were the longer ones. But anyway. It's laws. Everything that has to do with legal stuff is laws. Those are, when it's collaborative, multiple author collaborative, then I don't. I feel less ownership on those versus, say, like the article on the Middlepop, which I collaborated a lot with Nick Schell on. I love that one. But I was the only author on that. Because Middlepops are awesome. He spared no expense on red ink on my art. He was just like, I don't like this and this and this and this and this. So I had a lot of editing on that one. But I thought it turned out very well. It did. I really enjoyed that one. But anyway, I don't know if this one turned out well or not. we will find out because oh well I guess I should note as always full disclosure because we're covering the hobby in a somewhat news type way Jeff did send me a donation from This Week in Pinball for not that article specifically but I guess the several I've done since then so FYI I've been bribed I never ask I'm always willing to write for anyone as long as I think the topic's interesting and that I have the time which I tried to work on this while I was at my conference.
    15:32
    Try to work on this while I was at work. Well, I didn't have all the information. So when I'm at a conference, it's work the conference all day, and then I go up to my hotel room at night, answer all the emails I missed, and then work on the article because there's nothing else to do except watch network TV. Hey, hotel Wi-Fi is terrible, unless you pay a lot of money for it. But as part of our contract, I was given the premium elite status for free, so I actually had like 25 down oh that's not bad yeah i was actually i was shocked it wasn't just the complimentary 0.5 megabits because because i mean when we we've been talking about texas and and this and that because that wi-fi is terrible right and and i don't know if i'm going yet or not because of everything going on with family stuff and this and that but i was talking about maybe bringing the oldest daughter and we were talking about you know her being able to play her switch and this and that. I'm like, um, just floating you out there that there's no good Wi-Fi at a hotel. And she just dropped her arms and she stared at me. She goes, but it's Wi-Fi.
    16:38
    Why isn't there good Wi-Fi? How is there no Wi-Fi? It's like, because not everywhere has Wi-Fi or they charge you a lot of money for Wi-Fi. She goes, but I need my Wi-Fi.
    16:49
    Yes. She would have Wi-Fi but it may not be Splatoon worth that's probably the answer and that probably isn't the answer she wants to hear she wasn't real happy with it, no you just gotta get one of them portable plans like the dead flip Jack Danger does to stream on remote I hear those are only really expensive hey, I'll weave that I've been trying to get her to lockdown she's still burning like a gig a month on her phone plan a gig of data a month it's like, come on, stop downloading videos when you're not on Wi-Fi. That's all you got to do. Don't dump a gig onto YouTube because you're not on Wi-Fi. So,
    17:30
    I'll lock your stuff down. Back to pinball. All right. Well, we're going to get, let's hop into Beatles. That's really the only huge thing to talk about. We're going to ride around in Beatles. That's right. I didn't know you were such a VW fan. Well, I guess I've discontinued those now. They have, again. Again, yeah. But they're bringing back the microbus. Oh, well, that's at least more stylish. Yes. So, Speaking of stylish, Beatles. All right. This kind of hit a little bit after our last episode. So I know we have not talked about Beatles at all yet. Right. Other than. And by a little bit after, you mean like hours after we recorded last time? Yeah, something like hours. So let's quickly just run through some details on what's going on. All right. And there's been some new news. This is where it's been helpful that I helped on this week in baseball because I absolutely know what's in the upcoming release. so this will help me out quite a bit so thank you Jeff and Zach alright we're going to scoop you we're not going to scoop them this stuff's already been on forums it's summarized in the newsletter so I've already read all of this anyway but I'm using their cheat sheet as a guide so I don't miss some of the stuff alright so here are some of the things we know it's a limited run there are going to be 1,964 games total how cute Yes. Very cute. All right. So 1,614 of these are the gold edition.
    18:55
    And then there are going to be 250 platinums and 100 diamonds. The art packages are supposed to be different on all three. The mock-ups that I've seen show the same back glass for the diamond and the platinum, but supposedly that's not correct. That was just digital stuff that we're doing to show the trims. Yeah. So the gold trim looks a kind of, I think it looked to me a lot like in the mock-up, the Guardians of the Galaxy gold, though supposedly it may be more sparkly than that. I don't know.
    19:25
    Now, we don't know the pricing yet, other than it seems like most of the reports are that the gold editions are expected to be in the neighborhood of $8,000.
    19:36
    As far as I understand it, there are no gameplay differences between any of the models. Oh, man. This hurts already. Okay. It is a modified Sea Witch layout.
    19:48
    So for those that remember Sea Witch, it's a Stern Electronics game, very flowy style. They have made a few physical modifications to it. There's an additional spinner. They added a couple of magnets, including a spinning disc around one of the magnets. There's another shot that's behind some drop targets that was added in on the left side. But by and large, if you look at this, if you've ever seen Sea Witch, you'll go, oh, yeah, that's Sea Witch. I saw it. It was Sea Witch. I mean, don't get me wrong. Sea Witch is a – I enjoy Sea Witch. I think it's a top-tier Stern Electronics game. Yeah. I put it up there not quite as high as, say, Quicksilver and Stargazer, but above a game like Ali. Yeah. No, I could go up there. I put it up there like in Meteor Territory. I could see that. I would even agree with that. So we got that going on. The distributor network, I guess, is getting to set the price on the – they're being granted a great deal of flexibility, I should say, on the pricing for the Diamond Editions and the Platinum Editions. From what we're seeing, the number that they get is based on how many orders they place. So these are, I guess, being sold to the distributors in blocks or allotments. uh sets of some sort so uh my understanding is something like in groups of 10 like they get seven golds two platinum and a diamond per batch of 10 that's weird as crud yeah i'm i'm glancing because i'm trying to remember if that's the exact if that's the exact breakout but it's something akin to that.
    21:35
    Coindor. This has been a big one that's been coming up on the forums a lot because it's been inconsistent. Does the game have a Coindor or does the game not have a Coindor? Apparently Joe Kamikawa has indicated that will depend on whether or not the customer requires a Coindor. So the game supports a Coindor. People will have the option to get a Coindor, but it doesn't sound like the default is that the game comes with a coin door. Does it cost more to get the coin door? I don't know.
    22:06
    I don't know. Another thing that's sort of come up is the songs. Like, is this a traditional music pin? Are there going to be full length songs in it? Because one of the rumors that's gone around is part of the challenge historically with the Beatles licensing has been full length songs are very very expensive from their catalog so most of the things that use the Beatles only use snippets from songs
    22:35
    Again, according to Joe Kamikow, he indicated that the song length is tailored to the mode length. So the lengths are going to vary depending on which song mode it is, because the modes have certain time periods. So it sounds like it's going to be a time-based mode game where maybe you have a certain number of seconds to complete a Hard Day's Night mode or something. That's my takeaway from that statement. Interesting. The songs, there are eight songs in the game. Hard Day's Night, Can't Buy Me Love, Ticket to Ride, All My Loving, Help, Drive My Car. it won't be long I should have known better some of those are pretty big some of those are pretty not big in my judgment so they got B and B signs ok so anyway so that's it in a summary and I'm sure you've seen the art it's very 60's No matter which version, it's all really running with what I could say. Which makes sense. That makes total sense. Early Beatles, all of that.
    23:55
    And I think that's really enough for us to describe about it. So, Tony, what are your thoughts on this idea of a, I guess we could start from the beginning, but like the idea of having a Beatles pinball machine, the idea of taking a Stern Electronics Classic and re-skinning it basically, adding some new features, but doing a throwback in layout, the pricing, the setup on the limited counts. I don't know. Go where you wish to go.
    24:27
    Having a throwback-style game themed to the 80s, or to the 80s, to the Beatles, so having something that really gives you that feel of the Beatles and the 60s and this and that, I think it's a really good idea. re-theming Sea Witch to do that I don't actually like I can see taking I can see bringing a layout like Sea Witch and modernizing it and bringing it forward in new code and this and that or even better to me would have been like a Stargazer but I don't really like it for a title release that's supposed to be as big as this is going to be and the fact that we still don't know what the high-end versions of this game are going to cost.
    25:14
    And I don't understand why somebody would put money down on something when they don't know what it's going to cost. Well, yeah, I'll put money. I want a diamond edition. Put it down. Okay. $1.48 million, please.
    25:25
    Wait. No, I think it's terrible. I don't like it personally. I don't like the way they're going about that. They just need to, whatever the price needs to be, they just need to let the price out there. I understand in my head I can understand that what they're going for is a well we think we might be able to get by with selling this really expensive but we don't know so we're going to give some flexibility in there so we don't get caught out with a whole bunch of stuff we can't sell is what is in my mind I think they're trying to do but I just think it's dumb.
    26:04
    My thought on the pricing on the more exclusive, so like the diamonds and the platinums, is that I think this is Stern's experiment on seeing if by basically passing the buck to the distributors and saying, we're not going to announce an MSRP on those two models. They could always have charged as much as they wanted as distributors is my understanding anyway. But by doing it this way, where they're not declaring how much the game is worth. It lets the distributors decide, do we want to try and price this high and stop people from buying these things and then flipping them on the third-party market? Or is it going to keep the price competitive because if I call Cointaker and get a price from them and I call the TNT Amusements and get a different price, is the competition from the distributor network going to mean all of these are basically at the same price anyway and it's not going to really show any variance? I was going to say, I wouldn't think they'd be, I wouldn't think considering the limited number of distributors there are, I would think more likely than not, the distributors are going to sit down and go, whoa, we want to sell it for this. Well, we were going to sell it for this. Well, how about we sell it for this? Okay, that sounds like a good compromise. And then they're all going to be the same. I don't know. I mean, saying aside the price fixing, angle if they actually were to all get on a conference call and try and do that.
    27:38
    What my thought is that Stern may have been thinking, well, if coin taker price is too high, they're just going to be sitting there with diamond editions that don't sell. So they'll eventually have to tweak the price. They won't feel obligated to keep it near that MSRP value. The MSRP value won't be known to the public. So if they make a lot or they make a little, it's not going to be a case where you're like stuck with WWE LE where everyone knows how much it was worth MSRP and so they're just sitting in warehouses because no one wants to fire sale the things yeah but I don't know I don't overall I don't think it's going to have the whatever the goal that Stern has with it I don't think it's going to have that effect I think that Diamond Edition Beatles games sell for less than $15,000 that's what I think is going to happen I think you're right more of them than there were Batman 66. I know that the Beatles is a bigger brand than Batman is, but we have to bear in mind that this game, being such a throwback style, which I'm fine with, except it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's the same thing that we saw with Total Nuclear Annihilation for a lot of people. You cannot, for a broad set of people, show them something this flat, this Baron and convince them that it's worth more than a pro.
    29:02
    So now I don't think Stern's targeting pinheads with this. I don't think so. I think it's targeting Beatles fans. And so I won't say that they can't sell out of this modest number. I mean, 2000 seems almost 2000 seems pretty high in pinball, but it is the Beatles and it's, It seems very oriented to being a game that would be approachable visually. I don't think Sea Witch plays that hard. No. So I think it's a fairly, kind of like how Jetsons was designed to attract a certain type of person. I kind of think that's what this is going for. And part of the reason why I assume they picked Sea Witch, besides that look, is if this is also an experiment to see if there's demand from people who want the classic Sterns remade, and trying to test and see price susceptibility and such. Sea Witch is a fairly ugly game, so re-skinning it isn't going to offend a bunch of people. Re-theming Stargazer would just piss the world off because everyone thinks Stargazer is the best art package that Stern Electronics ever did. That's true. So given that, I would never re-theme Stargazer first if there was a chance about just reproducing it with the original artwork. A game set that, because there's no license issue, could sell lower than Beatles would. So this could be a test case at a higher price point to see if there's interest. Right, but could you see retheming Stargazer to any license without having just stand-up horror outrage? No, no, I just, I mean, stand-up horror outrage only goes so far. Let's not overstate how popular Stern Electronics games are. I know that Ron and Bruce of Slam Tilt have done their darndest to drive the prices of those up by talking them up every single episode and it's having a visual impact in the market. But that said, it's still just early numeric solid state games. And there's only so much demand. And even a game as fun as Stargazer is a one-shot game. So if we're talking about straight-up remakes, I can understand why maybe they're thinking, no, we need to try something here where they've... Every change they've made to the Sea Witch layout I think is smart.
    31:22
    The magnets I think are smart. The ability for the one up at the top to drop it into the pops there, that was a shot that was almost impossible on Sea Witch. The additional spinner, smart. The super jackpot shot behind the left drop target, smart. Every change they've made is an improvement in my view to that layout.
    31:39
    Stargazer's layout is decent for its era, but as you know, it's got all these shots everywhere, but the only one you want is that one spinner and that one set of drop targets in the upper left, if you want to win. Right, but that can all be, I mean, they made changes to this, they can make changes to that. Sure, but that's not a remake anymore in the traditional true pure sense, like Monster Bash remake. Now we're changing code. Right. And there's money to be spent when you're changing code. So it just becomes, it's an interesting area. I don't think Stern's really inclined, personally. I don't think they're really inclined to remake Stern Electronics games. I think that they would feel it would be too costly for – they'll have to sell the games for too much money and everyone will be mad. Right. Because outside of something like Stargazer, who's going to spend $5,000 on a Meteor? Let's say you got it down to $4,500. Why would you spend that much? You can buy them for under $15 used in pretty good shape. Yeah. So it's not like Chicago Gaming and Monster Bash and Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars. Those are going used for more than you could feasibly make and sell them. Right. No, no. Those make total sense. So that's why I just don't. Overall, I'm not particularly impressed or interested in Beatles. I don't like the color scheme. I don't love Sea Witch enough to say I would ever spend that much money on it, even if you could drop it by $2,000 more because you got rid of the license. And I'm not a big enough Beatles fan to care.
    33:17
    Yeah, this is definitely not anywhere in my wheelhouse. And because the rumor mill is still saying that Monsters is coming out before 2019, I think this is a sign. This is no cornerstone title.
    33:28
    It's like when they did a month of vaulting Star Trek. This is just whatever. This is a thing that they did with Kamikau to sell to the Beatles heads. I can see it. so I could see us moving on from this boring game yep actually it might be fun to play I have been seeing that we will probably get one will we? now that I'm seeing confirmation that you can get it with a coin door 403 does expect to get it that's my understanding so we'll give it a try I'll play any you put any pinball in front of me I'll play it yeah just about any I'll play any pinball once that's fair enough I think going nuts only needs to be played once right same thing with like barbed wire poor barbed wire but yeah poor barbed wire poor anyone who played barbed wire alright let's pivot to the game that stole the show at expo octoberfest monkey gate familiar with monkey gate tony I saw the start of it well no I saw the first like when it first popped up in forums. I saw a little bit of it, but I have not tracked it. Let's go with that. There has been a great deal of blowback because in the back glass, the monkey, I guess, from Houdini was doing a little unsolicited grabby grab on some women on the back glass. People said, this is not okay. American Pinball has come out and said, we agree with you. It will be removed. Right answer? Wrong answer. What is your thought? I think it's the fine answer. I think that it was the right answer. I think that having the weird suggestive eating of hot dogs and stuff is innuendo. I think having people being touched at this point.
    35:25
    Yeah, we don't need bestiality in our pinball. No. And people are saying, well, what if it was a guy being molested or something? I still don't need bestiality in my pinball. We don't need it. We just don't need it. So it's smart to pull it out.
    35:41
    Now they just need to change the entire art package. It's just so busy. So busy. We'll see how it works. We will. I'm not. Now this is a more fun one, and this is the last pinball news topic. And again, this is not, in my view, not news. But we got to say what we got to say. But Jack Danger on Facebook had posted and I believe since removed an image with a Stern pinball logo of Bill and Ted's Excellent Pinball Adventure. I believe an artist then, I think it was Christopher Franchi, weighed in and said, oh, you're going to get in so much trouble, Jack, and then removed. So now everyone's talking about whether Jack made some sort of mistake or as an official ambassador to Stern, this is just a trolling exercise, either on the behest of Stern or on the behest of Jack. the leaks that come out of Stern are they're at the point and they've become so expected that I think it seems pretty much obvious that none of that stuff is leaks but it is the type of stuff Stern does to maintain their hype without pulling out the kind of BS most of the other pinball companies have to do where they make the huge announcement and huge this and that this game's coming this is great hey come on give us your money. You'll get your Pirates of the Caribbean in like I don't know. Sometime in the next 10 years. Still waiting. I asked. Mr. Mac, yes. So how long is he going to wait until he turns in? He actually gave some warning spoilers. Gave some warning signs that he ain't going to wait forever. But we'll see. He's such a JJP fanboy. I don't know if he can resist. I think anything that happened here like this was something that was intentional. It's like, hey or it's either hey drop this pull it back it'll generate a little word of mouth it'll do this and that and we'll be cool or it was somebody somebody in the line said yeah go ahead you can let that go and somebody higher up the chain went whoa wait a minute it was one of the two i think it's a troll thing i jack is a is a big deal for stern they use him for all the official gameplay reveals they do not and in my mind will not use a pinball personality to announce a new game when they have ign giving them coverage and all of that it just doesn't make any sense they have a much for game announcements they have a much bigger platform than any person who just specializes in pinball that's why they don't do game reveals that shows right of you why bother they're not trash. They don't need that. They don't need to win Expo. It's irrelevant.
    38:31
    Pirates won Expo last year and look what that got them. Nothing. Basically, they're Nintendo. Yeah. I mean, in the world of pinball, they are. They are the Nintendo. So, I think it could at best be Stern wanted to test the waters and see is there demand for this sort of license? probably not the hardest to obtain. Third movie is underway purportedly. So that would be a very, kind of like how I think Sony was, while it was completely themed around the classics, Sony didn't mind having a Ghostbusters pinball machine come out when the female Ghostbusters movie was dropping. So I could see something like that. I don't think it was much to do. I mean, Stern Pinball goes and posts pictures on their Facebook of them going around at the Hogwarts theme area of Disney. This is low-grade troll compared to what they've done or wearing Jaws hats while on streams and things like that.
    39:36
    The Godzilla shirt right after that whole big... There you go, the Godzilla shirt. Now, do you think Bill and Ted's the two movies, would they be a good pinball machine? Would you be interested in them? I wouldn't be... It doesn't have the draw to me. A lot of other movies from that era would. But I think, unlike a lot of other movies, they would have a high potential for fun, humor, and real interesting things that can be done to it just based upon what they are. Which would you rather have? Bill and Ted or Point Break? You monster. That's what I am.
    40:17
    Probably Bill and Ted. I don't know. I am an FBI agent multivolve. Come on. You're right. Bill and Ted, I think, overall would be stronger.
    40:30
    Point Break is not a bad movie. Yeah, it's so campy. I mean, no better campy Keanu Reeves movie. You might as well just do John Wick and do something modern if you're going to do a campy Keanu movie. Right. Maybe that's where they need to segue to It's not licensed to a movie They just license it to an actor Just the Keanu Reeves, the pinball machine Well, kind of like the Bill Paxton machine That Ben Heck did Right, exactly That's a great idea Yeah, that'd be great Neo-multi-ball followed by John Wick Wizard mode Yeah Whatever his name was in The Devil's Advocate or... Yeah, well... I don't remember. I don't know. Weird movie. Yeah. That would be the one where all the voice lines he keeps dropping in and out of the southern accent. You couldn't hold that southern accent. Oh, it's so painful. Pacino steals that movie, though, so... It's Pacino. Yeah. He steals almost everything he sees. I steal everything! I can't do a Pacino, especially sick, but... All right. Well, that was it for Pinball News, and that's really it to talk about in pinball. So let's play our 20 questions, Tony. 20 questions! And then we got a lot of BlizzCon to go through. Oh, yeah. We got meat and potatoes for you, folks. Meat and taters. Mmm, taters. But for those not familiar with 20 Questions, it is the hit game that we play on this show, where Tony will start by asking me a series of yes or no questions. These will be regarding a pinball machine that I know he has played before. It will be a flipper pinball machine. After the first 15 questions, he is allowed to go open book, so he can use IPDB, Pinside, any other resources that he may so choose to research possible answers to the question. I'm terrible at this game. Tony, you say that every time, but you've never lost. I've also never not needed the internet. You've never lost. No, there was one time you didn't. No, I did. No, you're right. I didn't. I hit it. I am right. I know. I got it on 15. that 15 1 through 15 are not internet you're right and that was the one where it had crossed my mind at like 5 and I said no it's not that well it didn't have to be that there were still plenty of potentials yep ok so my point is that you're a winner so just believe in yourself I'm a wiener just believe in yourself and the power of the spiral go ahead and I'll keep track of the question count. No one understands the spiral reference, and that's fine. But you can ask your first question when you are ready. Is it solid state? Yes.
    43:19
    Is it DMD? Yes. Is it Bally? No. Is it Stern? Yes. Is it from 2015 or newer? No. that was question five. Is it from 2010 to 2015? Yes. Is it a Richie game? No. Is it a Trudeau game? No. Is it movie themed? Yes. Does it have more than two flippers? No.
    43:54
    That's question 10. Is it Avatar? Yes. Good job. Question 11. That is a new record. That is. Wow. I'm sitting here, I'm trying to, it's like, what movies would fall into that range? And I was like, Avatar, Transformers, or Pirates were the ones we're jumping up to. James Cameron's Avatar is the full name of the game. Two-flipper game. It's a John Borg design with Lonnie Ropp, who did the software, but he also helped design the game, apparently, according to the write-up. The software was both Ropp and Lyman Sheets, in fact, which I did not know. Wow. Two-flipper game, single-ramp game, and it's one we've played quite a bit. Yeah, I really enjoy it. I know a lot of people don't, but I do. I like the ball lock. The coffin one? The coffin ball lock. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And I like the tightness of the mech shot Oh yeah the amp suit That a hard shot The amp suit shot That a hard shot No I really I played a lot of that game when it was available and I really enjoyed it myself Well, very, very good job, Tony. That is a record. Yay, me.
    45:11
    So, let's go ahead and flip this back the other way, since we have such a short pinball section. Let's give the people who shut us off after pinball's over one last little run, and we'll do the same thing, but you get to go. Oh, boy. Is it EM, electromechanical? No. Is it from the year 2000 or newer? No. Is it from 1990 to 1999? No. 1980 to 1989? Yes. Is it from 1980 to 1985? Yes, and that's five. Okay. Is it Williams? No. Is it Bally? No. Is it Gottlieb? No. Is it Gameplan? No. Is it Gamatron? No. That's 10. That was a bit of a gamble, but... It's a good gamble, because I've thought about using that one in this a couple of times. Is it Farfalla? It is not Farfalla.
    46:11
    Farfalla. It's not Falafel. Is it Stern Electronics? Yes. Is it Sea Witch? No. I didn't go that easy.
    46:22
    Is it Stargazer? It is. I went that easy. Okay. 14th, I think. Yep. I blanked on Stern Electronics for a while. I always think 70s for some reason. Yeah. I shouldn't, though. Most of the ones I've played are from the 80s. See, that's the one. That's what gets me, too, sometimes is when it's like, oh, is that actually? Because, like, when I'll be thinking of a theme, it's like, they're like certain games that are obviously, I mean, especially like right at the beginning of a decade. So a lot of the like early 90s games, when I see them, I'm like, oh, yeah, that game came out in 85. Yeah. I mean, and it's obviously, I mean, Silver Slugger. Silver Slugger, I'd say 87, 88 would be my guess.
    47:11
    But, yeah. That was very clever. Yay. All right. So, now we will go to the video game segment, which everyone has been waiting for with bated breath. And there is a lot of stuff to talk about, mostly because of BlizzCon, which is the big convention that Blizzard Entertainment holds on an annual basis. Because they're too good for E3. Yes. That's what they think. I'm not going to disagree with them. No, I'm not really going to. It tends to work out pretty well for them. So let's go ahead and let's kick it off with our favorite ongoing Blizzard game, which everyone loves to hear us talk about, Overwatch. Overwatch! Because there was a new character reveal. Well, they revealed a new cinematic involving a starting character, McCree, the cowboy. But that tied in very well to a new character that is stemming from McCree's past. Right. Another sniper. From a lot of the stuff I've read, not really. Sniper in the sense that McCree's a sniper.
    48:20
    Kind of. Yeah, I can see that. A mid-range sniper. A miper. It's dependent. I haven't seen confirmation one way or another. Well, let's roll it back and start. Yeah, we got a back roll.
    48:33
    Her name is Ash. It is a new female character. She is the leader of the Deadlock Gang, which is part of the backstory lore for McCree.
    48:45
    And she, as Dennis was saying, seems to be a... The initial reports I'm seeing are a fairly high-skill mid-range sniper. Yeah, a hit-scan character. So for those that don't know, hit-scan characters are the bullets hit the moment the trigger is pulled, they go wherever they're pointed at. Now, has it been fully confirmed that she's full hit-scan? It's not been fully confirmed. However, from what I saw from the clips of her playing, it looks to me that she is. I didn't see any bullet trail. Right. Because I know there was some talk that some people were thinking she might be more like Anna where she's split. Interesting. Where her from the hip fire is. Let's hedge on her whether or not she is indeed hitscan. Yeah. I just don't think we know. I think it would make sense either way. Okay. Well, I'm not sure what she's shooting that wouldn't be hitscan because it seems like she shoots bullets. Well she does but There are some people who thought And some of the initial reports I've seen Some people who played her at BlizzCon Thought that Her from the hip fire might be Projectile and her over the sides Fire would be hitscan Like Anna is Okay Huh But I haven't seen anything hard confirmation Either way so it's just I didn't think Anna was hitscan Under either mode She's supposed to be hit scan in In the scope Maybe that's why I need to quit leading with her so much Yeah From everything I've read Anna is hit scan when she's scoped Alright So what can Ash do Ash like everybody has A couple of abilities Her main weapon is the Viper It's a semi-automatic rifle That fires quick shots It looks like a lever action rifle But she has an ability to aim down the sights to give her, as they say, more precise, more damaging shots.
    50:51
    That'd be kind of like Widow. Kind of like Widow, but not as much zoom, probably not as much damage buff. To me, I think it feels more like the type of thing you'd see in a Call of Duty, where somebody's got a rifle with an ACOG to give them more mid-range type stuff. It may be like DMR and Halo. Yeah. Slight zoom. Because from the video watch, that's what it looks like. It's a slight zoom. It's not a huge zoom. But we'll have to see. So Viper Knight driving. Viper Knight driving the rifle.
    51:24
    She has dynamite that she throws that has a short delay. It's got a short delay fuse. But you're able to detonate it with your weapons fire. As dynamite would.
    51:37
    okay why not you know like I did back when I was a minor we saw it all well of course they were minors look at them look how tiny they are I loved that movie that movie was so good but instead of just being your normal boom damage it is actually a dot because it ignites people on fire which I'm assuming creates a mechanic similar to the new Tjordbjorn's dot where it causes a burning damage.
    52:17
    So that's going to be interesting in its use. She also has a coach gun which is a short range shotgun that has a huge recoil. It like throws her backwards. Versus all those long range shotguns but go on. This is video games man. I've seen video games where people have been sniping with shotguns. That's my favorite weapon in Battlefield 3 and 4 would be shotguns because you could. Yeah, exactly. They're terrible. But it throws her backwards. And in a lot of the gameplay I've seen, it's almost used more often for mobility than I've seen them use it for actual close range combat. Coach gun jump. That sounds dangerous. Exactly. I don't see how it hurts her. Just the recoil throws her up and back. But they treat it like Rocket Jump. In the video, they treated it like Rocket Jump. And I've seen some other clips from people at BlizzCon that were using it for like,
    53:19
    oh, I fell, kind of throw myself back up type of stuff. And her final is her ultimate, which is both awesome and terrible because it's terrible because it uses her co-Deadlock Game person, Bob the Omnic. And I think Bob is so cool, he should be his own character. No, I think we should be grateful that Bob is not another Omnic to play. Why not? He's awesome. I think we can all agree. He's got a mutton stash and a bowler. And sweats. He sweats oil. but uh uh when uh she summons him uh he charges forward knocks any enemies he hits up in the air and then he basically becomes a turret who just sits there and rotates around and uses his arm guns to tear stuff up yep um the initial all the initial reports i've been reading and everything i've seen is she is a fairly high skill character with high rewards okay well jeff from the overwatch teams did indicate that she was designed to be high skill. Yeah, and I can see it. I can see where she could bring a lot of that type of thing to play. I would not be surprised when the new season starts in February for her to be common in some of the builds. We'll see. It'll depend upon how the meta settles out. It will. I also think it will depend on how well balanced her ult is. They really struggle. Basically, Bob is a turret and I don't know if they've struggled so hard with Torbjorn and Symmetra in balancing turrets which at the high skill levels seem to be just easy kills. Right. And then at the lower levels, but you can't buff them too much because at the lower levels people have a lot of trouble dealing with turrets. And I think the interesting thing that's going to turn out to be is, again, this is all people who played it at BlizzCon initial report so there's a long way to go before this is seen. There's going to be a lot of changes put in. Is that between the dynamite and Bob, she's pretty good at breaking the kind of shield walls that are being very common lately. Yes. I thought in her intro video, they did a very good job of showing Brigitte's fear. Right. And right now, I think a lot of people want to see a big time Brigitte counter or something to counter the shields without going dive. Right. Because Brigitte exists to stop dive and she did it. Yes. We don't see dive all the time now. You still see it, but it's... It's not an all-in. It's a sometimes food, like cookies. Right. It's a sometimes food. We like sometimes foods.
    56:02
    But now, that's the secret to climbing ladder. That's what even Siegel, the great player, will tell you, is you want to climb into Grandmaster? One-trick Brigitte. That's how you do it. Yeah. Because she's that critical. No one should be that critical. And I'm thinking Ash is supposed to help break that. I could see that. But we'll see. We'll see. and I mean the this is Hero 29 Jeff did talk about Hero 30 so we know there's a Hero 30 and we know it's not Echo so do you think it was our friendly companion at the end of the that's Echo that's her name is Echo oh because I wondered if it was finally Athena well that was my thought at first too but in an actual interview with Jeff, he referred to her as Echo. Okay. The voice did seem a little different, so I wasn't sure. Because when I first saw her, my thought was the same as yours. Okay. But no, he referred to her in an interview as Echo, and then he said later that Echo is not character 30. There are six more characters, according to the interviews I've read, currently in development. Yep. Okay. Well, they're still continuing as much as the game is played. I'm not surprised. Right. And from not all, but from the way he talked, a majority of the characters in current development are support or tank. Okay.
    57:31
    That's, I mean, especially now that offense and defense is just combined as damage. Right. It's lopsided in favor of, there are plenty of DPS characters. Right. So. Right. Which is what Ash is, is obviously a DPS character. And that's fine. But most important thing before we move from Ash. next Halloween.
    57:51
    Ash Ketchum skin confirmed? Oh, that'd be awesome. That's one of the... Her current... Just her regular skin is awesome. It is. She has a... I like her current cowboy western skin. I want her in the ball cap. I want Bob spray painted as Pikachu. That would be awesome. I actually... Or Snorlax. I bet you it. He looks more like Snorlax. Right. That would be awesome. That would be... But I just want him to be deployed in that outfit and just go, Pikachu.
    58:23
    That would be great. Speaking of great, let's pivot to something that did not have such a great reception, Tony. I know this one has filled you with glee. It did fill me with glee. When you have a big convention like BlizzCon, especially one so oriented towards PC gamers, what sort of games should you not highlight? probably you should steer away from making a huge build-up and a huge deal leading into it and getting people's hopes up and then of course putting out a press release that says whoa whoa guys don't go crazy as you as you touched on on our last episode exactly but uh even then you probably shouldn't follow that up by being super hyped for the mobile game that you're announcing for Diablo. Diablo Immortal.
    59:15
    Part of me would kind of like to send an email to Blizzard, specifically to the Diablo team, and ask them, how does it feel to get booed at BlizzCon? Because that's what happened. They got booed in their announcement.
    59:32
    It was rough. The Q&A was rough. yeah so you watched the q a i watched clips of the q a i i i i have i didn't have a virtual pass so i didn't get to see the whole q a but i saw where people clipped sections of the q a the thing is is a blizzard has been doing cnds on a lot of those and getting them pulled because you had to have a virtual ticket right right right uh because the only thing that they released without a virtual ticket was the opening thing. Yeah. But I know at least one fan during the Q&A came up, and when it was his question time, he goes, so is this just a massive delayed April Fool's joke?
    60:17
    And the host looked pretty stunned. It was like, no. And to the point that one of the guys up on stage was like, you all have phones.
    60:29
    Everybody's got a phone. What is wrong with this? No, they don't understand. They don't understand. We saw signs of this at E3. It was very dangerous on the Microsoft stage when they allowed the pop gears to come out. I remember how dead silent. That only worked because then they announced real gears right after it. Yeah, exactly. And even then it was rough because of it. because people right now are and remember what happened with Command and Conquer people right now are hypersensitive about development time being wasted on a popular franchise being moved to mobile that's what I think it comes from right now we could see if this is a waste of time because some of the initial reports or at least of the UI for this game looks identical to the UI for another game put out by the company that Blizzard hired to put this game out. A reskin job. So they think it might be a reskin job. We don't know for sure yet. Nobody knows for sure yet.
    61:41
    Tony, no. We'll have to see. Now, Blizzard was... Not like this. I know. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad.
    61:50
    Now, I will, in Blizzard's... I won't go so far as to say it's in Blizzard's defense. On Blizzard's side, a little bit, I don't think anybody expected anything huge out of this BlizzCon. They tried to temper that. And just in timeline-wise, I mean, last year was the major WoW expansion, so there was not going to be anything else as huge as last year's WoW hit for WoW.
    62:18
    Hearthstone puts out a card expansion every BlizzCon. It's not unusual for a... It's actually pretty much gotten to the point where the big character announcement, one of the big character announcements and a cinematic release for Overwatch is always a BlizzCon. But there was nothing else huge expected for Overwatch. There was nothing huge expected for anything, Blizzard-wise, just timeline-wise, because StarCraft II got a big boost last year with some of the changes they made in the release of StarCraft, the reimagined StarCraft.
    63:01
    And Diablo was the only thing that hasn't had a big hit. So people kind of hoped it was coming this year, and it's not. Now, Blizzard has gotten out there with some interviews, and I'm going to quote directly from an interview they had with Polygon, and we have a link to the Polygon in the links section.
    63:23
    And he said, Blizzard said, and I quote, we have said that we have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple Diablo projects, and that remains true, even after releasing Diablo 3 for Nintendo Switch and announcing Diablo Immortal. We still have multiple Diablo teams working on multiple unannounced Diablo projects. Diablo is a temple franchise for us, and it always will be. We love it. We hope our fans understand what we're saying when we say that, which translates to maybe next year is the best I can say. Okay. I mean, because there's rumors that they're working with Netflix to put out a show like the Castlevania show, an animated Diablo show. There are rumors that they've been working for a comic book series. And the only other thing I can think of then to work on would be Diablo 4. But is it going to happen? I don't know. We'll find out.
    64:19
    Okay. I mean, part of me wants to try the game when it comes out, which is, I think, the 16th. And I might. But the truth of the matter is I don't like that style of game on mobile. On mobile, I like to play games that are very hands-off or minimal stuff. I like to play either tap games that require just, you know, quick, easy, single tap type stuff or card games are my preferred mobile gaming experience. I play a lot of mobile games. But when I've played other games that require the full up, oh, you've got the virtual joystick on it and buttons to shoot. I don't really like them. I don't feel comfortable playing them. so I'll probably try it but I'm not holding my breath for me liking it just based upon playing other games like it okay well they did also announce the remaster for Warcraft 3 I never actually played Warcraft 3 really? no I put a lot of time into 2 and 1 but I remember when 3 came out they were like splitting up how the campaigns were in different sales or something And I was really turned off by that, and I never ended up actually just getting it. I eventually got it when they released one of their big battle boxes that Blizzard was big on releasing there for a while, and I enjoyed it. It was really good, which wasn't a surprise. I know most of our game time was always on Warcraft 2. Right, that was a big LAN party game for us. Yeah, but Warcraft 3 was fun. It had good stuff. Now, when they re-released StarCraft last year, one of the things they did with the re-release of StarCraft was they fixed the online stuff and they gave it a modern matchmaking capability.
    66:20
    And they modernized the graphics and they left all of the gameplay alone. because, well, the people, the big StarCraft players, thought that was a completed and good game. They didn't want any changes. Right. So all they did was they modernized the graphics, modern matchmaking stuff, and built a better online capacity and put it out there. And it's been really popular. Now, with this, they decided with the, they're calling it Warcraft 3 Reforged, they want to do a much larger change for a variety of reasons they feel that the story needs to be retconned in a lot of ways because a lot of the stuff and especially they're going so far as they're even going to be changing some of the maps because some of the locations in the game are in World of Warcraft and people play it and they're there and in Warcraft 3 they don't look alike at all so they going to redo maps so that the Warcraft III Reforged maps look like when you in a certain place it looks like that place in World of Warcraft And when you see, and they're making adjustments to the lore so that the lore matches the lore that they've created in the decade plus since Warcraft 3 was initially released. So they're going to be doing a whole series of upgrades. They're redoing the cinematics, doing the retcons, redoing the maps. They're doing major rebalancing to the game units and buildings to modernize the game to something that is more with the current thought of how a game like this would work. So getting rid of the seriously, seriously OP units that were more common in older games of this style. Right. They're also going to be Doing what's really interesting to me I'm not sure how it'll work They're setting up So owners of Warcraft 3 The original Warcraft 3 Will be able to play Multiplayer against owners of Warcraft 3 Reforged I have no idea how they're doing it I don't know how many people still have Warcraft 3, I own it It's somewhere I think their willingness here to go beyond the graphical upgrades and actually make some more substantive changes will be better accepted with a game like this than with StarCraft. I think it's safe to do. Warcraft 3 just doesn't have the same popularity. Right. I mean, original StarCraft is still one of the best RTES games of all time. And I full-on understand them not wanting to change that.
    69:10
    I know I own Warcraft 3. I couldn't tell you where it is. I don't even know. I've gone through so many big minimalism swipes through my garage in the last couple of years as I just get rid of old stuff. I full on might have thrown it away at some point. Sure. But I'm probably, I'm at least deeply enough interested that I'm going to put Warcraft 3 Reforged on a, I will probably pick it up at some point. Okay.
    69:38
    It releases in 2019. When in 2019? No earthly idea. They just said 2019. So it could be January 1st. It could be Christmas Day. Who knows? We'll find out. We will. All right. I see you have a note, Destiny 2. Right. Now, Destiny 2 is a, it's an Activision game. Destiny is Activision, right? Yeah. Bungie makes it. But, I mean, it's like produced. Yeah, I think the publisher is Activision. The publisher is Activision.
    70:09
    And for some reason, my note's not showing up here. I have no notes on it. That's why I had to go, I see you have Destiny 2 here. I wrote a big note on it last night, and now it's not here. That's weird.
    70:19
    Okay, that's fine. We'll live with that because I can remember my note. Destiny 2, the reason I put it on here is Destiny 2 and, like, Call of Duty 4 are available in the Battle.net launcher. Oh, okay. Because Activision is kind of shifting stuff that used to be very available in, like, the Steam launcher and this and that. They've been shifting some of that stuff to the Battle.net launcher. Um, but the thing is, is from, from, uh, the start of BlizzCon until the 18th of November. So that's 14 days from now. Anybody with a Battle.net account who logs into their Battle.net account, they can go to the gift section, which is up in the upper right corner next to where your private messages and stuff are. And you will get a free copy of the vanilla game of Destiny 2. Hmm. Okay. Um, I've, I've claimed my free copy for myself and for my oldest daughter and I'm going, I've set it up to install, but I haven't done anything else to it because I've never had any interest in any of the destiny games, but it's free. So I can at least try it. You can try it. You can find out why everyone said destiny to vanilla was a step back. Right. And I don't know if I'm going to have enough interest in it to actually spend money to get the upgrade that makes it fun. Right. They did take all the DLCs that have come out They've combined them all to the newest DLC That's getting ready to release So if you buy that DLC you get Everything that came before it But I don't know I just figured people should know That hey you can get a free game Okay well good for them to know And then This was news that I also Heard from a separate source about World of Warcraft Classic because A person we used to play World of Warcraft with ramen messaged me last night about this. Wow, I haven't heard from him in like years. He's a police officer now out in Virginia. He's too big for us. He's a bacon bit.
    72:24
    So, he's like, hey, did you hear about this World of Warcraft? I was like, yeah, what? Are you planning to go and just watch people die in the fire because they won't move again? Is that what you want? Is that what you want to remember? Apparently a lot of people do. Okay. Well, this is the classic. This is before Burning Crusade. That was before people stood in fires. Yeah. This is from when I first started playing. Because I don't know. Did you start before Burning Crusade? Barely. Like Burning Crusade was coming out that week or something. Right. Because I played for almost a year before Burning Crusade came out.
    73:05
    I was still on Final Fantasy XI. Maybe even longer than that now that I think of it. Because my guild was doing a hard rush to get through Blackwing Lair before Crusade hit, and we failed. Okay. I was in before, because I remember when Crusade came out and you had the flying mounts. Yes. And I remember we were always trying to do a lot in, we'd go to Molten Core a lot. Right. But Blackwing Lair we couldn't get all the way through. Right. It was too rough. Too many eggs. Yeah, because I think we ended up being in the same guild. We were. I mean, I was in a different guild first because I changed guilds when you guys started playing. But it was, I enjoyed my time with World of Warcraft. Yeah, I don't have the fondest memories of World of Warcraft Classic, though. 40-man raids were very challenging to assemble. Very challenging. Yeah. And it's not that you couldn't find 39 other people, but finding 39 other competent people. Right. I mean, what I liked about Burning Crusade, to me, Burning Crusade was the expansion. They simplified it just enough. You still had a lot of, you know, the 25-man raids worked a lot better in my view. And after that, they started really pushing the 10-mans, which weren't raids to me. Those were just big parties. Right. And I think 25-man raids were the sweet spot. I think so. It required, you had to work together as a meaningfully large group of people to accomplish something. And you had, and the thing is, is I can't tell you how many times in a 40-man raid it was obvious that we had like 10 people that weren't doing anything. Yeah, well, and the problem was having the proper balance on the classes. Right. Where it's just like, no, we need, you need to go in and you need like six healers and you don't have them.
    75:02
    Anyway. Or doing the whole, well, we need you to heal, but I don't have any healing gear and I'm not healing spec because that's not what I play. Well, you do now. So I like that it's going to be a modernized version. It's cool that they're letting everyone who's subscribing to WoW right now get the classic version for free. I have no interest in going back to this one. I'm not going to go back to it either. To me, this is very little different than when they last BlizzCon announced Vanilla WoW. Right. this is just hey it's actually happening next summer yeah now one of the things the only thing that pulls me as an interest to this but it's nowhere near enough for me to do it is that they are going to be releasing all of the end game content stuff for it in a series of waves we don't know how far apart the waves are going to be or whatever but that's also going to include the big world events they had going on and I only ever caught one of the world events. Most of the others had happened before I started the game where everybody on both sides on the entire server is fighting one big world event and working towards a single goal. I only ever took part in one of those. And that was a lot of fun and it was really interesting. Yeah. But not enough to go back. Well, I see you've put together a summary of some other just various things that came out of BlizzCon that you wanted to hit on. Yeah, there's a bunch of little stuff that none of it I thought needed its own stuff. Teeny tiny. I'll give... Oh, hey, look, there. That's for all my Destiny 2 information. I moved it and then I forgot to delete the other section. So that works.
    76:45
    A lot of this is, you know, like Overwatch related, but that's just because that's my biggest interest. Well, Overwatch was featured a great deal Because the World Cup happens at BlizzCon Right, and the finals for StarCraft The StarCraft World Finals And the Heroes of the Storm World Finals And the Hearthstone World Finals Yeah, there were some finals Yeah, I watched Overwatch And a little bit of StarCraft First big thing that interests me They made the official announcement and released all the images and the information on the Overwatch LEGO sets, the first eight of them. We've known these are coming. These got leaked a month or so ago. All these images actually got leaked a month or so ago. They're releasing eight sets. They range from $15 to $90, basically. Okay.
    77:41
    I'm not hyper-interested in any of them, except for maybe the Dorado set, but that's just because I want the truck. because they've got the truck that's the payload into auto. I just kind of want that little hover truck because it's awesome.
    77:56
    And most of them come with mini, or they all come with mini figs. The mini figs available are Widowmaker, Tracer, Soldier 76, McCree, Winston, Reaper, who for some reason appears in two of the sets.
    78:15
    And did I say Winston already? Yeah, who knows? Winston and Mercy. Because the oldest daughter wants the most expensive set because it has Mercy in it. And that's her jam.
    78:31
    Yes, with a gun. Except for she says Mercy should never have a gun. She's playing Overwatch now. Like, I got another copy of Overwatch in my Humble Bundle monthly set for October. and I went ahead and created her an account and gifted my extra copy of Overwatch to her and she is starting to play and she likes tanks.
    79:00
    She's never really played a PC-based first-person shooter so she's got a long way to go to get the skills and the keyboard and everything and the mouse work worked down because everything she's done has been console related. But she likes playing Reinhardt, and she likes playing support, but she likes tanks better. In addition to those, all that big information releases, they started stuff that was a joke spray initially in Overwatch itself.
    79:37
    Lucio O's, the cereal. Oh, yeah. They're actually making Lucio O's. They're coming out from Kellogg in December. Once again, the fangirl that is my daughter has already told me that we have to buy them when they come out because she wants to see if they're any good. Okay. Well, at least she is accepting that they might be terrible. They're from Kellogg. They're going to be Apple Jacks. They look like Apple Jacks, yeah, or Fruit Loops. It's going to be Apple Jacks or Fruit Loops in a Lucio box. Okay. But each box comes with a loot box for in-game. Oh. I might have to buy one now.
    80:20
    They also kicked out Lucio's first album. They released it for free online. We've got a link in the show notes for it. We've got a link to some... I don't remember if I put a link to the Lucio video or not. The Lucio O's video or not. But they've got his first album out Synesthesia Auditiva I've listened to it It's Electronica Okay I was guessing country It's not bad for Electronica But Electronica is not a huge thing for me I'm pretty eclectic when it comes to music I listen to most everything But Electronica Is definitely on the lower end of my to-listen-to list. So it's not bad. I've heard a lot worse of Electronica, but it's not going to be in my daily music rotation.
    81:16
    And let's see here. The last bit of segment is a little touch on the Overwatch World Cup itself. I watched that.
    81:26
    I'm not going to go too deep into it because that's not our thing. I say congratulations to South Korea on the three-peat. Maybe next year some country that's not South Korea could win the World Cup. Not how it looked. Yeah, I know. Not the way it looked this year. It finally happened in StarCraft. A South Korean finally didn't win the World Finals for StarCraft. It was a gentleman from Finland.
    81:57
    But there were several unexpected upsets this round. The biggest one I think is obviously The USA got knocked out by the UK In round one Yeah it was not pretty either No it wasn't China also took out Finland Which I was not expecting Yeah I think a lot of people assumed Very little out of China but that's mostly because The Overwatch League team out of China was so terrible Right and it didn't have China's actual top tier players In it I think based upon the showings China gave us at the World Cup and knowing that a couple of the biggest stars of the Chinese World Cup team have been picked up by some of the new Chinese teams that are coming out, I think next season of Overwatch League, China is going to be a pretty big force. Yeah.
    82:52
    Which, with them having three teams now, isn't a big surprise to me. Right. I agree. So we'll see. The shenanigans on the desk were weird.
    83:09
    And they were crazy. I understand it was being a single-day, eight-hour push thing, and they had to keep people's attention. So the shenanigans on the desk, it was kind of like the All-Star weekend. The shenanigans were high. Yeah, a bit. Yeah, well, when you have Golden Boy working the desk, you're sending a message that you're not intending to be professional. Right. Because Puckett's the professional. But they stuck him in a hoodie he didn't know how to wear. Oh, that was so bad. And made him try and do the T-Mobile thing, which everyone knows is Golden Boy's sponsor. It is. I did not hate the shenanigans on the dance. No, it was fine. It was a lot of fun. It was fine. I've included in the link a link to somebody put together a clip show of some of the craziest, funniest things. Not all of it, but some of it, including the insanity that was chugging a bottle of maple syrup, which I think you just get diabetes from that. Yeah, it's a lot of calories at once. I mean, that was crazy.
    84:11
    I would like to see them having a bit more fun like this during the regular season without going this out there. We'll see. I think they're having this delicate balance because they're trying to figure out how to be respected as a real sport. Right. And that level of shenanigans does not happen when you watch the NFL Network. Right. Though from reports I've heard, one of the most popular NBA groups, that level of shenanigans is them on a slow day. So who knows? I don't know. I don't watch the NBA. so the big thing for me otherwise was also on the talent side they had two commentators that normally do contenders ZP and Jake Ratt from does he normally do contenders commentary? he does he did a lot of contenders commentary through this round of contenders oh ok so he hasn't done it before but starting this year he did a bunch of contenders commentary and he did commentary here And he's a really good commentator. I think it's something we'll see more of in the future. I think it would behoove them quite a lot to have some of the retired OWL players move into the commentary because I think they added a good thing if they can find the right players to do it.
    85:38
    I would like to see ZP and Jake on the actual season commentary because Jake's not necessarily the DPS level of what a lot of the other OWL players are anymore at this point. So I could see him not remaining with the league for horribly long, and I think this would be a good role for him. Okay. Well, he addressed that and said he's playing in the Overwatch League, and he's not going to be an analyst. I know that. I'm saying when he retires. Oh. I mean, this is esports. It's the oldest person's what, like, he was 29 and he quit halfway through the season. Yeah, I know. But, I mean, it's one of those things. Because what surprised me, though, is I preferred the commentary of ZP and Jake to Uber and Mr. X. And Uber and Mr. X were always one of my favorite commentary duos.
    86:32
    Not like Monte Cristo level. Yeah, they weren't. For some reason, they weren't involved. ZP is very popular. Yeah. A lot of people were disappointed that he was not brought in to do Overwatch League, but stayed with contenders. Right. So, we'll see what happens. Now, the other thing they did that I think is something they need to look into doing full-time with Overwatch League is,
    86:55
    for each they had a talent, an interviewer, a host, whatever you want to consider them, for each team that included someone who was fluent in that team's language. so that they did not require a translator, a third person up there to do the translation for the interviews and the questions. And it worked really, really well. And I would like to see them do that more for the upcoming OWL season. I think with the fact that it's not going to be basically just English speakers and Korean speakers with the addition of Chinese speakers, that it wouldn't hurt them to bring in a few more interviewers to work with Malik and Zoe. And they had several that I thought did a really good job this time around.
    87:45
    Emily for the Chinese team. Don't take her mic. Yeah. Oh, man, they were ganking her mic, and you could see it. There was anger in her eyes. Don't take her mic. Danny with the South Korean team did a really good job. and Mika I really liked Mika also who was doing the Americans and everybody else English speaking because they had her I don't know I liked her I was even more surprised because when I was looking their names up and looking them up on Liquipedia and trying to get information I didn't realize Mika is LeVar Burton's daughter I didn't know that which just makes things better I like LeVar Burton because he's a reading rainbow. I grew up with that show. Yes, you did.
    88:37
    But that is pretty much everything on BlizzCon. Okay. The insanity that was BlizzCon this year. And all in all, we'll see what comes out of it. We will. Because it will be back next year. Yep. I don't think they did bad enough to not come back. No, it sounded like it was well-watched. It was well-watched. It was well done overall. I think it was well, even the people I saw there, the biggest issues I saw were the people who were angry over Diablo. And let's face it, Diablo 3 came out in 2012.
    89:12
    It was never super popular. It was never Diablo 2. And its fan base, while vocal, is pretty small. Well, we'll see what they bring out about Diablo in 2019. And we'll see what we bring out in two weeks. you can write into the show eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com we're also available facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast we're on twitter and instagram at eclectic underscore gamers and we've been on twitch lately we have a bit not been as much as sick as I've been but a little bit a couple days ago so anyway we'll talk to you guys later see ya