Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is episode 186 on February 5th, 2023. I am Dennis. Unfortunately, Tony was not able last minute to be able to be here on the show. However, he did pre-record a small section that I'm going to drop in now so you can hear from him. Hello listeners, Tony here. I just wanted to apologize for not being present with Dennis today to talk about the pinball boards and give everybody an update on the ongoing D&D OGL shenanigans. I'll give you a hint. They bent over backwards from their initial thing and are going the exact opposite direction from the looks of it. We'll see how that continues to go. but I have been unable to attend our normal recording session today because of some family issues that have crept up. So instead, I'm recording this little blurb at 5 in the morning for everybody. And I wanted to reach out especially today to thank everybody who has donated so far for my polar plunge that is coming up in two weeks. And I will be taking that plunge the day before we record our next episode. So when we do record our next episode, if you hear a weird sound, That's probably just my teeth still chattering together. They recorded a promo earlier this week for the polar plunge. And to record that promo, that did involve a couple of firefighters and wetsuits going out with chainsaws to cut through the ice. And even though it's supposed to be warm the next couple of weeks, I don't think it's going to be warm enough long enough to bring the water temperature up all that much. So we'll see how it goes. But I have hit $700 out of my goal of $500. And I wanted to thank everybody who's donated. Dennis, my wonderful co-host, my first donation. Anthony V, Scott G, Matthew K, Chris C, Chris G, Brett A, Omar L, Jennifer D, and Michelle P. All of you have donated, and I thank you very much for bringing me up to $700 so far, so far above my goal. So I have almost everything for my costume in, the wigs in. I think it looks absolutely horrible on me. I do not look good with long hair. I will say that for sure. And I'm just waiting on the shirt. I had to change shirts that I was planning on getting to one that's not quite as good, but it will still work. But it's going to be a fun time. Dennis will be there recording me making an under full of myself and freezing. So until next episode, thank you all for your donations. Thank you all for your help. And I can't wait to talk to you again. Thank you for that update, Tony. As a reminder to the listeners, I do have a link to donate to his polar plunge in the show notes. So you'll be able to go and continue to support that just because he's met his goal is no reason to mean we can't even go further than that. In fact, Tony's tied for fifth currently on the highest levels raised. And if you actually want to get him in the top three, we'd have to raise that $700 up to at least $1,326. So if you haven't donated and you're interested in supporting Special Olympics Kansas, go ahead and follow that link and give it some consideration. In terms of introductions beyond this, I don't have a whole lot to say. We're still at 45 Patreon members, no new additions to report on this week. and the main thing that's happened since the last episode is Tony and I both went out to Evansville, Indiana to the famed Flip N Out Pinball Theater in order to attend the pinball awards. And so let's go ahead and transition right into the pinball segment so I can go over that. The pinball awards were held on January 28th. I do have a link in the show notes to the ceremony video. As I noted, Tony and I were there in person. I did go ahead and present on one of the award categories, and I helped a bit behind the scenes. Obviously, as I think a lot of listeners know, I've been involved with the Pinball Awards, or before this year it was known as the Pinball Industry Awards, for now three years. This is the third ceremony that I've at least done calculations on in terms of the voting results. There was also coverage by Nudge Magazine, and I'll have a link in the show notes to their article, which had some actual film photography photographs included, so you can go and look at that online. I'll run through the results real quick for those that are interested and don't want to sit through the ceremony itself. These results are available on the Pinball Network social media, on the Pinball Awards social media, and I'm not quite sure if they're yet up on the website. It usually takes us a little while to get the website updated. But Best Art for Cabinet and Backglass went to Toy Story 4. Best Art for Playfield went to Toy Story 4. Best Lighting Effects went to Rush. Best Theme Integration went to Alien. Best Toys went to Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. Best Innovation went to Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. Best Playfield Layout went to Rush. Best Music went to Rush. Best Callouts went to Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. Best Animation went to Toy Story 4. Best Sound Effects went to Alien. And the Best in Show or Game of the Year went to Rush. In terms of the Excellence Awards that recognized elements of media, Excellence in Streaming went to IE Pinball. Excellence in Podcasting went to The Pinball Show. Excellence in Writing went to Nap Arcade. Excellence in Social Media also went to Nap Arcade. Excellence in Photography went to Nudge Magazine. And Excellence in Videography went to Straight Down the Middle, a pinball show. Speaking of awards, there's another set of awards that's actually being held today called the Degenes or the Second Annual Pinball Degenerate Awards. That's going to be held today, February 5th, 2023. It's going to be live at 4 p.m. Eastern. You can watch that on the Pinball Degenerate Facebook page. And I do have a link in the show notes to that page I believe it a private page So you want to go and join it so you have access ahead of time in order to be able to listen I going to try and get this episode out before this ceremony actually goes live So this statement actually means something to some of you. I will say, I think they give, if my count was right, 17 different awards and they have some, we'll say oddball. They do some oddball awards. This is a different style of award show than the typical ones like the pinball awards that I just talked about. So if you're interested in maybe the little sillier side of pinball, go ahead and check out that award ceremony. So let's move more into the game news itself. And I think the big item that I wanted to cover is the gameplay reveal that happened by Spooky for Scooby-Doo Pinball. I do have a link to that video in the show notes. It's a sizable video in terms of length, so you get a good view at Scooby-Doo. I didn't watch all of the video, but I did sit through and watch it, at least a portion of it. And I wanted to talk to Tony about it, but obviously he wasn't able to be here today. My initial thinking on this is, and of course a lot about games depend upon setup. I think if you were concerned about it playing like Halloween, I think you could tell from the photos it was not going to be like that. and watching it played, I would say it will, I think in most people's opinion, play a lot better. I think it looks like a lot better layout than Halloween has. I do think it looks like a very safe layout. I do feel like the ball time was pretty long on this game. It gets tricky when you have people that have maybe played it for a while doing your gameplay reveals, so maybe it's not quite as easy as it looks to me. I thought the main play field actually looked like the ball had a decent clip, a decent speed to it, which given it's a wide body, that was probably an initial concern for some. I know it was an initial concern of mine. I'm not quite sure it plays fast, but it didn't seem overly problematic other than the upper play field. The upper play field did look floaty, very floaty to me. Again, that may be by design, but that's not a mechanic of gameplay that I normally like very much as floaty gameplay. But given how big that upper play field is, and it is sizable. I did at the pinball awards, get to see what the, an actual upper play field from Scooby-Doo is one of the giveaways. And I was, I was surprised at how big it was. I did not realize it was that large, but anyway. Um, and yes, there are a lot of horseshoe shots as we identified in the photos. So, uh, it doesn't look like it would exactly be my type of gameplay. I, I do want to try it. I think it may make sense that it's a safer layout, uh, saying aside for whatever, if there were motivations behind it or not, other than let's not do what we did with Halloween and Ultraman. I think with a cartoon theme that maybe would appeal to a lot of kids, I think it's better in my personal judgment to lean towards easier gameplay than to kind of pull a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that Stern did, which I think most people would agree is a fairly brutal layout and makes it perhaps somewhat unapproachable to what you might think the target audience would be. And so in this case, yeah, I would say based off of this gameplay reveal, at least the amount that I watched. Scooby-Doo looks like an easier player. I don't know it's necessarily easy to get all the way through the rules, all the way through the code, all the way through the story, but in terms of a layout, it seemed quite forgiving. Not necessarily what we'd think of in a traditional flow layout fashion. A lot of shots are coming back like through those horseshoes and stuff. We're not talking a bunch of feeds that are clean to the flippers, but it seemed very forgiving. So if you like easier gameplay, I do think this game will appeal to you. If you like things to be flowier than Halloween and Ultraman were, this definitely has more flow than that. And if you enjoy upper playfields, it's been given a significant amount of space and there does seem to be a decent amount to do up there. So regardless of its floatiness, if you enjoy upper playfields, this would probably be a good game to take a look at. Moving a little bit away from Spooky over to Multimorphic, there was an announcement that Scott Denisey was named the creative director of the next P3 pinball game by Multimorphic. And I note that as a transition away from Spooky to Multimorphic because Scott is perhaps best well known for having designed a couple of games for Spooky. Or I should say a couple of games built by Spooky. First one, Total Nuclear Annihilation, or commonly called TNA, is really his game that Spooky just ended up building like a contract build. But Rick and Morty was a spooky title where Scott Danesi was the lead developer, lead designer for the title. He's also, for those that don't know, he has worked on a couple of P3 releases. One is a first-party P3 release. That's Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity, which I just noted won three Pinball Awards. He was responsible for a lot of the sound work on that game. Essentially, all of the sound work that wasn't just dropping in Weird Al songs. But he also worked on a third-party P3 title called Silver Falls, doing the music for that as well. So Scott is familiar with the system already. In fact, I believe the P3 Rock system, which is what TNA used and I'm almost positive Rick and Morty used, is the same sort of board system that powers the Multimorphic P3. In fact, I think it's called the P3 Rock because it was developed for the P3. But I'm getting outside of my area of expertise. But overall, I think this is very positive news. Multimorphic is going to get a lot of attention for having Scott involved with the game. Scott, amongst pinheads, is an extremely popular individual. A lot of people like his creative decisions that he's made in his other games, whether they're games he was lead on or games he just participated in. And because of that, I think his name is one of those that helps move units. So if you're doing a game, even if it's unlicensed, if you can say Scott's attached to it, I think you get more sales than you would otherwise. And so for those reasons, I think this is exciting news and a big positive on Multimorphic's part. In other news I saw a report on Nap Arcade and I do have a link to the article in my show notes that Planetary Pinball Supply has filed trademarks for Big Bang Bar There are actually a couple I think there one for Big Bang Bar and one for Big Bang These happened in different months but essentially it was November and December of 2022 that these were filed So of course this leads to speculation that Planetary Pinball is planning to license a reproduction of Big Bang Bar through some pinball manufacturer, and I'll get more on that in a little while. And so obviously that's a pretty big deal. For those that are not familiar, Big Bang Bar was a Capcom title from the 90s. And I would say Big Bang Bar was the first famous sort of pinball remake. And it was done, there's a whole story behind it in terms of how it got executed. And so there were a number that were made, I can't remember exactly how many, I want to think it was around 120 remake versions based off of the original because someone was able to secure a lot of the parts to the original games from Capcom. And those became extremely valuable. And in fact, even though the project itself might be seen as either a success or a failure, depending on your perspective. Successful in the fact that the games did actually get done, get built, and get sent to buyers. A failure in the sense that, by all reports, it was a financial burden on the person behind it and those involved. There was a lot of donated time, and so for the people actually making the game, it wasn't profitable. Whereas those who acquired their game ended up with a major windfall if they wanted to, or to this day choose to sell it. But all of that said, there's been, I think, speculation for a long time. I've heard reports, though some of it may have just been, again, more speculation than actual rumors, that someone was going to do Big Bang Bar. And there was a point in time when a lot of people thought that Planetary Pinball Supplier PPS was going to work with CGC, Chicago Gaming Company, and not just do these Bally Williams WMS sort of titles, but rather maybe branch out into some other stuff that wasn't as successful. Capcom, namely. Capcom was sort of seen as the big one. I hadn't been hearing stuff about like Alvin G and company having their games remade. But that's sort of where this stands right now. So anyway, there seems to be an intention here to do something given the revival of the Big Bang Bar trademark, but we will have to wait and see. Speaking of speculation, there was some speculation that was discussed on episode 11 of Life Lessons with Tim Lee, which I do have a link in the show notes too, about Goonies, so that a Goonies pinball may be in production. Now, there's not really a rumor that Goonies pinball is being made, or at least I don't have a rumor to share with you about it. Like, I haven't heard a particular manufacturer has secured it or anything along those lines. The discussion, which starts about 57 minutes in on the episode, really revolves around, given there's been some recent gambling device activity with the license that the time may be ripe or the interest may be there to go ahead and do more than just say a slot machine with Goonies, but rather also go and do a pinball machine. My personal opinion is that it's a bit of a reach still. Again, this is why I wouldn't claim it as a rumor. I get the logic of it, but that same logic would have said we would have had Harry Potter years ago, right? Because my understanding is There's other things with Harry Potter. We know there's other video games. In fact, a new video game just came out with Harry Potter. So the logic is like if you're seeing things like video games happening, then tacking on something like pinball would make sense. You know, we're kind of hit or miss if that's the case. If nothing had been happening recently at all with Goonies, though, and this is like the first time that license has come back, other than like re-releases on Blu-ray or whatever of the movie. again, maybe that means it has legs, but I'm a little skeptical. But anyway, it's just it's something that's interesting. I know that's a license that a lot of people really care about. So that might be an episode to go check out if that is a topic that you find of interest. And finally, what is an EGP episode at this point without introducing Rumor Corner? Okay. I mentioned CGC and PPS earlier. There is a rumor going around that PPS, Planetary Pinball Supply, and Chicago Gaming Company are done working together, moving forward at least. And so I heard about this just a few days ago and I was like, What? Okay, that's interesting. And I actually had to do some follow-up because I had initially thought, okay, well, I kind of get this rumor because there have been reports that I've been hearing for a long time. We've talked about it here on Rumor Corner about Pulp Fiction and CGC. I've heard a lot of rumblings that CGC wants to be done doing remakes, that they would like to go ahead and start doing some original, licensed but original games of their own design. And again, this kind of squared. It was a question of when would be a good point to do the cutoff, because obviously they cherry picked the best WMS games, games that were really low production, that were trading for extremely high amounts secondhand or very rare. obviously Medieval Madness, Cactus Canyon, and Attack from Mars are all fairly low production, especially Cactus Canyon. They were all commanding significant amounts of money. So they were all very obvious choices to do. Beyond that, it was going to have to be a little more creative. When you look at the secondhand market, there were some like the J-pop games that have traded at very high dollar amounts. So I still thought they might want to explore doing some of those. You know, I know there were some people that were saying things like atoms in Twilight Zone and rumors about Twilight Zone clocks and stuff going around. But beyond like that clock rumor for Twilight Zone, those seemed a lot more difficult to me in terms of licensing challenges. And the Monster Bash, for example, was a I should have mentioned that one earlier because that a fourth one that they did That one did have some licensing issues but I in terms of having to deal with and I remember the delays in that game coming out I think there was a lot of suspicion It may have had to do with licensing but anyway back to this rumor the the issue is actually not CGC is what I heard but CGC is not the one planning to end the relationship. It's PPS. PPS is upset that CGC per the rumor, this is not confirmed fact, but that they are upset at the speed that Chicago Gaming Company has been turning out the Cactus Canyon remakes. And so the assumption is, especially given this trademark that we covered about Big Bang Bar, that Planetary Pinball Supply is going to look for a new manufacturer to partner with in order to continue to do the remakes. Now, of course, the part I plan to do with Tony here was to have some speculation based off this rumor. Who would Planetary turn to? Because that's not an easy question to answer in my mind, And the rumor didn't come along with a, oh, and PPS is going to go work with Stern, right? I don't have an answer to that. Assuming the rumor is true, I don't know where they would go. And I don't think it would be Stern. I think Stern, with their backlog, is way too busy to do it. I think while they have clearly got a licensing relationship with Haggis in order to kind of do those early 80s games, I do not see them turning to Haggis, which has had its own production speed issues for something that's going to sell like this would sell, like a Big Bang Bar would sell, the DMD era games would sell. I don't think Haggis can do the volume. And so it would be a big challenge to turn to them. In fact, I think it would be a big challenge to turn to any manufacturer that's not based in the United States for what they would probably assume would be a pretty high seller, be it Big Bang Bar or Twilight Zone or Atoms or Tails or whatever game we want to insert. that we normally think of as a CGC remake. So I think we have to rule out the international manufacturers entirely. But Haggis, they do have a relationship with, so I wanted to address that one specifically. Now, if I were to guess, I have two potential picks. I'm not comfortable with either of them, though. But one would be JJP. JJP has not so far shown any inclination to do contract manufacturing gigs. So that's the main reason I'm not sure that they would do it. But the issue has been with JJP design side in terms of getting ready to do their next games and their line capacity is not a problem. And now that they're in Chicago, in theory, they have better access to consistency on their line. I could potentially see them saying, this is a deal we want to do. I think this one's pretty unlikely myself because JJP has been, I feel, priding itself on trying to get to a point where they can do two of their games a year. I continue to hear that they have every intention of doing that in 2023. And so if they're doing two games a year, I just don't see them being able to accommodate this. but that being said you know if the next game is like toy story 4 which i have also heard a number of reports that those say after that initial first couple of weeks those sales dried up the distributors were not interested in the initial allotments that they had planned on because the game was not the success that guns and roses was they might need this especially if godfather as a theme is the next game and godfather as the theme is as poor of a choice for pinball as i think it is, but I don't think they're the most likely. Now, if I were to guess, I would say American Pinball. American Pinball has made no secret for years that they are interested in doing contract manufacturing work. In fact, in theory, I think that's what they probably should be focusing on because they have struggled mightily with putting out games that are their own. And we have to remember that since David Fix came into American Pinball, the only game they've come out with isn't their game. It's a contract gig game, or that's my view of it, and that's Legends of Valhalla because it was completely developed outside of American Pinball. So given that, and given the struggles to come out with Galactic Tank Force and whatever else they've been teasing over the last couple of years, if their line isn't that busy or they've got enough space on the line to expand up, and they've spoken about the ability to do this, they seem to be the most likely one. Their build quality is respected. So I think a lot of people would feel that if you were moving away from CGC and you went to American Pinball, like the comfort would be there about the build. But like, like if they were to turn to Spooky, for example, which I, I don't think so, given how busy Spooky is with doing the Scooby-Doos and everything. But Spooky used to do a lot of contract manufacturing builds. But Spooky's build quality is probably the number one complaint, more so than layouts or rules or anything. It's always been the build quality. American Pinball's build quality is very well respected. So I think PPS would be more likely to turn to someone like American. And let's face it, they're clearly not very busy. That's the public perception that we all have is Americans not very busy building all that many games. How many more Oktoberfest do you have to keep putting on the line? It can't be very many per order slot. So it's like they would be my best guess. But again, I'm not sure that they can do the production levels that CGC was doing. I don't know. It's because we're not seeing much come out of them right now. But maybe they're faster than CGC. And if PPS is this upset with CGC, maybe that's the direction we go. But anyway, I cannot ask if Tony was rumor tamed because Tony is not here. But hopefully you all enjoyed the rumor corner. And that's it. Tony and his blurb that I put in the start touched a little bit on the tabletop stuff. I don't have any show notes here for video games or tabletop for me to walk through with you. so we're going to cut this episode short and end it here thank you very much for supporting us if you want to contribute it's as low as a dollar a month you can go to patreon.com slash eclectic underscore gamers if you want to reach out to us you can email eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com we're on twitch twitter and instagram at eclectic underscore gamers and we are on facebook at facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast until the next episode my name is dennis take care everybody