All get around, he's on the rebound Hear the sound of our buddy, oh lordy, it's Orby Pinball now to rejoice He's tugging pinball, craft beer and coffee Miffed with syrup and honey He wants to laugh with his family in a random tangent Stories of his boys He's on the poor man's pod network We're gonna get more listeners Welcome back, Pinball Nerds, to episode 516 of your fifth favorite pinball podcast. My name's Orbital Albert, and today we're going to be talking all about Keith Elwin's new masterpiece, hopefully, James Bond 60th Anniversary Edition. And I've got poor man's favorite here, tribe favorite member, Mr. Jonathan Hall, also known as Jay Hall here, to kind of just have a quick fun chat about all things Elwyn's Bond. Yes, we're going to talk about the price, but we're going to talk about everything else first. Jonathan, welcome to the show, buddy. dude albert i'm so happy to be on the show finally i feel like we've been talking about doing this for a long time yes yes yes um my internet connection is not super awesome so you cut out there for maybe a half second but fingers crossed fingers crossed it's going to get better who knows uh you know it was of course it was working perfectly until we hit the record button, am I right? In poor man's Nova Scotia style, here we go. There you go. Nova Scotia, right? Yes, yes. Okay, remind all the listeners, everybody's heard you before, of course, I know on Tribe Multiball and with Drew before on the main show, so to speak. Whereabouts do you live again? I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee. Okay, okay, I like that. The south As we like to call it But you're still like the funny part is like It's funny when you mentioned earlier you're in eastern time zone Because I'm actually nostalgic for that time zone Because I spent 39 years In the eastern time zone and now I'm way out at Atlantic time and nothing happens on Atlantic time you know what I mean it's all eastern time Yeah In our minds we're the center of the Universe I'm not sure well hey thank you so much for being here um let's just jump right into it we'll give all the fans we'll give all the listeners everything they want they want to hear our thoughts i like to be i would say i think for the last three if not almost four years typically pinball nerds podcast um whether i'm over here on the poor man's pinball network or or you know on my old uh channel i like to be the first one out i don't like to go on to pin side and read what everyone thinks after a live stream. I do read the chat while I'm in there a little, I'm not going to lie. But I want to start by saying that the production itself was top notch. It always is with dead flip. I think Jack said on the very first game, hey guys, let me know if the, you know, the pinball machine volume is too loud. And almost, you know, immediately, I thought it was pretty good, but maybe a little loud. And a couple of people in chat said, oh yeah, it's a little loud. He turned it down. That was the only minor that I wouldn't even call it a blip. I wouldn't even call it a tiny little fart, you know what I mean? It wasn't even like a flaw, but that was maybe the only blip that I noticed. What about you? Did you think at least the production value of the stream was pretty good? Jay Hall? Yeah, I missed the first part a little bit, but I got kind of caught up. Oops, sorry, is my mic on now? Hey, can you hear me now? Sorry. Yes. My mic cut out. So anyway, the audio guys have audio issues. So yeah, I missed the first part. I was at my son's hockey practice tonight, but I caught up the last 45 minutes before we got on the call. Jack always puts on a top-notch stream. I was wondering why all his games were packed up, and then he finally mentioned that he had, and he probably said this earlier, but he had moved in to his new studio. Yeah, he just moved in there. Yeah, it looked like he was packing up his games, but actually he was unpacking them. But yeah, he kind of sets the mark for quality on streaming along with, like, George from Don't Panic Flip, for sure. Yeah. You know, everything always looks and sounds amazing with him. Oh, for sure. I think, like, Carl sets the bar for, you know, tournament pinball, and then for just, like, live streaming, of course, George Fisher and Jack Danger are two of the best out there, for sure. It was really nice, too. Like, I didn't know we were going to get Elwin and George Gomez. I wouldn't really call him my homie Gomi but tonight George Gomez was drinking all Elowen's IPA and I felt that I've had that before where like you're at a party with your boss or something and they're like oh I see you got some cool craft beer is it cool if I just steal one and you're like oh man it's my boss but I only brought enough for me but yeah oh yeah sure no problem and then George goes yeah Elowen I think this is your last IPA you don't mind do you and he's like you can just see his face going yeah no problem and he's just like oh man That's my last beer, though. Come on. So that was kind of a fun little non-pinball moment that I, you know, I can relate to because I've been the boss. They all have to work tomorrow. Oh, yeah. They weren't lighting her up or anything, you know what I mean? But I think they're all kind of christening Jack's new studio there. And what Jack said when he was packing up the old one that I found really cool is that, you know, he started in this really tiny, small, little apartment. I remember when he did the Domino's Pizza World Premiere, the Pabst Can Crusher, I believe, as well, like in this little tiny studio apartment. And then, you know, and I think he lived there as well and everything. And then he moved on to having like a small studio, then like a medium studio, then like a giant studio with like, you know, 40 pins or whatever. And he just felt like it was just too much. And, you know, even trying to do maintenance on 40 pins, trying to keep, you know, 40 pins waxed, 40 pins even dusted. You know what I mean? It's just so much time, energy, work, and labor. And I think he's got this much smaller area that he feels maybe more cozy in, and it's kind of more up his alley. So I'm excited. I'm excited. It's neat that I've got to watch him through all these transitions and such. But let's start by talking about tonight. You know me. I'm a freak for sound. The sound has to be just perfect. And one of the things is in here. Yes, yes. And I don't know if you caught them talking about this at the very start, but Mark Panaccio. I hope I'm pronouncing your name right, Mark. That's the only time I'm going to say it. I'll just call you Mark for now. But Mark, his last game was Fishtails. He's now back, of course, on James Bond's 60th anniversary with Elwin. And he did all of kind of the coding and kind of most of the rules. And the other thing he did is he worked on the sound package, and there's five different sound packages. And I thought it was so cool because, okay, I love EMs. I like chimes, I like bells, but I think that could kind of get older in a big, like, you know, in a lineup of machines with a whole bunch of people playing, that sound could kind of become grinding, but the sound package I like the best that I found they use the most often was kind of like the 80s sound package, and I like that one as well. There's also like a more modern, stern one, and it's just neat. Like, I was blown away by the five different sound packages, how it almost changes how the whole game felt. It almost seemed like the ball slowed down when they were playing with chimes. Did you notice the different sound packages much? No, I guess I got in late on that. So did they go through them all or did they just show you a couple? Yeah, right at the start what they did is they each did one ball with the chimes, like the 1953 ones, then the 1970 whatever ones. They started with the chimes and they went to the bells or vice versa and then they went to like the 80s package which I kind of think that's that's going to be people's favorite then more of a modern stern one and I just thought it's neat because you know especially if you had just have it there by yourself and you're playing by yourself uh to just change up the game to just find your favorite sound package that you like best I thought that was that was more they had said there might be different spinner sounds and stuff and different pop bumper sounds and they were going to add chimes but I'm glad you could turn the chimes off because I think in a modern arcade, the chimes going would, even in the 10 minutes I saw them play three or four balls with the chimes, it was, you know, it takes away from the rest of the sound package a little bit, like the cool sound of the spinners. You have four opto spinners, let those bad boys shine. We're kind of all, I love Craig Bobby, but we're kind of all sick of that James Bond theme song, and it just kept playing over and over. But what saved it was how the cool sound effects were implemented in so many different, you know, five different versions. So, sorry, were the chimes, like, digital or actually, is there a physical chime unit? No, no, no, no, no. They didn't have a chime unit, which I can understand you'd think that maybe because they had the reels, right? But, no, they didn't do that. But I'm sure, I think it's just sounds. I can't imagine chime units break down so often on EMs. Like, you know, I can't imagine they would do that. But that is a funny thought. Those stern chime units are, like, impossible to find, right? I've heard that. Like they can't even get them aftermarket anymore, really, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's a start time unit. I don't know. It's beyond my knowledge. But, yeah, I'm sorry I missed that beginning. That sounds cool. I'll have to go back and watch that. I actually tried to go back and watch the beginning a little bit before we got on this call, but because they're streaming live, it's not available. So I'll have to check the on-demand on that one. But I think, you know, a good half hour, 45 minutes of gameplay. So I'm at least educated on that part. Well, let me just ask you this then. What were your first thoughts? Just your overall observation. I don't know. You're within even the first two minutes of watching it. Did you think it played faster than you thought it would? That's what I thought. I thought, geez, this is a pretty fast game. Yeah, it definitely doesn't play like an EM, if you could even call it that, with the mechanical reels and stuff. Not at all. No, I played like a TNA or something. I mean, a brutal single-level game. But not totally brutal. It's like the time back to the flipper was fast on some shots, but then some shots kind of, you know, gave it a chance. I don't know. It was interesting. It shot pretty smooth, pretty buttery smooth, which you can expect if Ellen's going to do a single-level play field. It's going to be a lot of flow to it. So, yeah, it looked like a fun shooter for sure. The one thing I was worried about when I looked at all the pictures was, as far as the shooting of the game goes, was that odd job hat in the middle. It looked like it would obstruct a lot of the shots and make those three very important drop-down targets at the back really challenging. But I noticed once in a while Jack Danger would revert to the camera that showed the odd job hat spinning around. And you could tell that it didn't spin completely weighted. It's counterbalanced. No, it was like stopping. Yeah, it was stopping itself back at square. Yeah, I noticed that too. Yeah, so as long as you figured out those three shots when it's in that regular position, it looked like they were shootable. Now, is it going to be slightly left of that or slightly right of that once in a while? Sure. But it looked like from that position where it just sat normally, you could typically hit those shots fairly easily. Yeah, that was one of the most frustrating things about Avengers is I had an AIQ Pro and just when that spinner would get stuck right at the spot that it was blocking the, I think it was Captain America shot. It just is so frustrating because it's like that's the one shot you have to hit and you have to hit that spinning disc to get it and you hope that it lands out of your way and then you hope you can then trap up, catch all that chaos that spinning disc is causing and then hit the shot that you wanted to hit when the thing was in the way, you know, in the first place. It's just super frustrating sometimes that it's there, you know. And then I had Turtles, which had a spinning disc, you know, that was, you know, on its own, had a mind of its own. And then I had GNR for a little bit, which had a spinning disc, too, in the middle. So it's like, you know, I've told myself a bunch of times, like, I'm not going to have another game with a spinning disc in the middle. I just I can't do it again. the way that one gets back around and like you said kind of gets out of the way of itself I'm like oh okay so maybe that's better I don't know I won't have that spinning disc in my house either I think I somewhat famously said something about enough with the spinny flippy shit or something like that when I was talking about this and it's like you know Tim Lee sent me that one liner he's like this was my favorite sentence from the but you know he's not going to give me a whole paragraph but if he finds one particular sentence funny he'll kind of you know fire it off to me and he sent that off to me i was like yeah that was proud that was kind of i you know i i i never i famously never listened to these things because uh to me it's my voice is unlistenable which you know i know that happens to a lot of people but like i don't even want to hear my voice on my answering machine when it comes on at my house never mind listen to an arab be talking which is why i could never edit my own shows because I would have to, yeah, it would be horrible. But I thought that was kind of a funny, you know, a funny remark that I made. Now, this reminded me of something while I was watching it. Two or three times George Gomez said, oh, my God, I'm getting a text from Ed Ed Robertson. And I guess Ed Ed Robertson was joking about there being no till bob in there because I don't know if you noticed. Did you notice how often they were nudging and moving the machine around and they actually tilted a lot? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I said you guys need to get out the socket wrench when Keith nudged that thing, and it looked like he was going to break the legs off of it. It was wild. But here's my theory, and I could be totally wrong, but on a lot of modern games, there's two, if not even three, sometimes four ramps, and most of those ramps, not always, but most of the time those ramps feed back to your inlanes, and you can directly have another safe shot at a ramp if you want, and quite often these modern machines will reward you for hitting ramp after ramp, which feeds right back to your flipper. So when that's happening, you don't need to nudge at any point if you're accurate. Whereas with this particular machine even the two orbits they come back towards your flippers but it not like an in where you know 100 you got it And then that figure-eight shot, you can only hit it from the right-hand side cleanly, easily. From the bottom left, like when you're trying to hit that figure-eight shot from the bottom left, 90% of the time it goes into that locked target up there, which I don't know if, you know, I mean, Elowen is crazy good at pinball. Maybe he's good enough to know how hard he's hitting the flipper. I did see it a couple times make it the whole way, but usually it went into that lock. So, you know, when you're looking at that, it's like you've got all these shots that none of them actually give you a safe shot back at your flipper. So in that way, it is very similar to, like, TNA or, you know, a really, really, really fast-shooting late model, like a Fireball Classic or something like that, like a, you know, something that the outlanes don't really matter or the inlanes I should say don't really matter because they rarely go there like you rarely saw the ball going there so I felt like it's a very nudge heavy game so if you're someone like me who's not really good at like deep rule sets like AIQ like you mentioned and mind you I'm not a billionaire so I can't quite afford this pin but hopefully I'll see it on location and I'll get to play it and I think that if someone's really good at nudging but maybe not that good at remembering rule sets they'll have a slight edge on this And if you suck at nudging or you're just someone who prefers not to nudge or you don't want to nudge because, you know, it's a $20,000 machine on tall legs, right? You don't want to hit it too hard. You're just not comfortable doing that. You're not going to be able to get these big scores. You're not going to be rolling it all the time like they did, right? So I don't know. Did you notice they were nudging it a lot? Like pinball was invented for nudging. Yes. there's no value of a machine that I would not give a little slap to on the side a little something yeah I mean gosh nothing is pinball but I get your point there's all kinds of different pinball people out there and there are people that like to purchase them and look at them and maybe play a game here and there but they certainly wouldn't nudge it or move it across the floor no death saves So they're calling that a figure eight, which I kind of get. So I watched the right-hand shot feed back to the left flipper, and then I don't know that I ever caught the left flipper, like you said, seemed like it was always going into that little, I don't know what you call it, the little lock shot. The little lock shot, yeah. Yeah, the little lock shot. but I never saw the backhand from the left flipper go into the other side of that, or does it come around from the right-hand flipper? I don't know. Basically, they said that that figure eight was repeatable from both sides, but I never saw it get fed back to the right flipper ever, so maybe I just misunderstood that. Jay Hall, I'm not going to lie to you, bro. I'm back on the wagon. I had a couple beers. What I was doing is I was typing into my laptop, so that I could be part of the chat, but then I was watching it on my big screen TV so I could see the shots well. And my really, really bad internet wasn't doing great with trying to have, like, I had one at 160p, the one I was chatting in, because I didn't need to see it. And so, honestly, it froze five or six times. I had to switch laptops a couple times. All I know is someone wrote in chat, hey, I haven't seen the ball make it the opposite way through the figure eight, and almost immediately, almost immediately, George Gomez said, oh no it has but I don't know if he meant oh no it has gone the opposite way through because I did notice when Elwin was waiting for a super jackpot he did say this is the hardest shot or sorry he said this is a hard shot I don't know if he said this is a hard shot but he said this is a hard shot and he had to hit it the opposite way that you typically wouldn't go through that lower the left hand lower entrance and it's still he was awarded the super jackpot but again it went to the lock shot so I don't actually remember seeing it happen. I just thought that that's what George Gomez meant when that was asked. But to be fair, I didn't see it happen, but I was having some beers, enjoying myself a little. So I could have missed it. I could have missed it. But either way, it's still a cool shot. It was so satisfying to see it go the opposite way. That looked cool. Yeah. Well, and it comes back to that left flipper pretty fast if you have some heat on it. I kind of see it now. I'm looking at the play field. I don't know. That was interesting for sure. That's a cool feature in the game. Yeah, I thought so. Another thing that I did notice, and I wanted to be critical of this, but instead I'm going to praise it. I wanted to be critical of the fact that the light show, and again, it's because you keep thinking about that price tag, that $20K price tag. You're going, well, I want to see the best light show out there. I'll tell you what. Dwight did not work on this light show. This is a fairly, like, I would say, it's good. Like, it's better than, like, a solid state would have been, like, or way better than EM back then, of course. But it's like, you know, in comparison to the last ten light shows on the Cornerstones, it's, you know, it's fine. It's good. But I'm glad it's not flashy, and this is why I'm going to praise it, because I think it actually keeps it looking relatively more old school. Does it look completely old school? No. If something came out like that machine in 1987 with the sound programs and the light, and I didn't hear many call-outs, I can say that, but the light show itself wasn't that flashy, but I still thought it was, the light show was exactly what I expected. It wasn't over the top, but it wasn't, you know, it was good. It was kind of what I expected. So here's what I'll say. This did shock me, and this I was excited about, and Elwin threw this bad boy in. I even had to hit the clip button on Twitch to go back and listen to it to make sure I heard it. I think George Gomez mentioned it later, but this machine is actually on a boat right now on the way to Europe, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, France, Japan, wherever. Canada, thank God, doesn't have to get on the boat. We're not quite that far, but hopefully those ones are coming soon. The rest of them are on the line to go to good old United States of America and Canada and Mexico. but it's shipping with co-op and it's not only shipping with co-op mode and I don't ever remember any pin shipping with co-op but it's shipping with co-op and it's also shipping with code past 1.0. The very first time people get their hot little hands on it they can up the code to code 1.03 so I thought that's kind of neat that basically Elwynn said it's essentially code complete. If Kaylee George or Escher Lefkoff or Eric Stone or one of the other incredible top tournament players figures out some way to just repeat one shot and get incredible scores or blow it up. Yeah, they might change something small in the code, but for the most part, the code is done and there's co-op in it. I watched them play the co-op mode. That looks really fun. Just like George Gomez said, older games, they are fun when you have lots of people. What do you think about it shipping with co-op? Yeah, so that's interesting. did Turtles not ship with co-op? I guess that was a later edition too I could be wrong I could be wrong I don't know I got Turtles later on so it may have been you know what I think in the live stream it had it so maybe you're right but still it's cool the code's complete it's few and far between hey look I mean it's much different than the other Bond right now that's for sure so it's interesting to me it didn't like, A, Elwin Games seems to ship more co-complete. That's true. I can't think of any of his four previous ones that shipped with as much left to do as some other titles. I don't know. The co-op was cool. It was funny that it came down to that it came down to George on the fourth player to get the thing over the top or whatever when you roll the game, over the top. And it came down to him. He needed like, I don't know, 5,000 more, and he blew it. He bonked it out. But, yeah, I don't know. I think this kind of game probably should ship with mostly co-complete because, you know, what else is there to do? I don't know. No, I know what you're saying. Like, there's not crazy compounding rules like AIQ and stuff. Of course, it's not supposed to be as complicated, so why would it, right? Another neat thing, George Gomez did, again, I don't know if he did it accidentally or he was shooting for the figure-eight shot, but he put a lock ball in very close to the start of his plunge, and he hadn't hit a figure-eight shot yet, and it gave him a special bonus. and Elwin mentioned that, so I thought that's kind of cool too. Because I think what happens is most of the time you go into that lock shot, it appeared to me anyways, like people were attempting to hit the figure eight shot, but they just kind of missed by an inch or two and kind of went into there, right? I mean, I'm sure when Elwin was shooting it, it was meeting too, but George Gomez is more like a typical player like you and I, and Elwin and even Jack Danger is on a whole other level. It is a fast-playing game though. So on one hand, it will be a good tournament game. because it would keep the tournament moving a lot quicker. Like, you're not having a one-hour ball on Deadpool or something like that, as opposed to, you know, like, even Keith, when he really got his hands on it, and he got, like, I don't know, 23,000 on his second or third game, and he rolled it, I guess, rolled it, I'm just putting in quotes, rolled it, he rolled it twice where he got over the 10,000 barrier. He didn't play that long. Like, he was in, like, maybe, like, I don't know, a six-, seven-minute game, right? but it wasn't like when you're watching in-disc or something like that with the top players, Elwin's playing like a 15-minute ball on a modern machine, right? So it wasn't like that. The only place it would get tricky is if you had, and I mean this as if it was in a top-notch tournament, if you had like the four top players in the world or four of even the top 50 players in the world all playing on it, once you get to 150,000, now, of course, if it were in a tournament that big, it would be televised and it would be recorded and the commentators would be keeping track and the tournament director would be watching. But I'm just saying, like, if you were playing in a tournament with four good players and they could, now, again, Elowen only got to, I think on his very last game I saw him play, he was at 40,000, and that was his best score of the night. I didn't see anyone beat 40,000. But if you got past 149,999 points, it would just revert back to the 10,000, like when you got to 160,000. So at that point, there would be really no way, if you weren't recording it, to tell what the score was at. So I don't think that'll be an issue people will run into very often. I'm not going to run into it. That's what I was wondering. It's like, where's the score going to be kept? And on the screen in the play field, which I'm sure we'll talk about, often it would show all four-player scores and where they were at. And I wonder if that actually rolls over. You roll the reels, you roll the 10, 20, 30, 40 over the top, and then it still shows your total score on that little screen down there. You know what would be really cool is that they took three or four of these machines, put co-op four players, took four of the best players in the world on each machine, and whoever rolls it over first wins the tournament or something. I like that. No, like a timed event, basically, yeah. Yeah, have a lightning round. Like, you know, because Keith himself said, like, one player by themselves is probably not going to roll this game over. But then they put it in that four-player co-op mode, and all of a sudden they're, like, almost to that over-the-top, you know. So it's like, yeah, put a few of the best players because, you know, Jack's no slouch either. No, no. So, you know, they were close to rolling the over-the-top part. I don't even know if you call that rolling it over. but they were pretty close to that the first couple of co-op games. So that was cool to watch. That definitely adds a lot more value to what could be considered a simple game. But I think there's a lot more depth here than what meets the eye for sure. Yeah, I think that what they did a really good job at is from time to time, even Stern's been guilty of this in the past, especially I know sometimes when Dwight's doing the rules. But, you know, it can be anybody. Sometimes they talk for, like, way too long explaining the rules before they start playing. And I found this particular one, it was like they talked for, like, two minutes, and they were like, let's just start playing. And I really like that because I can't learn when someone's just talking about it. I have to be either watching them play it or watching a live stream of it or, like, watching a Bowen video on Papa when he's explaining it while he's playing. That works for me. just reading rules on pen tips or listening to someone stand there and talk about the rules, that's not really good for me. I don't know him personally, but Keith seems like a pretty stoic guy. Godzilla, when they did that stream, he just walked up to the game and started playing. They hardly said two words about it. So there's probably a balance. Walk me through the shots real quick and maybe walk me through. a little bit of the rule set. Maybe it doesn't take as long as some of those other streams, but, yeah, they got to be pretty quick on this one. Or on Godzilla. I didn't catch the beginning of this one, but, yeah, that's a typical Keith Elwin reveal stream right there. There's something, you know, he doesn't like a lot of the BS. He just wants to show you how the game plays, which is cool. He just wants to start playing. Something else, too, I think Jack Danger alluded to at the start that never happened, or at least if it did again, I might have been refilling my beer or doing something like that but what I noticed is they didn't bring it up if it did happen while I was there but there's an achievement if you can get all four spinners ripped and still even spinning slowly and then get the hat spinning. If you can get all five going at once there's a cool achievement for that. I didn't see that but that sounds neat. Those are all opto spinners right? take everything, every spinner in the game is an octo spinner, so you could keep those things ripping for a minute for sure. I thought they had the momentum thing on the hat Every time you spun it it added to a meter couldn tell if that meter like went away or if it just always it looked like you had to keep the momentum going and keep the you know keep that spinning disc spinning to get that, you know, like you unlocked a multiball or something. So that was kind of cool. There's definitely some cool stuff in it. I was trying to think about this, and this is – we're getting – I'm not going to say we're at the end here. I've only got a couple more little notes here. A couple of these are like things I took off as like minor negatives. But I try to put myself in the position of, I'm not in the position to be buying new inbox pinball machines right now, but I try to put myself in that position, hopefully maybe in the future once, you know, a couple of the kids have moved out and I got a little bit more money kick in or something like that, right? Try to put myself in the position. If this James Bond pin was the same as a Stern Pro with everything it has right now, and arguably there's really no toys or mechs in it to be fair but if if if i were in the position would i rather have this or would i rather have say jurassic park well i think i'd rather have a jurassic park pro even if this were the same price as a stern pro and then i thought well would i rather have this or a james bond pro and immediately i said i'd rather have this even though james bond pro has way more toys i just think this shoots better i'm sorry george i love you, George, Mr. Gomez. I'd love to have you on for episode 1,000. I'll be pushing for it for another 400 and something episodes, but I really do think that this is the better bond, excluding price, excluding price. And I know David Deniser, my buddy Dave, as I like to call him, of Silver Ball Chronicles, he did announce, I'm not saying anything that hasn't been publicly announced, but he did announce that he got the cornerstone today. I'm not sure if he got the pro or the premium or the LEA. I'm assuming the pro or the premium, but he did announce that he got George Gomez version. I think that maybe, I could be wrong, if I were him though and he was even considering 1% chance that he would have to maybe possibly get this Elwin, he wanted to put in his purchase order today because if he saw this live stream and I was Dave Dennis, and again, I know he's much better with the finances than I am. I think if he wanted to, he probably could afford this even at 20k even though I looked it up it's 27,000 Canadian so it's pretty pricey and that's not even including shipping but I think that if at the let's just say for fun they just wanted to see like it was almost like a competition if George Gomez released his pro model the Dr. No One I believe right and this came out on the same day honestly what do you think would sell more Keith Elwin's without ramps or George Gomez with ramps but arguably obviously code not nearly as good. What do you think would sell more? Sorry, did you say price point matter? Mic's messing up again. Do you say price point matter? Is the price point still the same? No, let's assume that they're both... What is a Stern Pro right now? 7K or something? Let's assume that George Gomez Stern Pro Cornerstone came out the same day as Keith Elwin's. If this were a Pro at the same price, do you not think that this would sell more than Gomez's? At the same price? Yeah, maybe. It'd be tough to say, but I think they would sell a lot more. If you're asking me would I pay $20,000 for this or would I pay $20,000 for a Bond Premium and a Beatles Gold, I would take the Bond Premium and the Beatles. Yes. In a second, I'd take two games. This reminds me a little bit of that. in a very simple way. It's just single-level play field and some drop targets and stuff. There's a lot more in this game, but I don't know. Give me the Beatles and the Bomb Premium, or give me the Beatles and the Bomb Pro over this. I don't know. I hear you. In my case, honestly, if I had $27K Canadian to spend, I mean, even before I moved out here to Nova Scotia, I had about $15K a little extra to spend to start my arcade, and I bought like, you know, a $5,000 used Stern. I bought, you know, a $4,000 Flash Gordon. I bought, you know, a couple of like $1,500 pins and an $800 EM just because I wanted the whole, you know what I mean? And for so less than 20K, you can get a whole arcade full. So, of course, yeah, all things given. Now, that being said, if I won the lottery tomorrow, and I'm not talking about like $10,000, $15,000, $100,000. If I won like a quarter mil or more, I probably would go out and buy Keith Elwin's bond, just because I'm such a huge Keith Elwin fan. It would be hard, though, if I only had like $40,000 or $50,000 to play with in my sandbox, so to speak, of pinball money to designate half of my pinball money just to this one pin. That doesn't have super deep code. That doesn't have an LCD. What did you think about it missing the LCD? I thought it would really bug me a lot, and I felt like it was okay. but I think it's less fun for people watching. You know what I mean? You know, I think it's weird. It's all kind of there on that tiny one on the play field. I mean, you know, it's like a tiny version of a normal Stern backbox. Like even when they went into menu, everything was there. And, you know, I hadn't really thought about it. All the things that they would have to have that wouldn't be there on the score reels and all of a sudden that tiny one on the, you know, I keep calling it tiny, but that small LCD on the plate field made a lot of sense because that's where everything has to go. Everything Spike 2 has to go on that menu. So it makes sense why it's there. Yeah, I don't know. The LCD wasn't doing as much as hard work is what I thought. It was doing more of like the scorekeeping stuff and telling me what the next shot was, but it wasn't like there were movie clips that played on that. No, no movie clips. I think from a player's perspective it's fine because I don't really look up much anyways, but I think from everyone standing around, and you know what, also streaming. A lot of streamers really rely on that cool LCD to provide secondhand entertainment any time a ball is stopped. Even think about Ninja Turtles. You know, every single time that you lock a ball or something or you start a multiball or any pinball moment per se, you have a cool LCD clip, right? So I kind of missed it, but I didn't miss it, I guess, as much as I thought that I would. If I had to also be negative, I thought, did you see the clip? There was a very short clip where they showed the topper. No, I did not. I was interested to see if they would show the actual rest of the game, too. They did. They did. They showed the topper. I thought the topper was mid at best. I'm not going to lie. Maybe that wasn't a cool light sequence that was happening when they showed it. But, like, I thought it was – I honestly thought, like, if you had two hours to create a topper – obviously, the light show took longer than that to program. But I thought, like, if you just had to make a topper with the logo that was a flat piece of plastic, that's what you would do. And it was like, I don't know, man. I thought for 20K you were going to impress me, you know. I thought it was just going to be blown away, like the Mandalorian topper or something. That's what I thought you would, you know. It's James Bond. He's got all these gadgets. He's got all these things, these magic things that, like, you know, he's got every possible ejector seat on the planet. He's got every, you know. I thought we'd see more magic in the topper. I thought the topper was very mid. I thought that, well. You know what they should have done? They should have put all of the stuff on the play field LCD and made the topper also like a widescreen LCD, an ultra-wide, and then show like movie clips or something on that topper just to bring that all in a little bit. I'm sure there's licensor problems with that too. But I know, but it's like, again, it all comes back to the price. And this is the part that I, you know, this is probably where we're going to, this is probably the last part we're going to talk about because this is really the elephant in the room or the jumbo elephant in the room, right? is here you have, and I don't mind that it doesn't have, I did kind of troll and chat a little, I'm not going to lie. I did say, is it true that Stern's coming out with their official first James Bond 60th anniversary mod is a ramp mod? Where you can add a mod where there's a ramp, right? Which, you know, obviously that's not true. But if it wasn't, again, if it wasn't for the price, if this was introduced as a home model and a really good entry-level machine to get that's kind of like stripped down and it doesn't have the LCD and it doesn't have like tons of crazy difficult rules. And they said this is great for like a new first time. And it seemed when Mark, I'm not going to try, I'm not going to butcher your last name again, Mark. When Mark was explaining the rules. The Nacho. I think it's the Nacho. Thank you. I thought it was Mark Nachos. But no, probably not. I'm getting hungry. I'm getting hungry. No, but when Mark was explaining this, it was like, okay, I get the rules. He was explaining how you fight the villains, how you start the mode is you just hit the drop-downs on the left. I did think it was cool that Keith, one time he registered, he qualified the action button in the middle, which I agree with Jeff Teolis. Jeff, shout out, love you, buddy. I do agree with Jeff that action buttons are not that cool, especially ones like in Star Wars where you've got to look like you're smacking the hell out of the machine, and everyone in the arcade is like, what is that guy doing? Is he okay? I love that part. I love that part. I just got a Star Wars, like, and just watching people come up to that game. I'm like, you're going to hit that button really fast. And then watching them try to, like, manage the ball, trap up the ball, hit the button at the same time. And, like, you know, they almost always lose the ball because they're so focused on hitting the button. They're like, oh, wait, you've got to stop the ball, too. Like, it's like just watching people's brains go through all that is awesome. Like, it's a pinball moment for sure. Okay. You know, Keith Elwin hates the action button, so he never uses it. But he used it this one time? So you have to put yourself in Orbi mode, okay? And imagine you're in a, I would say this store is like 80% to 90% French people. The odd English person like me from Nova Scotia comes in. It's in Moncton. It's called Spin It Records. It's got four pinball machines in the front and about 12 in the back. Well, in the back, you kind of got your own space to play. But in the front, you're right along the cash register and where everyone, it's a movie rental place with primarily French indie movies. that also has, like, records, and then it has video games in the middle, and then it has, like, Funko Pops and other collectibles somewhere in there, and then it has, like, rock band T-shirts and records at the back. And so, anyways, I'll go in on a Saturday morning, get baked as fuck, and then I'm sitting there playing stupid Star Wars, and all of a sudden, there's, like, 20, 30 people, like, oh, Tabernack, and they're looking at all the different movies, and everyone's quiet, and they just had their nice breakfast, and they're in there shopping for records. And all of a sudden I start going like, oh, and I'm just like slapping the shit out of this thing, like hitting it. And everyone's looking over me like, what's wrong with that dude? And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm the one English guy here. Don't worry about me. I'm just smacking the hell out of the machine. Now, the guy who works there gets it, but everyone else in there is like, we don't know what this dude's doing. You know what I mean? So it scares them. It scares them. But I will scare them again if the record store gets, which they usually get music pins, but, you know, they have Star Wars. They have Turtles. They have Weird Al coming, which I'm really excited for. If they end up getting one of Elwin's, which Patrick, if you're listening, please get it because I want to play it because no one else on the East Coast of Canada is going to get it. But if Patrick, who owns about 200 pinball machines, if he decides to get it, I don't know if he'll put it at Spin It Records. I don't know if he'll put it at Zero's. I don't know if he'll put it at the Bowling Alley. But if he puts it somewhere in Moncton, I will go play it because Keith Elwin made it so you can qualify. So instead of individually having to hit, what, those three, four, five drop targets on the left, you just hit the action buttons and they all just drop it once. And I thought that was kind of cool. So I don't know. I don't know. Do you have any final thoughts overall on the game? So let me give you, so my son Grayson, he's nine, and I promised him I would read you his review because we were watching the stream together. I love that. So I'm going to give you, so he's a only plays pinball sometimes. Sometimes he knows that I really like it. We watch some pinball streams together. He doesn't go out into the garage and play the games every day. He'll play once or twice a month. So given that, so here's nine-year-old Grayson's thoughts. Number one, display is cool because it's down low so you can see everything. you won't lose your ball while you're looking up at the big screen. I like that. Thought that was, yeah, but that was good. Then I said, so you see this guy play and that's Keith Elwin. He designed Godzilla. And Grayson says, that's cool. I like Godzilla. And I said, the other guy, now you see the other guy, that's George Gomez. He designed Deadpool. And he goes, that's cooler because Deadpool is awesome. Which we have both Godzilla and Deadpool. So there you go. Then I said, cost-wise, I said, do you know how much this pinball machine costs? And he said, no. And I said, $20,000. And he said, what? And I said, $20,000. So he said, there's not a lot going on. He said, that's a lot of money, and there's not a lot going on. Keep in mind, he's not. My man. And I said, dude, so that's roughly two to three times the cost of a Mandalorian, or he loves Stranger Things, but we don't have one, but we played it on location and he loves Stranger Things. He wants one. And he said, yeah, Stranger Things is way better than that. He said there's not even one ramp on this. So I thought that was kind of cool. He doesn't have any precursors to this. And then with the scoring reels, they opened up the machine to show the scoring reel. Yes, to prove it. Yeah, so he said, why are they opening up the machine and showing you inside? And I said, well, it's because it's got mechanical scoring reels. And he said, so everybody wants to see that? And I said, yeah, Pim Older just wanted to see the inside of the machine because of the scoring reels. So he had no clue why they were looking at that. So that's 9-year-old Grayson's roundup on Bond 60. Well, honestly, like, tell him thank you very much. He probably the youngest pin turn we ever had here on the show So that great I appreciate that I let him know He wanted to stay up and give you his thoughts himself but I told him I have to take the cliff notes But yeah I thought that was pretty insightful as a kid who likes to play a little bit. So there you go. That's the impression from the youth. Well, I love that. Honestly, when my sons were nine, I don't think they played much. Maybe the odd time if we were at like a random arcade that had one pin in the corner. I talked them into playing the oddball, but by the time that I started doing the podcast and I had pins at the house, it wasn't that hard for me to say, it's up to you guys. Would you like to go outside and cut the lawn, or do you want to play a pinball tournament with your dad? They're like, oh, I like pinball. Sure, sure, I'll go off my phone. So I would give them simple, would you like to do the dishes, or do you want to play pinball with your dad? It was always an easy choice for them. You know, I like to see. I gave them the no option. Albert's advice for fatherhood. There you go. It's not quite advice with Tim Lee, life lessons with Tim Lee, but, you know, we're going that direction. Now, I do want to talk about my tournament from last weekend briefly, and I'm going to give some shout-outs to some people who bought some coffee and other stuff since, you know, I last chatted because it has been a while since I've done a show. I know you have to work early tomorrow did you want me to let you go? no man I'll hang up okay alright hey guys you heard him I am going to keep it quick I am going to keep it brief but actually believe it or not Jonathan I got my largest pinball nerds we've got bigger orders than this but this is the largest order I've ever got from a listener of the show so Matthew K out of Colorado actually put an order in for like 200 bucks of coffee, which just blew my mind. My man, Danielle said, there's no way I'm not heat sealing all of these. If we're just sending out one or two bags, sometimes we don't heat seal it because just, you know, using that, the zip, you know, the resealable thing at the top that keeps it pretty damn fresh. But my man ordered like, unless he drinks like 10 coffees a day, my man ordered like, and I don't know, maybe he owns a little pinball cafe. That would be really rad. He didn't mention that, but I made sure I gave him, if you're going to put in a big order like that, I'm going to toss you some free stuff, including some free coffee. I think I gave him some comics, some Pimple Nerds podcast trading cards. Matthew K., thank you so much, my man. I appreciate that. Largest order we ever had. And then, of course, frequent listener of the show, Tim Lee. Tim Lee, I'm sorry it took a little bit longer to get your coffee out. The labels we got didn't look just so, and my rad, patient, kind wife told me not to call the printers and yell and scream. She decided that she was going to be like, hey guys, these labels don't look very good. So we had to wait for new labels, but we've got both Tim Lee's order. He put in a big reorder. Thank you so much, Tim Lee. And Tim Lee, I already told you, but now I'm going to tell the listeners, I'm not doing this for everybody, and on the fourth annual Nerdies, I said I would not give out a trophy anymore, or ever, for the Nerdies. I would buy you a beer if I saw you in person. But I decided, because Tim Lee put in a big order, and I was already shipping stuff to him anyways. I took something I already had in Orby's Arcade, and I stuck a big sign on it with a post-it note that said, Nerdy Award. So there you go, Tim. And I will tell you this as a hint. I hope that Tim either posts a picture or something, either to the Pimble Nerds podcast Facebook page, or maybe just sends it to me and I'll post it. I think it would be really cool if he figured out a way to use it as a topper, because this thing that I sent him from my arcade is very related to one of his newer pinball machines and he could use it in place of a topper until he gets one or just forever. I don't know. Tim, it's your award. You deserve it for your awesome Bond impression. You do whatever you want with your nerdy award. Enjoy. It's a one of a kind. He's already bragged to me about his nerdy award. Are you serious? Okay. This guy's excited. Alright. It should get there this week or so. I also wanted to give a big shout out to my buddy Eric Norwood. He doesn't listen to the show a lot but he's been on the show two or three times in the first couple hundred episodes. He helped me set up the live stream, of course, on Pimple Nerds Podcast. The Twitch channel, which is now retired, but I might start a new one eventually. He actually made a purchase from my eBay store and he went out and bought he's a big video game collector. He didn't own any, I don't know if you've seen these NES games, these Nintendo games, the Tangent ones that are like black. He bought RBI Baseball 1 from me, the original. Nice. Have you ever seen these black cartridges? There's like 10 or 15 Tangent games they're called. They weren't officially licensed by Nintendo, but they're like a black cartridge, and they're kind of sleek like a Ferrari. Anyway, yeah, he's a big video game collector. I think this man has, he probably has more in video games than even a James Bond 60th is worth. So he's got a lot of video games, and he went on there and did that, which was really nice. My buddy Matthew Megaphone actually bought, he's been on the show like five times. he actually bought the very first ever appearance of like the very first movie adaption of Star Wars in comic he bought it from me CGC 6.5 it was a couple hundred bucks I'm not going to lie and honestly it's gone up three or four times since then but it's the first appearance of Luke the first appearance of Leia the first appearance of R2D2 C-3PO Han Solo like Chewbacca like everybody it's pretty much I think it's Darth Vader's second appearance but everyone other than Darth Vader Like, it's their first appearance. And he actually bought that off me, which was really nice because it's kind of off-season right now for Angrel Packer. We don't do a lot of sales. I did want to say this weekend was my wife's birthday on February 8th. And, unfortunately, there was a giant ice storm here, which, like, a quarter of the province lost power. And, anyways, it sucked. She was supposed to go to work for the day, but that was called off. My youngest son, Owen, had a basketball tournament, which that got canceled. and it's like they're in districts right now, so they're trying to go to regionals. Unfortunately, he got to play tonight, and they're not going to regionals. They got fourth place, not third. So they don't get to go, but they still did really well. Out of, like, 25 schools, they got third. So it was great to be there and get to see that tonight. But what I was going to say is – go ahead. Down here in Tennessee, when you get snowed in and have nothing to do on your birthday, you celebrate that. Well, the problem was Danielle really wanted to go to her favorite Korean barbecue place, Mansu Korean Barbecue in Moncton. She really wanted to drop me off at Spin It Records to play pinball and go to the mall and maybe do some shopping and have a nice day. And then we got, like, 15 centimeters of snow and then 5 centimeters of ice. So, like, even, I couldn't even get out to the chickens to give chicken feed. I had to crawl. Like, there was just ice everywhere. Like, normally you can only toboggan at our house two or three times a year or, like, I don't know what you guys call it there, sledding or something. We can only do it if there's, like, just a pure sheet of ice, basically. And so we were able to do that, but, of course, the buses couldn't go to school and we couldn't get to Moncton. And I even had a toy show, which I missed, which I had tons of video games for and comic books and Pokemon cards even and sports cards and everything else. And I totally missed out on that. So what I wanted to say, because I get to bring Drop Target next weekend to Moncton, fingers crossed, it's only supposed to snow five centimeters, that should be fine. And if we're ever going centimeters, I think it's like three centimeters per inch, I don't know, something like that. So five centimeters of snow, again, not that much, but when you put ice on top of it, it makes it tricky to drive for two hours, put it that way. So anyways, I'm bringing her there. If anyone listening right now would like to help me treat her to an extra special day and even offer her the massage I really wanted to give her for her birthday, please feel free to head over to the Pimple Nerds Podcast Facebook page. I actually posted a link right to Hummingbird Soap, which is just the name of our store. You can click on it and look at all the listings, make a purchase from me. I'll throw in some fun stuff if I recognize the name or send me a Facebook message and just let me know that that was you in case I don't recognize 100% of all the listeners, right? And if not, if you're not into collectibles and toys, which you probably are because you're listening to this podcast, But if you don't want to hook yourself up with some new cards or a new video game, you can head over to Angry Alpaca on Facebook. It's written there in pink and teal. You can see it just says Angry Alpaca. When you click on it, it's very clear that it's not a sign company who owes us, who really should be paying us to use our name. But that's neither here nor there. If you click on it and you go to it and it's about coffee and tea and you see Danielle's birthday picture, which she just posted, then you know you're on the right page. Order some coffee and tea from us. Hit the Shop Now button. And if you do that, then I am designating. She doesn't even know I'm doing this. I didn't run it by her first. I'm designating every penny I get between now, the 21st, until the 25th, when we're heading up to Moncton, I'm designating that for her birthday. So I'll be able to take her out for an even nicer meal, or I'll be able to grab her a massage or something like that. So if you're listening and you want to support the show, you enjoy listening to Jay Hall and myself break down Elwynn's new pin, that would be super highly appreciated. But if not, maybe just, you know, I just appreciate that you listen, to be honest. And frankly, the fact that you're still listening even amazes me. So you should pat yourself on the back. So anyways. I'm looking at Angry Alpaca's website right now. The City Lights, which is an excellent coffee, is low stock. Yes. Order now. Yes, thank you. Order now. I did not even tell them to do that. We do. We did just get. Yes. No, that is a good one for it. I think there's only one or two bags of that left, but we have quite a bit of the East Coast Dark Roast because the local, speaking of hockey with, you know, your son playing and everything else, the local hockey arena here, it's called Curly's Canteen. Shout out to Curly. He's a really nice dude. They completely, like, use us as their coffee and tea vendors. So it's really cool to get to go see a local game of, you know, it's just, it's whatever, like two levels under the NHL. but we get to go watch that game and get to go order some of our own coffee. So, hey, if Curly's picks us, you know we've got to be good. Am I right? Yeah, that's cool. That's awesome. What I really like, too, on the Santa phone call I had with you, you sent me the picture of, like, the hologram, and I always make sure no matter who orders, I always throw a hologram in there, but you have that cool hologram. Is it on your beer fridge or something? Yeah, it's on the beer fridge. I love that. You're with all the other pinball speakers. so do now did you know that it's scratching sniff no i'm just kidding no don't either neither neither i'm just kidding no when you scratch it it smells like an em pinball machine like cigarette butts from the 70s and like i pulled it no no no it's not it's not scratching sniff that would be that you know what i'm actually going to look to see if there's some way to get um the the last thing i did want to mention i don't know if you've heard of this, you know, because you're way down there in Tennessee, right? I don't know if you've heard of this, but up here in Toronto, that's how they call it if you're back from Ontario, in Toronto, tomorrow night, Wednesday, February 22nd, Jeff Teolis is, I think he's helping organize and run this, but the man himself, Roger Sharp, is actually coming to Canada. I can't believe the man in the mustache, he's going to get some Boston cream in that mustache, a little bit of poutine, you know what's happening, a little bit of gravy, a little bit of cheese, but it's his, okay, I'm not going to call it the world premiere, but let's be honest, Canada basically is the world, no, I'm just kidding, but it's the Canadian world premiere of, you know, his movie, his pinball film, Pinball, the Man Who Saved the Game. So if you live anywhere in the greater Toronto area, I'm talking to you all, my London pinball nerd friends. Get over there. There's still tickets available. It's at www.pinballfilm.com. You can, of course, just go over to Pinball Profile on Facebook, and there's a link right there. But it's tomorrow night, and here's the part that was a surprise I just learned right now. Not only will you get a meet and greet with Roger Sharp, but it's hosted by Ed Ed Robertson. How cool is that? That's cool. It's like I've already had the pleasure of meeting Roger Sharp. He actually played, like, at the machine right beside me in A Division, which if, you know, you weren't nervous enough playing in Pemburg A Division, you have Roger Sharp right to your left and Robert Gagnon right to your right, and you're like, okay, all right, I'm really here, I'm doing this. But I've never got to meet Ed Ed Robertson, and I've been a Barenaked Ladies fan literally, you know, for two and a half decades now. So I would just be, oh, my God, it would just be incredible. Have you met him or not yet? No, no, not yet. I just love that band for, gosh, yeah, many years. Okay, sometime, J-Hall, you and I are going to go see the Barenaked Ladies. I don't care if it's halfway between here and Tennessee. I don't want you to have to travel too far. I don't want to travel too far, but we're going to meet up, and we're going to go see the man, the myth, the legend. We're going to watch him play, and maybe, just maybe, maybe, I know T.O.L.S. is friends with him. Just be like, hey, Jeff, Jonathan Hall and I would be super, you know. It literally would be the coolest thing of my life to just play a game of pinball with the guy after or before one of his shows and get to see the show. That's a dream of mine. I've gone completely off topic now. I've kept you way too long, my friend. I'm so sorry. Do you have any shout-outs you want to give or say hi to any of the other tribe members or anything like that? I feel like we're missing shout-outs or something. All my tribe members. I love each and every one of you. So, yeah, it's been a good time, Albert, and I'm super happy we got to do this. And, yeah, I mean, go out and buy Elvin's Bond 60 tomorrow. Yes, or just take a loonie or a dollar if you're in the United States of America and play it. Once it's, you know, it's not going to be tons of places, but you know where it will be? It'll probably be at MGC. It'll probably be at TPF. So you don't have to spend $20K. Just save up enough to go to a rad show this year, hang out with your friends, hang out with all the tribe members, and play a game or two. That's all you need to do. You don't need to buy every single pin that's ever created. Am I right? Yeah, it sounds like there will be a few of us at TPF, and then it sounds like Expo is going to be the spot again this year. So we'll see if we can get kicked out. We didn't manage to do that last year, but, you know, there's always 2023. Hey, you can always try again next year. You guys are probably right on that verge with the self-beer bar back there. But, yeah, you guys tried. And I can't wait to meet you and all the other tribe members. But if you know what, say it with me, my friend. Until next time, Pinball Nerds, remember to eat, sleep, and breathe. Keith Elwin's 60th anniversary pinball. You tricked me on that one.