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Episode 29 - Too... Much... Pinball...

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·2h 7m·held·Feb 27, 2017
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Pinball podcast covering Aerosmith gameplay, Alien shipping, Pinside moderation, and IFPA/Super League competitive politics.

Summary

Long-form podcast discussion covering pinball news from late February, featuring positive coverage of Aerosmith machine gameplay and Alien Pinball shipment announcement, followed by discussion of Pinside moderation issues, competitive pinball politics around the IFPA/Super League system, and community dynamics. The hosts explore tournament mechanics, forum culture problems, and the complexities of managing a growing but contentious niche community.

Key Claims

  • Aerosmith (Premium)/LE upper playfield does not disrupt ball flow significantly and the ball does not stay there long

    high confidence · Dennis discussing Aerosmith gameplay footage from Dead Flip stream; based on watching video clips of actual gameplay

  • Alien Pinball Pinball has officially shipped, with at least one machine confirmed loaded in a truck

    high confidence · Tony and Dennis discussing Alien shipment announcement; Tony notes seeing video of one machine in a truck

  • Pinside is planning a moderation crackdown on repeat troll offenders

    medium confidence · Dennis referencing a thread on Pinside about a 'great purge'; expresses skepticism about follow-through

  • IFPA changed Super League (NYC) requirements to only count players who actually show up to finals, retroactively adjusting rankings

    high confidence · Dennis explaining IFPA decision after Modern Pinball declined to require intent-declaration forms; change was retroactive

  • Super League generated disproportionate IFPA points due to massive foot traffic, giving NYC qualifiers unfair seeding advantages in state/national tournaments

    high confidence · Dennis and Tony discussing long-standing complaint about Super League inflating rankings; Dennis notes only Super League regulars qualified for NY state finals

  • Aerosmith playfield and animation design is better than initially perceived from still images and early announcements

    high confidence · Both Tony and Dennis watching Dead Flip gameplay footage and reassessing initial negative reactions from early promotional material

  • Tilt Forums has a reputation as competitive-only, limiting broader pinball discussion despite being polite and moderated well

    medium confidence · Dennis describing perception of Tilt Forums versus Pinside activity and community assumptions about what is welcome there

Notable Quotes

  • “Twilight Zone is a shoe-in. I don't see how Twilight Zone could lose to Wizard of Oz.”

    Tony @ ~8:30 — Strong prediction about 2017 Modern Widebody Tournament final four matchup, showing confident assessment of game rankings

  • “I would say arguably they're probably programmed with about the same amount of depth. But I have to go to the competitive point then. And with it just being all about multiball on Indiana Jones and only some of the modes even being worth playing, I just think Star Trek got a leg up on being better programmed.”

    Dennis @ ~12:00 — Detailed comparison of code depth in competitive context; shows how tournament meta influences game evaluation

  • “That upper play field was going to be issue-y too, but after watching them actually play, and everything said a lot better than it was originally. I would have to say I think this is a better machine than, say, KISS.”

    Dennis @ ~20:30 — Aerosmith positive re-evaluation after gameplay footage; comparison to music pin genre

  • “It's unfortunate because it is the most active pinball community... Tilt Forums is extremely polite. It's much more fun to read, but it's also a lot less active.”

    Dennis @ ~38:00 — Core tension in pinball community: Pinside dominance despite toxicity vs. Tilt Forums quality but low activity

  • “Rather than try and satisfy that, they're just going to count the finals, is what Modern said, we'll do that. So this change retroactively resulted in a lot of ranking shifts for people.”

    Dennis @ ~55:00 — Explanation of IFPA's resolution to Super League inflation problem via retroactive ranking recount

  • “You could get really nefarious and start suggesting that they were just pretending these were ghosts. I haven't seen that spelled out that anyone was claiming that, but I thought some people were dancing around that implication.”

    Dennis @ ~53:00 — Acknowledges speculation about fake league participation without direct accusation; shows community suspicion level

Entities

TonypersonDennispersonStern PinballcompanyHeighway PinballcompanyModern PinballcompanyPinsideorganizationIFPAorganizationTilt ForumsorganizationDead Flipperson|content_creator

Signals

  • ?

    product_concern: Aerosmith machine received negative first impressions from still images and early promotional material, but extensive gameplay footage from Dead Flip stream significantly improved community perception; upper playfield design proved more functional than anticipated.

    high · Dennis: 'I initially...tried not to pass too much judgment...but watching it while it played, I thought it worked really well.' Also notes animation criticism dissipated upon viewing gameplay.

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinside (primary pinball community) struggling with troll infestation and off-topic thread bloat; announcing moderation crackdown but hosts skeptical of follow-through; tension between removing problem users (who generate traffic) and maintaining community quality.

    high · Dennis describes Pinside thread purge announcement, notes backpedaling, expresses skepticism. References SkitBee and J-pop threads with 20,000+ posts where minimal content is relevant.

  • ?

    community_signal: Tilt Forums positions itself as high-quality but low-activity alternative to Pinside; reputation as competitive-only space limits broader participation; creates knowledge/discussion split in pinball community.

    high · Dennis: 'Tilt Forums is extremely polite...much more fun to read, but it's also a lot less active...you could go...once a day and probably get caught up in 15 minutes. So it's sort of pin side or bust.'

  • ?

    industry_signal: IFPA's Whopper points system vulnerability exposed by NYC's Super League league generating disproportionate points through casual/foot-traffic participants who never compete; systemic imbalance affecting seeding in national tournaments.

    high · Dennis explains Super League inflation: 'only the Super League regulars were the ones who were in the state finals for the state championship series' despite entire state participating elsewhere.

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.383

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is episode 29. It is Sunday, February 26th. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk to you about pinball and video games and no tabletop again because Man, there's a lot of pinball today. Yeah, there has been a lot of news happening over the last couple of weeks that we've been sitting on, sifting through, waiting and waiting, both forms of that word, in order to give you a very compelling episode full of drama, intrigue, and mystery.
0:47
But first, intros. Tony, what's been going on besides all of our hard work that we've been putting forth to get this episode together? Well, I have managed to find myself a new addiction. I've been playing some mobile gaming, but I've also recently been watching a Let's Play for a completely insane game called Aurora 4X. And I've just recently started my first game of Aurora 4X, which is a free-to-download game that is, it's complicated. It's a very complicated 4X space game.
1:27
It is Dwarf Fortress level complicated, if not a little beyond that. But it's very, you can do anything in it pretty much. You can design everything to be exactly what you want, so you're not just going, oh, here is a class one laser. You can make your laser have the exact range and the exact tracking speed you want. You can design your missiles to be the exact engine type you want, the exact amount of fuel, the exact amount of everything you want. It's super complicated. The learning curve is like a wall, but I'm starting to punch through it.
2:06
Wow, that sounds almost overwhelming. It is. I actually, I have been, if I had not been watching a Let's Play, I think I would have smashed into this wall and just walked away. But I'm like 19 episodes into a Let's Play, where each episode is around a half hour. So, I mean, and that gives me enough that I'm willing to, that I feel comfortable starting to play, knowing that I'm willing to be terrible at it at the beginning. but I can at least start learning, and I'm not going to be starting from scratch.
Super Leagueevent
Aerosmithgame
Alien Pinballgame
Twilight Zonegame
The Wizard of Ozgame
Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventuregame
Star Trek: The Next Generationgame
KISSgame
Game of Thronesgame
Elvisgame
Metallicagame
Red & Ted's Road Showgame
Black Holegame
Judge Dreddgame
Embryongame
  • ?

    competitive_signal: IFPA retroactively recounted Super League points by only counting players who showed up to finals; Modern Pinball declined to implement intent-verification forms, choosing finals-attendance method instead; resulted in significant ranking shifts downward for casual Super League participants.

    high · Dennis: 'IFPA said...fine. And they not only are doing that going forward but they went back and only counted the instances of the number of people showing up to the finals.'

  • $

    market_signal: Hosts discuss music-themed pins (Aerosmith, KISS, Metallica) as separate category with different expectations than thematic pinball; theme-driven by music rather than narrative plot creates different design constraints and player expectations.

    medium · Tony: 'music pens are their own separate little thing I don't expect the stuff out of a music pen that I would expect out of an actual machine.'

  • ?

    product_launch: Highway Pinball's Alien Pinball officially entered production/shipping phase after extended development delays; at least one unit confirmed shipped in truck, but unclear if rollout will exceed single-unit batches.

    high · Tony: 'Highway Pinball's Alien Pinball has been announced as finally shipping.' Dennis notes one machine in truck video, expresses cautious optimism.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Star Trek TNG and Indiana Jones pinball machines compared as roughly equal in code depth, but Star Trek edges ahead due to shot variety mandates and competitive viability of more modes; Dennis prefers Star Trek's shooting feel and ball feeds.

    medium · Dennis: 'I would say arguably they're probably programmed with about the same amount of depth. But...with it just being all about multiball on Indiana Jones...Star Trek's got a leg up.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Aerosmith's ball lock mechanism praised for functional design reminiscent of Scared Stiff; described as better executed than KISS demon head or comparable to Metallica's hammer lock; toy integration and target appeal higher than peers.

    medium · Dennis: 'I like the ball lock in the system...where it's laid out, reminds me mostly of Scared Stiff...looks like it played out pretty well versus...Elvis.'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Aerosmith shifted from cautious/negative community sentiment based on early promotional material to significantly improved reception after Dead Flip gameplay footage; animation and playfield layout reassessed as competent.

    high · Dennis: 'I'm a lot happier with this machine now than I was when I saw the original clips.' Tony concurs after watching gameplay.

  • ?

    content_signal: Extended gameplay stream (Dead Flip/Twitch) providing several hours of actual machine footage appears to reverse negative community sentiment more effectively than promotional stills or early announcements.

    medium · Both hosts note watching gameplay footage changed their perception; Dennis: 'watching it while it played, I thought it worked really well.'

  • ?

    event_signal: 2017 Modern Widebody Tournament proceeding through final four with all higher seeds advancing as expected; final four features top 4 Pinside-ranked machines (Twilight Zone, Wizard of Oz, Indiana Jones, Star Trek TNG).

    high · Dennis: 'everything that was higher seed advanced...most of these votes were not particularly close this time.' Final four seeding matches Pinside Top 4.

    • 2:44
    Cool. Anything else? Other than that, not really. I've just been listening to some audio books and getting stuff ready for starting to study for my big test at the end of the month. All right. Well, I haven't been doing a whole lot. I've been real busy at work. We're having phone system problems for the last three weeks, which I'm the tech department. We have less than 10 people. So I function as the tech department, but I'm not trained in tech, and I'm very much not trained in telephony. So that has been a nightmare where I keep thinking things are solved and then they're not solved. And so I've progressively had to go up and up and up the chain of aid. This cost us quite a bit of money. So very frustrating. So I'm glad I'm not dealing with any phones this weekend. It's just recording issues.
    3:30
    Telephony. I like that. That's a fun word. Yeah. I don't know why I used that instead of telephone system. I think that's just what they branded it as, so I just remembered. But in terms of more enjoyable things, I've been doing some more Overwatch, as usual. I started up Gears of War 4 in co-op mode, so I've been playing through that story. I never finished it on single player. I shouldn't say, like, I gave up. I just got busy and quit working on it. So I'm almost as far along in co-op as I was in single player at this point. and then finally I did go and last week put together a brief video of Superman gameplay pinball, Superman pinball from Atari and commentated it I had the glass off to avoid any glare so it's kind of hard to hear but I will have a link in the show notes to the video, it's about five minutes long and I did do pretty much all of the shots in the game on that playthrough so it shows the scoring strategies and such that they're not all that complex because it's a game from the 70s. But there were only a few videos I saw online, and most of them were just kind of quiet or showing off restore work and stuff and not really talking about scoring strategy. So I figured, eh, I'll go ahead and throw one together. Well, intros are done, so let's get going. As we noted at the beginning of this episode, it is a smorgasbord of material, especially on the pinball side. It has seemed like we are drowning in news. But before we get into the news, let's go ahead and get the next stage of our 2017 Modern Widebody Tournament out of the way.
    5:07
    So for those that don't remember, we are wrapped up with round three at this point. There were no surprises. So everything that was higher seed. You mean there was nothing? We didn't have a tie, we didn't have another coin flip, and we didn't have games that should have been completely wiped out. Go ahead. No, no. Now, some may feel that some of these higher-seeded games should have been completely wiped out by this point, but they continue to linger, and most of these votes were not particularly close this time. So Twilight Zone did beat Roadshow with 77.5% of the vote. Wizard of Oz did beat Black Hole with 70% of the vote. Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure did beat Judge Dredd with 57.5% of the vote. That's actually the closest. Well, that's the only one I thought was an actual fight going into this one. I thought that the others were all going to be exactly how they ended up. I thought Indiana Jones and Judge Dredd might be a fight, though. Yeah, I leaned. I agree. Let me see. I did think there was a slight possibility that Black Hole may have put up a decent fight against Wizard of Oz, if only for any of the video game listeners who maybe only know Pinball Arcade might not have had experience with Wizard of Oz, but they definitely would have had experience with Black Hole. I thought perhaps, but I think most of those listeners who might be more video game inclined probably don't go and vote in the poll anyway. because our poll votes tend to be significantly lower than the plays that we actually have for the episodes, as you'd expect. And last matchup was Star Trek The Next Generation, and it did beat Embryon with 82.1% of the vote. That was actually the most lopsided one, which I don't think was particularly surprising. Yeah, no, not at all. So we're in the final four now. Round four is the final four. And these, incidentally, are the top one, two, three, and four seeds of widebodies on the Pinside site. So, you know what? Maybe Pinside actually got something right for once. I know it's hard to believe, but that's the way it's looking. So, there are only two matchups.
    7:34
    We got the one seed, which is Twilight Zone, is against the four seed, Wizard of Oz. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tony? Twilight Zone is a shoe-in. I don't see how Twilight Zone could lose to Wizard of Oz. It's not even possible.
    7:51
    I mean, let me rephrase. It is actually possible. It doesn't seem believable to me for Twilight Zone to lose to Wizard of Oz.
    8:01
    I agree with you. About the only way I can envision it is if a lot of new-in-box buyers of Wizard of Oz feel, this is going to sound somewhat derogatory, so I'll apologize up front, that feel the need to justify their purchase and thus say that it is the better game, might say that over Twilight Zone. And to be fair, I think you could make a reasonable argument that Wizard of Oz is a much better coded game than Twilight Zone. Yeah, I think you can make a very good argument for that. That said, I would rather play Twilight Zone than Wizard of Oz. On the other hand, I would have rather played Roadshow than Twilight Zone. Right. Well, and having played Twilight Zone and Wizard of Oz, I agree with you. I actually am more interested in playing Twilight Zone than I am Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz just never really clicked for me.
    8:55
    But there are some legitimate and maybe less legitimate paths I can envision for people to actually rally to Wizard of Oz. But, no, I think Twilight Zone wins, and I think it wins with at least 60% of the vote. Yeah, that would be my assumption.
    9:10
    So the other matchup is the number two seed, Indiana Jones, The Pinball Adventure, against the three seed, Star Trek Next Generation.
    9:18
    Now this, I think, is going to be an actual tough fight. I don't know. I honestly, I don't even know who I'm going to vote for in this situation, because they're both good themes and they're both fun-ish tables. I mean, it's, I don't know.
    9:40
    Yeah, vote-wise, this one I believe could definitely go either way. For me, it's not close. I think Star Trek has a lot more shot variety that's mandated versus Indiana Jones. So for me, I'm going to put it down to code. And while I don't love the code on either of them, I think Star Trek's got more depth.
    9:59
    I would say arguably they're probably programmed with about the same amount of depth. But I have to go to the competitive point then. And with it just being all about multi-ball on Indiana Jones and only some of the modes even being worth playing, I just – I think Star Trek's got a leg up on being better programmed. I also think it's a lot – but I'm biased as well because I think Star Trek's a lot more fun to shoot.
    10:23
    I think it feeds better. Every time I've played Indiana Jones, I can't even say if it's been fully working. I think it's sort of clunky. I actually really like the theme for Indiana Jones but I also Next Generation is my Star Trek so the call outs and everything just work better for me for that but you know in terms of the broad pinball playing public yeah there's a reason why they're the number 2 and the number 3 it could go either way I think that there will be less than 10% difference between them but I can't say which one will win I can say I'll vote for Star Trek, but I don't know which will win. Yeah, I'm going to have to think about it. I haven't decided yet which one I'm voting for.
    11:11
    It'll probably be Star Trek, but I don't know. I've got to think about it. I've got a fair number of plays on both of them, but it's tough because I enjoy them both. Well, you think on it then. And while you're thinking on it, we're going to go ahead and move on. The show notes will have a link to the round for voting, so feel free to just click there. Google sign-in is required, and may the best machine win. Or machines, because we're still down to two. Next episode will be our wrap-up on votes, so that'll be nice.
    11:45
    Errol Smith. We're going to start with some of the more positive news, and then we're going to gradually decline into the more negative on the pinball stuff, because it's been a mix. It's not all been a bad week, or two weeks, I should say. One of the things I thought we should go ahead and hit on is that there has been Aerosmith gameplay featured.
    12:06
    The Twitch feed, Dead Flip, and we'll have a link to the YouTube capture of what was streamed on Twitch in the show notes. They went ahead and they showed a premium version of the Aerosmith pin that is coming out, and they spent a couple hours on it. I didn't watch live, but I did get a chance to catch some of the YouTube clip portions.
    12:31
    Yeah, I was the same way. I didn't get a chance to watch live, but I watched some of the video afterwards. And I have to say, I'm a lot happier with this machine now than I was when I saw the original clips that were released and the original announcement stuff.
    12:51
    Me too. I initially, you know, I tried not to pass too much judgment initially. But, of course, I saw a lot of other people passing judgment based off of what was said. But overall, I think it looks like that it's a lot of fun. I like the animation. That was something I'd seen a lot of people criticize was the way the animations they felt looked. But watching it while it played, I thought it worked really well. I knew the game, you know, like the play field stuff looked good. So that wasn't any surprise to me. The big thing that was a surprise to me is that the upper play field on the Premium and LE editions, it looks a lot better than I thought it would be when I read about it and when I first saw the still images. It doesn't look like it disrupts the ball flow, which is my big gripe with Game of Thrones Premium. The ball isn't up there very long, which I think is good because it's just a one-flipper thing. and it doesn't seem like you go up there all that often, which also feeds into having good flow. I guess if it's not a feature that's used that much, then maybe that means it's not something that you really are going to evaluate very heavily in terms of are you going to buy a pro or are you going to buy a premium? But I just thought it looked like it played out pretty well versus, say, the last one flipper upper playfield stern I really remember playing was Elvis, and I didn't really like the upper play field on Elvis, but this one I thought it looked good. I thought overall it looked like a pretty good playing machine. Yeah, I agree with you because I'd seen, like I said, that original video that was released and all the talk and this and that. I felt like that upper play field was going to be issue-y too, but after watching them actually play,
    14:41
    and everything said a lot better than it was originally. I would have to say I think this is a better machine than, say, KISS. I would say you'd definitely rather take this over a KISS, given the choices.
    14:56
    Until I actually get a play on it, I don't know how much it'll be compared like the other music pens or compared to something like Ghostbusters. But it definitely looks a lot better than I expected originally. yeah I mean hands on will be necessary to know kind of I think instinctively people are going to want to rank it amongst the realm of music pens because it is a music pen even I have even that's how my first thought when I looked at it was comparing it to KISS because I know it's probably not real but for me and I think for a lot of people there is a music pens are their own separate little thing I don't expect the stuff out of a music pen that I would expect out of an actual machine. But at the same time, I don't expect a normal machine to do the things that I would expect a music pen to do. Yeah, I think it just has to do with how the theme has to be handled is probably what it comes down to, because it's basically being unified by music of a band instead of revolving around a plot. I'm not aware of a music pen that actually plays a plot out. So I guess that's probably the difference. What I do like about it is I like the ball lock in the system. I think a lot of people will look at that and they'll go, okay, this is just from Indiana Jones 4 pinball. That's the basic mechanism, which I agree it probably is. It, though, where it's laid out, reminds me mostly of Scared Stiff, actually. But regardless, I think it looks really cool as a toy. I think it looked like a fun lock to use. whereas you brought up Kiss. I'm not a big fan of the Demon Head ball lock in Kiss. I think it's kind of clunky, which overall I like Kiss's layout, but it doesn't impress me as much. Like Metallica had a really cool ball lock with a hammer thing, for example, and the Snake was kind of like the Demon Head, and I wasn't a big fan of trying to lock balls there. This looks a little more like an appropriate target to me that I would actually enjoy shooting at. But it depends on your taste. Yeah, see, I think the hammer is a great ball lock, and I actually prefer the snake to the demon head.
    17:13
    I think it feels better. I don't know why, but just on the shots it feels better. But, yeah, it's one of those things that KISS never really worked for me. It's not a bad game. I'll play it, but it's not a game where I will go and, you know, just keep hitting it. Like, I'll keep playing Metallica. Speaking of games, though, there's some other pretty positive news, and that is Highway Pinball's Alien Pinball has been announced as finally shipping. So, hooray! Yay! Now, I did see, has there been more than just the one shipped? I remember seeing one shipped. Right. And I don't know. That's why it's only a sort of hooray and not like an applause. Yeah. Last I saw, it was just the one. So, you know, whether or not. I saw that video clip or pictures or whatever it was where it was just one machine loaded in a giant box truck. And I was like, that's kind of underwhelming. yeah I yes I agree and I only want to note it because the project is so far behind that anything shipping I think is going to be seen as as a positive and people would want to know that at least something has actually finally I guess officially gone out that isn't just purportedly a prototype so yeah I don't I don't know I don't know much about why there have been so many delays. It seems like everything is just sort of a couple weeks off, and then something else seems to crop up. And honestly, it's not a machine that I'm tracking very closely. As we had noted in past episodes, we don't know anyone who's getting one of these. So it's, you know, we're kind of having to sort of follow it vicariously because it's just, you know, I'm hoping we'll get to see it at Texas, I believe. Yeah, that's my hope. So maybe we'll have some more news then, but they made a big deal about announcing that it was shipping, so we're just providing that. They have officially declared that it has shipped, so I guess as far as they're concerned, they're at final state, and they're rolling them out now, and I hope that it's going to be more than one per truck eventually, but that's what we know. I mean, I know it looks like there might be some more out there from what I've looked at, but I haven't really followed the stuff online. I don't really get on, like, Pennside or any of the pinball forums very much, and when I do, I have to go check myself because I think I might have caught cancer.
    20:09
    But I haven't seen a whole lot about it. Well, I didn't have this as a discussion item, but there's not really anything else to say on Alien at this time. There is a thread on Pinside that is describing a great purge that will be happening to deal with the trolls.
    20:27
    Really? Yeah. That could be a very useful thing to happen to that website. I'm skeptical that it will actually follow through, given how the thread is going. It sounded initially like they were going to crack down pretty hard, and then it seemed like there was a lot of backpedaling. and honestly many of the people posting in the thread are the ones that I would assume need to be purged. So it's, and I don't know, it runs into that whole issue of, I've seen this with other sites that have kind of grown and so they're sort of mid-sized, I guess I'd describe them, mid-sized communities where you're on the cusp of basically being able to be a professional, like you could run, and they do, Pinsight is run by people who do it as their full-time job, They make enough money to be able to accomplish that. But you get into that weird growing state where there are questions about how you're doing your moderation and how your super users are treated on the community. And I think it can be very difficult sometimes to say, well, let's eliminate these people. They're the problem. But those are also the people that are driving most of the traffic. And so it's like, well, your post count will plummet if you get rid of them. And you have to reach that point where you're willing to do it. But it's a small hobby also, so I think a lot of the moderators and or the owners know some of these people who are the trolls, and then that gets extra difficult when it can't be impersonal. Yeah. But anyway, no, overall, I think it's a positive development. As we've noted many times, I basically almost refuse to link in the show notes to pin-side threads. They're just too... Setting aside the trolls, the off-topic stuff is really what needs to be dealt with. In my opinion, someone should be going into things like the SkitBee thread, the Jpop thread, and just deleting mass amounts of posts. I mean, when you've got over 20,000 posts and not even 1 20th of them are relevant to anything meaningful, it's just people opining. those are not useful resource threads but they are treated like they are actual resource threads obviously other threads are going to be discussions where people are just going to be giving opinions you see it's really really hard to impose a structure on just a community like that it makes it very difficult when you're told keep everything in this one thread all the J-pop stuff is supposed to be in the J-pop thread it's a nightmare no sane person would want to read it I have tried to read that over the last couple weeks with everything going on no sane person can read it And it is amazing how you can skip two full pages, and they're still arguing about the same three people arguing about the same things that have nothing at all to do with pinball, let alone the game. Oh, yeah. That you're talking about. No, it's that Pinside struggled with things of this nature for a really long time. And it's unfortunate because it is the most active pinball community. I follow tilt forums as well, but there is a stigma is probably not the right word I'm looking for. But there's sort of a reputation that tilt forums is for competitive pinball talk. And other types of pinball talk come across as not being welcome there. Or that's the assumption because you look and all the threads have to do with whopper points and tournaments. And so I think that limits what people are willing to discuss on there. which is interesting because Tilt Forms is extremely polite. It's much more fun to read, but it's also a lot less active. So you could go to Tilt Forms once a day and probably get caught up on everything in 15 minutes. And that, I mean, read all the new posts and all the threads. It's that limited. So it's sort of pin side or bust if you want any sort of in-depth large group discussion. but as you've noted there is so much white noise that trying to get to anything meaningful becomes very challenging in any of the active threads so anyway they've announced intentions to do something on the trolling side specifically and we'll see I think they're planning to focus on people that they've had to moderate to temp or permanently ban out of particular threads that are repeat offenders and we'll see if it happens I don't know But I know a lot of it's been driven by some of that stuff you saw in these more recent threads, and it has really put off the operators of the site. So I'm hoping they follow through, but seeing, as we say, is believing. Yeah, I mean, there is some good stuff on Pennside, don't get me wrong. It's just certain threads are cancer. You've got to stay away from them. It's terrible. it's unfortunate because some of those are the uh the those tend to be the most active threads so yeah and often on the topics you you want but um speaking of tilt forums let's go ahead and transition to our official uh fourth pinball topic which would be the death of super league which we don't talk competitive pinball very much on this show other than mentioning when we go to tournaments on occasion. Yeah, that was in the wood. Yeah. Well, we're not high-level players. We basically, Tony and I don't participate in leagues because of when they're run. So we do the tournaments kind of as our social pinball time, and we don't practice to the same degree that the try-hards do. So we don't stack up score-wise to them. And for me, that's fine. I just go because I want to. Yeah, I go because it's fun, and you get to hang out with friends and this and that. I am not a world-class high-level player. That's why I decided not to join the big tournament at TPF, because I know I'm not going to finish any higher than in the 100 somewhere, and I'd rather use my time for other stuff in that situation. But that being said, I do rely upon the IFPA and its Whopper points because it lets me see if I'm getting any better. So I like a lot of their stats, and I like the tracking, and I like earning points because it's fun. I have a competitive part of me as well that does like to try and win when I am there. Even if I have the disadvantage, I still want to win. So this was interesting to me because I had been aware of Super League for quite a while. So for those that aren't aware, Super League is, and there are a lot of leagues that can call themselves and do call themselves Super League, but Super League is very specific to a league that operates in New York City. And the issue has always been, the complaint from outsiders has always been that Super League has so much foot traffic, the number of participants that are actually essentially walking through the league, so to speak, is so massive compared to anywhere else in the world that it breaks the system. It breaks the Whopper point system because they earn so many points, those that actually go and compete in the finals, even if they're not particularly great pinball players, that they have a lopsided disproportionate status as being a significant force to be reckoned with. and it kind of manifests in the state finals, for example. It would be a case in point. In New York, my understanding is, as of like the last year, only the Super League regulars were the ones who were in the state finals for the state championship series, like what I did in Kansas, where I'm not, you know. Yeah, they were scraping the bottom of the barrel when they brought me in. But in New York, if you play anywhere else in New York State, Even if you play in New York City and you don't participate in Super League, you wouldn't have enough points.
    28:26
    That's been a – and obviously that's a state issue that doesn't really matriculate to anything else. But other people have complained over time because this sort of ranking advantage has other implications in other high-ranking tournaments where seeding is affected based off of your IFPA rank and such. Because then you get first dibs, choice of machine. It has an impact on the competitive side, so people have been kind of sensitive about it. Yeah, it's one of those things that, I mean, it's got a pretty decent-sized impact, and I know they have been making adjustments to how the IFPA points are done over the last several years, trying to weaken it. Super Leagues, the way Super League pushes things over, because I know they changed it so you had to have at least five tournaments under your belt before your points would start counting to add or remove from points to a tournament's ranking and stuff like that. But that didn't really seem to change very much. No, no. The issue for that example that you brought up, you need five lifetime games before you add to the grand total of the point pool, a bonus, so to speak, was that most of the Super League qualifiers, they met it. They have played in more than five leagues or tournaments or whatnot because a lot of this foot traffic is not tourists. It's just New York residents, but they don't really care about competing. And a lot of leagues aren't really all about the competition. But they're in it all the time, but they're not in the finals was kind of the thing. So, yeah, they tweaked that. They tweaked rules about having to have a certain number of games as in-person live match play events, which then they had to do certain things to protect pin golf because pin golf doesn't meet that same criteria because of how the holes are played. I mean, they've done a lot of changes to what counted for points. And a lot of tournaments had to respond to that because they didn't want to lose what points they were worth by being like, well, here's a really fun event, but now we don't want to run it because it's not worth as much Whopper points as if we do a more traditional match play, head-to-head style format.
    30:45
    The change, let me just go ahead and get the change out of the way real quick. What they ended up doing is they contacted Modern Pinball, which is the host of Super League, and indicated that they wanted evidence. IFPA basically wanted evidence that the people who were in qualifying were meaning to play in the Super League. This has always sort of been the issue. So I believe what happened is a form that's used in another quote-unquote Super League out of Chicago was provided to Modern, and it was basically, you just need to get the people who are playing to sign this and say, yes, I know I am playing in this season of the league, and gather those so that they can be provided the IFPA.
    31:34
    And I believe Modern Pinball's response was, that isn't really feasible for us. So moving forward we just count the people who actually show up to the finals as being the ones that have essentially agreed to that because we can verify that for you And so IFPA said that fine And they not only are doing that going forward but they went back and only counted the instances of the number of people showing up to the finals Because the suspicion of the outside community is that a lot of these people may not know that they're playing in a qualifying thing, or maybe these people aren't always showing up. You could get really nefarious and start suggesting that they were just pretending these were ghosts. I haven't seen that spelled out that anyone was claiming that, but I thought some people were dancing around that implication. But the bottom line is a lot of people who quote unquote league with Super League are not ever showing up to the finals. And so they're not actually trying to win is the thought. And that's okay. But they just, because of that, IFPA decided we want proof that they're actually meaning to be in the league even though they never come to finals. And rather than try and satisfy that, they're just going to count the finals, is what Modern said, we'll do that. So this change retroactively resulted in a lot of ranking shifts for people, most of which unsurprisingly fell quite a bit.
    33:05
    Not the really, really strong. The Super League has some really, really strong players. Yes, it does. The scores didn't change much. But those that really get all their points from Super League, yeah, they kind of fell through the floor. Now, this didn't affect anything like the state championship and stuff. Those things are sort of frozen once they're set. So post-changes don't have an impact on that. But this had an impact on the world rankings. There were people who moved up significantly because the Super League people moved down, because it all interrelates.
    33:36
    Now, because we don't live in New York, I don't really care what goes on with Super League. but what I thought would be sort of an interesting short discussion we could have is do you think the IFPA will change any of the other changes that they've done in the past to try and break the Super League back?
    33:58
    I don't... And should they? I guess that's sort of the two-parter because they've done a lot of things like the five game thing, the we want 50% of the people to be involved in head-to-head. You had to have a certain number of qualifiers qualify for finals. These were all things designed to destroy Super League's massive accumulation of points. And none of them really worked. But they still stand. Those changes still stand. I don't know that the five game rule is a big deal, all in all. I mean, I don't see where it's necessarily going to change anything by getting rid of it. Because I know just from all the tournaments we attend is that it's not uncommon to see people show up for one or maybe two tournaments and then you don't ever see them again.
    34:48
    But some of the other changes, I could possibly see them being rolled back if they're causing bigger effects. I know the head-to-head play requirement has gotten rid of some stuff because I know there's a lot of people who really enjoy stuff like the Penn Golf and the other games that aren't really about the head-to-head, they're more interesting, and those have been weakened out. I could see that one getting rolled back. I'm really more interested in the fact that not only did they apply this going forward, that they applied it retroactively, because that was a surprise to me when I first read about it. Yeah, I think part of the issue there is the way the system's designed, it kind of has to do it retroactively, because of how it all interrelates. except I could have seen them saying we weren't going to go back, obviously, and say, all right, we're going to say only these finals, only these finals. So that aspect definitely was, I thought, was interesting that they said, no, we're going to go ahead and do that, at least all the way through the years that are still on your record because you kind of carry a three-year rolling balance of your scores. Well, yeah, that makes sense. If that's how the algorithm works, There wasn't a way to change that without making major changes to the algorithm. That totally makes sense.
    36:10
    But otherwise, it just seems a little weird to go back and retroactively change somebody's stuff like that. Yeah. In terms of the question I posed on IFPA undoing some of their changes, I don't expect them to undo any of them. I think they're pretty happy with what they've done. I would like to see maybe a little bit tweaked. Like, I don't have a problem with the five-lifetime game thing. I think that makes sense. I do think – I know they basically put in an exception of sorts for pin golf. They've structured to let pin golf go, but I'm not a huge fan of mandating the head-to-head play thing. I get it. That's the formats I most play in. it's just I think it kind of puts a damper on trying to be creative with some of the other concepts like maybe pinballing or things where it's like you're trying to gear things towards a certain final structure so that you still maximize your whoppers I just don't really like formats having to be set to maximize your whoppers the only other thing I can think of is I know the IFPA has an option for privately hosted pinball things and I don't know I don't think this was done for Super League, but it is one that I noted, and it always kind of frustrated me, and that was, you're allowed to have a private location competition, but you have to have at least 16 people for it to be worth points, and I've always thought, yeah, that really kills the idea of doing a small tournament. You basically have to bring a huge, I mean, 16 is a lot of people. I always thought that it would be nice, I get the idea of wanting to control private events because you want this to be open for people to earn points. I'd actually rather them, instead of saying, like, you can have four private events a year, do something where you could just say, like, there will be one event. You can have one private event a year, but the number of people playing doesn't matter because then it can't really be – I don't think it can be milked for points at that point. But if people, like, wanted to do a birthday thing and have their local tourney players that they know come, A lot of people probably can't score 16. I mean, we could in this area, but I don't know about in some of the other locations. I see the public ones are lucky when they break 10. So I just, you know. Well, like throwing a party at your place would be 16 people at your house would be insane.
    38:41
    Yeah, we don't want them here. or the whole, but you still want enough that you avoid the concern of, you know, you and me and two other people get together and we have a tournament that counts and we have one every week and it's always there and we always, so we always, so it might not be worth a lot of points, but when you're kicking out, you know, 52 of them a year or however many you do or you get a couple machines and a couple of roommates and you have a tournament every single day yeah you have the 365 things so right right and that's where i i think the i get what they were trying to do they try they decided to control it by the attendance count and i i just my own personal take when i saw that was i i thought it would have been probably more accessible for that. The goal is to grow pinball. There are people I know that I could host for. They'll never go and play publicly, though. At least not until they try it. And that, you know, if you want to get them in the system and show that they're ranked and all that, it might have been better to control the number of events a host is allowed to do. A private host sort of thing. Either bar it by the host, bar it by the location, tie the two together.
    40:03
    And because if you could only do like one or two a year, then there's no risk of point inflation because of shenanigans. You just can't run enough events. Not to mention that their Whopper counts are going to be smaller. They're less than 16 people.
    40:18
    Especially if they're all unranked. So this is the thought I had, but it's not a big deal to me because, I mean, in my case, it would be very difficult to do much. But I've met other people in the area who have decent-sized collections that I could So you wouldn't want 16 people in their house, but might, you know, be interested in having eight.
    40:38
    Yeah, no, I can definitely see that. And then also it's going to vary by location, because I know some places might have a whole lot of collectors, but no actual public places to play. So if you're in a place like that and you can only count one private location a year, that would hurt there too. So there still has to be a way to get some of those private location plays in. Right, right.
    41:11
    This is one of those things where it's just going to be there. It'll probably just stay like it is and things will just be played with as issues come to a point where they feel like they need to be dealt with. I agree.
    41:25
    Okay. Let's go ahead and hop to our next topic. This is where we're going to start descending into the negativity, the negativity of the podcast. We can't. Yeah, feels bad, man, but what can you do?
    41:38
    We're going to start with skit B. That's right. This is the Kevin Kulik debacle involving the Predator pinball machines that we've been touching on more recently. The third hearing has occurred. I do have a link to the hearing audio in the show notes. I also have a link to a Skip Bee research folder. We had research folders for everything else, so now there's a Skip Bee research folder. A lot of people have been kindly providing legal documentation on PennSide, so I've taken some of the – I haven't taken all of them. I've taken the more interesting documents that I think are relevant and put them into that folder so you can just go and look at the PDFs to your heart's content and not have to sift through yet one of those massive, horribly derailed, oftentimes disorganized threads that we talked about earlier. In terms of what's happened, there wasn't a lot in the third hearing. It's only about a 30-minute hearing, and Kevin wasn't present for this hearing. As we had noted the last time we talked about this, the bankruptcy is not happening, But the trustee is still involved in trying to gather data and information so that creditors can be paid.
    42:53
    So what has happened since the prior hearing is the check copies that the trustee was after did arrive, but they only just arrived before the hearing. So he still had not had an opportunity to review those. So that's part of the reason why the hearing was so short is because he had to essentially ask for another hearing so he would have enough time to go over those checks. the attorney for Kevin, and Kevin is the owner of Skit B, suggested that Kevin might not be able to produce any of the other requested items because his trustee noted other than the checks that he had just gotten, he didn't get anything else. So the lawyer was admitting that Kevin is pretty much working from memory, that he kept terrible records, and it just may not be physically possible to produce any of the other requests. the judge has expressed concern namely at the large sums of money that were shown in the records already reviewed by the trustee that kevin had been pulling out of atm machines these were amounts that are not not what the job judge had referred to as nominal walking around money these were there were atm withdrawals in the thousands that were done pimping ain't easy you gotta have flash money, man. You know, it has been over a decade since I used an ATM machine, so I don't know how much you can take out of them anymore. Back in the day, I thought a lot of them had limits, so you couldn't get more than like $300 or $600.
    44:24
    That's an adjustment I think most places let you set on your individual account. Okay. Makes sense. And I imagine now that more and more people just rely on ATMs as their way to access bank cash, that they wouldn't raise those limits. But so aside from that, a couple other interesting. Well, one other interesting thing beyond that, the next hearing is scheduled for March 3rd. So when we do our next episode, we may have more audio if we're lucky. So yes, but but the the trustee has indicated in the hearing that just had happened that he wants the experts of dangerous IP. because it could have value to try and help with recovery for the creditors. And I don't think we've really ever touched on it, but while Predator was kind of in quote-unquote production, Kevin had also been working on another pinball machine concept called Experts of Dangerous. It's essentially Mythbusters. It had, and I believe there is legal licensing that is actually held. That one was worked out. They had the two MythBuster hosts at a pinball show where that was announced. So they were definitely on it, in on it, but it's based on them, not on the show specifically. So it's not licensed as MythBusters, licensed as Experts of Dangerous, but it's them being the MythBusters, if you can follow.
    45:49
    It's all about cheaper licensing. Sure, because they just had to get the two hosts. but people know them and since an IP arrangement is in hand the trustee does say that this is one of those things that may actually be of value and it should now belong to the creditors not to Kevin anymore because this actually was the legitimate IP he secured so I've seen some of the playfield art for Exports of Danger so I don't really know anything about it other than I'd always been aware that it, at least back in 2015, I was aware that it existed in some form, but everything was all about Predator for obvious reasons.
    46:31
    Anyway, those are sort of the latest. There have been a few other things, legal documents that don't relate specifically to Kevin himself, but the trailer that he purchased for his, or was claimed that he purchased for his mother. That has been awarded by default. The owner did not come into court and defend against the claim that it should go to the trustee, so it gets to go to the trustee. A similar thing happened with another individual, I don't recall the name, I believe it's one of the documents though, in the research folder I mentioned earlier, who had I believe been suspected of running a route for Kevin, Like, he was the one collecting the money from the machines and such, but the money was the machines of Kevin. A whole bunch of inventory. I think something on the order of $60,000 to $70,000. That, again, was awarded by default. They didn't go and contest it, so the trustee wins. That's how it works. So, yeah, there have been – because there have been some other parties besides Kevin Kulik that the trustee is going after. all of these are essentially tied to the grounds that they were paid with predator money and they shouldn't have been paid. And some of that could get really interesting because it includes the people who worked for Skit B. Because Kevin has claimed that there weren't employee arrangements. There are not actual employees. As such, the trustee is claiming, okay, any money they got, these were illicit gifts because they didn't actually work for him because there's no W-9s or anything. So that could be interesting because some of those people, if they actually were paid for working on the machine, may try and contest because they thought they were employees. I don't know. It's too early to really say on it. But there have been a slew of legal claims against other parties besides Kevin at this point in an attempt to pay back the creditors.
    48:32
    Yeah, that's one of those things that we were kind of all expecting to happen. or at the very least I was expecting to happen, especially once they dropped the bankruptcy and that they were going to start seizing known assets and tracking stuff down as they could to try and get back whatever money they could, obviously.
    48:54
    And I think the fact that they're not even contesting this stuff means that I think pretty much any fight he was trying to put up is done. I could be wrong. I could be completely wrong, but it feels to me like he took his shot at getting to hold on to everything and now is just doing everything he can to stay out of jail. Yeah, that could be. I think it could get interesting if some of the, I mean, how all these other people will react to the documentation.
    49:27
    I definitely think that when push comes to shove, they're not going to sacrifice themselves for Kevin. I never would have suspected that they would. some of these sums are pretty large so it could be but I mean if for example you were just helping operate a bunch of machines that were actually owned by him giving all of those up wouldn't be a big deal to you if they weren't really yours and you're like yeah they're not mine so they can go just like these purported employees though I don't know I mean if they also don't have any documentation where they can point to where they thought that they were employees you know that could really sting if they're asked to pay back 10 grand. I mean, not everyone just has 10 grand lying around. Even if they weren't supposed to have it, it's probably been spent. Well, that's one thing. If you're doing work as an employee but you're not an employee, you don't get hit with a 1099 like you're a contract employee. You don't have W-9s filed. You don't have all the actual taxes filed. are you an employee or are you just getting, what's the phrase I'm looking for? Is it one of those under-the-table cash-type deals? And in this case, it actually comes back and bites you. Right, right. And I think at best, that's what it was. At worst, it's what the trustee suspects, and that is he was sheltering money, handing it to people, either that they were going to give it back to him at a later date, like after he got through bankruptcy, or just giving it to them because he knew he couldn't have it anymore, and they're his friends.
    51:01
    Who knows? Who knows, but it's interesting. Yeah, it's definitely going to be something to see how that ends up turning out. I mean, I would think if they were sheltering the money, that money's still going to be there. But if it was money he gave to them, and this is another thought that will come up with something we'll talk about more later, is when it comes up to, like, the taxes and employment and such. I mean, how exactly, if you're working as a contractor, but you receive, instead of payment, you're receiving goods as your payment, I mean, is that still something that's taxable? How is it taxable? How do you figure those taxes? How do you pay those taxes? Stuff like that. Like, if I helped, you know, just per se, somebody work on a car, I fixed somebody's car for them and in return they gave me stuff so it was like a barter economy type thing that's one thing that's off the books and it's just like oh here's half of a cow for helping me fix my car type thing that's kind of a barter economy thing which wouldn't as far as I know be something I wouldn't have to go and report to the IRS that oh yeah I got part of a cow for fixing a car where if you go yeah, yeah, I'll help you troubleshoot that problem. Oh, here's $10,000. Oh, thanks. I mean, that's a totally different thing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know well enough about how the tax would be if you were actually being paid in in-kind goods. I assume the work would still be seen as having a value, so if it reached a certain threshold, it would probably become reportable, kind of like how if you do a charitable donation of money, it's really clear. If you donate like a used car, that's tax deductible as well, but you have to figure out what the value is. And things, small things like clothes and stuff, a lot of times it doesn't reach the threshold where it's actually relevant. It's not, you know, it's not worth it to you to try and get your deduction for turning in three old sweaters to goodwill. So no one does, but, well, maybe someone does, but I don't. But the, no, I, yeah, whatever's going on with this, it's just, it will be interesting because if they actually were viewing themselves as employees, even if they don't have the legal documents, legal records, if they have evidence, emails or any sort of written agreement where it's like, yeah, you'll work for me and I'll give you this stuff for doing the job. I mean, then that would demonstrate that he wasn't being truthful when he said he didn't have any employees. I mean, maybe he didn't do it right. Maybe he didn't collect payroll taxes like he was supposed to, But that was his job to do it if they were, in fact, employees to him. So we'll have to see if anyone actually was paid for doing labor for him. And then he claimed he didn't actually pay anyone to do anything like that. And they come back and are like, no, no, no, you did. I have my 2012 email here that says you want me to where I agreed and you asked me to come work for you and help you build 200 cabinets or something. I don't think it's going to happen, but it's just yeah, I could I could envision it. It's not I don't think it's far fetched. And just a quick thing, I just actually answered my own question on bartering. Here is directly from the IRS. In today's economy, small business owners sometimes save money through bartering to get products or services that they need. The IRS wants to remind small business owners that the fair market value of property or services received through barter is taxable income. Bartering is the trading of one product or service for another. Usually there is no exchange of cash. However, the fair market value of the goods and services exchanged must be reported as income by both parties.
    54:50
    So there, you still have to report as income even in a barter type situation. Makes sense. It's the only way to be fair. Yeah, and I'm sure that's one of those things that, I mean, they even have a 1099-B. It's a barter form. Of course they do.
    55:11
    Yeah, I like that it's labeled B. That's extra clever. So, I mean, I've dealt with 1099s in the past for, you know, just like contract work for like little stuff. Like back when I worked at the airport, I got 1099 once for washing airplanes.
    55:32
    But it's one of those things that is interesting. Very interesting. That answered my own question. You did. Good job. Your research is not linked in the show notes because you read it live. So everyone, or not live, I guess, because people are listening. But regardless, the information is now in their brains, and thus making them better people.
    55:54
    So let's go ahead and move from one not-so-great topic to another not-so-great topic within the realm of pinball. This one kind of hurts me. Tell me why it hurts you, Tony. Speak the words. I love the Big Lebowski, the movie. I had high hopes for the game I didn't get to play it last year because I when I was at Texas because I didn't want to stand in the lines I was highly hopeful of getting chances to play it this year I was highly hopeful of getting chances to play it on location and then this happened they've been having issues they have been claiming board issues and it has caused a large delay and it turns out that the delay in the boards and the issues has nothing to do with the board having a problem and everything to do with Dutch Pinball not paying money, which brings up all sorts of questions. I mean, it's deeper than that. It is Dutch Pinball, once they got pinned down about their line, claims that the manufacturer wants an extra 1,000 euros per machine, and they can't pay it, so there's no more machines coming out until they get something figured out. But this whole thing is just insane to me. Because you would think there would be a contract, and you would think they would have said something instead of just lying for, it's been what, four months they've been talking? Yeah. Four problems? I guess, I mean, I believe the delays started around October of 2016. I'm not certain exactly when, but yeah, it's been several months.
    57:46
    And Tony has summarized it very, very well. The board, the company that's doing the contract manufacturer is also the one who builds the boards. And some people have said that they have indeed had board problems with their received Dutch Pinball contract. Big Lebowski's. But whether that was just a one-off thing or there were board issues and they ended up getting resolved, I'm really not all that clear on any of that. The contract manufacturer, I'm not sure how to say their name. It's A-R-A or ARA. I'm going to just say ARA.
    58:19
    What ended up happening is, as Tony noted, Dutch has been saying that there are board issues whenever they've bothered to respond. And there's been a lot of criticism online that Dutch Pinball has been very poor about communicating. I know, poor communication in pinball. It's shocking. Yeah, terrible. I mean, it's not happened ever before in the last couple hours. Yes. And so someone reached out to ARA because Dutch had last indicated that the problems were the boards, that ARA was having to fix the boards. And that's when Aura issued a clarification. They didn't come out and just start contacting the owners when people first thought that, but it was actually in response to clients asking about one of Aura's clients, which shows you how bad the relationship has deteriorated if Aura was comfortable talking to Dutch's customers instead of just saying you have to talk to Dutch. But they are the ones who said that it is an issue of contract and payment. my understanding is someone with Dutch Pinball to one of the purchasers or potential purchasers did admit that they were lying about the boards that they said that because they didn't want to admit the delays had to do with a problem with the contract manufacturer and that I believe the quote was to buy time so the only other piece before we go into our discussion is Dutch Pinball has announced that they are looking for another contract manufacturer and also that now the Big Lebowski's run is limited to 300 units.
    59:55
    And for comparison purposes, to my knowledge, roughly 60 have gone out, and nothing has gone out for a few months now, as Tony mentioned. Did we ever get an idea of how many units, if they're reducing it to only 300 units, did we have an idea, were 300 units the maximum number of units that they had already sold, or did they just pull a round number out that included everything they'd already sold and maybe a few extras? I don't know for sure, but I lean towards that. My understanding, some people know what number they are in the order, I think, kind of like how LE people sometimes know. So I think some people have, it may just, it may be, I want to think they round it up and it's not super tight, but I know there are people who are in the 100s who are waiting. so there's been because some people are like trying to get out because Cointaker is the distributor in the US that you can get these through now and so Cointaker has been taking deposits but and my understanding is if you ordered and you put a deposit down through Cointaker has held all that money so anyone who's done that can get out but people can buy those spots because technically the machine is still supposed to be made Then there are the people who, then that's for the get the machine for $10,000. Those that pre-ordered have paid in full, and not all of them have their machines. I don't know how many pre-orders there are, but I believe that over 100 count are the pre-orders.
    61:31
    So there are a lot of people who have paid the, they weren't charged $10,000. I think they were charged something on the order of eight. I may be wrong, and I apologize if I am. I'm not going to look it up. But that money is fully in the hands of Dutch Pinball. And if they've already paid ARA to build some machines, if ARA is setting on completed machines, but they're waiting for more money, then where is Dutch Pinball going to get the money to have somebody new build new machines, and how are they going to get the machines that are just setting back? I that is the big question and my understanding is Ara has said they do have completed machines that's what I thought I'd read is that they'd had completed machines I never saw any numbers on how many completed machines they're sitting on but if they're sitting on completed machines I mean that money has been spent if they're just waiting for an extra thousand euros per build per machine or are they waiting I mean that's the question or has Dutch Pinball not paid them at all for those machines that they're sitting on? Is Dutch still sitting on a nest egg of that money for those machines?
    62:44
    I, you know, who knows? I mean, there's so, obviously we've got the he said, she said thing, and then there's also the fact that you can't trust anything that Dutch Pinball says now because they're liars. They're liars and they've been lying. They're big fat lying liars. So, I mean, so you don't know and you don't know if Aura is completely being honest either. Someone weighed in on the Pinside thread that was coming up discussing this, and they had gone on a factory tour of Aura that Dutch Pinball had. And this was during the time frame that one of the letter responses that Aura sent to the person who queried them about what was going on with the Big Lebowski machines said that they hadn't been producing strengths. so you had someone say no I went and I saw them actually working on them and that's after that date so Ara's lying now whether or not Ara just whoever responded just wrote down the wrong date and that was wrong or they are actually deliberately lying as well I you know who knows the thing that I would assume and again we dealing with the Netherlands I don know all the nuances of how their laws differ from our laws
    63:58
    I'm sure it's some form of contract dispute, but, you know, I don't know who is in the right. I mean, ARA may think, you know what? it's easy to imagine how it happened, that maybe Dutch had agreed on a certain rate, Aura had to make modifications at Dutch's request, and then Dutch didn't want to commit to paying for that additional scope creep, so to speak, and Aura thinks, no, our contract gives us the right to charge you more because you made us redesign the boards again or something. Yeah, and something like that was obvious. I mean, cost creep happens due to stuff like that. I mean, that is part of a manufacturing like that. If you request changes, that costs money.
    64:42
    Now, in terms of the now announced Dutch plan that they're dealing with this legally, I mean, if ours got completed machines, once, if and when that gets resolved, those going out I don't think is going to be a big deal, obviously. They're actually built and done. I'm a little concerned, though I understand their stance on it, given how toxic the relationship has become.
    65:09
    I'm not quite clear on how easy it's going to be for Dutch Pinball to find a new contract manufacturer and be able to transition all of this to them. If it was just assembling the machines, I think it would be challenging, but I could envision it, and they could probably reason that it would be more cost-effective than paying what Aura now wants. On the flip side, though, if ours who designed the boards, I mean, I'm assuming Dutch Pinball owns the designs to the board, but you're going to have to have the boards built somewhere else also. So it's not just, I mean, you could go to, like, let's say they went to American Pinball, for example, which wants to be a contract pinball manufacturer. Do they do PCB work? I don't know. I know the kind of quote-unquote parent company that they're kind of – one of the owners is affiliated with is sort of known for board stuff. But I don't know. If they don't – if Aura doesn't share the designs, does Dutch have the designs? Even if Dutch owns the designs, what if Aura won't give them up because they say, you didn't pay us for them yet?
    66:15
    I don't know without seeing the contract. So I don't see how it's cost-effective to change manufacturers. This seems like a really bad idea. I understand that they may have no choice because it may be at the point where Aro will be like, you'll pay us the 1,000 euros for what we built and we won't work with you anymore. We're done with you. It could be that bad. And so they'd have to change, even if they didn't want to, maybe. Maybe the relationship has deteriorated too much. But it doesn't seem, obviously, it seems somewhat sudden, even though obviously this conflict's been going on for a while, and I don't think Dutch knows what to do.
    66:56
    I think that's pretty obvious that they are out of their league at this situation. Well, I do have another question that kind of crept into my mind when I was thinking about this. If Dutch finds another place to build the pens somehow and build the boards somehow, what does Aura do with those pens, with the pens they have? what can ARA do with those completed pens? Can ARA turn around and sell them on their own?
    67:31
    Or do they just sit there unless they tear them apart for parts? I mean, that is one of those interesting things. And how many of those pens would be just left behind? I don't know. This is going to be another legal boondoggle.
    67:51
    Boondoggle is a good word for it. It's complicated because it's another country's law. So, I mean, if it was in America, what my assumption could be wrong, but what my assumption would be is if ARA were to get the court to say that, yes, indeed, Dutch violated contract, you have a right to recover costs as you can, that they may be able to go out and directly sell what few machines they built on their own. that I think that would be legally conceivable. I have no idea if that works in the Netherlands, though. But I don't think that they can do anything with them until a court deals with it or until an arrangement is reached between Dutch Pinball and ARA. And if I were to guess, my thought is, ARA may think, we have the leverage here. You need to sell these machines so that you have more money to be able to continue to build more machines. We've already built them. We've already sunk our costs in, and we don't just exist as your factory. We geared up to be your factory, but we actually do a whole bunch of other contract work. So they're going to just go on as an organization, just stick those in the corner of their warehouse, and just wait. And then they can wait them out, is what I think Aura believes. And then Dutch might think, well, you can't do anything with those machines. We'll just find another place, and maybe Dutch has the cash reserves to pull this off. I mean, they've been around through a lot of delays and continued onward. So do they have the means to finance a battle with them? And if they're in the legal right, then they may be like, R is miscalculated. We can win this. We just need the time, and we have the cash to get through it. So R's ploy is silly, and if we wait them out, we'll get the machines for the original price. In the meantime, let's find someone else so we can just continue to build the rest of the machines out. I mean, that's my speculation that the two sides might be thinking. But I don't know how confident either of them. Maybe they both think they're right legally. Maybe one of them knows they're not right, but they think they can strong arm the other. I don't know. But Dutch's decision to lie about the reason for the delay just makes them look really, really bad because it's hard to cheer for someone who – I mean, silence would have been preferable to making up an excuse. It reminds me of the Martha Stewart thing when she went to jail. It's not the crime, it's the cover-up. And that's the thing that sinks everything, it seems, is when you decide that you're going to mask it.
    70:24
    Well, that's the thing here is, considering the large number of problems that the pinball industry has had over the last, say, four or five years, especially with startups and lots of lying and lots of this and that. I think Dutch should have either been completely silent or I think they should have walked out the door right at the beginning and said exactly what the problem was and that they were working on it. None of this board issues, lying, none of this. Either of those would have been a preferable thing, a preferable answer to what they actually did. And we are talking about a community that is reeling from, you know, Skit B and Zidware and all these other little issues that have come out. I mean, the alien people, even though it's now shipping, they were starting to have deep concerns. the Dutch people were having concerns because it took so long to come out and now their concerns are being borne out even though some of them have actually gone out I mean we're just looking at my shock is that so many people still pre-order stuff at least the people who pre-ordered and put money down through coin taker can easily recoup their money but this is something that Dutch handled poorly and that all the boutique pinballs and the little pinballs and all the new starts I've been having issues with. And I think it causes major damage to the hobby as a whole. Yep, I agree. And when we transition to our final pinball topic, we're going to hit on that, I think, in even more depth because there are just some people who are in this hobby, and I'll never understand them. I'll never understand it. They put on these rose-colored glasses, and they look through it forever, it seems. I actually saw someone post on Pinside I won't call them out because I don't but we posted on Pinside I believe today, maybe yesterday and they were talking about, well, but what if John Papaduke pulls off his Alice in Wonderland and I'm like, why are you still even why are you even thinking this anymore? Why have you not moved on to try and get back what you can? Why do you still hope? Do not trust to hope It has forsaken these lands, and you're just being silly at this point. But it happens, and I'll see people who get upset, and then they, but that theme comes out. And I've never understood someone, you know, I don't have the mentality. So I've never been able to understand someone who's like, there's just certain themes about no matter what, no matter how they treat me, no matter how much pre-order money they want, no matter how much the risk, that I have to buy it. And apparently there are people that are like that with the Big Lebowski. There are people like that with aliens. There are people like that with Ghostbuster. There are people like that with everything. And sometimes it's a safe thing to do and sometimes it's not. But I've never been able to understand that mentality. It's such weakness that it puts people in positions that are ridiculous. And it's so easy to just put some ground rules for yourself and say, you know what? Even though I think of something as super duper awesome, I'm not going to be weak and just cave. the moment I see a picture or hear the title and think I have to own. But there are people that do. And I apologize if that comes across as overly harsh. I don't mean to be cruel, but I just don't get it. I do not get that sort of thinking.
    74:05
    I can understand the thinking to a degree. It seems kind of like, well, case in point, going to video games and stuff, I kickstarted the Battletech game on the basis of nothing more than I freaking love Battletech. And anything that gets me a new Battletech game makes me happy. That said, we're talking about, you know, if you sit down and consider what something costs based upon the number of hours it takes you to work to build up that money. I was out a couple hours of work. Well, I was out like a day's worth of work. but that's not a $10,000 pinball machine. I mean, because unless you are a CEO of a company or you are one of those people who makes, you know, a million dollars a year or more, that's a lot of time and effort and money and it's gone. And it's like, it's not even like investing or putting something in savings where you might get something back. If you hand $10,000 to somebody and you don't see a game for five years, that's just $10,000. It's just gone.
    75:23
    And, I mean, you don't get any use from it. It's literally just throwing money away. And I think it's a kind of, I almost wonder if it's not kind of like in an abusive relationship where they get to a point where it be protecting the relationship, or in this case, protecting the manufacturer because they've got their money and they've got this and that. It becomes what they do. It's almost a Stockholm Syndrome type thing.
    75:54
    I mean, we've all seen cops. We've all seen the ones where the lady comes out covered in blood because she's been beaten, and then she freaks out on the cops for arresting the guy. I mean, you hear stories about like that. I wonder if this is like the exact same thing, but when it comes to a company and a customer. It could be. I mean, and your point about obviously the amount invested in trying to acquire something is well taken because that is the key factor. the thing is well a lot of these people who go in on a $10,000 Big Lebowski for example maybe $10,000 to them is the equivalent of $100 to me for example but if that is indeed true I don't think we'd see this level of attachment and I think some people are really extending themselves on some of these titles is the thing because if it's really that ratio if it's like my $100 is your $10,000 then if it falls apart you're just like yeah i'm at a hundred bucks i mean to them this was just a hundred bucks i mean if i'm at a hundred bucks i'll be annoyed briefly and in less than a week i'll be over it i'm out a thousand bucks it's going to be it's going to be longer yeah i don't think i ever mentioned on the on the podcast but you know a couple years ago i tried to get my deck rebuilt someone i went to high school with he didn't finish the job and i lost basically paid him $2,000, the $2,100 that he absconded with. So I took him to small claims court and he didn't show. So kind of getting back to skit B, I got a default judgment. And of course, I can't collect it. He moved away and I don't know where he is and he didn't have a job. So I didn't know what to garnish. And I still think about that all the time because to me, $2,100 was a lot of money to lose for nothing. The thing is, I don't have no benefit of the doubt anymore. I had that period where I kept trying to contact, and I wasn't hearing. I didn't hear back, and at a point, I just had to draw that line and say, you know what? Now I think you've stolen from me, and I have to take what action I can, even though there's next to no hope, but there's no point in thinking, well, maybe in four months, he'll come back and finish the deck. You know? You just got to move on. So in your battle tactics, sure. Be like, if I go and I bought every single iteration of Halo, I could go buy every... And one stinks, it stinks, but I'm out 60 bucks. And to me, that's not a big enough deal to worry about that sort of risk. If someone decided, you know what, I love the Star Wars battle pods. I'm going to do Battletech battle pods. Are you going to go in on a... It's a new startup. Are you going to go in on a $30,000 arcade game? Oh, no. No, no, no. Right, right. That's what some of these people seem to be doing. And they may talk that they have the dollars to do it, and some of them probably do. I think some of these people are overextending on this stuff. And that's a different topic. But the way they worry and fret about it makes me think that it was a significant share of their income that they've put on projects built on hope and rainbows. And I don't understand it. I just don't understand the behavior. But they shouldn't be wrong. I'm upset that they've been wrong. It's unfortunate that they can't trust that. But there's a lot of naivety that is operated in some of these things. The thing is with the Big Lebowski, which, of course, is the topic we're currently on, they've been shipping games. So you could definitely see why people would start to put deposits on now and try and get them now. They've been at multiple shows. It's playable. I saw one at Awesome Games Done Quick that was brought out and played on stream. I mean, they're there. So this one is extra disheartening because they were actually sending them out.
    79:49
    Yeah, and it just stopped. And it's, yeah, it is really disheartening. And it decided to be Fiddy McPhibbersons about why, which I'm just like, why did you do it? That's so stupid.
    80:03
    Yeah, and I think that's the part that is the biggest blow. They lied for no reason at all. Telling the truth, everybody would have understood if they told the truth. If they'd stayed silent, everybody would have been saying all sorts of stuff and freaking out, but that still would have been better than actually actively lying and misleading your customers. I mean, at this point, even if they get the problems ironed out, Even if they finish all 300 big Lebowskis, would anybody trust them to buy another machine from Dutch Pinball? Would Dutch Pinball be able to make another machine? It's Pinball, so some people will no matter what is the thing I'm coming to understand. But I have also seen people say that they have canceled their orders with Cointaker because they do not trust the company anymore. So there are some that are applying a level of logic and they're like, I don't want to deal with a company that behaves this way, even if I love the theme. And that I can understand. So anyway, it's tragic, but that's the saddest as we know it involving the big Lebowski.
    81:15
    Let's go ahead and hit the last pinball topic while we're still fired up and I'm frothing at the mouth of the range.
    81:23
    And that would be Magic Girl. I guess you could maybe say that this is a positive or maybe say that this is a negative. I think there are no positives that come out of this mid-wear debacle. I think the only positives that could come out of this at this point make you feel the same way the positives the doctor tells you about.
    81:49
    I will be more generous than that. I am kind. I will say that for those people who had put in purchase money for Magic Girl,
    82:03
    getting something is better than possibly getting nothing. So at least they have something. Not everyone came out a winner. You could actually argue everyone came out a loser. But there was a chance that nothing would ever be recovered ever, period. and at least some people got something out of it. So in terms of at least achieving something, that's a form of progress. But let's go ahead and dive into why we don't think that is particularly great progress.
    82:39
    Oh, gosh, there's been so much, and I've really, really, really been working hard to try and keep up with all of this. This trying to keep up with Magic Girl is what got me to spend an extended period of time on Pennside for the last week or so, which is why the doctor came back and told me I was positive with something terrible because of it. No, it's so terrible. The threads are terrible. Things are flying around. There's comments being made that six hours later are proven to be untrue, but two days later people are still repeating them. It's just, it's insane. It's insane. Yeah, that's the one word that probably describes this the best. Let's go ahead, before we discuss, and just try and encapsulate it as best we can. This is what I believe we know.
    83:29
    That John Papaduke, or J-Papa as we commonly call him, has completed building a bunch of Magic Girls. And by a bunch, I believe the number is somewhere on the order of 19 to 25. I have read that there are 19 confirmed completed machines and up to 25 actual finished play fields. So those have been built, and those machines have been shipped out or picked up by the customers.
    83:57
    The games do not seem to play right. I have seen video footage of the games going. They flip. They light up. There is some code that is operating on them. However, it looks like there are also a number of mechanisms that either are never put in or not connected, or they are connected and they're not actually coded to work right. And so the game does not operate in all the ways that it seems to need to operate. However, it does score and play to a degree. So it is actually operational as a pinball machine to a degree. It's just not very deep.
    84:42
    Beyond that, I don't know if there's anything else to say in terms of details. I've seen a number of these machines listed in an attempt to sell them right off the bat, especially once the rumors started coming out that the game didn't play well and wasn't coded right. The asking prices tend to be pretty high.
    85:01
    And I've even seen a few want ads listed on Pennside. I have no idea if they're legitimate or people are just trolling or what. But I've seen a few videos that someone has taken, and I think you listened to one of the pinball podcasts that has someone who has obtained one of the machines, and I do not. So you may have some additional information beyond that. but I think it's the person I think that's the one and the same who's doing the podcast and is doing the videos I've seen the videos were shared on there yeah that's everything I've seen I haven't seen all the videos but I've seen some of them where Chris who is the guy with the machine was doing some tests testing switches, testing shots, doing that like the ramp shots and such they are makeable from the flippers and there was initial speculation that it was completely unmakeable because the videos that were coming out from J-Pop didn't ever have those made. But it is makeable. I don't think the game flows particularly well, but there were some spots where the ball might get hung up and such.
    86:08
    But I don't really think much of that matters when we're talking about essentially 19 machines. Yeah, it's not like it's something that there's hundreds of them out there that need to be made to work 100% correctly. Now, a couple other elements. the programmer and the artist who different people, the one who did the software the rules, and the artist Zombie Yeti who did the Playfield and Backglass original art, they were told that they would receive machines as part of their compensation for working on the project. They are not getting machines is what I have heard. That they were not contacted as one of the 19. So it's just the paid customers who are getting the machines is my understanding.
    87:00
    And so that has not been made whole. None of the outstanding bills have been made whole. So the software programmer had also came on to Pennside and indicated not only was he owed a machine, he was also owed $11,000 in back pay, which he has not received. So those elements are still outstanding, and obviously the issues of Raza and Alice in Wonderland remain an enigma. There was someone who I believe is involved on the Houdini project for American Pinball who came onto the thread, made very clear, as did an announcement from American Pinball, that John and Papa Duke's Zidware Magic Girl machine, he was given space and materials to put the machines together. He is not working in – it's not an American Pinball machine. Any issues or complaints or concerns have to go to him, not to them. And he is not, as they've also made very clear, he is not at all involved with the Houdini project anymore. They kept the name. They kept the theme Houdini. Other than that, they pitched his design and it started from the ground up, which we have mentioned was indicated in prior podcasts. So as near as I can tell, American Pinball, I think they've kind of tried to salvage, and I'm going to give them credit. I think they've done pretty much the best that they could do, given what they stepped in. Yeah, I've been pretty impressed with how deep their hole was and how many bodies they managed to pile under themselves to lift themselves up. Right. It looks to me that they basically, these are, we don't know. These are all assumptions. My assumption is that American Pinball ate the bill for getting these Magic Girls constructed. They told John Papaduke, we'll get you the boards, we'll get you all the equipment, the cabinets. You put it all together. It's your thing. We're not helping you. He was indicated online, was expressly told he could not come over to the Houdini side of the factory. He could not be involved. They did not want him there. And they stayed out of his area. They weren't required to, but they just did. And so they basically did the build for him per what was assumed to be the in-kind agreement where he would give them the Houdini design, and in turn they would take care of his Magic Girl problem. Now they basically have to do Houdini by themselves, bringing in Jill Bowser and such. But they went ahead and they followed through on the Magic Girl thing because they had made public statements that they were going to be doing that. Once all the legal and administrative stuff was hammered out, so they knew they wouldn't be in trouble for doing it. so other than my thought that they should have dropped even the theme as Houdini and completely made it clear that they had a fresh break full kudos to them I think this was probably the best step they could do to salvage their reputation and I think a lot of people will look past the relationship with J-Pop and probably consider Houdini with fresh eyes and not hold stigma over them so as a business move I think it was pretty smart Yeah, it was the best they could do. They managed to step into it and give themselves a very hard footing to start with, and I think that this is the best that they could hope for to try and redeem themselves and bring themselves up to speed. Yeah. I'd say probably the only real negatives I know of, Beyond that, there may be some people that will not be able to forgive them for getting into bed with J-Pop on pinball projects and overlooking all of the drama that was already going on and just be like, no, that's not, we're not forgiving that. There may be some like that. The other risk would be if people get a lot of views of Magic Girl, which is pretty low given the number of counts, but between the videos and stuff and think that they don't have good build quality. if that rubs off and be like, well, American Pinball put the parts together, and this looks like trash. Yeah. I think that risk is low, personally. I think it was a risk that they had to take.
    91:11
    Yeah, I think that's something that had to have been done. I mean, I've heard reports that the plastics are very thin on the machine, which is, of course, going to give you concerns about breakage, breakage and I've heard concerns about some of the other just manufacturing stuff on it, but I don't know how much of that was them and how much of that was just how the game was designed and how much of it was just because you're trying to put it together with as little money spent as possible because of what it's going to end up being. I saw some people zooming in on some of the photos and saying some of the parts were clearly 3D printed because of how the plastics were put together rather than injection molding or something. So there were concerns about fragility. But that may have been, that could just be that's what they needed to do to make the weird custom stuff that he wanted and they weren't going to go that route for their stuff.
    92:11
    I've heard some initial reports too that the play field and art and stuff doesn't seem to be silk screened on.
    92:20
    I've heard reports that it is not the highest, like it's not the highest DPI on the art. You can see some almost pixelation type stuff in some of the art.
    92:35
    Not having seen one in person, again, this is all just what I've read and heard, and there's been so many things bouncing around, because when the game first dropped, the initial reports was that there was no code except for the novice mode, but that's been proven that there is. You just have to, you can change it when you start the game. Right. I took it as kind of like having to choose your advanced mode for Game of Thrones if you didn't want to have to play Stark. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of things where it's just like, okay, is this,
    93:07
    how much of this is real, how much of it isn't real. But I've heard enough reports about the plastics and like how some of the art looks a little bit lower quality than you would expect and how it wasn't a silk screen and stuff makes you wonder.
    93:21
    Yeah, I'd say, given what I've seen so far, it definitely has some rudimentary code to it. I think the biggest thing, aside from some of the aesthetics that you've noted and concerns about the quality of some of the materials, like the thinness on the plastics, is that it looks like a number of the mechs are not functional, either that they aren't there at all, or they didn't have a chance for the rules to be coded into them, like there are spots for certain magnets that don't seem to have magnets, or the magnets aren't working, or there was clearly going to be something like a magnet, and then they put something else instead, like just a cover.
    94:02
    And some of this has been rough because they haven't had, I haven't seen a video yet by a proper tech who's gone in and knows all this stuff. But looking at what, you know, there's been a good quantity of video at this point. So a lot of people are able to tell that some of these things, they're not even wired. You've got spots on the boards that, you know, there were some underneath the Playfield video and there are plenty of spots on the boards to control things, but there are no wires connecting them. So you know they don't work. Because there ain't any wire. You gotta have a wire. This ain't Wi-Fi. so um the going there are obviously there are a lot of theories here here is my theory and i think it is in no way particularly unique and is likely the most common theory this was done to try and mitigate the ongoing lawsuit by showing that the machines were produced and thus saving j-pop getting into additional legal trouble he'll be able to claim that rosa and Alice in Wonderland are just on the horizon now. See, look, he was just behind schedule. He got the Magic Girls done. I think you're right. I think that's exactly what this is. I think that's the reason that this stuff happened, that it got finished, is that it is all about getting the lawyers. It's all something that is to help him out on the legal front. and there are some who not many, but there are some that seem to be indicating that they think that they may actually be buying into this in the sense that well but he did get Magic Girl done so maybe he can get Raza done I don see how anyone can think this And this is a problem with hope that I mentioned earlier, and seeing little things like this. First off, do you even want a Raza machine if it is of the quality and completion that Magic Girl is? It doesn't matter, because it's not going to happen, so set that aside. Here is the thing. Magic Girl had, per our speculation, which granted could be wrong, you basically had almost an angel investor. You had American Pinball come in and subsidize the construction of these things. They're not going to do that for Raza. For one, J-Pop's name is poison to them. They don't want anything to do with him at this point. I can't imagine them bringing him on as a designer now. It wasn't worth the headache. They got Joel Bowser. Why not use a reputable pinball designer that no one's mad at? So just do that. And if they're successful and able to stay in business, they don't need him anymore. Remember, the whole thought was J-Pop was being brought in to be like the shock and awe. Hey, look, they've got the master himself, a theater of magic and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Three of the top 20 pin side ranked games are Papa Duke games. They don't need that once they're established. yeah once they're established that's going to be again I mean we said from the beginning we thought this was a bigger hit on them than a help and I fully believe that they didn't know what they were getting into no I think it's pretty obvious it's shocking that they didn't know I still remain shocked but people not in the pinball industry I mean I can it seems like they just didn't do very good diligence, but and, you know, maybe, I think one of them knew John, so they, you know, maybe got kind of seduced by him, because he's, I guess he's very convincing to people when they talk to him. I don't know. But, alright, so that's the main thing. The other thing is, Raza ain't no 19 machines. I think it's over 100. I think so. So it's just not practical. It's not practical. It's not practical. The dollar amount necessary to do it is much higher because of the quantity. not to mention the very notion of John Papaduke sitting there without any real income, just assembling over 100 machines by himself. None of that really makes a lot of sense. I'm not saying that it's not conceivable that some path to these all getting built somehow exists. I just don't understand why anyone would want to wait that long and accept that as a viable piece of relief. I mean, of the people who are getting Magic Girl, how many of them want what this is? And how many of them would rather have had their $16,000 back?
    98:32
    I'm sure most of them would have probably rather had their money back, you know, four years ago or three years ago or whatever it was. Oh, sure. Yeah, I just, I mean, I get it that there's something. And there's still people who look at it and say, oh, it's so beautiful. But it's so beautiful.
    98:50
    So what? I don't understand. Tony, help me. I don't understand. I can't. Buy a print from Zombie Yeti. He's the artist, not John Papaduke. Buy his work. You can get stuff like that a lot less than this machine is.
    99:07
    It'll take up a lot less room. Yeah. It's like, I mean, I get it that some people love that pinball looks artistic. And I know that I'm one of the people that care less about the art on the pin versus pretty much everything else. But, you know, I'd rather have a good-looking pin rather than an ugly pin. And the industry is moving in response to those demands from collectors, so it's a very good thing. But it just irks me, and it shouldn't, I guess, because I'm not the artist. I wasn't in on any of these pins, but it's like, that's not John Papaduke. John Papaduke just has good taste in art. That's, I think, all we know. He's not the artist. The artist didn't get paid. or he didn't get his machine and it gets so frustrating to me because on occasion I've seen and this even came up in the thread at one point but it seems some people act like John Papaduke discovered Zombie Yeti which I think is incredibly insulting to Zombie as an artist and gives John Papaduke way too much credit.
    100:08
    I was already an established artist and he came in to he wanted to work on pinball. It's completely conceivable He would have contacted Stern, and we'd have gotten Ghostbusters anyway. So I don't like this notion that somehow Ghostbusters already exists because of John Papaduke. I don't think John Papaduke has achieved anything in this project that is remotely worth giving him credit for. And this final completion, I don't put it as a feather in his cap. It's too late. It's just too late. That he got stuff out is good versus not getting stuff out, I suppose. but it's not a win. Nobody won here. Some people seem to think that there's a win. I don't know. Maybe if you flip the machine for $20,000 and you kind of recoup your $16,000, if you were to have the money invested, it's still probably not enough. But I guess that's kind of a win. But whoever bought it loses.
    101:11
    Yeah, no, it's not a win. It's not a win. This whole Zidware thing has done one thing. It has severely tarnished John Papaduke's history and the machines he's turned out. And I know for a lot of people, a lot of people consider John Papaduke the greatest game designer. They love his games. I'm not one of them. I'm not a huge fan of any of his games. They're fine, but I don't think a single one of his games is in the top five games I would most love to own. I don't think that he's got any of his games in the top ten games I would most love to own. But it's one of those things I think is just an overall injury to his legacy. Legacy, yeah.
    102:06
    I mean, it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate. But, I mean, I guess we'll see. Legally, I wonder if people will be able to claim that he sold them something that they – something different than what they bought. That would have to be the angle. And I don't know because, I mean, it is a functional pinball machine. He didn't just send a box of lights like people were saying. It's rudimentary. It's not coded even to the depth of a 90s pin like you like to compare it to. but it's got code in there and it does score and it does play pinball so it is a pinball machine I imagine the lawsuits regarding Alice in Wonderland and Raza will continue to move forward some of these parties who were bringing suit had money in on all three and they still have grounds on the other two whether or not this completion will allow him to successfully argue to the court the others are just a little bit further off because he finally got one done I'm skeptical, but I don't know. I don't know how convincing that will be. Given this was the lowest numbered run, and it was so far behind, I don't know if people will be like, oh, okay, well, everything's just five years behind now. So in a decade, it'll be fine. The idea that people would ever even accept the idea of a game being ten years late boggles my mind.
    103:29
    But I think some would, sadly. There would be some. I think there would be some that would accept that.
    103:38
    But, I mean, you're looking at, I mean, for 19 games, 19 games took five years to build 19 games. So that's going to be what? 25 years to build 100 Razzes? Is that what you're expecting? Yeah. 25, 26 years?
    103:56
    I'm going to be dead by then from the stress of talking about this. Well, here's the thing This stuff has all blown up On all of this Not just Magic Girl Magic Girl, Lebowski, Skit B The whole alien thing That started rolling All this stuff blew up huge In the last several months Call it six months For when stuff started When the American Pinball first started Hitting I almost called them American Girls because my girls have so many American Girl balls, and, man, that would just be a totally different problem. American Girl pinball made by American Girl pinball.
    104:37
    Oh, man, it costs even more than a normal pinball machine. That's right. It costs $1,000. It's an American Girl ball. If it was an American Girl pinball, man, that would be a $30,000 machine right there.
    104:50
    But, I mean, it's one of those things. I mean, this whole bit of news insanity that has been running for the last, you know, five, six months in pinball, I like to hope, I like to think that we're starting to smooth out. I mean, look at all the good things that are coming. I mean, pinball popularity is still going up. There are still more people. Every time we go to a tournament, there's more people there. The tournaments, the conventions are getting more and more people going to them. More and more people are buying machines from reputable sellers. You see, I'm starting to see machines, less and less machines on Craigslist and this and that, and the ones that do go up are going so fast anymore, even if their prices are way higher than they were a couple years ago. People are buying these machines. The hobby is in a growth stage. There are a lot of good things going on.
    105:44
    P3 is entering production. we're getting new game announcements from all of the big people who have actually successfully put out machines even though several of them have had some issues I think let me go back and think I hope that what we're seeing here are the death throes of that dark period of boutique pre-order and just utter destruction of the hobby. I think we're seeing these last problems. I'm hoping we're seeing these last problems dropping away as we move forward. I'm hoping P3 doesn't have any of these issues as they pull forward. I'm hoping to see Dialed In drop very quickly into full production and hopefully Jersey Jack gets another machine announced and dropped into production faster. I can't wait to see the next things coming from Stern. I can't wait to see the next things coming from Spooky. I mean, the hobby as a whole is moving up. It's just these anchors of these old things that are pulling us down, and I honestly think they're starting to fall away. I think with Magic Girl done, things are going to drop, and I think, yeah, you're not getting your Alice in Wonderland or Raza. It's not happening, and I honestly can't see them getting any money back either. I think that is something that's destroyed, but we'll see. Maybe something will happen. Skip B's work is going through the law. I mean, they're grabbing stuff. They're getting money. Are those people going to get all their money back? There's no way they're getting all their money back, but hopefully a lot of them will get some of their money back. And hopefully the Lebowski thing gets figured out and everything settles down there. And Alien Pinball is shipping, and hopefully it'll keep shipping. And will Highway survive? We don't know. But I think things as a whole are moving up. It's just been so dark these last few months from these old holdover problems that it makes the hobby look worse than it really is right now.
    107:53
    That is a very optimistic stance, but I hope you're right. Yeah, nobody tell my wife I'm being optimistic on something. She'd call you a liar.
    108:02
    Well, I think we actually have finally plowed our way through this pinball segment. I think so we don't have tabletop today but we do have a few video game items that we wanted to hit on so let's go ahead and hop on over to video games first one I kind of wanted to talk about but not too much was a couple weeks ago Activision, they had a shareholder meeting Call of Duty came up they were disappointed in Call of Duty Infinite Warfare's reception by fans and they indicated a desire to go back to roots I think that's interesting The thing is, I wasn't sure what Go Back to Roots meant. So I kind of wanted to ask you, Tony, what do you think it means? Do you think that means going all the way back to the beginning of Call of Duty and basically doing World War II? Or do you think it means going back to Call of Duty for modern warfare and doing a modern warfare style thing, not this near future or future future sort of soldier stuff that they've sort of skewed towards lately? Or do you somehow, I don't see how this is possible, but you might. Or does it maybe mean something different than what I'm interpreting as go back to roots? I think that you're probably right. I would personally like it to be a return to World War II. I personally feel that those were the best Call of Duties, but I'm also old. And those are the ones I played online the most. But that was before the Call of Duty really got the online play that Call of Duty is known for. My honest thought is that they're going to go back to Modern Warfare And that style of online play I'm hoping that with how well Battlefield 1 has done That means they'll go back to World War 2 Because they want to get back into it But I think they're going to go back to a Modern Warfare style maybe Modern Warfare style online play in a World War II setting because again the World War II Call of Duties to me were more about the single player even though I played a ton of the multiplayer that there was nothing like Modern Warfare's multiplayer so I could see them doing a Modern Warfare style multiplayer with a World War II setting to a point, but I think overall that's not what they're going to go for.
    110:31
    I think I'm going to split the difference. Currently, Call of Duty has three developers that rotate. I've heard rumors, and this I actually heard verbally from someone, so I have no idea what the source was, and it may completely be untrue, that Activision is considering going back to the two-developer model and dropping the newest developer out of it. But even just assuming the two developers set up, I would say I could see it being where when it's Infinity War's turn, it's Modern Warfare, and when it's Treyarch's turn, it's World War II.
    111:05
    I could see that. I could see that as a very obvious way to do the break. And it could be interesting if they put it out. I've always considered them to have the superior single player.
    111:22
    And while I've not heard it, I've heard the single player is actually fun in this Call of Duty. But the multiplayer, which is what Call of Duty is all about, is what is not catching on this time. And I think that's why they will return to the type of online play that got them their big name in the first place. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Well, that's all I want to talk about on Call of Duty.
    111:50
    Another, yeah, we'll blaze along now. Here's another item, Destiny 2. It is due out. It was announced. It's due out this year, so later in 2017.
    112:01
    Tony, have you ever played Destiny? I have not. That is one of those console machines, and I am not a console. I don't have a console. Oh, I didn't have anyone since the 360. But yeah, Destiny is not on PC as far as I recall. Okay. Well, I only played the demo, so I don't have much more knowledge. And the demo convinced me not to buy the game.
    112:26
    Peter Dinklage was voicing one of the support NPC characters, and the voice work was terrible. And the game plot didn't really make much sense to me. I had heard that the game with a major DLC release got very, very good. in terms of the online play and such. However, Destiny has always sort of suffered from having a story that didn't make a whole lot of sense or people really care about too much, which is interesting because the world building that was done by Bungie and Halo is sort of what they're renowned for.
    113:01
    And that's why Halo is still as big as it is. That world building, that's what got people. It's what made people care about it. Yes, yes. But Destiny, due to its... They've been doing that sort of living game concept where they constantly are releasing new packs and stuff and just sort of keeping the game going, and this will be their kind of hard set to a new actual title that you have to purchase.
    113:28
    They have been very successful in keeping people playing, more so, I'd say, than other games that have kind of modeled themselves on this, like The Division. Tom Clancy's The Division, I think, had that intent and didn't really pan out. No, it didn't. But this one has.
    113:45
    Anyway, some of our listeners may be Destiny fans. Just FYI. You probably already know because this was announced about two weeks ago, but it is coming.
    113:54
    And there is high hopes that this will actually address some of the flaws that they weren't able to fix in the DLC. However, we haven't seen anything yet, so that remains an enigma.
    114:06
    Last video game topic. Tony, you've got something that I know nothing about that you get to bring up. Yeah, this last video game topic is about video games, but it's also kind of about a favorite bugaboo of ours and one that we just talked about in PedBall, pre-ordering, and even though it should have been called this but we didn't, it's crowdfunding.
    114:28
    Pillars of Eternity was put out a few years ago by Obsidian. It's a great game. They kickstarted it, and I supported that kickstarter, and I got the game, and I enjoy the game greatly. I have not completed the game yet because it's incredibly long. And frankly, I'm pretty bad about completing games when it comes to that because I'll dump a ton of hours into a game, and then I'll walk away from it for six months or longer, and I need to get back to playing that game. Well, they announced a new game, and the crowdfunding has ended already because I didn't really think about it or talk about it before now. And that's for the sequel, Pillars of Eternity 2, Deadfire.
    115:08
    But what I want to talk about is less about that, because you can still fund it, because they're not using Kickstarter. They used the newer, it's been out for a couple years now, crowdfunding site, Fig. Now, what's interesting about Fig is the thing that, Dennis, you're always talking about when it comes to crowdfunding as a pre-order system or as an investor system, is you always want to be able to invest. Well, FIG is designed to allow you to invest in a game.
    115:38
    And the way FIG lets you invest in the game is instead of putting in your money as a preorder like you would at Kickstarter, you can still do that, but you can also buy in as an investor. When you buy in as an investor, FIG provides a certain amount of money to the developer that's the investor money, and then they get back an amount of revenue from their sales receipts that is, I'm assuming, different with every game based upon the contract that they put together with the developer. But they get a certain percentage of every sales receipt for that game until that game hits until they fully paid back the money that was given to them and then a lesser percentage until the game hits another high point or a certain amount of time passes. Out of that money that FIG takes, FIG takes a certain percentage as a service fee, and then the rest of it is divided amongst the investors based upon the number of shares each investor had. So it is a kind of share-based investing system. I'm not sure how if it's something I would actually do I don't know how interested it is or how well it would work now like with a game put out by somebody like Obsidian I could see where you could perhaps get a pretty good return on it but lesser known games unless something really takes off I don't know where it would really do much of anything for you so I wanted to more talk about that than the game itself. I do plan on getting this game once it comes out. I'm sure it'll come out on Steam just like Pillars of Eternity did. I need to beat Pillars of Eternity because Pillars of Eternity 2 uses some of the same characters and picks up after the end of the first game, so I should probably beat the first game before I play the second game that continues the story. But I was more interested in seeing what you thought about this fig's way of doing an actual investing ability compared to Kickstarter's pre-order system?
    117:49
    Well, overall, I mean, it's interesting. In terms of investment law in Kansas, not Kansas, sorry, in the U.S., which has been loosened because of all the crowdfunding stuff, it still requires very significant dollar amounts and there are certain limits because the laws that exist are designed to protect people who are not trained in investing from destroying their entire lives by putting in money where they shouldn't. So something like this, which is kind of, obviously, the rate of return is not going to be as good as if you were a direct investor, but it does allow you to go in and shoulder some of that risk in an attempt to get a reward long term. I like the idea of it because, to me, the threshold then, the judgment then, is better. Kickstarter, to me, is a glorified pre-order system. And that's okay for a lot of these things that people want, especially like video games and like tabletop games are good examples where the amount you're risking is essentially the amount of the product. Though you can scale up and they do these backer rewards. But I think you run into a scenario where the backer rewards aren't really, quote unquote, worth what they start asking for. It depends on the project. But like getting a lunch with the developers for $1,500, to me that is not, I mean, that better be some pretty good lunch. $1,500 sort of thing. You know, it's all designed. Kickstarter's flaw, and I don't mean flaw in the sense of how it treats the people who participate, but the flaw for people who want to raise money is it has to basically rely on fanboyism. You have to be super passionate about the project. Something like FIG, though, could make people come in and look and go, you know what, I don't know if I'm excited about this, but do I think the idea has potential? will I fund it? Because I might get something out of it. That brings in a whole different dynamic because currently, who's going to back, say, another pinball arcade table on Kickstarter? Well, only people who want to play pinball arcade. But if I'm someone who didn't like pinball but noticed that the popularity of pinball was growing, that the IFPA continues to register more and more people, and I think, you know what? Folks are going to want to play these games digitally to practice and learn rules and stuff. I better start funding some stuff because I might get a return on it. I'm not going to go out and start my own virtual pinball company. I could see that. So that's where I think the potential is. Projects that might not actually get funding on Kickstarter could have a better shot at FIG because people know that they might get something other than the product out of it. They might actually get a reward. and now how the contracts are and what those thresholds need to be project to project are people going to be fully aware that's where the question would be will they look and they'll go oh this isn't an obsidian game this is someone else this is really niche what's the threshold if it's a small enough budget maybe it just needs to sell in the tens of thousands and you start seeing a return not millions of copies but that becomes a challenge to convince people that it's a good investment. But that really falls on the companies. And that's something I think they need to be doing that I'm afraid that on Kickstarter, a lot of times they don't have to. They don't have to really make it clear that they're going to pull this off or that their numbers are realistic. Just has to look seductive enough that people will go in and try and do it. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but it's not a big deal because it was a small product. And then sometimes it's things like the ultimate cheap 3D printer. That just don't happen. Yeah. Well, it's like in the Kickstarter I got burned on, Robotech. I got less than half of the stuff I was supposed to get because that's all that came out in Wave 1, and they're still talking now, years later, about Wave 2.
    121:55
    And they put out like four things last year saying, oh, Wave 2's coming, Wave 2's coming, Wave 2's coming. and their answers last year were all that it was coming next year, which is this year. And then this year they've been putting out, there's been a lot of drama that I'm not going to get into, but they've been putting out and including stuff talking about, oh, wave two, we're still working on it and we're looking at this and we're looking at that and we're hoping to get it out, you know, next year. And it's like, well, that's what she said last year. And all these problems you keep talking about having, you've been having the same problem for two years and the problem isn't like, oh, we're having problems getting this built. It's like, oh, we're still waiting for quotes from manufacturing companies type stuff. And it's, oh, we're wanting to redesign this. We'll have you redesign it. Well, no, because we're waiting for quotes. It's like, okay, well, you can't keep having the same problem for two years but tell us it's coming. I mean, it's something that most of the people who follow it, myself included, consider it a dead project. I still read the updates when they put out the various things and tell me what it is, but it isn't something that I actually believe I'm ever going to get the rest of.
    123:15
    It is my failure. You know, maybe the next episode, if we don't have a whole slew of pinball news, you can go through the details of that because it actually sounds really interesting.
    123:26
    But failure always is. It is a failure. I might go ahead and I'll have to go through. There's a lot of stuff, and I'll have to go through and build everything up for the issues. But if not for the next one, I will put it together for something here in the future. It's not like it's going to magically come out before I get around to putting something together. Let's put it that way. Okay. No risk. All right. And for those interested in Deadfire or wanting to see the Fig system, Tony has a link in the show notes for you to follow. Yeah, and Fig seems to, unlike Kickstarter, the way Fig does things, Fig only does one game at a time.
    124:10
    That's it. Oh, that's interesting. So you don't go and do, you know, it's not like, oh, I'm going to go look at the 40 or 50 different things and see what I'm going to follow. It's they do one thing at a time, one project at a time. Actually, I think that's pretty positive because that tells me that that company, and it may be to help justify their share of what they get, is trying to vet things very aggressively. So I think that's good, at least up front that's good. Over time I would expect that maybe they would expand it a little bit, but they're actually doing a lot of the due diligence to protect the investors because they're the primary investor, essentially. That's a positive because I don't think that really happens on Kickstarter.
    125:00
    No, it doesn't. Kickstarter has created rules and they've done this and that to try and get people's money back when stuff gets messed up or, you know, failed and this and that, but they are still all about doing mass amounts of stuff. I mean, I don't even know how many things are on Kickstarter right now. It wouldn't surprise me if there's, you know, a thousand projects on Kickstarter right now. I don't even know if there's a way to find out how many projects there are on Kickstarter right now.
    125:34
    Yeah, there's got to be hundreds and hundreds of projects. And the thing is, FIG is all about, as far as I've seen every time I've looked at it, is all about video gaming, where everything in Kickstarter has, you know, books and tabletop and video games and movies and public art and food, and they've got everything.
    126:02
    So, it's just, they're two different things, and I kind of, I haven't done anything on Fig yet, but I'm kind of liking the more I read about them, the way they do things. awesome well we finally reached the end of our very very long episode it's not E3 long though so it's ok no but it's still very long and that's part of the reason there was no tabletop this time around was making sure we can get this because we knew it was going to be bad thanks to the insanity in pinball yeah there's been I think only one episode so far of our 2017 episodes has been not heavy on pinball So anyway, if any of you want to write or reach out to us about any terrible things that we were wrong about on this episode, feel free to hit us up on Facebook.com slash Eclectic Gamers Podcast or send us an email. We're at Eclectic Gamers Podcast at gmail.com.
    127:01
    We're available on Twitter and Instagram as Eclectic underscore Gamers. We're available on Twitch as Eclectic underscore Gamers, So I haven't done anything yet because stuff kind of fell apart for me this week with, you know, like kids and work and stuff. So I didn't get a chance to do the stuff I was supposed to. It's still in the works. That's right. The project is not yet dead. Not yet. We didn't get started. And we haven't taken any money for it. We haven't taken, no, it's just slow. Well, until next time, everyone, I'm Dennis, and I'll talk to you later. I'm Tony. Have a good week.