Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, September 8th. It's episode 96. And I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. We're back. Once again. We've got stuff to talk about. Back again. Yeah. It's like Dick's back. Yep. Pop, pop, pop. They can't see your jazz hands, unfortunately. It's such a pity. If only we were a YouTube show. But could you imagine if we did this show as a YouTube show and just kept taking the Twippy away from straight down the middle? Because we would. Well, here's the thing. Because we're more frequent. I've got the camera to do that now. That's true. You do. And in fact, I got a Sony Handycam for my rig. In fact, I guess that's my intro update is I was going to get another webcam. I did order another webcam in order to experiment on another two rig setup because KC Game Con is coming up. And the webcam, it was deceptive. They had a, it was like a C960 or something. I just saw the model number. And since it had a C, I assumed it was a Logitech. It was not. It was an off-brand that's using similar model numbers. Oh. which I could tolerate if it played well with others. Like, I have a generic webcam. Right. That's fine by itself. It does not play well with other webcams. But the problem was when I plugged it in, it had no gain control. At all. Yep. So I was like, nope, that's going back. And so I was talking with Ken Cromwell with Special and Lit, because he streams a lot. And he's like, yeah, get the Sony, like, 405. And so I did. and I've done a couple streams with it and the response to it has been pretty good. The nice thing about it, because we're talking about for KC Game Con, at this point I've suggested if they can position the banks, like I'm assuming all the games will all be in one row again, but if they can position them so that the banks are, and they did this last time, like you're going to play 1, 2, 3, and then the next bank is 4, 5, 6. If they arrange it so that the order they're played in is always left to right or right to left, we could get away with just doing one rig and follow the same player set for that round. And then we go to another bank for the next round, like we wanted to last time. This solves two problems. One, we'll have better uptime than we did last time because we would have the setups on two different games and they weren't in the same bank usually and you'd only get a catch part of one game. Right. All of the other maybe. Right. And the other problem was what happens when those two games aren't being played. So this would mean we would always get to show it. The other aspect that this would solve is if I don't need to set up two rigs, we avoid the USB bandwidth problem. That we ran into last time. We were able to get away with it with a four-camera setup. And I think maybe I could push five if I toy with the resolutions. But it's just really difficult. For those that don't know, on the streaming side, there are all sorts of bottlenecks you can run into. But the one that we face, it doesn't have to do with the number of cameras. Well, it's related to the number of cameras, but we have plenty of cameras. We have plenty of cables. We have plenty of horsepower on the computers. What we don't have is enough USB bandwidth and laptops to accommodate that many webcams. And normally, you would never need that many. So this way, everyone's like, build a Carl rig, and I'm not paying that much for wireless routers. And the fact that you need a capture card for every single Sony Handycam that you've got, too. Right. But what you will find handy, Tony, because you were the master of moving the rig. As you know, a non-mobile rig, if we've run the wires like we did, it's not hard. No. It's actually really fast. It went pretty quick. The nice thing with a Handycam is it's got the screen, so you can dead center without anyone telling you. See, and that's really nice. How the cameras line up with the play field. Because everything else is pretty easy. The player face cam needs barely any adjustment. The score cam, if it's on its own stand, needs hardly any adjustments. So anyway, that's my intro. What about you? I, nothing nearly that interesting. I've been playing around. I got, I don't recall, I think I mentioned last time. I got a Nikon D5600. Well, you didn't say the model. You did say the make. But I've been playing with it some more, doing a lot of work stuff. I finally got everything pretty much done, being finalized for my trip to Chicago. You going to any arcades? I'm leaning towards Logan right now, but it's looking like the only night I'm going to have available will be later on Monday. but even that's not positive because there's a couple things that might eat that time I don't know yet every other night's already eaten until 9 or 10pm yeah that was the case when I went out to DC I originally planned to free up another day and then I thought no I'd rather actually go and do this networking opportunity with these other states I've got all this networking stuff and I was glad I did it Yeah. Like I said, I get there Sunday morning, and I've got stuff set up like Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, all day Monday, all day Saturday, or all day Tuesday, all of Tuesday evening, and then I fly out Wednesday morning. So it's looking like Monday, probably like after 7, I'll have some free time. Okay. Well, we'll see. We'll have to see what happens. If you have it to report back. Of course, that will be not the next show, but the show after. Right, because the next show we'll actually have to record early. Yep. Because I, otherwise, I mean, my flight leaves, we'd have to record at like 6 in the morning on that Sunday morning. Yeah. And I doubt you want to wake up at 6 in the morning so we can record. Well, I'd probably be awake at 6, but no, I probably wouldn't want to record. That's like TWIP levels of early. Not really, because Zach always is at least 15 minutes late. So for me, that's like, okay, I've already been up for two and a half hours, so what's the big deal? Well, sometimes I just don't want to talk that early. Well, I understand that. I have to rest this tool, this instrument. Speaking of instruments, we've got a number of things to play our way through regarding pinball, so let's go ahead and transition into that. We won't do 20 questions this time because I know we've got a lot of other stuff to discuss, and I don't feel like looking up a game. So it's been fairly light aside from a lot of clear coat news. And I, you know, it's like I don't want to spend forever on clear coat. But let's touch on a few things. First, regarding Stern, I have not heard any updates like if they're admitting there's a serious problem or not. Now, we were at the 403 Club yesterday. We got to play Jurassic Park. We're going to touch on that later on in our news section. But I noticed on the Jurassic Park that it has the washers already installed from the factory. Right. So I think that that's the solution that I've been hearing about with sort of moving forward to, I don't know if it's spreading the weight out or if it's just an issue of cover it up before you can see anything. I wonder if it's not an issue that while it's bubbling up, it's not bubbling up so far out that as long as you keep the washers and some pressure on top of it, while it'll still bubble up, it never gets to a point that's visible. So we don't know yet if Stern's doing anything more invasive in terms of play field swaps or something like that. Right. So I don't really have a news item about that, but I wanted to touch on it because we're going to talk about a couple other companies. First one I want to start with actually is Spooky because we had a listener write in anonymously, and they asked why we on the last episode did not cover Spooky Pinball's clear code issues. And their claim in the email was that Spooky did not replace Playfields. fields. And this, we're going back into Total Nuclear Annihilation. We did touch on how Spooky had some issues with TNA. And I know in prior episodes I mentioned a little bit about that there was a chipping issue where the art was coming up with around posts and stuff after a very low number of plays and that I think I mentioned it around the time I got my Total Nuclear Annihilation because mine is a late-run model where they made the adjustment. They're not printing the ink under those areas, and that seems to at least be related to the solution. That was the secret sauce people who looked at all the photos realized were the games that didn't have the ink there anymore were the later-run games, and no one was reporting issues with those, though they provided the washer solution to everyone that wanted one. So I have the rubber washers under my posts. But so, okay. So we didn't talk about it because we weren't aware of what the solution was with the chip. I didn't read the thread back then because I didn't own the game. So I never followed along. So that's why we didn't cover it. I mentioned that because the accusation in the email was that people are, and we've talked about this before. I think there's a little bit of basis there that people don't like to criticize spooky pinball. That is not our Ryan Policky. No, spooky can suck a pinball. Yes, I guess they could. But we have talked about in the past the interesting fact that was, I think, more true prior to Total Nuclear Annihilation. It was a lot more true, especially when we first started podcasting. because we would often criticize Rob Zombie and I know we noted repeatedly that it seemed like you weren't allowed to do that on forums and such or else the fanboy brigade would show up and criticize you yeah it was bad this desire to protect the little guy that's my psychological analysis of it with my all of one class of training so we know it's true yeah they were they used to white knight very heavily So fair enough, dear listener, but that was not why we didn't talk about it. We just did not know anything about that process. Now, however, since then, I have done some more research. It didn't take much because apparently this has started to come up in some of these clear-coding discussions as well. And Charlie, the owner of Spooky, weighed in on one of the threads and said that they sent out dozens of playfields for free to people. Now, my understanding is not detailed enough to know whether or not those were populated or unpopulated. I'm assuming the latter, but I don't know for sure. Right. But anyway, Charlie did clearly state that at least in some instances, you know, at a certain level of damage, there was a solution beyond just giving washers to people that had damaged TNA playfields. I do have a link to the detailed actual response in the show notes. So if anyone wants to go and read it on Pennside, you can just open the show notes up and click on that link and you can see his exact statement. But anyway, a listener did write in about it, so I wanted to touch on it because it was a fair enough question. Next company, Jersey Jack Pinball. We do have an update regarding their clear coat situation as well. There are multiple reports that are appearing on Pennside that Jack, the CEO of Jersey Jack, has been calling individuals that have brought up claim issues on Clearco, at least on the Wonkas. I don't know for sure on the Pirates of the Caribbean, but on the Willy Wonka games, he has been calling people, especially those that have gone and purchased the solution they were offering before, which was you can have a reduced-price playfield at the bargain deal of $550 and we'll send you an unpopulated playfield. He has informed people that have bought those that they were being refunded their money for the purchase of those playfields. And the way it's now sounding to me, based off of the reports of what people are saying they've heard from Jack, is that if the damage is severe enough, I don't know what that level is. It sounds like, at least if it's chipping, I don't know if they're doing anything about the bubbling, but at least if there's chipping, it seems that Jersey Jack Pinball is now providing free, unpopulated playfields. Well, that's something. It is. That's better than, oh, hey, we gave you something that's busted, but if you want to fix it, you've got to pay for it. I mean, it's just kind of not friendly. Yeah, I think this is a positive step. I noted when I was on the This Week in Pinball podcast last week on that venue that I think the solution really should be, in an ideal world, the populated play field. Where they send you a populated play field and you are asked on their dime to ship back your bad one populated. I think it makes sense. And whether or not you want to, if it could be, I would prefer them to send it and then you get to do the swap and send back the old one. Right. So you don't have any real downtime. That's not like perfect from the consumer perspective, but I think that's the reasonable balance where they're giving you what you need. There's still some challenge about being uncomfortable with doing a play field swap, but at least with these modern games where it's just a few connections and some weight, It's much more feasible than asking people to move all their ramps over. No kidding. So that's my personal take on it. But this, of course, is a better solution than someone saying, I have chipping, and then you just get a packet of washers. And you're like, okay, I hope this stops the chipping from spreading. It hides the chipping at least. Sure. Well, and if it doesn't get any worse, for me, I mean, it's, again, like when I bought my Jurassic Park, my Daddy East one, there was a lot of scoop damage, scoop wear. It's nice of you to clarify that you have not bought a brand new Jurassic Park. And then immediately, well, I have bought new games and then, well, like my Star Trek, I should say. And then I did immediately before playing put in Cliffies. But that being said, the Cliffies helped prevent the wear from spreading and mostly mask my wear, which made me happy. Of course, that was a used game, too, and I didn't pay $5,700 or $7,000 in the case of a Wonka. $7,000 for the low end I think this is Overall it's definitely better than As you noted asking people to Send money for a solution To something that wasn't their fault As an aside when we were at the 403 club for a tournament yesterday We went over And looked at Willy Wonka Which when we got there incidentally was broken down Surprise The tech did get it fixed Before the tournament started and the bubbling and blistering of the clear was rampant and not hard to find. Oh, no, you could see it easily. These were not the little, well, almost what I felt like were microscopic bubbles. I've seen some people show in their photos. Some of these blisters were the size of you trying to learn to play guitar blisters. Yeah, no, they were super noticeable. You didn't have to put your nose to the glass to notice it. There was massive pooling around the sling posts, one more than the other. But, again, I first saw the pooling on one of them. I thought it was a washer. That's how bad it was. Yeah. I thought he had a blue washer under it, and then I realized, no, that's just the clear bubbling of the rack. When you called me over to take a look at it, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, wow. And then we started looking, and pretty much every single post is bad. And I couldn't see any on the stern Jurassic Park, but in all the key high-traffic areas, they had those metal washers over there. So I could say I didn't see it bubbling around that, but I don't know. I mean, I'm sure those came that way from the factory. Right. And it could be under that or it could be. Or that helps prevent it. I don't know. Right. Or they could have where the printing doesn't go all the way to the post and then the washer covers the little bit of exposed wood. Yeah, I don't know if they've done that. I don't know. I don't think they've done that before. because I thought I had read, that's where I'm uncertain, that there were Jurassic parks that have been sent out that didn't have the washers. And I don't recall seeing anything in the close-ups of the bean bear wood. Okay. But I don't know if they made a shift or not. I haven't heard that they have, so I'm assuming they have not. It could just be that this is the type of thing we're going to see going forward with the adjustments that seem to have been made to how playfields are put together. I mean, if the washer from the factory stops it from blistering, I think that's a perfectly acceptable solution. As long as people can be assured that their game won't develop the damage. Right. But we're at the point where we are not confident about that. Right, because you don't know what you're going to see when you pull that washer out. And I don't know if I'm going to go around encouraging people to go out and buy modified soldering irons to iron out the clear coat. I mean maybe that maybe that'll work if you're careful that's the idea but that's like there are all sorts of to me you might as well just put a washer and cover it if you're not really if your whole concern is just you don't want to cosmetically look at it and we're not really fixing anything speaking of fixing things Dutch Pinball we can say we can say that we have to because there was an interview Pinball News and Pinball Magazine Podcast had an interview with Dutch Pinball's owner Barry I have a link to the audio interview in the show notes as a warning, I have listened to the whole thing but as a warning, it is over two hours long so think of that depth think of those cutting edge questions so it's like two hours of listening to a used car salesman trying to tell you why his lemon's not a lemon well, not exactly because you first have to sit through a fairly lengthy recap by the interviewers about essentially the entire history of Dutch pinball. So you could probably skip like 20 to 30 minutes before you get to anything about the actual issue. They just spend a lot of time going through the history of the Big Lebowski, which is essentially the history of the company. So you have to sit through the half hour of the train wreck happening, and then you get to see the important aftermath of the train wreck. Well, a lot of it's even pre-Trainwreck, just like how the unveil went, because it was so exciting. If you know nothing about Dutch pinball and you want to know the life cycle of the Big Lebowski development, it would be faster to listen to this than to go to the Dutch pinball thread and read it. So I'd say go ahead and do that if you're curious and you don't know. And you don't have the background. However, a pensider, his handle, I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce, Fosai Su, did, in my view, an excellent written summary of the interview. I don't know why no one has put it as a key post in the Dutch Pinball thread, because I think it's that good. Wow. But not that I'm the arbiter of all things penside. But I have a link to it in our show notes, so listeners can go and just click and jump right to it and read it. And so you can, in under one minute, experience the full meaningful elements of the two hours. I'm going to touch on a number of the interview highlights. So credit to Fosayu because I pulled most of this from his. I made some modifications, but I pulled this stuff from his summary. So here are the highlights, Tony, because I know you didn't sit through the two-hour interview. No kidding. I've been raging. Oh, God, I've been raging so bad. It's for the best that you don't listen. Now, there's a concept. Maybe we should set some stuff up at some point, and I can listen to it, and we can live stream a full reaction video. Oh, mystery science style reaction video? Oh, a full reaction video to it. Tony experiences the very interview. We'd have to put up the profanity filter. Well, we did it on YouTube, but it would be okay. We can be profane. All right, so here are the highlights so you don't have to rage. The Big Lebowski parts that were stored with, I have been saying Ara, now I need to issue another disclaimer. In the interview, because most people have been calling it ARA, and I don't know who to believe anymore. Jonathan, who lives in the Netherlands, has always called it Ara, and since he's Dutch, I have completely deferred to his understanding of how Dutch words are said. Barry constantly called it ARA, who is also Dutch. And at one point in the interview It was stated by Jonathan That you can call it either ARA or ARA So my past chiding of people Because it has actually been a pet peeve of mine That everyone was saying ARA But apparently you can say it either way So I must stand corrected I'll just call it the factory I'm probably going to end up calling it ARA Just because of my own habit That's what Jonathan says I'm trusting Jonathan So the parts for Big Lebowski's That were at ARA They're now in an off-site storage facility. Read storage cube. Yeah, something like that. You store it. A pod. Maybe a little more fancy than that. Dutch Pinball is in the process of leasing a new production facility. It sounds like in relatively – depends where mom lives. It sounds like it's in relatively close proximity to said storage facility. No, you said that that was a – you store it, not mom's basement. very indicated that they have at least nearly full parts for something on the order of 25 to 50 games. Okay. I'm just going to keep interrupting. That's fine. We're just going through the bullet list. Nearly full parts for 25 to 50 games. A, that is a huge difference. I mean, 25 to 50 games, that's a big difference. Yeah, one number is double the other. But nearly, if you have nearly full parts for 25 to 50 games, does that mean, do you have full parts for a single game? If you have nearly full parts, well, okay, what do you consider nearly? Are you one part short of having 25 full games? Or are you one part short for each of the 25 full games? Do you have full parts for any games? I think these are all very fair questions. In Barry defense he did not yet have during the interview itemized all of the parts So he doesn know That why he hedging So he just pulled 25 to 50 out of his bum Yes Based off of like I guessing this is my assumption, based off of how things were labeled and what he saw when he looked in boxes, I think he thinks he has full parts for some number of games. Okay. Okay. Note that that's parts. That's not, I don't think cabinets are being counted as parts. that he doesn't have cabinets, he doesn't have the ability to make a single game. Well, that's why he only has nearly full parts. It all depends on how you want to think about it. He's going to be sitting there in the Dutch version of Home Depot buying plywood and a miter saw. And apparently that's fine, because according to Barry, he is not at all concerned about being able to source parts to build games, including, he mentioned, his willingness, and it sounded like plan to approach Ara to produce more printed circuit boards and do the sheet metal work that he needs, such as the aprons. Why wouldn't they just tell him to kiss their bum? Because he thinks that they actually like him, and this was just business, and that these are just things that he would be able to pay in full immediately so that it's not an issue of, oh, well, there's not going to be the same cash flow issue when he's just ordering a bunch of PCBs. They're cheap. And he's paying for them in advance. I'm assuming that they'll end up making him pay in advance. I would have a hard time going to something where you've already had that kind of issue, even with a pay in advance. Well, he noted that if R.A. wasn't willing to work with Dutch Pinball for the PCBs, easy enough, he can order those from China because there are plenty of Chinese factories that produce PCBs. Where do you think all those NVRAM chips off to your left come from? Yeah, I know, because you can just order a shipping container full for like 75 cents. You send them your PCB schematic and say, make this. And it's really cheap. Now, sheet metal work, it sounded like my read again. My read from the interview was, he does not have another entity in mind right now to do the sheet metal work. But he's sure he can find one. I would assume so. I mean, I don't know. I don't know anything about the Netherland area. We have multiple sheet metal places all around here. But literally, I could walk from sitting in your kitchen right now, in 15 minutes, I could walk to three different sheet metal places. Yeah. Because they're all over the place. Yeah. So that's not a big deal. Because we use one of them that is literally like three blocks away from you is what I use at work a lot. Yeah, I remember it was a place that was really, I think, pretty close that when my dad was putting together a laser war pinball machine for my brother-in-law, he needed a bracket fabricated. It wasn't produced anymore, and none of the parts sites had it. So he just took an example one over to a sheet metal place, and they made him a couple because they had a minimum price. So they're like, well, we'll make you a couple sort of thing. And it was still, like we're talking, less than $50 or $60. Oh, yeah, no. We take and have, like I said, the place I'm staying at is just down the street. We literally, there's stuff that we have at work that will break bracket-wise. It's like, oh, we could order this and it's going to take it a week to get here, or we take it over to this place, hand them the broken pieces, and come back the next morning and they hand us four fabricated ones and it costs less than what ordering a new one would. So, yeah. So Dutch Pinball, currently, Barry believes that the number of games that need to be produced to make all of the EA's whole, the pre-orderers whole, and what he needs to be able to sell to be able to make them whole is in the range of 400 to 500. So that's sold games and pre-orderer games for free. So that's his current estimate. And along with that, Barry said he does believe that there is a market for 500 more Big Lebowskis out there in the pinball community and that he could sell at 12,500 like he sold those 40 that had been in storage with Aura. I think Barry's insane. This is probably the part where I struggle the most. Not with his estimate on selling two for one or whatever the breakout is with this count. I should go ahead and note, according to Barry, 55 games were initially sent to the pre-orderers. There are 135 people who have fully paid and are still owed games. So of that 500, the 135 are the number that he says are the free ones. So that's where you'll then need your either upper 200s to low 300s. Do we need to make 400? Do we need to make 500 sort of thing? because actually as I sit here... Because that's going to be what, like $6 million off at $12,500 if they make $500? Well, yeah, let's use the $500 and then let's subtract out the $135. So that would mean he'd need 365 games sold. And he's doing it at $12,500 a pop. That's $4.5 million. Okay. To give the 135 people their machines that they paid for years and years and years. And if his number of 400 was accurate, that would mean he needs to sell 265 games at the 12,500. And that would be 3.3 million. So he's got a range of about $1.2 million going on here. And he did stress he does not know yet. He does not know mathematically. That's his estimate off of things. He doesn't know what he has because he hasn't done anything. He doesn't actually. It's all just bubbles. Right, right. And that's, again, that's understandable when you don't know how many parts you have and which, are you missing your expensive parts or are you missing your cheap parts? So he's, that's why he's using a million dollar sort of range. Now, the issue there, though, is on the production side, because he did say his target is that all of those pre-orders, those 135, by the end of next year. And according to... 500 games in one year. And four months? A year and a quarter, yeah, basically, because they're not producing yet. And I think, according to the math that Fosaisu did, he noted that that would require an average of eight pens a week to be built. So there's a factory that's going to kick in. A factory can kick out eight pens a week, I'm sure. Well, remember, they don't have the, again, they didn't have the factory. And my understanding, he said it would be weeks before they would get to move into the place. He's got the place chosen, and he's taking over the lease from another company that wants out of their lease, is the plan. But they're going to have a huge crew with lots of equipment to throw these machines together fast, right? I'm not quite sure of the size of the crew. What he did indicate is that initially the crew will consist of Barry, a guy named Janos Kiss, who apparently knows fully how to build a big Lebowski already, and then a few volunteers. Oh, my God. And that production is going to slowly ramp up, and then Dutch Pinball does plan to actually hire people to be the line. And as I recall from the interview, Barry indicated he was not planning to have to keep building these himself for very long, it sounded like. I'm assuming because he has a day job. So, Barry and Janos Kiss and their friends, who are probably loaned them tons of money. Well, we do know that there was an indication that there was some investment support or some sort of support from friends and family. So, yeah, I agree. So, Barry Guss and their friends who loaned them money and wants to try and hopefully maybe get their money back are going to help them hand-build 500 pinball machines and sell them for the price of a CE Wonka. Yeah, at least for a while. Oh, this doesn't sound like terrible at all. This doesn't at all sound like the train wreck catching on fire and then a plane crashes into it. Well, now, if you end up wanting one, according to Barry... I'm pretty sure if I got one, it would burst into flames the second I touched it. I don't know. I remember when, before all this happened, and you were like, I'd really like to have that Translight. I did. I think the Translight's beautiful. I think the machine's beautiful. At this point, I don't know that I would do anything that would give Barry money because he needs help. Well, that's what these volunteers are. Oh, well, you have to ask Zach Minney for that. Maybe he can volunteer his time. Because this just screams so much of throwing good money after bad. He had perfect exit points to accept the failure and move on with his life. And instead, he's still just throwing hope to all of these early adopters. So, I don't know. I hope. Honestly, I know I'm rough on Dutch. but in all honesty I really hope they get their machines and they're happy with their machines that would be amazing I don't see any path forward that's realistic with it happening short of serious like angel investors coming in and doing it but I just at this point Dutch just feels like a running bad joke to me that keeps getting worse. My feelings on it are a little more complicated, I suppose. I mean, it would be nice for everyone who pre-ordered to actually get their game. Actually, I don't want them to get their game. I would rather have them got a full refund. Right. Now, that might not be what they want, but this would just be my stance, that I think at this point you've proven that you can't competently, quickly build machines. So in the perfect world, you should have just been like, nope, we can't do it. Here's your money back. That's what would have been the perfect answer. And because of that, my issue isn't that it would, of course, be great if they were able to take and assemble games and get them to everyone who preordered them, even though it's years late, as this alternative. The problem that I have is that, and it comes up in the interview, Barry has this plan that then after all of this, Dutch Pinball will go on and make new games. And I don't think that he deserves to have Dutch Pinball. So I don't think that that company deserves to exist anymore, at least as owned by him. And the brand is so toxic that it just shouldn't exist for anyone. If anything, it would be if they had actual assembly line assets like Highway did, It would be buy that stuff up and let a new company form. I don't understand how anybody could give them money after this whole situation. Well, again, aside from the friends and family thing, he did indicate that these new games sold at the 12.5 won't be through a pre-order model. You'll go through CoinTaker of your U.S. resident to buy. And if you want to buy in Europe or anywhere else, actually, you go straight through Dutch Pinball in that instance. But it will be a, when the game is ready, is when the game will be, when money will change hands. And then it will shift. As it should have been from the beginning. Yeah, yeah. But that was, it was a different time. This was years ago. It was a different time. Pre-orders were everywhere. Pre-orders are still everywhere. They are to a degree. Even Spooky is doing non-refundable deposits. I refuse to do it because I morally disagree with it. Yeah. But it's a $1,000 non-refundable deposit to be on the list with them. But back in this time, it was Jersey. Jack was doing pre-orders on all their games. Woz and Hobbit were like that. You had pre-order money involved with Highway. You had pre-order money involved with Skit-B. You had pre-order money involved with Zidware. Only other real thing to note is Barry, during the interview, did not go into any of the details about the court case. He acknowledged that Dutch lost it, but he didn't say what the ruling, what the judgment was that his outside settlement was avoiding. So you have to speculate a little bit about that. I can understand him not going into the court. No, and apparently I had someone who tried to get me the court case. And apparently in the Netherlands, they don't have an open-to-the-public-style court system like we do in the U.S. and a lot of cases are just flat out sealed. Oh. So that's why we can't find it anywhere. Okay. Because I tried myself. The only other item I think I would note from the interview was that Barry indicated that they have been discussing whether or not to offer essentially a pro model of the Big Lebowski that could be sold under 12.5 with the removal of features. but they haven't made a decision yet on whether to move forward with it, but it's something they've been talking about. My guess is the removed features is probably the bowling alley mech, the lower play field. And if they don't have a lot of that mech, removing that mech will let them use most of the other parts they have to make more machines. But then they have to make more machines because it wouldn't be selling them at $12,500. Well, they have to sell so many. I mean, we're talking $200 and some. that even if his optimistic model of 50 was accurate, he's already going to have to source parts, a lot of parts for a lot of games. And as you noted already, that's my big thing with this is to me, I don't see how the math works. Because, and it gets back to what you touched on when I mentioned that Barry thinks that there's a market for 500 Lebowskis out there at 12,500. No, there is not. And I say it with that degree of confidence because look at, you mentioned the collector's edition of Wonka. You can still get those, and that's capped at $500 at $12,500. A game you know you're going to get, and they don't need to move. People aren't all lining up to buy them. This game is not as impressive as Wonka is in my judgment. I agree. Fully qualifying that I have not been able to play it, so that's unfair of me in a way. I hear Lebowski plays fun. We know Wonka plays fun. Yeah. But there's more going on in Wonka than there is in this. This game's also much older at this point. But the problem that I think that Barry's not realizing is the reason why he sold 40 so quickly, you know, within a day at 12,500 is everyone there is gambling that this company is going to fail. and that was going to be the last batch of 40 to go out. He's not going to have that anymore. The more, if he does the strategy and it actually is working and he's selling games, the longer the strategy works, the more it works against his plan. Because the more Lebowskis that are out there, the less that's going to be seen as a $12,500 game. Because I know very few people other than the most devoted of Lebowski cult film acolytes who actually think this pinball machine plays at a $12,500 level. So I think he could sell some more at $12,500, but what happens after the first $100 are sold? Is it still a $12,500 game when everyone who's anyone in the hobby knows that initially they could have got in at $8,500? I don't think so. Yeah, and that's the obstacle. Not to mention, there's things like Willy Wonka, which you don't need to pay $12.50 to have all the features. You can get the LE version for under $10. And this is dramatically more money than an LE Jurassic Park. And this is not a good time for Dutch Pinball's arguably very enjoyable game to be going up against the new games from Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern Pinball. because those both are seen as very good players, better players than Lebowski is, just based off the generalized metrics that we're seeing the reports from people. So that's my issue. This is where I think, this is why I have no confidence in this. I think he'll be able to sell a few. As he acknowledged in the interview, he'd have to, this like ratio, this roughly two to one ratio of two sold for one new. He acknowledged that, but initially they're going to have to just sell everything for profit before they can actually get to that. He'll be on the back end that pre-orders start getting satisfied. So, again, when you start making less and less money, when does he do this shift over? He loses his volunteers that aren't going to be willing. Oh, let's lose another weekend for no money, put together someone else's games, and has to hire his workers and have the overhead for these facilities and all of this stuff that's going to be bleeding cost, plus to make his timeline, because the longer this drags out, it's not like demand goes up. I also don't see how in the world he ever gets into being able to make eight games a week. There's no way he's going to make eight games a week. It's like he's not going to become spooky. So I don't understand it. I don't think he's got it. I don't think he's got it in him to organize this. I think that's been proven already. Yeah, I do too. So that's why. But anyway, it was an interesting interview, so I appreciate that Pinball News and Pinball Magazine conducted it. Barry, if you're listening, feel free to I very rarely do interviews anymore on Eclectic Gamers Podcast but if you would like Tony to do an interview with you you may reach out to us, eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com and we will be more than happy to conduct one the questions will be slightly different slightly? yeah they'll be more pointed I'll be nice you'll be nice, but firm I thought Martin had some decent questions in this but most of this could probably be described as a relatively softball interview. Which is probably the requirement for the interview to happen. Yeah, no, I don't really have any judgment on it. But if you're thinking that there are going to be a lot of really hard-hitting questions, there were some decent ones, but again, if he wasn't inclined to talk about it, there was no pressing. Right. So, again, I'm not surprised. I just don't understand. Well, there's tons I don't understand, But I really don't understand how even he can see a path forward for the company, like coming out of digging out of this hole and then moving forward. I don't know. But I said the same thing about American Pinball with the whole issue they had with J-Pop. I thought they couldn't dig themselves out of that hole, and they did. Yeah, but they got, I mean, we at the time, did we assume that it was going to be, well, they just completely cut ties with J-Pop and rebuilt the entire. imagine how much money they lost doing that I'm sure they lost tons of money doing that I'd love this for any company but I would really love to see American Pinball's books because I bet they're a mess they've got to be horrible I don't think they're moving enough units for their size and I wonder how long they can sustain I think probably quite a while because they have some relationships with other companies that are very successful. But anyway, we didn't have that as a topic, but that would be I'm curious about it. I think what American Pimple needs very much is a big hit. And I think the only way they'll find that is with a license at this point. Oh yeah, there's no way they're going to get the hit they need without going with a license. I think they really need to do that. And then their other option to be fair is if they can put together the solid contract manufacturing and find enough companies that are willing to use them, they can do it the harder, lower route because they're just turning out other people's games. They can move themselves back into the pocket. I think having that option, I think that's a smart area to go into, but I think it'll probably need to be more on the spooky model where spooky did some corporate jobs and stuff. When they've always presented it, I think American people went in thinking that there would be homebrewers that would be interested in having them having things like Nightmare Before Christmas or Wrath of Olympus. Homebrew games that have had pretty high marks, but I don't think that the sales numbers on most of those homebrews are actually going to be huge. So you'll have to do a lot of little jobs like that or you need to move more into, well, we'll do like dominoes and we'll know we'll have at least 100. And with a lot of the homebrews, because so many homebrews are what would be licensed themes, it's one thing for you to put one together yourself in your garage. And that's why. That's exactly why I think that would be a challenge. It would be a completely other thing to do that and then make a whole bunch more and sell them. And in the case of Wrath of Olympus, which was a generic Greek gods theme, I believe they I believe it's been a long time since I've read about it that they reached out to see about the levels of interest in selling them and it wasn't a high enough volume to be worth the effort. Right. So they backed wisely backed away from it. I've never played it. I've heard good things. I'd like to try it. I'd like to try everything. I'd like to try Nightmare Before Christmas because I hear it's pretty good. Last item that we'll just kind of clump here under pinball news is we played Stern Jurassic Park yesterday. We did. We went to the 403 Club early. I didn't play as many games on it as I would have liked. No, but I actually got it in tournament as well. So I got some more in. And we had Steve Hill, who's currently the number one ranked player in Kansas, had showed up when we showed up. And so he walked us through a lot of the scoring strategies. What did you think of, bearing in mind that you and I both have limited play, it's not like I got 10 games in on it. What did you think, though, of your time with it? It was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. And I thought it looked like it would be fun in the videos. But actually shooting it was a lot of fun. I'm not willing to say yet which one I like better, Jurassic Park or Wonka. I just have not played enough games on either of them to make decisions like that. I played a little bit more Wonka Today, or yesterday I played one more game on Wonka So I still, I can't make a decision on it I like the way it shoots I haven't played enough to decide if it's better than Dialed In But Jurassic Park I like the way it shoots And there are some hard shots on that game Yes And there is some Evil Evil things in that game But it is a lot of fun And it is definitely at least how that one was set up it is a game that punishes you for not having control really badly Mm Yeah The game is more brutal than Iron Maiden is which I liked Yes. I like that it's more brutal. My problem with Iron Maiden is I thought gaining ball control seemed relatively easy. And Jurassic Park plays harder than Willy Wonka does. Yes. They both shoot very well. I think Steve summarized it best when he noted, it is a bit difficult initially to dial in on a number of the shots on Jurassic Park, but they do feel really good once you get them locked in. And it's not a tight but findable game. It's just, yeah, the things are a little, they're different than maybe what you're used to with a Borg layout, for example, with guy analogies. Like, yeah, with, well, Steve Ritchie would be a good example. Steve Ritchie likes to put a lot of his shots on basically the same spots on the flipper. he's acknowledged this before, that he thinks people really enjoy that. Elwynn's placements are just different than that. And it doesn't feel like the same placements that were on Iron Maiden, because they're clearly not. So given that, here's what I am willing to say. I think Jurassic Park, with the rules, and bearing in mind, I still don't really understand my scoring. I should have asked for a walkthrough on Wonka, but it was broken before the tournament started. because I'm not quite sure what exactly my approach ideally should be. I know there's the flow chart and stuff. I liked the idea of rescuing people and capturing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the structure of that and how the Jeep controls how you're moving through the island and what you need to do for the multi-balls and the super challenging smart missile shot and the, hey, look, maybe we should just grind raptors. Oh, no, that's death. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha. I, in a way, I almost pity Jersey Jack because I think when people... I think Jurassic Park is a better game. I would be willing to own it. Me too. Let me put it that way. I would be willing to own it. I will admit. I enjoyed Wonka, but I have no interest in owning it. I would own Jurassic Park. I enjoyed Black Knight Sword of Rage, but I don't have any interest in owning it. See, I would own that one. I'd be willing to own it. but Jurassic Park I kind of like want to own it yeah if that makes sense I'm trying to think of what was the last new release where I thought I really would like to like I could see this in the lineup and if I saw it'd probably be Guardians would probably be what I would next go or Deadpool, no Deadpool would probably be the most recent one I could really see I think Deadpool's a lot of fun, I could see owning Deadpool but I'm not really pursuing it. Jurassic Park is a maybe pursue. Yeah. I need a little more time on it because like you, I didn't get enough in on it but the voice call outs weren't as aggravating as I feared they would be. They're not ever present like the Wonka music is. Remember when we saw the original picture, I talked about the art and I thought it looked wonky and I had issues with it. In person, it's fine. I think it was just something with how it looked in the pictures. In person, it's fine. Yeah, I thought... I don't... I had fun with it. I enjoyed it. I think both companies have put out some pretty good games. Yeah. No, this has been a really good year for pinball. But, that said, I think that we just played Twippy Game of the Year. I'm skeptical anything else is going to come along that's going to beat Jurassic Park. I spoke with a number of people about it. Oh, let's... Okay. And I don't know anyone yet who doesn't like it. here's the thing. I think objectively and realistically you're right. I think the fanboy brigade means it's a toss up. Not as close as I think you're thinking. Let's remember that Iron Maiden won game of the year last year. As it should have. There was no good game last year. That theme sucks. That theme sucks. There are a lot of people that couldn't stand Iron Maiden because of Iron Maiden alone. That was actually the biggest complaint that Elwynn faced. Now, see, that's a valid point. I do think that Iron Maiden's a better theme than Pirates was. I wouldn't go that far. Because I think Iron Maiden is more niche. I think you're exactly right. I just think it's better. No, I get that. I think that, and we've talked about that before. I think Pirates of the Caribbean was a mistake of a theme to pick. But at the very least, especially because they struggled so much with assets, a lot of people really in pinball do seem to gravitate towards generic pirate-style themes. So with that, the idea of, like, oh, it's got a cool rocking ship toy. That was cool. It had a feel to it. Iron Maiden is like, unless you went in and edited your sound setup, There were just people that just didn't want to hear it. Right. Sort of thing. Jurassic Park isn't going to have that problem. It's a widely popular theme. The music starts. It's amazing. And it's relevant still because the branding ties in with Jurassic World, and Jurassic World does gangbusters, so it's not a has-been license like Pirates was. Mm-hmm. But, and that's the thing with, I think Willy Wonka is a very good theme choice for where JJP's been going. I think it's been a better theme than most of their other ones. In fairness, they chose Hobbit before the Hobbit movies came out. And otherwise, I would have defaulted to that being the best theme. But unfortunately, the movies were bloated and somewhat boring. But given all of that, it's not relevant anymore either. Kind of the Wizard of Oz problem, except it's not nearly as much of a timeless classic. Not even close. Again, there are twippies for all these various categories. I think Wonka will win some of those categories if I were to guess. That being said, I don't think it's going to be... Obviously, we're going way out on limbs here because we've still got a quarter of the year left. And an Elvira coming. And an Elvira, but I don't think that Elvira is going to be nearly as widely played to be in much contention. I have heard additional reports that are aligning with my speculation that there will be no pros. That doesn't surprise me. I've been thinking for a long time it was going to be a Kapow title. Yeah. And if they do that, and it's like the SLE approach and everything, I don't, I just don't think, especially factoring in the math of how late in the year it will release and then when they're going to close the Twippy votes and all of that, I just think it's going to have a disadvantage anyway. And Jurassic Park will have been better fleshed out. The code will be even further along. And given all of that, I just don't see it. I think Wonka takes number two. Jurassic Park takes number one. And currently I would speculate That it would probably be followed By Black Knight And Munsters will be beneath that That would be the order But we don't know yet If JJP gets out their game For Toy Story or Guns N' Roses Whichever it may be At the end of the year where that will factor in So that's definitely That's definitely a Or where Elvira Will factor in because Elvira It'll factor in somewhere They're going to have the same fanboy thing going on like J.J.P. titles tend to. Yeah, it's another one in the trilogy. It's just Elvira isn't really – Cassandra doesn't really do Elvira anymore. She still has her brand, but it's not as relevant. Again, it's another theme that's just not really relevant. It's a nostalgia thing. Yes. It's a nostalgia theme. than Black Knight, which is only a nostalgia theme to pinball people. Right. At least Elvira has other fans that know her for her old show. The same thing with Willy Wonka. Willy Wonka has other fans as well. People who just really love that movie. Right. Which is why licensed themes are smart. Anyway, those are my thoughts. So, video games. Video games. They exist. People play them. I don't, but I do a little bit. Not a whole lot. You talk about them, and that That's the important thing. Just like the Gaming on 10 podcast. They don't have time to play video games, but they somehow have time to talk about them for two hours every week. So this is one that we both had noted. We had a listener. I'm going to say his name wrong, too. Wayne Sager. I'm going to thank him for linking us the story, because this was the first I actually heard about this was from his linking. I do have a link in the show notes to an article about this, but Telltale, apparently it's kind of back. is, I don't really... We're back, sorta. Their assets were purchased. So, I mean, it's their back like any other company that has completely failed and gone into bankruptcy and had all their assets sold off and had their name come back. I mean, it'd be like Braniff coming back. Or Pan Am. Yeah, yeah. The way so, in terms of a little more specificity, A company named LCG Entertainment has, as Tony just noted, purchased the assets of Telltale. So what this means is LCG will be able to sell some of the back catalog. There's some things in the back catalog that the licenses will allow that, and there are others where the licenses, I believe, are expired. So, for example, I don't think they could sell, if I'm remembering correctly, they could not sell Tales from the Borderlands in the back catalog, but Wolf Among Us is still valid. Right. Was an example I think I heard on another podcast, but I'm not saying that these are all true. And, like, they did not get the assets for Walking Dead because the company that took that over has those rights. Right. Right. So in terms of the article that I linked, the – let's see. Yeah. All right. They have back catalog rights to Wolf Among Us and Batman. Mm-hmm. And they have full rights to do any original Telltale games, of which the only one I have ever heard of is Puzzle Agent, which I have no knowledge of. As you noted, Walking Dead won't be coming back because Skybound got that one. Correct. So that's gone. And at the time, so I said Tales of the Borderlands. I need to qualify at least at the time of the article. I heard a podcast from IGN was that it was not clear yet what the status was for the Borderlands game, the Game of Thrones game, Guardians of the Galaxy game, or the Minecraft game. And they did confirm that Stranger Things did revert back to Netflix, so they don't have that. Right. But what I think was interesting is it's not just the sell-back catalog stuff, obviously. they did indicate that there is a plan to bring back that stuff. No one's really filled, to my knowledge, really filled the Telltale style void. I mean, there's always been the sort of, yeah. Yeah, it's almost a walking simulator in a way, where it's all really emphasizing the narrative storytelling, but that this company wants to start doing that. What's not clear to me is, are they building a new engine? Because they would have the rights to the old engine, but the old engine is crap. I would hope they built a new engine. I think that's a big question with this. And then the other thing that was noted is that when they were asked about the past Telltale employees, they said that they would be offered freelance roles, and there might be an option for full-time work in the future. It should be noted, though, that LCG is not based in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where Telltale was. I believe they are about 800 miles south in Southern California. Yeah, they're in Santa Monica? I think it was Santa Monica is what it said in the thing. They're like, I know they're a good way south. But yeah, no. I have seen a surprisingly amount of very unhappy feedback on that because the general consensus that I've seen is, well, if they can't hire the old employees back full time, then they shouldn't use the name, which I think is the biggest BS dumb thing ever. They have no requirement to do anything for the old employees because they're not the old owners. No. Would it be a PR plus for them? Sure. Sure. But they're under no requirements to do any of that. I don't think that, I mean, depending on the level of investment they're willing to do, there's a big question about how fiscally feasible that would be. Given that you're going to have to relocate them if you're expecting them to come into the office. Right. And that's a huge expense on top of hiring them. Not to mention Telltale was, by all accounts that I can tell, a fairly bloated company. It had a lot of staff. Right, it did. From everything I read, it agrees with you. Yes, and due to poor management decisions, something that I, as you know, my work, I'm realizing, they unfortunately did not notice or act on their financial woes quick enough, which is why there were essentially no severance. I don't even think they got their vacation payouts. They didn't get nothing. They were just dumped. So I can understand why some people are going to have a very visceral reaction to that. But as you know, it's just not realistic. It's not the same company anymore. Someone bought the assets. So given that, and it's not like this was a pinball brothers highway thing where this company was somehow involved before and moved a whole bunch of stuff. There's nothing to blame them for. They weren't involved with this. Right. I think, in all honesty, buying the assets is fine. I think they probably shouldn't use the name. Yeah. I think it would be better for them if they did. I don't know. There is, with a consumer, a certain cachet that you would have. There are more people that know about the Telltale Games that know about exactly what happened to Telltale. True. So there's that. I don't know. I don't think this probably costs them all that much because it sounds like most of these licenses are, I mean, their back catalog will give them a little bit, but how much are they going to make selling Wolf Among Us? Not a lot. It's been out for years. I think their big thing, the way it read is it definitely feels like they are going to do a start small build up type situation as they should. So we'll have to see what comes from it I'm interested to see if anything actually comes from it Because stuff like this happens all the time And nothing ever actually hits the ground Yeah So we'll just have to see Well, I know there's been a lot of Nintendo news, Tony There has been They had a direct the other day As Nintendo will Instead of doing their big stuff So They're Thought we'd just go over their announcements real quick Nothing, well, there's some pretty big ones. I think the biggest one that came out was an announcement that was leaked on Amazon and a few other retailers a few weeks ago. Overwatch is coming to Switch. And it was leaked because they showed Overwatch-branded Switch stuff, including an Overwatch Edition Switch. Yeah, I saw some of that early. Yeah. So My daughter, my oldest daughter is very excited Yes, because she loves to play tank She's, yes She is a Dixie Reinhardt main And she's getting very good at it So She's going to be getting it I know she will She's already told us it's what she wants for her birthday So, the interesting thing is They are adding Some gyro controls to it Okay I thought it seemed silly but after talking to some people who play and enjoy Splatoon apparently it works pretty well because it's used more for like fine tuning like you use controller to get it close and then you can just shift it to fine tune your shots so okay whatever we'll see what comes of it and I think the big thing is going to be Nintendo's voice comm setup is dumb. It's not just bad, it's dumb. Because to use voice comms on the Switch for any game, you literally log into a server on your phone, and you play it with your phone sitting in your phone headset. I guess we'll see how it is. It may just be an environment where a lot of people aren't using voice chat, and you're just using the in-game commands. I'm assuming that's what it's going to be. I need healing. I'm assuming that's what it's going to be. Payload. Payload. Also, they have transitioned from putting out NES games for Switch Online members. They're now putting out Super NES games. So the games people wanted. So the games people wanted. Because all the NES games people wanted are now out. Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is they were releasing NES games monthly. and that is no longer going to be the case. That's not going to be the case with SNES games. SNES games are going to just come out when they come out. It's not going to be like a set schedule. All right. But they did drop 20. Oh, that's a good chunk. When it dropped, and I've downloaded it, and I've played a couple, and then my wife took it and is just playing it because that's what she does. So the 20 titles they dropped real quick. Brawl Brothers, never played it Breath of Fire, I don't recall it at all Demon's Crest, I do remember playing back in the day I think I don't remember the name, but the images I've seen look familiar F-Zero, that was a good racing game back in the day I don't know how it holds up Joe and Mac 2, Lost in the Tropics no idea, I remember hearing about it, never played it Kirby's Dream Course and Kirby's Dream Land 3. I don't like Kirby games, so hate me. Pilot Wings. I remember Pilot Wings, which was basically a tech demo for the SNES, is what it was. Oh, okay. For the, like, the Mode 7 stuff and this and that. But it was fun. It was a lot of fun. Star Fox, of course, a great game. Stunt Race FX I never played. Super EDF, Earth Defense Force, which is not the Earth Defense Force everyone thinks about because there are no giant ants. This is a shmup. Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Now, I did play Super Ghouls and Ghosts a fairly large amount, and it's a good game. I enjoy it. Super Mario Kart. It's a Mario Kart game. I think people who are used to the newer Mario Karts are not going to enjoy it as much. Super Mario World. That's what my wife's playing now. And for good reason, because It's probably my favorite. Yeah, I think I'd say Super Mario World is my favorite Mario game of all time. Okay. I would say it's a toss-up between it and Mario 3, but I think I like Super Mario World better. Super Mario World 2, Yoshi's Island. Super Metroid, which is pretty much the greatest Metroid game of all time. Yeah, I'd say most people would say that. Super Puyo Puyo 2? Never played it. but I've played other Puyo Puyo games. Puyo Puyo games are fun. So, Super Soccer, Super Tennis, and A Link to the Past. A mix of games. I'm sure there's going to be some fair popularity, but quite frankly, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, and A Link to the Past, I think those games right there are the games most people want. I'd say that's a pretty safe bet. Probably coupled with Star Fox. Yeah. But, I mean, a number of those are also on the SNES classics. You know that they're really popular. I'm surprised at the number of these that aren't as well-known to me. I was surprised, too. I actually haven't played most of this stuff, which doesn't surprise me because I never owned that many SNES games. See, now my question is, is one of my favorite SNES games going to make it UN Squadron, which in Japan was Area 88? And the answer is probably going to be no. Well, I'd say we will know on the whatever, but there's no set schedule anymore, so we won't. You'll just have to be surprised or not forever. Surprised or not. They announced more characters for Smash Ultimate. Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury. So at this point, I wouldn't be surprised at any character announcement for Smash Ultimate. Does that make you like the game yet? No. If all it took was a character to make me like Smash, they would have had that a while ago, because they've always had several good characters. I just don't like the game style. Not competitively. I think the game's super fun as just a four-player insanity game. But like competitive Smash, I don't enjoy watching it. Not like I enjoy watching other competitive fighting games. That's fair enough. Tokyo Mirage Sessions F.E. Encore Sharp F.E. Sharp F.E. Encore Why does it say Sharp F.E.? Alright I don't know That's not a note, is it? There's F.Sharp Right, or is it Pound F.E.? Is it Hashtag F.E.? I don't know I made an assumption because of the word Encore Right apparently Sharp makes sense because it's got songs and music related stuff but it's going to include new story elements, a new song and new characters and it's coming out on January 17th there's a sequel to Deadly Premonition coming that was a weird game I never played it the comparison that's often made with it is it's almost like they poached the idea of Twin Peaks, the TV show, and turned it into a video game. So you play a protagonist who's obsessed with coffee, and he's going around, and there's all sorts of weird stuff in this little town that he's visiting. It had a lot of really cool features in terms of the pathing and stuff that all of the NPCs had and where they'd be at at different times. There was a lot more than I ever experienced with the game the controls were super bad Were they Yeah They putting the original game out as Deadly Premonition origins Well, after the sequel to Deadly Premonition, we're getting an Assassin's Creed Rebel collection. It's going to have ports of... You rebel scum. Creed IV Black Flag and Assassin's Creed Rogue. I've not played any of those. So, we'll see. Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition is coming in 2020 a lot of people love Xenoblade I've never played one I haven't either Divinity Original Sin 2 is coming to Switch I think it's out now or very soon it was a pretty early release but it is I don't know that's one of those games I did not expect to hit Switch I've heard a lot of good things about it but like a lot of games anymore I have not played it but it's reviewed really well and everybody says that it's a solid game so we will see how that works on the Switch now turn-based strategy should work seems like it'd be something up my alley I should probably try it If you recall at E3, we saw they showed a trailer for a game called Town. It was a little builder thing. We didn't talk about it. I don't remember it. We didn't really talk about it. But they changed the name. It's now called Little Town Hero. Okay. So, we'll see what happens. Doom 64 is coming to the Nintendo Switch because... Why? apparently there are fans of Doom 64 who need that game on a modern system a lot of these announcements I don't understand that one I don't understand at all the next announcement it's a fun game but I don't understand it on Switch but hey I'm sure there's somebody who wants it Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 Jedi Outcast I'd heard of it but I never played it I played it. I played the first Jedi Knight more. But they're good games for what they were when they were, but they weren't, like, super my style of game. But it's fine. I guess it's just, at this point, Switch is getting all of the ports. That's what it amounts to. They're getting all of the ports. There's a Super Kirby Slash, a four-player free-to-play Kirby game. But you hate Kirby. who love Kirby. You hate him. I despise Kirby. He's terrible. He's a horrible, ugly little creature. He's horrid. Absolutely horrid. There's going to be some multiplayer arena battles to Luigi's Mansion 3, which, since the first time we talked about Luigi's Mansion 3 and back when we watched Games Done Quick, and I'd mentioned the speedrunner had done Luigi's Mansion. I never played a Luigi's Mansion game. I've been told several times I should play Luigi's Mansion and I have now not played Luigi's Mansion. I've never been a fan of anything that glorifies Luigi. Yeah. He doesn't need his own stuff. Yeah. He's trash. He needs to understand that he's trash. He's trash tier. He's not even F tier. He's trash tier. It's below F tier. Some updates on Pokemon Sword and Shield, which is coming in November. It's got a better character customization system than previous Pokemons, which doesn't take much to have a better character customization. But, and the thing people are excited about, and I don't understand it. Even my daughter's excited about it. I don't understand it. You've got the ability to make custom curry dishes and save them to your curry decks and eat curry with your... I don't know. I don't understand why the mainline Pokemon games put in these stupid, stupid gimmicky things and never keep it. Every mainline Pokemon game has a different gimmick. I guess there's something else besides collecting all the Pokemons? I don't know. I am obviously the wrong demographic. The ability to pet and feed and primp my Pokemons I never cared about. The only interesting gimmick ever was HeartGold and SoulSilver in the original Gold and Silver when the Pokemon followed you around on the world map was interesting, just because it was fun to see who was in the lead of your party the whole time. But I don't know. But you know what? Not the target demographic My daughter is very very excited For it Okay More details on crafting For Animal Crossing New Horizons Life and kid are happy about it I don't care Trials of Mana Will be available April 24th of 2020 Okay So that's Not bad Return of the Obra Dinn is coming to Switch I have no idea what that is Yeah, I don't either. All the videos I saw of it, it looks weird. Weird art and stuff, but I've got no idea. Rogue Company. This is the one kind of humor. Rogue Company is a team shooter from Hi-Rez Studios. Hmm. Coming to Switch. Hi-Rez Studios, for those people who don't know, are the people who put out Smite and Paladins. Yep, I've heard of those. Where they got hit with the whole being a massive Overwatch ripoff because they went into beta four months after Overwatch went live. So I wonder how they feel to have their new team shooter be announced at the same time that Overwatch gets announced for the Switch. Maybe they're hoping that Overwatch is old news and that their new game will be able to stand up against it. If I were them, I'd feel bad. Only because it's sort of like World of Warcraft versus other MMOs. Overwatch is the team shooter. It is. It's got the eSport behind it. And they keep supporting it. So there's all these updates all the time, and the mechanics of it are pretty good. So it's just one of those, in a way, it's very unfortunate, because basically Blizzard built themselves a monopoly, and no one else has been able to successfully punch through that. And I'm skeptical this will do it, given that they've been unsuccessful in the past. Right. And I've talked to people personally, and I've read stuff online from people who say that Paladins is a great game. I have heard positive things about it. But still, you can't beat Overwatch. Yeah. They don't have the backing. They don't have the support. Their one hope, in my mind, is if they're from the ground up, mechanics for Switch are better than whatever Blizzard did to make Switch controls work. Right. But I'm skeptical that Overwatch will have bad Switch controls. If they're going and even working with the gyro elements and stuff, they're clearly thinking about it. And people have to remember that while Blizzard historically has been a PC company, they already have controller-based versions of Overwatch because they have it on the PS4 and on the Xbox. So given that, it's like, yeah, they kind of already know what they're doing on that. So I wouldn't trust to hope on that. Right. And you have such a... Again, my daughter has Overwatch on the PC, and she still wants Overwatch on the Switch. Double dip. So she can play it with her Switch. Double dip. To be fair, that's probably just because she doesn't have a computer capable of playing Overwatch. I don't know. I do have it on PC and Xbox also, so... Yeah. But in my defense, it was... The PC one was like part of a humble bundle someone gave me, so... It wasn't my fault. Well, yeah. I didn't deliberately double dip. I'm a single dipper. On other games. I'm a single dipper. I hate double dipping. It feels so wasteful. Tetris 99 is getting a new mode in DLC. Which is Tetris 99 is that. It's Battle Royale Tetris game. I've heard it's fun. If you like Tetris. Obviously. That was all of the big stuff there. Now one thing I did want to talk about. Not about Nintendo. And I've only got. Actually there's two things. I've only got one of them in here. Wow Classic has fully, fully enveloped the original feel of Wow. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's got horrible login times, and you can't find mobs to kill because there's four wolves, and you've got 500 people trying to kill them so you can turn in a pill. It sounds exactly like what I remember Wow to be back when I first started playing Wow. I've heard it's also been subject to DDoS attacks. Yes. I just read that this morning. They did it. They brought back all the original feelings from the good old days of WoW. Congratulations, Blizzard. Good job. I guess it truly is vanilla. I've not played it. I'm not planning on playing it. But it's fun to hear about. Interestingly enough, it has been taking top slots on Twitch's viewership. Oh? People watching streamers playing Vanilla are WoW Classic, Vanilla WoW. So that's surprising to me, honestly. I'm a bit surprised that it's so popular from a spectator perspective a little bit. I mean, there's some stuff like watching high-end raids and stuff could be really interesting. Right, but they're not doing that. They're watching people grind Goldshire. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, the only thing that ever really, I felt that most of the expansion stuff that I was involved with with World of Warcraft were positives overall. The only thing, the thing that really alienated me from it was as of the second expansion when they dropped the raid size down again to where they're basically trying to keep everything as 10 mans or less. And then I kind of felt that that killed the need for a high-end raiding guild. It did. And I left before it came out because I was like, I don't see the – it went too casual even for me. Like, I liked the change from the 40-mans to the 25. I thought that was good. Because getting 39 other people that were actually competent was nearly impossible, at least on the Horde side it was. Well, no, there was the part of the thing going with that that we noticed when we were raiding and starting to do 25-mans is how much of the 40-man was just dead weight. because when you got down to 25 mans, you realized the people who weren't pulling their weight and weren't cutting it. It got easier and it got easier to build a balanced team. It did. I remember the big issue for the guild we were in at the time was with the expansion. We really initially for those like first four or five raiding months, it was that awkwardness where you had a guild designed to run 40 and you could only So do you expand the guild and try and run 50, do 225 man simultaneously and balance the teams out? And if I remember, we tried that and it was a disaster. There was always one horribly weak group that couldn't get past the second boss. And then there was the other group that made progress every week. And I just remember, because at this point, I think I was in guild leadership at the time. and it was like Antonio and I were in the same guild. There was drama. It was always something like you were either fighting over who had the good tanks that knew what to do or who had the good healers who knew what to do. And that was usually the issue. You were always short of one of them and you couldn't send you couldn't split it because you were locked into your instance. Anyway, it was ultimately we ended up through attrition shrinking the guild down to basically just run the 125 man but that was a really painful transition because you had a lot of people that whose feelings got hurt right all of that well there was well you know i i had issues with the guild anyway because i had limited rating time so yeah there was always that balance and that was true before even the expansion where you had in and this was a challenge amongst the leadership team where you had the leaders who really wanted to go full try hard and wanted to try and be trailblazers, kick out people that weren't pulling their weight as they defined it. And then there were people like me who were a lot more, no, this is a casual high-end raiding guild. We want to do the hard stuff, but we're not trying to set records. Right, and what that was saying is it was listed as a casual. Yes, and that was always a struggle, and there was even attempted someone gave me access to another group's. We had at some point apparently absorbed, before I had joined, another casual or high-end rating guild or something and that group had its own forums and own discussions and i got access to that through someone else's account they gave me their account and so i actually saw when they were plotting to leave the server and abandon the guild and so i worked on the other end of things and undermined it uh because i realized what their complaint like i read all their complaints with me for example like some people didn't like how i had done certain made certain decisions on and like enforcing certain rules. And so I would reach out privately and be like, you know, I, I got the impression you didn't really like my decision. Let's talk about how we can change it so that you like the rule. And then I'm still following the rule, which is all I did. Right. But it's a rule that we can all get behind. And then I could see on the forums like, Oh, that Dennis, he's so not, he, he reached out to me and he was, he's totally reasonable. And all that was like, yes, good, good. Good. And I kept them in, at least as long as I was still playing. We kept them into the fold. But, yeah, I remember the issue with you with them on the rating time thing was some of them, just because they were interested in high-end stuff didn't mean they were the smartest people. They weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, so to speak. And so I remember the big issue I had at one point is they had brought in another. You played a shaman. Sorry for everyone. It was an enhancement shaman. We're in Warcraft talk now. And you were an enhancement shaman. And the guild did not usually have enhancement shamans. Right. But the guild was the same way when they brought me in because they needed priests. And I said, I'd join if they had to bring you in as well. And they did. And then they found out I was a shadow priest and they were really upset. Because I didn't say what type of priest I was like. Oh, no, well, we met a healer. And I'm like, I'm better. I'm a shadow priest. And you don't have one. and it took some time but with those tools that would show you the impact of stuff going on I was actually able to with analytics once we had the stuff that would record how people were doing damage and everything happening I had the numbers to say this stuff helps you way more than you realize they didn't have the mental capacity to inherently understand how totem buffs were so helpful or with shadow priesting it's like look I'm putting on things that are upping your damage. I'm doing... Put me in a group that's taking off damage and I can heal the whole group without casting healing spells. And then when I could show it and they could see like, holy crap, you did a whole ton of healing. I'm like, yeah. I'm just not a good direct healer. If you build this group around my suggestions, it will actually help. You put me with the DPS that are up close and I explained all the stuff and once they saw some numbers they would get it. So you were in as an enhancement shaman and then they brought in another enhancement shaman joined the guild. Right. And he was friends with some of the other people. He was friends with some of those friends in that other guild that I was able to monitor, we'll politely say. And I recall them like, well, we need to put him in. We want to run him over Tony. And the thing was that the argument that they were always making was this guy's got full purples. Right. That's how he said it back in the day. So you had, he was in full epic gear. Right. And I was not. And you were not. You had some greens. You had purples and And blues. And maybe one green. Right. Specifically, it was one green. One green. But they hated that you had a green. Yeah. And I remember at one point, I was pushing back on it because these were on the raids that you could make. And I was like, so I looked at his stats because you pointed it out. You're like, look at his gear. And I look at it. And then you go to any major number crunching meta analysis site. and it's like, the guy isn't wearing the right gear. He's just wearing a bunch of purple stuff. And so I... My gear was... Because I could only place a... You theorycrafted. And I theorycrafted my gear. My one green, there were only two purples better than it, and they were both from raids that our guild was not able to do. Yep. Yep, no, it was true. And so I'd bring that up with guild leadership, and they're like, well, but... And it's just like, so we actually had a raid with you both in it. And we had the whole stat trackers. And the way it would work is you can, if you're close enough to people, the chat log has a side where you can turn on if you want to. That's showing all the damage and healing, all the metrics at the time. And this would capture all that. And the more people you have using the tracking software, I'd merge it every raid. And that was one of my jobs. and so I'd get like four or five people using the tracking system to make sure we had good overlap to capture everything and I only needed a few because as long as you're close enough to other people you'd capture all the stuff nearby so we do that and we did the raid and I just posted the numbers and I think I was this is on the leadership side because we had some private forum stuff too and I posted it and I showed the analytics and I showed just how much more all of your totems and everything had contributed. And I think I said, I don't want to ever hear about this other guy ever again getting a spot over Tony's spot because he is not pulling his weight. This guy is not pulling his weight. He shouldn't even be an enhancement shaman with that gear. He should re-roll. So I don't want to hear it. Here's the math. Tony knows what he's doing. Is there a counter argument? Because I have science. Science? and it wasn't even close. I theorycrafted my characters so hard because of my limited play time. I knew I had to do everything just as hardcore as possible. So I theorycrafted the crap out of my character and I ran all my stuff with I mean, I had massive amounts of macros to maintain my cycles of everything. And in their defense, I don't think they ever argued it again. No, I never had a problem getting into a raid after that. It was just the fact that I was working terrible hours and had just had the first child and everything else in time just vanished. And that's how it was. I remember when we finally brought in another Shadow Priest and he actually had better gear and better mechanics than me. Oh, I was annoyed. He's actually just flat out better. Maybe I should delete those stats. And the last thing is just a quick thing I want to toss out there for fans of games like this. Homeworld. Classic space combat game. Yep. Homeworld 2 was just as good. There has now been an announcement that Homeworld 3 is being built by Gearbox Publishing. Oh, interesting. Here's my problem with it. Oh. They are doing not a Kickstarter. They're doing a FIG. Okay. Which is basically like Kickstarter. It's crowdfunding, but it's through the FIG instead. Because FIG is an investment. Yeah, it's one where you actually get equity. Right. The model I've preferred. Right. So, but it's coming. they're talking about looks like 2022 is what they're calling it for a real estate. Way out there. As much as I love Homeworld, this thing's already completely funded and I'll just buy it when it comes out. I'm not going to kickstart this one or fig this one or whatever. Of course, to be fair, it was completely funded initially because their funding goal was $1. Oh, okay. That's weird. That's weird to do. Yeah. So we'll see. But I'm always glad to see more. I still play Homeworld. The original Homeworld and Homeworld 2. I still play them. I've got them on... They did a big, fancy edition that got put out on Steam with a whole bunch of like a... What's the phrase I'm looking for? the graphics upgrades and stuff. So it'll run on more modern games. Oh, it's remastered? Yeah, they remastered it. And yeah, I still play them both. Sometimes I've played back through the stories recently, and I've replayed, I do skirmishes from time to time just for fun. Hmm, interesting. Good games. I think that's everything I've got. All right, well, then that's the show. We'll be back in just under two weeks. Just under two weeks. We're not exactly sure which day yet, but you'll just be surprised. Until then, if you want to ask us anything, you can always email eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com or you can contact us through our Facebook page, which is at facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. We're available on Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter as eclectic underscore gamers. There have been a number of people that have now been subscribing on Twitch. You've probably got lots of bits, too. Someone came in and dropped a ton of bits. Really? Yeah, a big special when Lit came in and dropped a ton of bits one day. I've not actually checked the thing. You may not want to look. I've redesigned the emotes, incidentally. Did you? I did. So if we got a few more subscribers, I'd be able to add another Tier 1 emote, because currently as a mere affiliate, and you'd still be an affiliate with that, but you get one for Tier 1 subscription, another for Tier 2, and another for Tier 3. No one ever subscribes at Tier 2 or Tier 3, so there's no point, really. Right. I used to do our EGP modern blue logo as the Tier 1. I've gone ahead and just moved that as the Tier 3. The Tier 1 spray now is part of the translight of Popeye Saves the Earth, except it says fail at the bottom of it. Nice. If you start seeing that spammed in various places, you can rest assured that's the contamination of the This Week in Pinball podcast, and people pretending games that are bad are actually good. so I figured it would be more useful because when do you need to throw an EGP image out there? I don't know but when do you need to throw a fail out there all the time and who better to personify fail than Popeye anyway I'm Dennis I'm Tony and remember these have just been our opinions and they're completely wrong if they're Tony's according to some people