Get ready for the greatest pinball on Earth! Mwahahahaha! You wish to challenge me? You have what it takes! Come join the circus! Spanning the globe, this is the BlogCade Podcast, number 13. I am your host, in a hotel in New Orleans, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap, joining me today on this historic podcast. Jeff Strong. What's shakin', homies? Jared Morgz. G'day from Australia. Sean Don Carlos. Greetings, Earthlings. And our good friend Bonzo. Uten Tak. It's party time! Jackpot! You're a pinball wizard! Holy smoke! So, gentlemen, why exactly is this a historic podcast? Quite simply, because we've been doing this for a year! Yeah! Yeah, there was a preach music. Maybe a kazoo going on, I don't know. So, and actually, folks listening, you would have known that we were coming up on this. And, hell, you'd be able to see what I've been doing in New Orleans if you had followed me on Twitter, at ShutYourTraps. And you can also follow Jared Morgs, at Jared Morgs. So what the hell am I doing in New Orleans? I'm working on American Horror Story, which is much to great delight of Heretic. but sorry Hairtick, I'm not spoiling anything so to you he's sitting there trying to get me to talk to Sarah Paulson, I'm like yeah, I'm just going to go up to the actress and be like, hey, I know this Irish guy that has a thing for you sounds like a good way to get arrested you could at least maybe ask for an autograph and say make it out to HairyTick yeah, it's kind of frowned on for crew members to go to the actors. I can imagine that. There's something about that. Especially when they're in character and Sarah's doing a two-headed woman in this version of American Horror Story. So maybe I could go talk to the dummy head. I should just tell you talk to the other head. Oh! So yeah, we've been doing this little podcast here for a year and I thought I'd ask everybody, how the hell did we get here? Reasons and stuff and things. Reasons and stuff. I mean, if memory serves, we were all hanging out in the Pibb Moll Arcade fans chat room and just shooting the breeze and somebody got the wild, crazy idea of, wouldn't this be funny as a podcast? And you know who that funny person was? It was actually Heretic. The funniest of them all. And what's interesting about that is, Heretic, who thought that we should do the podcast, who nominated myself as the moderator of the podcast, who championed us getting forward to do the podcast, simply will not do the podcast with us. Blatantly refuses. We have tried tooth and nail. We have cajoled him, buttered him up, promised him oral sex. Anything possible to get him to come on to this podcast to the point that we even thought that he was going to, like he was all guns in, like, yes, I'm going to do it. And then the day before goes, no. But you know what? I don't think I'm going to be good for the podcast. That wouldn't be proper. No, no, I'm out. So, Erotic, you limey bastard, one of these days you're going to have to do this podcast so that we can put the mute button on you. Just saying. it's funny because I think with the podcast it kind of grew out also of an extension of Jeff was doing the five questions with Bobby King and I'd gone up and done an interview with Bobby and I was planning on doing another interview and hey why don't we actually record something together and that ladies and gentlemen if you listen or go back into the iTunes our very first episode, the pilot episode. That came after Jeff and I did the interview, and we did just a few little commentary. There was like a 15-minute podcast in the end just to see if it would gel, if we liked what we were doing. And strangely enough, we did. Although if I listen to it back now, I'm like, we should have quit. Yep. So we started this podcast calling ourselves The Barcade, and that was, unbeknownst to us, a registered trademark of some years. But in the chat room, we just thought that was kind of silly because apart from Territic, there was a frequent other members drinking while chatting, and we thought that was hilarious. It actually has been hilarious on a number of occasions. That being said, I don't know how hilarious a drunken podcast with our lot would be, but there you go. And that third podcast, we managed to somehow squeeze eight people onto it, which was probably a little bit ambitious. It was pretty insane. There was a lot of interruption. There was a lot of talking over each other. Concurrent. Concurrent interruption. And yes, at that time we were doing this over Google Hangouts, and I have a theory that we were crashing it. I don't know. Yeah, I think we were stretching the limits of it at the time, although a year has passed now, so we were actually using the Hangouts on Air feature and then just ripping the audio from it. And at the time it kind of worked well, but yeah, when we started to get up in numbers, it kind of struggled a bit. Flash forward to today. Now we're doing this over Skype because, yeah, we can't really get a guy from Australia, a guy from Germany, a guy from Chicago and two guys from California in a room at the same time. Don't know why. Hell, we can barely get ourselves into the Skype at the same time. Yeah, I think this would be sold if we just got more sponsors. We could actually get the flights. I would like the trip to Australia. I've never been. Come down here. We have killer animals. I've heard. Yeah, draw bears. Yep. Well, thankfully I don't have any babies, so the dingoes can't eat them. They weren't still them. You know, the thing about flying to Australia, you try and fly away and then it always comes right back. Get it? Their best invention. Sadly, I'm not even laughing at that one. Yeah, that was just... We need a laugh track. A laugh track. Somebody install the applause sign, please. Yep. Please, it's broken. We keep pressing the button, but it's not working. I need a little button on Skype that turns red so I know when to laugh. So if people are wondering why we only podcast once a month, literally we have been trying to get this particular podcast recorded since the end of October, like the week before Halloween. Yeah. that's now a week into November. Yeah. So we give ourselves about a two, three-week window of opportunity to record, and some days we're able to manage, some days we aren't, some days we can't get Sean on, so then we record without him. That's why he's not always in every single podcast, because somebody has a life. Yeah, he has a busy schedule. Yeah, well, I look at it like launch windows for spacecraft. There's like a limited time, and then if you don't launch in that time, you have to wait a little while before you get favorable conditions again. Abort, abort. And it's like all of our agents have to collaborate, you know, with our various schedules where it's like, don't call us, we'll call you. It gets very costly. And Bonzo's got a bitch of a writer. I mean, the kind of beer he has to have in his lobby, and the type of food and it's nuts. I mean, he only likes green M&Ms, you know. Yeah, you know, it makes Beyonce look like, you know, just a kindergarten princess, you know. Right. So you saw I'm more beautiful than her, so. Oh, my Lord. So, we all commonly bonded over the pinball arcade. And from that, our tastes have also, we've learned to discover that, you know, certain types of movies we like, that we like different types of digital pinball. Some guys are in pro pinball. Some of the guys, mainly me, like Zen. I know some of you guys hate Zen. But anyway, we all kind of found a common ground, but TPA truly was what brought us together. That being said, I'd like to introduce a new feature to the Blockade Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 60 Seconds of Rage with Jeff. Because, after all, a man this mellow sometimes just has to blow his top. Jeff, 60 seconds are on the clock. Rage! All right, let me see what I can do here. I've got to whip myself into shape. alright you mother you know I just don't know if I can I can't just summon it at will I mean I'm just I'm just too mellow you know you could just beep out you just say whatever you want just beep out random stuff just put keywords in like pinball this is true yeah I might just have to doctor it up because I mean someone as mellow as me can't just force themselves to rage at will. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. I've seen the forum posts. I think you can do it. See, that's the thing. It comes and goes. It'll come for a few minutes, and then I'll get over it and I'll be like, alright, that's out of my system. But I can't just, like, you know, whip it out and say, alright, I'm just going to rage for 60 seconds. I don't know. I just... I don't know if I can force it out, man. Oh, time is up. Well, that has been 60 seconds of rage with Jeff. Stay tuned for our next podcast and we'll see what else Jeff rages at. I tried. So last time we ran a contest with our thanks to our friends over at wizardamusement.com your home for custom shooter rods that easily attach to existing ball plungers. We will be announcing the winner of that contest who is going to be winning a custom rod shooter from wizardamusement.com at the end of the podcast. So stay tuned because I know a lot of you are dying to know who won. And competition was fierce, right? It was incredible. It took me three hours to tally it all up and draw out of the hat and come up with the name. I'm telling you, this contest made Publishers Clearinghouse weep with how successful it was. While we're waiting for those results, it's time for Lost in the Zone with Sean the Banhammer Don Carlos. Are you ready to battle? Although I've got to say, Sean, have you been willing to ban Hammer that much lately? I haven't noticed. It's not a hammer. It's a scythe. and actually no I've been too busy with work and stuff I got promoted a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago rather so I haven't really been on the forums at all thank you so I I mean I'm not seeing anything that's like demanding my attention I mean are people running rampant in the off topic or something it's off topic your case that depends on how off topic they go we do have minimum standards here Maybe I should take a look at what you're saying. I have an inkling of what you're going to dip into and I'm wondering if maybe you could start off with your pinball table talk. Alright. Last episode we gave the newly minted silver blob award to Medieval Madness for best overall table and lost in the pinball arcade. And so I figured, hey, we should probably talk about it since we haven't actually covered that table. And it is a great table. Yeah, I've heard it's popular with the kids. I've heard it's so popular, they're actually making a new run of it. And I think they're all sold out, but if you had taken the opportunity at the right time for a mere $8,000, you could have had a reproduction Medieval Madness table made. And let's be serious, Sean, a reproduction of a late 90s Belly Williams table is basically like the current Stern limited edition quality at the moment, with all the features rather than just the ones that they don't put on. Anyhow. There was only, thankfully, the one version of Medieval Madness, about the limited edition and the pro and the premium and the extra super duper special and all the marketing stuff that CERN does. Trolls come no matter what this time? Trolls are included with every purchase. Don't worry about the trolls. But no, Medieval Madness is extremely popular as a table. It's one of my personal favorites. It's just a blast to play, even though it's usually kicking my butt eight ways from Sunday. The real one is very hard. To give you an idea, the replay on the one at CP Pinball usually is wandering around below 20 millions. I don't know who is playing it, keeping it up that high, because most of the time I play it, I'm lucky if I get to 10. It's a brutal table. one of the things that makes it that way is the ramps have those little posts on the ends of them and there's little stand up targets toward where the castle is for the troll stand ups you hit any of those six objects and you are probably going to find a drain they I don't know how much time the Williams engineers spent placing those for maximum draininess but they did a good job So the actually, the ramps, if you look carefully at a real one, in fact, you can kind of see it in TPA if you go into pro mode and zoom in on them. They actually have a split in the ramps. That is to keep the ramps from rejecting into the center all the time. When they were testing the table, they actually discovered that the ramps were positioned in such a way that the ball would always go down the center and there was really no way of saving it. and so they split the ends of the ramp to make the ball take a different trajectory so you had at least half a chance of getting it on a flipper. Interestingly, I find it much more successful in real life for it diverting from the standard ring than I do in TPA. Yeah, I think, I'm not sure, we'd have to ask Bobby this, because I think he's the one who tuned it. I don't know if that's just a cosmetic thing in TPA, or if it actually affects the ball trajectory like the real one would. They probably got like a ball path set. the ramp. Possibly, yeah. I don't know. I can't say I've ever noticed, because when it does it on the real one, especially if you take a weirdly angled shot, you can almost sometimes see it fall off the one part of the ramp onto the other. There's a little difference in elevation there. I've never seen that in TPA, but I just assumed it was because it's such a small feature, and the ball's moving so quickly that you can't really... Your once-a-sixty-frame draw just doesn't catch that motion. Because when I've played the real one, it's interesting, I mean, with how much I've played it in TPA, that if the ball does start coming back down the ramp, I get a little gut clench of like, oh crap, it's going to go down the middle, and then it just doesn't even come close to coming down the middle, whereas TPA, I'm always clenching all the way to the flipper going, it might, it's dangerously close. So yeah, it's interesting that that's the one feature on the real table that I find way more forgiving. And the other, well, the other thing too to balance it though, is the ramps on a real one are jack more than TPAs. They're not as bad as Twilight Zone and their vacuum ramps, but you can get some pretty marginal shots of that peasant ramp, and you'll kind of see it accelerate its way around. Yeah, it really does. It picks up speed like nothing else. It's conveyor belts. Pretty obvious. The real one obviously doesn't do that. Most of the rest of the table is pretty well behaved. I mean, the catapult does its thing, the castle kind of explodes and falls apart, sort of like TPA's does, although, again, the light show in TPA will never catch the beauty of a real one doing that in a darkened room. It really is an impressive thing. It is spectacular in a darkened room. I would say it's right up there with Lost in the Zones, light show, strobe multiball, Circus Viltare's neon in terms of, oh my god, this is an awesome special effect. It really does look good, and that's one of the things, too, is if you have a broken castle, it just takes so much out of it. I mean, the thing still works, it's failsafe in it, but it's just like, aw, I don't get my, you know, that's a whole reward for shooting that thing, besides the two million, but yeah, you get to watch the castle blow up, because no other game has that. Really, it plays similarly, but the difference is the difficulty of the real one is much harder. Part of it is... Slightly. Part of it... It's more than slightly. Part of it is... The thing with Medieval Madness is you look at it, and it's like Attack from Mars. It's very flow-oriented. I mean, you can loop ramps and do all sorts of fun things with it. You can even alternate peasant and damsel up until the part where the damsel catches it and throws it in the tower. Ah, that feels good when you can do that. But you don't actually always want to play it that way, though, because it gets going really quick. And so if you want to aim for something like Merlin, or you've been looping dams a little bit and you want to hit the joust ramp suddenly, it's very hard. You don't aim for Merlin. You just randomly get it when you least want it. Well, we'll talk about that later. But there are times where you actually do want to aim for Merlin. Like maybe there's an extra ball there or something. but when you've got all five modes and you want to have I've never done that yeah that is the most impossible shot to hit ever I have never done that real one I've done it on TPA a few times but I've never done five on a real one I've gotten four a few times but the the thing is especially if you're shooting the castle or if you're shooting something where you want to put it in a very precise spot, because if you miss it a millimeter to the left or right, you're going to hit something in the grain. It's often good to kind of stop the ball on a flipper, take a deep breath, and aim, even though the table's like, flow, flow, flow, flow! Not always. It's because the table's at the time of the month for it. Wow. Two of two. I'm going to go for the hat trick. I can see why the standards of the forum may have declined. Just kidding. I was talking about progressive insurance, guys. Come on. That wasn't even a good save. That was a horrible, horrible save. Two tilt warnings. Anyway, so what do you actually do? There's two schools of thought on this. the one which is the endorsed by Papa method is to, in competition play just hit the castle repeatedly the castle starts out just like in TPA, the first ones only take a few shots and they start taking more and more as you finish them there's two reasons for that, one is besides the multiballs they score better than just about anything else on the table the first one's 2 million and they go up by 2 each time, so you can rack up a good 15 or 16 million pretty quickly. If your extra balls are turned on, there'll be an extra ball after the second one, unless your operator is an evil bastard and moved it to the third or fourth. So that's always good, too, because you are going to need the extra balls in this game. Ball time on a medieval land, this is generally not very long. It's a very fast, very quick game. So basically to do that, you can hit the castle from either flipper. I prefer the left, just because I've found that's a little safer than shooting it from the right. For some reason, it tends to come back to the flipper a little better than it does from the right flipper, and that's due to the angle of the castle. If you look at it, it's not quite straight like the force field is on Attack from Mars. It's a little bit angled, and so you get a little better bounce, or reflection angle off the left flipper than you do the right. it works I've played in tournaments that way and got a decent score out of it I wouldn't play that way for fun it's very boring after the first two castles and there's so much else going on on the rest of the table I should be charging up the center lane and rescuing damsels who are saying how big the dragon I mean, yeah, the dragon was the dragon, just remember the dragon Yeah, the dragon. So, I mean, with all respect to Bo and Karen and the team at Papa, yes, that is probably the safer way to play it in the tournament-approved way. That's not what we're going to be covering here, because it's as boring as hell. The other way, which I call the Theater of Magic method, because it involves the ramps and the orbits just like Theater of Magic does, because there's really nothing else than a ramp or an orbit on that table. basically if you do when you first complete a mode you know, Joust or Damsel or Peasant you light a star up by Marlin and we'll get to the resulting tragedy that happens afterwards if you complete it again before you cycle back around through Royal Madness, it starts a hurry up at the castle gate and it starts at 1 million and actually takes its sweet time counting down, that hurry up is not very hurried Times were slower back in medieval times. You can, yeah, you can let it sit for a while before you actually have to do anything with it. I mean, it does count down, but not nearly as fast as, say, something like Dracula's Bats, where you wait six seconds and most of the value's already gone. Someone getting arrested Well I am in New Orleans You were close to Sarah Paulson didn you Well you know it the murder capital of America so New Orleans is Yeah Yeah take that Chicago I feel like... I'm not in Chicago. You're thinking of Time Lord. Oh, yeah, huh. Still, take that, Chicago! So, anyway. So what you can do is if you complete another mode while that first hurry-up's going, it'll reset the hurry up and increase its value and it adds a little bit more each time it does it so the first hurry up is 1 million the second is 3 million and then it starts adding it goes to 5.5, 8.5, 12 so each time you add a hurry up you add the previous hurry up's value plus another 500k if you do it so that you have joust I usually just do joust, peasant, damsel the catapult is too hard to hit on a real table bear to hit a real table, and I can nail it at will on TPS. You can truly let the ball fall off the flipper before you flip, and that's, it's just, it's so, you know, nerve-wracking to do that repeatedly. You just sort of hyper-triple it somehow. Nothing to do with trolls. But the Joust Peasant and Damsel are pretty complete. If you get them all so that they're almost complete while you've got a hurry-up going, and then you can complete three of them just back to back to back, you can jump that hurry up from 1 million to 8.5 right away. 8.5 million on a real Medieval Madness is, you know, it's a third of the replay value usually. So you're not talking about, you know, negligible points here. Technically the multi-balls would score better, except, as we'll get into in a moment, getting the higher levels of the multiball madness is kind of a pain because of that Merlin scoop. And so I usually find that an 8.5 building on a hurry-up is actually going to be better for me than even a complete, you know, three-ball, multiball madness. So it's something to think about. The trick is getting that first hurry-up going and then not hitting the castle while you're setting up the rest of it. That gets a little tricky because, you know, any time there's, you know, the ball gets a little bit out of control, you have to, you know, you panic, you fling it away. Guess where it's going? it's going into the drawbridge, because that's, hey, something's lit here and you don't want to hit it, so I'm going to go there. In that same vein, that Merlin scoop, you're going to hate that thing, because you're going to be, oh, I've got Peasant, and I've got Damsel, and I've got Catapult, and I've got all this stuff ready to go, and you've got a light lit, and it'll go in the scoop. And you'll get this very pathetic multiball madness out of Merlin. I mean, even he doesn't like it. He's just like, really, you're that bad, you couldn't even get me a decent sound line. And the scoring is pitiful. It's like 100k for a jackpot, which somebody should just be banished from pinball for that, for saying such a low score constitutes a jackpot. The super jackpots are 400k at that point, which is even more insulting. Yeah. Unless you're an EM player, then you're like, hey, what's with all those points? well the EM players are still trying to recover from Attack from Mars and it's you know 150 billion Total Nuclear Annihilation rounds just for putting a quarter in the machine yeah you can get a billion it's like when you take your SATs and you got 200 points just for signing your name on the top of the sheet yeah right but the no if you get to the when you start thinking about doing the multiball try to stay out of the center. That means not shooting the castle, not shooting the troll stand-ups. Just try to focus on your jousts and your catapults first because they're farthest away from the center. Now, wait a second. When you first get multiball and the... You're not up to multiball. Right, and the trolls pop up, right? You've got a limited amount of time for ball drainage. That's the perfect time to go after those trolls. If you have trolls lit, they'll pop up. If you haven't hit the eight stand-up targets for trolls yet, they'll stay low. Yes, that is the way you want to dispose of your trolls, is to get them lit and then go in to start trolls at the same time as multiball madness. There's actually two reasons for doing this. One, you can bash away on them for a little while while the ball saver is going and not have to worry about anything. Exactly. The other thing you can do is when you complete trolls, its mode gets added to the current multiball madness. So it actually has a... Yippee. Start. So if you're down to two balls, it'll launch any of the others back in. And you basically start your multivale over with increased scoring and all your balls back. It's good to have your balls. It is good to have the balls. I don't know about the third or fourth one, but, you know. Any balls. Yeah. Usually two is a good number of balls. Yeah, I'm not touching this one. Yeah, I'm going to let that go. Let it drain. Did you fire a call? This is going to be the let's see how firmish we can make Sean podcast. We always do that though. You seem to be more successful this time. Either that or I'm just leaving more openings. I don't know. I am tired. But the other multiball, the castle multiball, that lock is hard to hit. it's in a really tiny position it's there's an evil post right next to it if usually what I do is I kind of just ignore it if I've been taking shots to the castle with the right flipper which I know I've said not to do but sometimes I do it anyway for lack of anything else on the left side that I want to shoot sometimes if you botch it it will go into the lock you need four shots for the first castle multiball castle, if you're good at hitting the ramps you're going to love it because you just you can just fire them up the ramps alternately and get the first part of it done there is an extra ball that shows up in the middle of that which is always nice if you by some miracle manage to complete the third part of it, which is the part where you have to make all the the blue light shots your catapult, your joust, whatever that will get you a basically start the round over with increased scoring that can get pretty decent if you can cycle through it a few times that's hard to do on a real one but it is nice scoring let's see we've covered the trolls, royal madness if you get there, you play it basically the same way you do in TPA I try to save the trolls for last, even though they're in the middle, just because they're quick and easy to hit, and when your counter is at three or two seconds and you need a fast shot, the troll is going to register its hit faster than anything else on the table. I've actually lost to Royal Madness because I had shot the peasant ramp and it didn't reach the proper switch on the ramp in time. Very annoying. So the catapult takes a little while to register its hit, too. the orbits are a little faster about it just because I think the switches are a little further down on the orbits than they are on the ramps but yeah, keep a troll around just in case you need a quick shot to reset your timer we're not going to go into battle for the kingdom on a real one because I have never gotten anywhere close the closest I've gotten to it is four of the blue lights and believe me, I was bouncing off the walls just for that hell, I've only gotten to it twice in TPA that was 78 million game which is the best I've ever done on it. You look at that in TPA, and you'd be probably up around a billion by that point. You know, really. I don't do very well, you know, compared to the other tables, I don't do very well on Medieval Madness, which is kind of a mystery to me, because I play it a lot. I just don't, you know, most of the time, if I've played a real table, and it's a TPA counterpart, my TPA score is like 10 to 15 times higher than my real one. and on Medieval Madness it's only about 4 or 5 or so even the one where I did finish Battle for the Kingdom it was only like a 500 million game was not particularly high scoring now Attack from Mars I can go on forever it's just something about the game it's just I don't know if I'm too busy laughing at all the sound lines or if it's just that much harder but I just don't do as well on that one for some reason. But anyway, enough of my monologue. Any questions about Medieval Madness before we move on to the other subject? No. The tears. I'm just wondering if it's possible to backhand the castle lock from the left flipper on the real table. That depends on the size of the post that is on the peasant ramp. If it is a tiny, like one of the little tiny black ringed posts, you can sometimes squeeze it by there. It's extremely difficult. It's not something that I can do on demand. If it's one of those big fat yellow posts, like you see sometimes they put on for tournament play to make the tables harder, you're not getting a pass there. Don't even try. It's obviously... Put a nice custom cliffy protector post on there. You can probably get it past, because they're pretty thin, aren't they? The cliffies. Yeah, I mean, take a look at it, basically. Your eyeballs will be able to tell you whether you can do it or not. And also, before we depart medieval madness, I just wanted to take a quick round of everybody at what is your favorite line from the table? Oh, man. It's tough, because there's so many. They took our women, yay? What was that? they took our women yay well and I was going to say isn't that one followed by they took our pinball machines isn't that one no that one is I think they took our pinball machines and our treasured historical monuments yeah that would be I think that would be one of mine I think oh there's something that one of the damsels says it's one of the innuendo laden quotes something like a There's a lot of those. My big dragon. Mine. Yours is bigger. Oh, yeah. Such a big dragon, but I bet yours is bigger. Something like that. Every time, it cracks me up. Jeff. So am I. I like the drunken dude that you fight where he's like, it's happy hour. Juke of bourbon. Yeah. Yeah. He's got some classic ones. Go ahead. I was going to say, one of the quotes when the King of Pain, I think when you get up to the later castles, he said, I didn't like that guy anyhow. That's pretty good. I thought you were going to say the King of Pain, the King of Pain one for the start of Battle for the Kingdom. If you start knocking on his castle door, one of the quotes he says is, Not now, I'm on the throne. First time I heard it, I actually lost my ball because I was doubled over in laughter. I've actually never been up to battle for the kingdom I got close in fact I think I did it in one of those 20 minute tournament modes I was like 2 minutes to go in the tournament battle and I was nearly there and I was going of course I had to do it in a 20 minute time game right that quote actually isn't part of battle for the kingdom you actually have to destroy his castle before you can even start battle for the kingdom it's while you're knocking on his castle he says that obviously you have to do it in one of the later where it takes quite a few hits on the castle. Yeah, it's like eight hits for the gate. It's just a load of hits. But my favorite is still the, I'm Howard Hertz, who the are you? No matter how many times he says that, it's just funny. It's hilarious. Howard Hertz is the best. My kid, when playing it, my boy is eight. He was probably seven at the time when he asked me, but that line came up, and he's like, what is he saying? and I go, oh, he's just asking, how the heck are you? There he is. Right. There's another one in that same one. It's like, why they call me Howard Hurts? Lord Howard Hurts! That was good, too. As far as the soundbites, his hands just overfeed the best one ever made. It's got perfect balance of humor, and it's got the perfect balance of just, like, so many quotes and soundbites in it, too. They've really packed them into that ROM. It must be just, like, at the limit of its buffer, I reckon, with the adequate... It's got to... You couldn't have done that. Even the earlier 90s machines couldn't have done it, because they had to have WPC-95 chips and everything. You couldn't have got the Twilight Zone era. But moving on. The other thing we're going to talk about, is just kind of an interesting thing that I happened to pick up on while the Addams Family Kickstarter was going on. If you're like me and you've used Kickstarter for any length of time, at the bottom, after you've looked at a project, you might also like things that we see all over the web. They all have different projects featured and everything. Well, there was one there in video games, and it was for this game called That Which Sleeps. and it had this picture of this tentacle Cthulhu-esque demon with its tendrils wrapped around the world. And it was this really dark, kind of foreboding art style. And it's just like, okay, what the hell? I'm bored, I'll click on it. This is probably a waste of time, but we'll go see. And it's actually... I'm not going to get into the game itself because it's kind of irrelevant to what I want to talk about, but basically think of, like, Risk with Lovecraftian horrors and old ones in it. Basically, you are an awakened ancient evil, and you've just woke up, and you're kind of weak, and you can't just, like, directly take over the world. I hate it when that happens. Yeah. These little agents, you recruit these agents, and they, like, infiltrate governments and terrorize villages and basically, like, spread chaos in your name. Wait, wait, like North Korean and Asian? Oh, Asians! Oh, okay. Asians. North Koreans would be ineffective for this. It's kind of an... If you're into the old-school strategy games, it's kind of a unique twist on it, because you're basically taking over the world for evil, and so there's this whole thing about... You can't really just go out and terrorize half the world, because then we'll realize, hey, this ancient evil's waking up, we should go take care of that while he's still weak. So there's this whole deceit and trying to get what you want done without making the rest of the world realize it. Anyway, what got me, though, is the company, which is this little tiny company called King Dinosaur Games. I think this is their first game. It's two people out of Boston. And their Kickstarter is amazing because it's over now. it was winding down during the date that we would have originally recorded this podcast had everybody been there. But it was just, it was everything that Farsight's Kickstarter was not, which is to say it was awesome. I don't want to bash, you know, we've already beaten that horse enough, so we're not going to dwell on that. But just the whole thing about it was, the game was pretty much already done. Like, they have a working beta that they were, like, they had a video of, like, people playing the game and everything, and the Kickstarter was basically for the art, because there were only two people, and they didn't have artists on staff. And so it played really nice, but it looked like, man, it looked like hell. It was like playing Zork. It honestly, it looked like... Like a text adventure game now? It looked like a tabletop game. The pieces, you know, the little agents and everything almost look like little figures you'd see in a Milton Bradley game. Oh, right. So the Kickstarter was entirely for art at first. They had gone out and basically gotten quotes, and they knew exactly how much they needed. They knew exactly what they were doing. Everything was all planned out. You go through when you start reading this, they've got the details and the risks and challenges and all the sections that you have to have on a Kickstarter campaign. And I start looking at some of the updates, because I had gotten in at about halfway through, so basically they had already funded the project and they were on their stretch goals at this point. And it was just like being in the company. When you backed the project, you pretty much knew exactly where it was, exactly where they wanted to take it. Everything was out there in the open. The guys were constantly... Like, constantly. There's only two of them, and they're trying to develop the game while they're doing this. You know, they're answering everybody's questions. The thing had 10 stretch goals. Its goal was 12,000. It made it to 85 at the end. Wow. With all 10 of its stretch goals founded. So now, you know, they're adding, like, religion into the game and multiple, you know, the ancient evils are called old ones. Games where you can, like, play, you're fighting for the world over multiple, you know, all these different art. enhancements, whole nine yards. Wow. That's awesome. The schedule has slipped a little bit because the scope has creeped out beyond all reason. But they were upfront about it and they said, basically one of the stretch goals basically says, hey, if we get this, the game's going to be delayed two months because we need time to put this in. It was just very refreshing to have that kind of openness and transparency in a Kickstarter. And I think that's a lot of what we don't see and some of the other ones. Not just the one that's most relevant to us, but other video game... A lot of the video game Kickstarters fail, and fail horribly. So for this one, let me ask you this. Was the key for you, one, the communication that was happening with the people, two, the openness of what they were trying to accomplish, or three, the stretch goals? What do you think was the most important for you that makes you feel like it was very successful? An even balance of the first two. The stretch goals, I mean, they were already on their way before I even saw the project, so that would have probably happened regardless. Okay, when you joined the project, what would you say? Were they two weeks in, let's say? They were about two weeks in. They had about, I think they were on their fifth stretch goal at the time. And how much, were you able to read past communication with them? Yeah, if you go in the comments section, you could see the whole, I mean. So what would you say, how often were they communicating? Like once a day, a couple of times a day, every other day? What would you say was the, about? I would say probably, I mean, they would answer a bunch of questions each time, so you couldn't really go by post count. But I would say probably, I mean, there'd be a batch of answers in the morning and a batch at night. toward the end of the project, you could kind of tell when they were answering things because it was always the same time of day. I guess what I'm trying to wonder is, and this is where it does relate, I feel, to the farsight and when they do Kickstarters, is that obviously in the case of Adam's family, many people thought, oh, this is going to fund like crazy really fast. And yeah, it got off to a rocket start over the first two days, right? And then I think that's when people want to start hearing more info. They want to hear that the developer is engaged in this Kickstarter just as much as the people that are kickstarting. And so I'm wondering if that's why this particular one maybe was able to succeed, because if you're just a little company trying to do its thing, that's a big pill for a lot of people to swallow. But if they sense your passion about it, it kind of can become contagious. I think it was a lot of that, because even if you look on KickTrack, it doesn't have the same pattern that the Farsight ones do, where you've got the big burst at the front and the back and a long trough of nothing in the middle. This one was like three days of nothing, because they didn't have their media presence out yet. Eventually they started getting, you know, some of the gaming sites picked them up and stuff, and so that's when the horses were let out of the barn. But you just saw a steady increase throughout the project. You didn't have that whole kind of a lull thing there, because there really wasn't any lull. There was no, you know, something was always going on with that project. You know, either they had an update, or they had a new video out showing the gameplay, or they, you know, there was just always something that would maybe make you go and say, I should look at this Kickstarter again today. And, of course, you know, when that happens, people start telling their friends and blah, blah, blah. Now, were they running also the rewards? Yeah. Most of them are, they're all digital. There's no physical rewards. There's no, you know, licensed products or anything like that. But they're all, you know, they've got their standard, you know, the pre-order, the beta access, some other things of that nature. And then the higher tier ones are actually, like, one of them is you can create your own agent that gets put into the game. Like, you work with the developers to create this agent, and he gets put into the core game as part of the pool of agents that you can play with. You know, that one was a high-level one. I think that was 1,000, because it takes up a lot of the time to do that. But, you know, it was just a lot of it was, you know, they were things that made you feel like you were helping develop. Like, right now, they've moved on to a set of private forums, and a bunch of the people who are doing the beta testing, they've got like 400 beta testers out of this, they are actually going through and they've got some of the initial art samples back from their artists that they were able to contract with and we're actually going through and helping them pick out this one looks good, we want to see more of this that one's terrible, don't use it so even though the campaign's been over for two weeks it's still an interactive process and I think that's because we kind of kind of sense that was the direction it was going in. They got a lot more interest from people who otherwise would have said, oh, it's just another game. Here's my ten bucks and let's move on. I think they got a lot more A, a lot more money than they could have gotten otherwise, and B, a lot more commitment. Because they basically transformed themselves to a studio of two developers to a studio of two developers and a 400 beta testing team Right So you can get a lot more done Even though the beta testers have varying degrees of experience or inexperience if you've got 300 people telling you this art sucks, go in some other direction, that's going to be good for your game. Well, it sounds like these guys ran a pretty savvy campaign. I mean, we're able to really capitalize on... Yeah, I mean, it's a little hard to compare it to something like TTA just because, A, I think this is the only chicken in their pot right now, so it's not like they have to put out monthly DLC and fix bugs and deal with all the established product stuff that they have to do to keep their doors open. But on the other hand, it's like they have much more staff. They've got 20 to 25 people. Well, also the thing is that Farsight has run now four Kickstarter campaigns, and some of the very things that have been suggested, I will say not complained about, but suggested on how to run a Kickstarter have been suggested since the very first Kickstarter, and one of those has been communication. and it's you know i think having somebody constantly stoke that fire for the kickstarters keeps the kickstarters from going you know doing what inevitably happens which is all of a sudden they start sniping at each other and you know this and that and and uh well that was the we had a few trolls in that one right right but you know what i mean even even to the point where it was hey wait a second i'm at the the hundred dollar level i'm getting the gold table am I also getting the regular table? And it took a couple of days to get a response for that. And that should have been something that, as soon as that was even mentioned, should have been like somebody hopped in and they're going, oh yeah, yep, this is what it is. Yeah, there was actually a similar question with this one. Because when we put the rewards in Kickstarter, you can't change them once they're up. Right. And so there was a fault in the wording where it made it sound like this particular tier didn't get the rewards of what was below it. You know, innocent mistake, whatever. And so, you know, people are like, what's going on? You know, I want to do this, but I want this other stuff too. I think they had a response like 15 minutes after it first came out. Wow. It was just like... That's pretty good. People, you know, I think that's the difference with these things is people get interested in your Kickstarter if you are interested in your Kickstarter. If you're not going to show interest in your own project, Why would anybody else? Right. Well, hey, this actually leads into it. We're going to shut the door partly on Litz. We're going to leave it cracked. We're going to leave our foot in the door because I'm going to transition into your... We're going to let the power seep out. Yeah, we're going to let the power seep out, but I think Bonzo, can you shut the door for us? Sure. That's been on for so long, he doesn't remember the proper... He doesn't remember the prompt. All right, Jared, it's all you then. Oh, really? You want to let me do it again? Can we give you a suggestion of how to do it? Sure. I want it as a teenage girl getting a brand new car. Oh, my God, don't shut the door. That was actually really good. I think the power is running for its life now. The power is going, run away. So here's what I wanted to transition into. So Zen had come out with the South Park tables, and a discussion on the thread that was related to the South Park tables kind of got into how is Zen able to pull this stuff off and Farsight isn't. And then that morphed into why is it that we are always the ones that are championing Farsight, and then Zen has Kotaku giving a big ol' write-up about having tables released, whereas Pinball Arcade doesn't. Well, the man who created the Pinball Arcade fanforms thread site, That'd be Gord Lacey. He summed it up very nicely in a paragraph, and I thought I'd read it to you guys and see where this kind of... You'll see where I'm going with this. So he says, Zen is very, very good at marketing their product. They also have a slick interface for their game. Farsight has no one in charge of marketing their game, and it shows. Major video game websites talk about every Zen table update because Zen sends them information. Farsight's updates aren't mentioned on the major gaming sites and rely on fringe sites to find out about a release and promote it. I identified their lack of marketing early on, which is why I started this forum for discussing the game. I've mentioned multiple times that Farsight should create standalone versions of their top-tier tables and put them on the iOS and Android app stores to help sales. But they've never created them. It shouldn't be rocket science to think the standalone app for these licensed properties would capture fans for the properties much easier than in-app purchases would. So where I'm transitioning from is, obviously, the Ghostbusters table got released in the meantime as a standalone app. And, again, we had people all of a sudden freaking out about, ah, what are they doing, and this isn't TPA, and I'm not going to support this, and blah, blah, blah. Oh, my God, tokens. Yeah, do you guys think that Farsight has a marketing problem? Obviously. Obviously. Oh, yeah. I think that goes without saying. Yes, they need to do more work with marketing. And this isn't just PR. This is actually having somebody that, you know, it's kind of like having a press release person, somebody that can put out the notifications, notify everybody, rather than relying on us, more or less, to beat the drums. do you feel that the Ghostbusters table being released as its own little app, how do you guys think that that's been just in your own minds working do you think that it's just kind of been wildly ignored or is this the direction Farsight needs to go in for me I think it's a good idea from the perspective of metadata searching in app stores because if you the only way you could actually find out whether for example the Ghostbusters table was included in TPA's core app is if they set metadata really really well in the app so you've got hits on all the when you do a search and at the moment they've only got the I think like the first four core tables in the description on Google Play they don't have all of the tables that are in there, and if they did that, that might actually help them get some search buy-in from people who are actually looking for a particular property or a particular franchise to get in on. In other words, if somebody typed in the search Whirlwind Pinball, it wouldn't pop up anywhere in the App Store. Well, I'll try it now, shall I? Oh, live experiment. Yeah, I'll try it on iOS at the same time. Yeah, all right. Oh, I'm dying for the results now. Where's the Jeffrey? It's fast to get first. My app actually crashed as I was typing it in. That's not a good place. Oops, pinball is not how I do it. Oh, okay, so if I type in whirlwind pinball, I do get the latest table pack up. And how does it know that? So they are doing metadata searching, so I'll take that back. They seem to be doing that. Oh, yes, they have all the tables listed now. See, they didn't for a while. What about... Let's do another search for some of the latest ones. I think they've got Phantom and the Opera in there because it's like the latest, so they should have that. Yeah, I think they have all the titles listed here, which is great. Great work, guys, for doing that because that helps a lot. Bad news. Bad news on the iOS side, though. No results for World 1 Pinball. Pinball. We don't need a soundboard. We can just use our own voices. Exactly. Exactly. So, I do think, though, Chris, you're definitely onto something there with having a separate app with, say, like, Star Trek The Next Generation as a standalone, or, you know, The Twilight Zone as a standalone. These big franchise names. Well, they seemed like they would do it. Yeah, I was going to say, I thought I had heard at one point a long time ago that that was going to happen. They're great at hinting at stuff, aren't they? And again, I think that in terms of... Hey, if we keep talking like this, we might be able to get Jeff to do a 60 Seconds of Rage. Yeah, you might get me riled up. We'll give him another chance. I'm going to crank that wheel. No, I honestly believe that Farsight needs to get away from the Kickstarters. And if they can find a way of making the money or guaranteeing that they can have the money, that they don't need the Kickstarter, that would be ideal. And so if these things were released as a separate app, each table, because this is where I'm dying to know what the information is on the Ghostbusters table, but I'd love to know, how are they doing? Are people actually buying tokens to be able to play more? Why not have Best of Both Worlds and just have its own app and also in the collection? Exactly. You offer the tokens, but if the person digs a little bit more, then they can find out, oh, hey, I could have just bought this table, and now I'm in with all these other things. It's the crack dealer offering a taste, and then you're coming back for more. It totally is. And I think in the past with standalone table packs, certainly in the case of I'm talking from Zen's experience with this, is that if they release a standalone pack, they have troubles merging the entitlements back into the core pack again. Now, that's the only barrier to entry for a lot of places here, but if they can get around that problem, and I'm pretty sure there are ways that they can get around that issue. Is that a technical problem or a licensing problem? That's a technical problem, I think, in this particular case. Like, the purchases... I'm talking about Google Play here, of course, because I'm an Android dude, but I think it has something to do with the way the purchase is appended to the package name and that sort of mechanical thing in Google Play but I have a feeling that Zen is trying to work around that problem. I was reading one of their forum posts that they were trying to resolve that issue because a lot of people complain about it and it is something they're trying to fix. So if they can fix it, that sets them free. Because I know with Zen, if you buy the game on PS3 then you get it for the Vita and you get it for the PS4 but if you bought it for the PS4 you would not get it for the Vita or the PS3 so they're encouraging everybody to buy it through the PS3 and I don't know there's where I'm not sure if it's technical or if it is licensing or how it goes yeah I think I think it's purely for marketing I'm speculating here because I don't know the ins and outs of Zen's marketing model or their licensing contractual obligations. But in the case of Marvel, see, on Google Play, they have a Marvel app, they have all the different franchises separated. The Star Wars app and the Marvel app. Yeah, that's right. So I think from that perspective, that's purely a brand alignment issue, and I don't think it's a licensing issue because they also have those games in the core pack. So that's purely a branding exercise. and I think it makes a lot of sense because many people who are into Star Wars or for example with TPA into Star Trek and are not into pinball in general might just look for some interesting Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel whatever app and might stumble upon the pinball and then get sucked into the hobby, maybe I gotta say too it was a small miracle that for once with the Ghostbusters table it actually lined up with a goddamn anniversary. Yeah, nicely played. You know, I mean, how many times have we been saying this where it's like they miss some opportunities of releasing a table. Like if they had released World Cup 94 while World Cup was going on, because you've got a lot of people that are just searching World Cup. And by random happenstance, the table might pop up and people are like, oh yeah, you know, because they're into it at that moment. But you use other people's – again, this comes back down to marketing, but you use other people's momentum and catch a ride on it. I guess the other one that they kind of lucked out on too, or I don't know if you could say lucked out on or planned, was Dracula with the movie. But I don't know. But was that timed for anything? Wasn't there a new Dracula movie that just came out? Well, Dracula, yeah. I'm not told, but I don't think anybody really – It was pretty lame, yeah. I don't even know what you were talking about. Yeah, see that's... I don't know if it's just a coincidence, maybe. Universal Pictures is trying to... Everybody wants the next Marvel property, you might want to say, to do these multi-movie franchises that are all connected and interplayed, and Universal finally realized, hey, we own the monsters, and so they're trying to relaunch The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein... Oh, all the old 40s and 50s... Yes, and they wanted... ...a la Marvel is doing where one movie leads into the next movie and you build this giant franchise. And apparently Dracula Untold was the opening salvo, which more likely was that they shot a couple of BB guns and people went, ouch! Because I can't hear anybody talking about that movie. But technically... Normally I keep up with the Dracula stuff, but I didn't even hear about that one. Yeah, it launched, I mean, around the same time as the TPA table. so I mean that was October 10th how perfect would it have been to release Doctor Who table during the whole 50th anniversary brouhaha that was going on and granted yeah it would be an extraordinarily expensive license to do but if you're going to do it time it right well there are Daleks on the table so I think the guy who created the Daleks is some very special guy to deal with. He's a state now. He's dead. Yeah, he left... Basically, his will basically ties up anybody else other than... Because I remember even when BBC was trying to do the relaunch of the new Doctor Who, they were almost afraid that they weren't going to be able to include the Daleks because they couldn't reach licensing terms with the guy's state. they did eventually. I don't know how much extortion he got out of them. Yeah, they're legendarily difficult to license. But, I mean, people must do it because I've got a little plush Dalek on my desk and you squeeze it and he goes, exterminate, exterminate! So, I mean, people are doing it. I guess it's just you have to have a lot of money. What do you guys think of the Ghostbusters re-theming of Haunted House? I can safely say I've played it more than I've played the Haunted House table which I think I've played Haunted House maybe twice and I've played Ghostbusters maybe a handful of times just because I've only been able to play it on my phone and I don't like playing TPA on the phone it's too tiny it feels like playing one of those little plastic toy pinball machines I kind of played it a fair bit in the beta testing round for Android and yeah, after that I haven't really touched it. Although, I kind of find that that's the case with most of the tables now. Like, I really play them extensively during beta testing and then I don't touch them probably until they come up with a tournament that has it in it again. It's funny. I get sort of burned out by it. I don't know. I played a little bit of it during the beta and I played a little bit of it afterwards. Well, first of all, I don't like Haunted House. I just don't like that table. No, I don't either. That being said, I think they made improvements to the game by making it so that, you know, A, adding multiball, and B, making it so your ball doesn't fall through the flippers. Yeah, that gap on the right has been mercifully closed. Yes. Honestly, if I'm playing, I don't play as much as I used to in general, but if I am playing, I'm usually playing the Season 1 tables, because those are the 90s Bobby Williams that I like. And since then, it's been a lot of Gottlieb, a lot of second-tier tables. And I don't play them as much because I don't play the real ones as much. When I'm at CP Pinball, it's just I don't... They kind of fired all their guns in the first season, and there's not... For a while we were getting Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Attack from Mars, just one after the other, and it was great. But even back then I was like, they're going to run out of these top flight tables pretty quickly here. Because a lot of the other ones that they haven't done yet are the ones that have really heavy licenses attached to them. I feel it's that abundance of wealth. When you have so many, you wind up not playing any. I mean, I do the same thing with, I have over 200 movies in my rack, and I'll sit there and I'll stare at them going, I have nothing to watch. That's one hell of a rack. Yeah, hell it is. That's a rack. I like them big. And so it's like, I'll have all these movies, and I'll wind up not watching anything that night, because I'll have spent ten minutes staring at it going, do I want to watch this? No, do I want to watch that? I don't know, that one's a possibility. and then I'm just like, eh, never mind. As opposed to when I first started getting Blu-rays, and all of a sudden I had only five Blu-ray movies. And I would stare at those and go, yeah, I'm going to watch this one. And it was weird because when I had a smaller collection, then I would watch them more, but as the collection gets larger, it becomes too daunting for me to even want to start wading into it. See, what I do with that is with the – I just – especially on mobile, it's a little hard to do it on PC, but with mobile I just close my eyes and start spitting the table selection wheel. The price is right wheel. And then I just hit start and see what comes up and if I don't like it I just exit out and choose another one. And then when you see going nuts come up you go ahhh! You literally go nuts. That is bankrupt and I usually just set the thing down and go away because obviously the pinball gods are not in my favor if they suggest going nuts to me. Which again, if we would get the new UI we would have, well at least some of the things that were mentioned was random table or some of these functions that would make it happen. Vaporware. Vaporware. I'm still waiting. Are you ready for another 60 seconds of Raze? I'm slowly getting warmed up. Okay, well to be continued. Okay. I'm curious to know, and this is a little more of a transition since Bonzo is in the room and we can finally talk about this. So... Cricket the German? Yeah. So Farzad introduced the token system. Now, I haven't maxed out the tokens, but part of that is because I use one game and I start seeing that little timer going, you'll earn the next token in three hours. And it's like, really? Three hours for one token? I mean, that's... It's pretty stingy there. By contrast, Hearthstone Hey, Bonzo, we're talking about it. There's a game called Hearthstone that was put out by Blizzard. It is a spin-off game. Bar marketing geniuses, by the way. Yes. And it is a spin-off game of World of Warcraft. And King's Off Polished Gaming. Exactly. If you want to talk about how to put out a polished game that, for all intents and purposes, is freeware, and at the same time how to put out a freeware title with in-app purchases that don't beat you over the head with them, that don't punish you for not buying in-app purchases and actually give you a way of earning points in the game to purchase those in-app purchases without laying a dime out, this is it. I mean, it is incredible what they did with this game to entice you to play it. And I think that's what's critically missing from many games, not just what FarSight is doing or experimenting with the token system, but all your candy crushes out there too, where at some point they beat you into submission where you're like, you know what, screw this, I'm not playing this title anymore because you've made it impossible for me to go forward with any enjoyment. So just giving you the example of what happened in Hearthstone, They came out with an expansion pack that was going to be for solo play. And they were going to charge... Jeff or Bonzo, can you remind me what they were going to charge per week for each pack that was opening up? I didn't pay anything. You mean an in-game currency? Yes, because... Jeff, did you wind up buying the expansion? Yeah, the Curse of Nexoramus. Yeah, I actually just ended up paying cash for it because I'm the kind of guy who, like, anytime I get gold in the game, I'm, like, constantly going into the arena and spending it and getting new cards and stuff. Right, so essentially, as you play the game, you can earn in-game what they call gold. And you can use that gold to buy more cards, because this is a customizable card game. So you can use it to buy more cards, which are rare cards and higher-powered cards. It's basically like a pack of baseball cards that you open up, and it's like a booster pack. Yeah. It's a booster pack. So they came out with this expansion game, and they offered two ways of playing the expansion game. You could either use your gold to pay for the game and open it up for free, or you could pay your money. And they were opening up a new level each week for, I believe, five weeks. It was four or five weeks. And so for a player like myself, who I wasn't playing the game that much, I just started hoarding gold. I was like, shoot, I'm not going to pay a dime, and I'm going to get to open up all these things. And then, yeah, you've got a player like Jeff who actually is playing the game and trying to be ranked and stuff and have actually good decks built. And he laid out the cash because he didn't want to wait around to collect it because somebody actually came up with the formula of time versus money. Here's how much time you'd have to spend playing in order to collect enough. The economics of Hearthstone. Oh, exactly. Somebody broke it down and was like, look, it's just better if you pay the money and go. It was kind of an interesting way of doing it. But that's what I'm saying. They made it so that I mean for myself I started playing like crazy because I wanted to collect more gold And so I was playing that much more And it was I thought it was genius You know, they encouraged you to play and didn't punish you at all. And that's the thing with this game. You can play it for hours on end. There is no energy bar system. There is no, you know, there's certain things, like one of the areas is called Arena, that yes, you do have to pay into with your gold to be able to play. but it's not critical to the game it's just another way of playing the game and having fun with it and if you're not totally bad at it you usually get at least what you invested back so it's not even a loss yeah it's like a gambling thing with you have the potential if you're a good player you can go in there and come away with like I think I've made when I had 12 wins one time I got like 700 gold or something just for investing 100 gold or 150 gold into it so you could really, you know... Which basically translates into seven new packs of cards. Yeah, so you can come out of there, and so it's really ingenious, the system that they have set up. And they just announced a new expansion this week at BlizzCon, which actually just took place, just finished up yesterday. And they're introducing, like, 120 new cards, and it's not like Naxxramas, where you have to pay to unlock the things. It's all those cards are going to be available in packs, or you can craft the dust and stuff. So instead of a wing of adventures, which Naxxramas was, this is more like a total expansion to where everything is going to be available in packs. So it's a pretty novel idea. And the thing that I think that really makes Hearthstone successful is that it's almost entirely multiplayer. Yeah. I think that is something that, if TPA had that in place, then something like the token system and that sort of thing really would shine. But with the lack of multiplayer, I can't see the community really blossoming into something beyond what it is now. Unless you said because it ceases to be a community and it maintains a solo experience. Once you get bored on your own, then there's no enticement to come back to it. Exactly. And having that ranking system that Hearthstone has, that's what's kept me playing it. Which, by the way, and here's the other thing that's genius with a ranking, it resets every month. Yeah, exactly. So every month, at the beginning of the month, there's this mad dash scramble of, a lot of times, of the players that suck, trying to get a high ranking really quick before the good players come in and squash them. And I don't know how many times I've been saying this within Pinball Arcade, reset the damn leaderboards. It'll entice people to come back and try and regain the top spot. It's like having a tournament without being for a limited time. Reset those leaderboards every two months, every six months. I don't care. Just reset them and you're going to see a surge of playing come back. And just imagine if the pinball arcade had a ladder system, a matchmaking system for multiplayer where it matched you up with people of similar skill, similar high scores. so I mean it would just be insane I mean Hearthstone is I'd be for that because these leaderboards I don't even try because I don't have 18 hours or however long it takes to get 864 billion on attack I mean the 20 minute challenges help with it a little bit but those are sporadic things those don't happen all the time they're only a week or however long they run in the tournaments if you go on Twitch right now Hearthstone is the number three game. There's more people watching that than Halo, Counter-Strike. Even World of Warcraft, there's more people watching Hearthstone. So they're obviously doing something right, and they just had the World Championship. Twitch isn't anything good to me anyway. I can't, from the generation, I don't understand why people would watch a video game rather than play the video game. Well, a lot of people watch it to learn from, because the streamers are professional, most of the time professional. It's kind of like watching professional poker players. Yeah. So a lot of people watch to actually learn strategies and stuff like that. Because you start going, oh, I know exactly what to do, and then you go, I'm going to go play, and then you go sit down and play and you get your ass handed to you. Okay, so apparently I didn't learn squat. Back to the drawing board. No, I don't have a poker face at all, so I knew better than to try to do that. I would highly encourage, even if you have no interest in customizable card games, download Hearthstone, give it two hours of just looking at it, going through it, play the tutorial, and you're going to see... Even the tutorial is lovely, isn't it? Oh, yeah, it's so powerful. That's actually the reason why I have been very studiously avoiding doing that, because I used to play Magic back in the day, and you know what would happen if I had a game like Hearthstone, it's like, I need to have, you know, I don't have that time. Exactly what happened to me. I got sucked into the vortex. Yeah, but even, what I'm encouraging this is not even so much for the gameplay, but it's, look at the polish. Look at how the interface interacts. Look at how it does, yeah, matching up you to other players. Look at, even while you're playing the game, the little effect touches that they have going on. I mean, they didn't leave anything unturned. It's not playing Solitaire using the basic program that came with Windows, Solitaire. It's a breathing, living thing going on for a card game. I mean, it's insane. Just keep in mind, though, we're talking about Blizzard Entertainment here. They have the resources to do these kinds of things at that eyelash of the cost. They do, but my point is, look at Blizzard. do not look at King Games or whoever's making Candy Crush, which, unfortunately, I know that is who Farsight is looking at. There are good companies to look at for how to do a product really well and be insanely successful, and then there's these zingas and companies that are basically looking for a viral hit. And I don't think that a game like Pinball Arcade is a viral hit. It's something that is, you know, we know, it's core fans. And you want to keep them engaged and keep them activated, and you want to gain more core fans. You don't just want flash-in-the-pan people that are going to play your game for two months and then never, you know, delete it off of their phone. I move that we call the title of this podcast Marketing 101. Yeah, we have. There you go. Marketing 101, yeah. And I think if you look at Zen, I mean, they've got the polish. I'd say their polish pretty much equals Blizzard's in terms of how... I have some of their games. They're lovely games to look at. The physics still grates on me intensely. Yeah, same here. I mean, if I didn't know, if I didn't play real pinball and I didn't know the physics were terrible, I'd be thinking, oh my god, this is great. You know, it looks awesome, it's easy to use. I love the fact with Xen that you... I wouldn't even know that what farce... Well, I mean, I guess beyond the real table thing. I recognize that part of it, but I wouldn't necessarily know that technically Zen is flawed in the eyes of a pinball purist. Right. Love the fact with Zen that to get started on the table on mobile, you tap the table, or even it has full controller integration even on mobile on Android. So if you have your controller connected, it's like move the little highlighter to the table, press the X button three times, and your game's started. that's it. No scrolling, no going through menus. The fact that TPA doesn't actually have proper controller integration means I can't actually use it as a game on, for example, my Shield tablet, which has a mode where you can make it into a console mode and turn off the screen. I have to have that touchscreen on, and I have to get out of my seat to go and press the buttons on the screen. It's frustrating, and Zen doesn't have that. then I can actually turn it into a console and just sit on it for hours if I wanted to and play it you're losing a market share there, so you need to give the UE more prioritisation and I know that these things don't bring in the dollars technically, but I'd argue that they will, because the user experience is what sells the game, the game content itself has to be good, but onboarding a new user into a game, if they see the interface now mobile will be going, wow, this thing's like two or three years out of date. What's going on? From a UI perspective or UX perspective, it's bad. Bad, bad, bad. I think I'm speaking for a lot of us here. I'm putting out putting up with a lot of inadequacy in the presentation because I know it's real pinball and because I want that and I can't get it anywhere else. If it was something where I had the option to go elsewhere or I didn't necessarily care that it was real pinball. If I'm just some casual person that wants to play a pinball game and I don't care that it's based on the real tables, I think they're losing people because of that. They are, especially on PC. It's a pain to do some things. And it looks... It doesn't look horrible, but it doesn't have... It's not as shiny as Zen. It doesn't have the sparkle or whatever you want to call it. It's what's known as curb appeal. Yes, that's what I was looking for. you know the inside of the house may be beautiful this is why I'm not a marketer I'm an engineer I don't know the terms if you don't want to walk up to the house in the first place then nobody's going to see the interior yeah exactly we want the interior we want the exterior to match you know at least CPA has the better title theme so the other thing I was thinking to do is in Zen this is another point of difference in Zen when you go into the table options or the graphic settings. The graphic settings don't have technical jargon behind them. There's like detail high, detail standard. Whereas in Android, and this is just an example because this is the only platform I've got, in Android there's MIP mapping and there's local texture quality and stuff like that. There's an actual menu item called MIP mapping. Which geeks love. I would totally know what that was unless I looked into the subject. And I actually touched on this in a beta's past. I said you need to make these more human-readable. And the problem is that the current menu system, again, it's down to the UX. There's a limited space that they can actually put for the menu item in a landscape or a portrait orientation. And so the menu directly here is limiting what they can do to help the user understand features in the game. It is UX fail. Fail, fail, fail. I mean, come on. The way it is now, if you want the highest possible settings, you have to turn one feature off and another feature on. I tried to tell that to my mom if she wanted to play a game of Pillow. She'd never get that. Good luck, yeah. The mom factor. It's really tough. They need to push that priority tree and deprioritize some other things. The UI is important. It is your curb appeal for the app, as Chris rightly says, and it will actually get people in the door so you can start selling them your DLC. Yeah, good point. I mean, even focusing on stuff like Ghostbusters and Orbles, Balls, and stuff like that, it's like, why would those things take precedence over these core features? Or it's the tail wagging the dog. Yeah, it just seems so backwards to me. they want to bring new people in but they're forgetting the things that will actually what are the things that people are first seeing when they fire up the Pimbarcade and trying to set it up and trying to customize it to their liking it's just not user friendly at all and it's a bad reflection on a good franchise exactly yeah it's really bad once you get past it The gameplay is awesome. That's what Sean was saying. Once you're playing the game, who cares about all this other stuff? But it is getting through that front door. Every time you're going, you're walking by. You're just like, oh, hey, now we're here. Okay, great. It's a front door with an arbitrary lock that when you open it, you have to push the other side of the door rather than the side the door handles on. It's that sort of analogy. I know it's a crude analogy, but it kind of is like that. it's just this cludginess that makes you go, uh, why? You ring the doorbell and it's like, would you like a punch in the nuts? I guess if I could play pinball. But, I mean, come on, it's been two years. I mean, it's time. It's time for a lot of things, in my opinion. I mean, multiplayer, don't even get me started. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Jeff, it's time for 60 Seconds of Rage with Jeff. Go! Well, you know, I mean, just the PC version in general, every time I think about it, it does give me a sense of, I don't know if I'd say rage, but irritation. Just because, I mean, you could fire a VP so much. I mean, people say, oh, it's harder to set up, this and that. Well, it is. I mean, last time I tried it, it was pretty simple. They got an executable that you can just run and boom, you're there. I mean, it's come a long way. I'll look into that. Yeah, it's come a long way. The last time I tried was still the, you know, put this here, put that there. I mean, yes, you do have to drop the ROMs in the right folders and stuff, but, I mean, I would assume most people could figure that out. For some reason, my video cards still do not like that game. Yeah, it is picky in terms of, I had an ATI one time that was, struggled with it a little bit, but, anyways, I mean, for me to, I know I've said a lot of these things in the forum, but. Oh, I'm sorry, Jeff. That is all the time we have for you today. That has been 60 Seconds of Rage with Jeff. Oh, the rage is so thick. Speaking of rage, so we're going to be introducing a new logo. And we put it out there earlier a few times ago to see if any one of our listeners would be able to help us with a logo. And the only help that we got was we got something from PinballWiz48, I think. I can't remember. 45. Yeah. He submitted an effort, and then I opened up an email, and it was some guy spreading his ass cheeks. That was about the itch for it. Chris got goat seed for the record. Yes, I got goat seed. Don't Google that. Please don't Google that. I am not responsible for what happens if you Google that. Not safe for life. So after seeing deep into somebody's prostate, I realized that coming up with a logo was probably going to have to fall into my lap. Hey, at least it inspired you, man. Go see it. It's hard for people to action. So anyway, we are having a brand new logo. I hope you guys like it. If you don't, tough, because this is what it is. And we may be doing things with it. We have plans. We're forward thinking of where we might want to go with this. But as was witnessed by our latest contest, you people either hate Twitter with a passion that just boils up from the seeds of hell, or you hate free stuff. That didn't even make sense. Okay, let's try this again. What didn't make sense? My analogy? I was free-flowing there, you know? Just go on. Where does this even make sense? We're in the insanity part of the podcast here. We're way beyond how long we usually do these podcasts, but anything goes. It's a one-year anniversary. Deal with it. Yeah, you've got to pause the button. Come back to us, bitches. So anyway, we were in this contest asking you to submit a picture of a pinball table and you throwing up either double horns, a hang loose, giving us the finger, or a thumbs up. We had one entry. One entry. Boo. you could have won with a 50-50 chance just by doing one other entry. But no, we had one person enter. Now, normally I'd be like, screw you all. We're not giving you the prize. You don't deserve it. But you know what? To Eric Wartenberger, whose Twitter handle is at Chuck Wirt, dude, you're getting it because you actually submitted something. Something was not terribly difficult, which is find a pinball machine and give it the hand signal. It wouldn't even have to be your pinball machine for credit. Exactly. And I don't even care if you don't own a pinball machine. You could have won one of these cool-ass toppers. I know that I would want one just to put up on the shelf, you know, with pinball paraphernalia. There are all sorts of things you could do with it. I mean, come on, use your imagination. Exactly. Hey, Chris, tell him what he wins. Well, he's going to win his own personal session of 60 Seconds of Rage with Jeff. Oh, no. I'm too exhausted at this point. No, but Chris sounds like he's worked himself up pretty good. Well, yeah, Jeff petered out. I petered out before I even started. Eric, we're going to get in touch with you and let you, I believe I talked to Mike, who is the man in charge over there at Wizard Amusement. He is debuting Walking Dead plunger pullers for the Walking Dead machine, but I believe he also mentioned to me that you would have your pick, whatever he has in stock. So we'll get in contact, get your info, and I'll hook you up with Mike, and then maybe you can take a picture and post it on at Blockade of what you chose. That would be pretty awesome. Which pinball machine was in his entry photo? Big Guns. Oh. Oh. I wonder if he has... And he gave us the hang loose. He didn't even give us the finger. You know? I like that. That was nice. I like that. Yes. Classy. Which is why he's a winner winner chicken dinner today. Indeed. And just for the record, we had over like a thousand downloads for the episode. So it wasn't like, you know, we got this one guy listening or something. So I mean, you all had a chance. You're all lazier than me. Obviously either hate Twitter or they hate free stuff. I don't know which would be. The Twitter part I could see, but come on, the free stuff? I mean, give me a break. Yeah. You're lazy, people. Come on. We'll expect more next time. I know. And see, we were having plans with this new logo, I think you'll see. You know, hey, maybe we could put on T-shirts and if people like the T-shirts and stuff. But, you know, we can give T-shirts away. But I don't think people are caring at the moment. They just want to listen. Which is fine. We'll give them their listening. We won't berate them too much. We appreciate you all in your own lazy way. From one lazy man to another. This is like the burn all the bridges episode. Yeah, this is the last episode of the podcast. I'm not going to do what y'all think I'm going to do. Who's coming with me? Next podcast, we're talking entirely about, you know, food. Food? Food. Now, if Heretic doesn't show up for that one, that's just going to be downright awful. Yeah. He'd show up if we could offer him bong and pee, but... Yeah, we have to bravado him out. Bong and pee. Bring a bong, he's there. I mean, it's a done deal. Not only does he like to drink pee, he just likes to announce that he likes to... Oh my god. He doesn't like to do it with you guys anymore. What if we fill his bong up with pee? I was going to say, maybe that's his bong up. Gurgle, gurgle. Now that would be one of the king of a roach. That would be nice. You know, at this point I would say I'm curious to know how many people have been listening to this in one shot, but then I also know that somebody did a podcast on pinball recently that was like six hours long. So, you know, we're still fresh. We're just getting warmed up. We're just daisies. Oh, my God. So are we going to do an avatar change this time? Should we do an avatar? Well, we've got to find out who's still listening after this. This is true. So if we were to do an avatar that would be appropriate to this podcast, I think it should be birthday candles for our anniversary. How appropriate. I'm so glad you said that. I had no idea where you were going with this. Well, I thought about asking for spread cheeks, but yes. I think birthday candles in your avatar on the Pinball Arcade fans forum would be a wonderful way of showing your support for the Blockade podcast and saying, hey, I listened all the way to the end, and this is what I got out of it. all 13 episodes and all I got was this crappy avatar that I had to find on my own through Google Images I had to buy my own oh boy we're going to wrap this we're going to wrap this thing up we're going to let Bonzo go to sleep because it's like 2 in the morning now for him so I have been your host shut your trap saying thanks for listening. Thanks for participating too. Jeff Strong, Jared Morgz, Bonzo, and Sean, the Bandhammer, Don Karmelos. I know it's the band song, but I don't care. You know what? Bandhammer sounds better. It does. It's just not original. I don't even hardly use it anymore. Fucking dust, man. You're going to have to dust it off. You're going to have to ask somebody. Maybe we should invite some of the people that have been banned back so you can ban them again. No. Maybe we just need to start picking random people to spin the wheel. All right. Random ban. Spin the wheel of ban? I got a clue to that already. Oh, really? Oh. Sorry, it's not original then. Anyway, thanks. Good night. We'll see you later. Goodbye, Earthling. Of course, Chris starts cutting out right at the very end. oh did I get stuttery right then yeah internet's been dying on you New Orleans is hopping man everybody's online right now yeah looking how to kill the next person oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh More time, more time, more time, more time, more time.