this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i am your host chris frebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan g'day chris how you going mate well you know I go you go I thought I'd do like typically a stride and greeting for you today yeah try that on for us that's right show him it's done we can deal with that no for me it's the kid went back to school this week so it's getting into that yeah right yeah totally yeah definitely one of those numbers yeah so uh i got a uh i got an unexpected uh message this morning jared and with along that it becomes we have a special guest ta-da all right we're gonna we're gonna jump right into special guest who uh was wanting to talk to us this is mart with uh he's the community manager for Magic Pixel. Hello, buddy. Thanks for having me today in your podcast. Absolutely. Hey, when somebody from a pinball, digital pinball company says, hey, I want to talk to you, I got things to talk about, and we're like, okay. Plus, we've been wanting to talk to the guys from Magic Pixel for quite a while. We've been usually doing a lot of, we usually do a question and answer with Salt there, and of course Zolt isn't really comfortable coming on and talking in audio, so we always usually get a guest in to read the questions. Good question and answer back. And it worked quite well, but we've really been wanting to speak to someone from Maisie Pixel. So it's great to have you on. Yes, it is. And I'll just start with this. Question one, yes or no? I've got my body armor on. What's that? I've got my body armor on. You've got your body armor on. Okay, question one. Yes or no? You're here to announce that Magic Pixel has the licensing rights to Belly and Williams. No, we don't have it. Okay, question two. Yes or no? You know that somebody, and you know who it is, that has the rights to Belly and Williams. No, I think there's someone else. So, with that being said... Thank you for coming on the show, Marge. We'll talk to you again later. Okay, bye-bye. Oh, yeah. Like I said, we've been having fun with, well, as much fun as we can in these mystery times. So what's on your mind today there, Mart? You mentioned something to me about Magic Pixel and the Zachariah Pinball app have recently launched on? The Nintendo Switch. There you go. Yeah. And, yeah, that was quite a thing, actually, because, you know, it's a hot console or hot handhelds, as you can call it. You can travel with it, which I think gives quite a few possibilities to people, you know, gaming at home and gaming in traffic and gaming at vacation. And the numbers has been quite surprising because this week also Switch has beaten the record on the free table on Steam. Oh, wow. Yeah, we're going to the time machine, who has a free table, and when people submit scores to it, they can try it out, see if they like it, just like FX does with the Sorcerer's Lair table. And then this week, it was like 22,500 people that tried on Steam, and then the Switch just beat it with 23,000. And interesting enough, the Switch has been released for not even a month, and Steam has been rustling for two years. That's really, really quick take-up of a brand-new release. You've got to be happy about that, Mark. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm quite interested in six months if we reach the 100,000th. Well, certainly with a start like that, it's possible. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, like you said, it's a great platform because it is mobile, and I know there's a lot of people that like playing their pinball mobile. Yeah. But with the bigger screen and actually being able to use controllers to do the flippers and still be mobile, I think it definitely plays up its advantage. It's currently just a landscape mode pinball, or is it also portrait? Yeah, we launched it with portrait mode. For those who don't know what it is, it's a rotated 90-degree screen. So that's been there since the beginning, and for the Switch, it's quite ideal as well. and also in the next update, which is probably end of this one, August. A little bit begin September, we're launching a new update. And then we can also rotate the screen both directions, you know, clockwise and anticlockwise. All right. And then you can use it for the flip and grip. Yeah, Jared, I don't know. We haven't talked about this, and I don't know if you're aware of this product. There was a Kickstarter, I think it's over now, for this thing called the flip grip. Oh, okay. Basically a little cradle to put the Switch into in portrait mode, and then the controllers would be able to be locked in on the side. Oh, that's awesome. So it's totally in that configuration, and yet you still get the buttons to be able to play with. Awesome. And it was all of, well, I mean, I don't know what their final pricing is going to be, but I think in the Kickstarter, to purchase one, it was like $15. So it's a totally reasonable... Shut up and take my money. Give me portrait mode right now. That's such a bargain. That's awesome. Yeah, so I'm glad that you guys embraced that, and I'm almost positive that Zen has embraced it. I don't know if Pinball Arcade, the way that theirs is, direction there rotates, if it will be able to be playable in that too, but I imagine it will be. I know they've got portrait support in Pinball Arcade. They do have portrait support. Well, they've got the extra flip grip support. Well, what it is, the controller has to be flipped a certain 90 degrees to allow for the ports to be accessible in the flip grip. Right. So if Pimble Arcade or Zen don't care which direction you flip it, that it works either way, then it won't be an issue. But if it's locked into a certain 90 degree rotation, then that's where it would be an issue. So, Mark, with the flip grip, this is the first time I've heard of it because I'm not actually a Switch gamer. But is there an SDK that you need to develop against for that particular controller? Or is it just sort of it's all catered for within the basic mapping for the controllers on Switch? I wouldn't know that answer because I haven't updated the Switch version yet. I focus mostly on PC. Okay. But, yeah, another thing also that's coming for the Switch is a little bit end of this month. We're getting also an update as well. and then we're also trying to finish the collection that we have on Steam. Right. In the Steam, you have these bundles, you know, the gold pack, the silver pack, and the silver pack is like all the EM and the solid state machines. Yep. And then the gold pack is then the same but with the bronze pack, and the bronze pack is where you can unlock all the settings. Yeah, right, all the operator settings so you can control everything without each game. But for the Switch, it went a little bit different. We got there a couple of packs, like EMPack number one and EMPack number two. And yeah, we're adding that end of this month with a bunch of EM machines and some remakes. So yeah, I think there's something like 12, 14 tables coming end of this month. Now let's talk about those remakes because coming from mobile, I was on Android for a long time, of course, with your focus on Steam that Android has sort of not really had too much love recently. And I've recently got onto Steam. I've got a Windows 10 computer that can run it now. And I thought, oh, I'll just download Zacharia and see what it's like. I didn't have any unlocks or anything for it, but I thought, oh, they're usually pretty good. I can usually try all the tables out. And then I saw these remake tables, and I was kind of blown away by what you guys have done over there with those. They are fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. It's funny too, Jared, that you say that because Mark was able to hook me up with tables today and so I was going through and he hooked me up with two of the remakes. And so I looked at one of them. One of them was Space Shuttle was the title of it. I played that first. I went, check this out. There's like, you know, wireframe ball trails. Yeah. And the flipper, where the flipper placement was, I'm just going to call it European because it's very reminiscent of some of the earlier Zen tables where they placed flippers. I thought, oh, wow, that's really interesting. Okay. I was like, guy, if I had have known that Zachariah tables were like this, I probably would have been more interested in playing them. So then I go and I play the original version of Space Shuttle. And it's not even remotely close. And I was like, well, wait, where did this one come from? And Mark, you basically told me that this is the designers having fun at Magic Pixel. Absolutely. I think one of the few elements is that the art on the play field, that's a little bit similar. Yeah. It's still different because you still need to draw your elements of your game. Right. And then you have the back glass, which is mostly the same. And there might be some sound effects that are a little bit similar and intended. But otherwise, there's also a custom OST, a soundtrack that's there. And yeah, developers just go nuts. because there was a little bit of a problem that we saw as well in the long run is that when you've got games like FX2 and arcade, there's a lot of fancy design. And when you get to these EM machines, there's a lot of people who get a little bit bored of it. It's a certain breed that likes those tables and it's not necessarily the youth of today. No, true. And I think also a lot of people, it grows on them as well. So they say, oh, this table is boring. We'd actually play it. Like, oh, it's pretty cool actually. and they start to create a certain love for pinball because if you love solid state machines, you're going to love other stuff as well, you know, because you're having the basics. Now, I noticed one other feature while scrolling around there that apart from the remakes, there's also these things called their retro tables. Now, is that also the designers having fun? A little bit, yeah. I mean, you could almost call them demakes. I think they're a little bit down. But yeah, very old school tables. And, yeah, the way it works is that if you own a DLC, let's say, you know, for example, Farfalla, you get the retro version for free. So it's also thanks to the owners for their loyalty. But, again, that's not a recreation of a real table. It's just designers basically turning it into a true EM. Yeah, it's just, you know, creating a simple version and having a little bit of fun. And, of course, at every table there's always achievements as well, and people love getting those. I was also quite surprised at, you know, last time I had looked at the Zachariah pinball, the UI was kind of sketchy to look at and get through. And so I was quite surprised to see how it's all very much organized. But the level of, like, customization you can do on these things is nuts. It's unbelievable, eh? Your engine that you use is incredible with the amount of tweaks you can do, both graphically and just gameplay-wise. It's a very powerful engine. You can change rubber color, if you so desire. You can change the color of the wood. You can determine if you want playfield glass on or off, and if you have it on, how many fingerprints are on it? Is it scratched? you know you can even turn on the this table is beat to hell feature you know it's just like wow everything in the kitchen sink is thrown in on this yeah there's a lot of options and you know sometimes just good because people I know you were in 2018 you know and if you look back to the machines back then they were fun and I think it's time to step up the game a little bit you know Let's see what people can make of it. And I'll bring another topic up regarding that a little bit later. But, yeah, also the lighting. People love that stuff, you know, where they can – I mean, there's the white, the RGB, which is red, green, and blue. And then you also got an option with colors. And people also love to play around with that, you know, having a complete green table, for example. And, yeah, try that stuff. Essentially, people who would actually own – because I know a few people here in Australia that actually own Zachariah Tables. and have them out on location in a few of our barcades here. And it would be, for those people who own tables or aspire to owning them, it would be that ability to swap out the LEDs like they would on their own tables and theme the table to their heart's desire. It really is almost like having it in your lounge room, the pinball machine, with the amount of customization you can do. It's great. I just laugh because it's not like, you know, Zachariah tables are lacking in color. They are rainbows. They're pretty much vomiting of every color in the rainbow. Psychedelic art left and right. Yeah, some people play Far Fun in real life actually put their sunglasses on when they play. It is a visually intense, let's put it that way, table. So one of the tables that I was just trying to sample around from was with Space Shuttle and playing the solid state version. I started playing and I went, wait a second, this sounds very familiar. I played a little bit more and I'm like, okay, who went and stole the firepower sound effects? That is exactly what playing in this thing I think that was a tradition though back then wasn it Mark The Zaccaria team in Italy they were essentially taking a lot of the Belly Williams tables even the circuitry, I think, and re-engineering it and taking all the sound samples out and just doing their own thing. Back in the days where licensing and copyright were a little bit grey. so yeah i mean um we're now busy with an um an em machine from the 70s it's called top hand and uh yeah if you look those pictures up you actually see some of the artwork from williams and you know the square parts that kind of stuff and uh i don't i don't know where we're going for yet you know what's the final design for for top hand will be i think this will be very tuned to the sakara direction of williams because the people are going to get two crazy ideas when they play like, hey, they got the license back or something like that. But, yeah, that's the last EM machine we're going to do top-end. Okay. I haven't heard – go ahead. If you have more pinball to talk about, please do. Yeah, and this is also maybe an answer to a question I get also quite often, and that there is quite a few tables we haven't added yet. And one of those tables is called Ski Jump. and it looks a lot like the winter sports table so what you notice is that there's a lot of tables out there that are almost exactly the same but they got a different name oh yeah recent yeah yeah a little bit different backless art a little bit different design but uh it's not entirely sure we're going to go for that because they're so similar so we i don't think a lot of people will find a reason to buy them and uh another reason is that we have these bundles and they only become more expensive. Right. When you add more tables in. And if you have a lot of tables that are the same, it sort of, it makes it harder to sell, doesn't it? Exactly. So I don't think we're going to do that. That's so common. Yeah. There's still one EM that is actually left that we might do, and that's called New Stars Phoenix, which is, I think, 87, where it comes from. And it's sort of a modern version of it. Oh, okay. There's an extra flipper there, and we might do that one, actually. Yeah. Because it's different enough that it's more acceptable to actually buy it again. Yeah, it is, because mechanical, it's also different. And then for some people, there's a switch going on, like, okay, this is a little bit different. Yeah. This is actually worth my pocket money. Yeah, that's fair enough, too. It was funny, wasn't it, when they were back in that era of pinball, even Gottlieb were notorious for it. They would take a playfield layout and just do three or four graphical iterations on it so they could keep selling them. When the appetite for new machines was so high that they basically had to be turning out tables every couple of months to satisfy the operator demand for them. or they go well hey the previous version was only one player now you can do two player hey look at this it's now four player yeah that's right it's essentially their version of the pro premium in LE right because how many versions of Eldorado did they put out wasn't it something like seven yeah that was a very popular layout that one a layout that I just happened to have played last week, and we'll discuss that a little bit later. Hey, Mart, I've heard rumor, maybe you have more to say about this, but I've heard rumor that Zacharia is actually working on a pinball creation program. Is that true? Yes, it is. Basically a table editor, as they say. Actually, there's already a small part released. There's a DLC. It's called the Artwork Editor. It's a very simple version you can change you know some uh you put some textures on it you know some pictures and you can change some colors uh there's a default layout that you use but uh that's about it for that specific part you can't you can't really you know move bumpers around that kind of things but uh that's still in the progress i mean the editor is still uh you know being made it just hasn't gone that far because uh you were checking the kind of interest we get when we released. So we released a small DLC to see people's interests. But at the same time, we're just getting smashed with all these requests from people. And other people wanted for the Xbox and PlayStation people say, bring it to the PlayStation as well. And then the mobile audience comes with a car saying, yeah, we want it too. And so there's a lot to do. So it's on hold, but it's definitely something that we like to do. We know that Magic Pixel is a small studio, but when we say small, how many people would you say that are working in that company? I think roughly four to six people. Okay. Four to six people. Wow. Because like Farsight, we're talking about it's 20 to 25 people, give or take, depending. But many of them are now working on other non-pinball related titles. so their pinball division if you will is uh smaller um comparing that to zen who we have heard they have a team of roughly 20 again 20 25 people that are purely dedicated to the pinball side of things and then there is an additional 25 people just within the company uh doing other stuff that can be pulled in and out of pinball stuff so it's it's kind of interesting to see where sizes of companies so that people can also realize that, hey, output is going to be limited because of how many hours in the day there are for the people that we have. Yeah, and sometimes for certain jobs, like take, for example, 3D modeling, you don't need constantly 3D models at you. You make a table and you create two or three 3D models. So sometimes we also hire people for a certain time that we need them. There's also a little bit of that going on as well for certain jobs. Sometimes we hire also people for a certain time and then they do what they do and then we hire again some other people. There's a stable crew and there's an additional crew that helps when we need it. I noticed it and I'll just confirm it but Zachary Pinball can also be put into cabinet mode, correct? yeah and we also have cabinet support in the game okay uh there's there might be still things added to that you know the cabinets uh owners often have a lot of wishes yeah i know that uh there's a tool out there where you can you know put those animations from the game the dmd animations onto your dmd display yes there's some requests for that and yeah i think we might work on that as well but yeah definitely you guys need a uh you know to talk to the boys over at arcuda We know the people to talk to. All right. Yeah. Get as many licensed things onto that machine as possible. It's pretty good. Is there any other news of things that are being worked on within the project? We're so excited to hear that. We'd mentioned this a couple of podcasts ago that it was like, whatever happened to Zachary? and then somebody emailed us and was like, no, it's alive and well and pumping out machines. And that's when we were like, what? And then we found out about all the remakes and stuff. It was like, oh, hey, look at that. We figured that once they were done with those, how many actual Zachary machines were produced? Different titles. Do you know off the top of your head? Yeah, you're probably going to go to 39, I think. Because, I mean, I think the Steam store says something like 36 or 37, which is quite tricky because there's two versions of Pinball Champ, 82 and 83. That's also becoming remotely inaccurate because we have Least Tropical, Granada, and Toppan are coming. So those are three very old EM machines. They were quite one of the first machines, so they were very rare to collect your materials from. And then we still have that New Stars Phoenix. So yeah, I think we're probably around 3940 actually. Okay, because I know that the last time we had sent questions to Zolt, basically the collection had been finished. And so that's where we were like, oh, well, what are they going to do now? And I said, so funny about the remakes, and now I'm noticing that they've done these retro tables. It's like, oh, they're just having fun now. It's like, well, no, we're not gone. We're just kind of amusing ourselves with what we have and, you know, showing what we can do. Experimenting. Yeah, experimenting. We've got this great physics engine and this game platform to do with, so we're not stopping. So, no, it's exciting to hear that. Yeah, I mean, there's really a bunch of work left. I mean, I just changed the banner on Facebook this week that there's a new mobile app coming in 2018. Oh, great. It'll make all the Android and iOS people very happy. Yeah, not sure everybody agrees with that. but it's a new one isn't it all together it's not the same package name that's on the app stores yeah correct it's an entire new app and that also has to do because the engine has changed entirely you know there's a lot of different things running so if you're going to put that old app on you upgrade it you're going to have a lot of people can't actually run the game anymore because their mobile is old and the specifications are that old that it doesn't work anymore for them. So you were forced a little bit to make a new app. But there's also a good part about that is that there's more tables. There is a better engine, new remakes. But also you can think about that. What we're trying to do is let all the platforms run the same source code. Yes. One build. And if you make fixes for Steam, that's going to go to the switch a couple weeks later, a couple weeks later to the mobile, and so on. So all the platforms are getting the same kind of updates. Wow, that's excellent. Like unifying the source code for this sort of thing is it allows you guys or any studio really to rapidly release and not have so much technical debt as well, which is the killer normally with software and games. So that's so good to hear. Yeah, and so we're planning 2018 to get that new app running. Wow, that's going to be excellent. Yeah, it's going to be quite a big thing for us. And also, you know, with the Switch as well. So we plan to release the updates for every platform as well. You know, Steam will be the main one that's going to get first because it's a platform that we, well, we always did first. But also we get feedback a lot from the people. Oh, right. And, you know, Steam discussions and while Switch and mobile, you don't always get to communicate so close with people and directly. and so Steam is a really good platform to get some feedback. You know, we make a new patch. Sorry, if people do want to actually give you feedback, what's the best way on Steam to do that? Do they open up a forum post or do they use Steam chat to do that? Well, they usually open something in the forum, you know, if they have a blog or something to discuss. But you can also go to our Facebook page. This is something we have been doing the last months And because we came to the point, especially with the mobile one, that we got different audience, you know, the Steam audience, the Switch audience. And Facebook is a very general place to put them all together and where everybody can send a message, even if you don't own the game yet. Right. That's great. Yeah. So we've been really active on Facebook and it's just a carry pinball. So if you want to check it out there, we also host small prize competitions because we made these little mini playfields of wood with plexiglass. Oh, really? Yeah, you should join it. We host competitions and people can win stuff there as well. I saw that you released an answers video to all the competition questions. I stumbled across that the other day. I don't know how I did, but, yeah, I saw it. It must have been on Twitter, actually, I think, because I subscribed to you on Twitter, and I think you cross-posted onto Twitter. I thought, oh, this is interesting. Yeah, it is really fun. We also have sometimes some DLC stuff where we give for free. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on. We try to share as much as possible on Facebook. We've got one or two times news per week. Oh, great. I'll make sure to link it in the show notes for you. Yeah, we want to make sure that people know where to approach you. Like I had mentioned when I was talking to Mark earlier that, you know, the Zachariah threads in the Digital Pinball Fans Forum have been kind of anemic and not much has been going on there. And now we kind of know why because they're over on Facebook. We should put links back to the Facebook area to encourage people to get involved over there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We're quite responsive there. I mean, so far we've got 100% response radio. We're constantly growing. We're trying to keep up with that too. Really everybody's questions because sometimes a little bit annoying is what you see with the big companies. They get too big and you only get announcements on these Facebook pages. Yeah. Yeah. But we still try to answer. Yes, it's a little bit unpersonal. I still try to answer every question we get there. That's really good. yeah that is well hey we really appreciate you coming on here and let us spend some time talking to you about about Zagoria Pinball and Magic Pixel in general and you're more than welcome to come back on anytime when you get closer to that mobile release please drop some and you can drop back in and let us know what's going on with that too yeah and maybe next time I'll come with some news about the Xbox because we're also busy with that absolutely wonderful Yep anytime you more than welcome Thank you so much Mart Mart community manager for magic pixel Go say hi to him on Facebook Okay Thank you everybody for listening and I see you guys next time Okay. Bye bye. Bye bye. All right. Well, there you go, folks. Unexpected announcement. See this, this is why we don't plan anything for our show. Cause we just have to cancel it. Yeah, we would, we'd have to cancel it. and it'd just be very difficult and awkward, but having no show plan makes it very easy to pivot. Massively easy. So, so Jared, I mentioned, uh, uh, I, I actually got my hands on, like I said, a, uh, one of those reskins of, of El Dorado the last week, because I played in my Orange County pinball league. Oh yes. And the, one of the four tournament tables was called solar city. Ah, yes. One of the two-player reskins of that. So... This whole city's an EM, isn't it? Yeah, it's an EM. And strangely enough, and I... For somebody that's not a fan of EMs, I do remarkably well on them in tournament setting. I don't understand how that is, but I do. And this one, because I actually kind of knew where to expect the ball to go, it helps. and I posted a pretty decent score compared to what other people were posting, but I did not make the top three of that table, which is what you... So I think I've explained it to you. We have a new format where four tables are selected. You play all four tables and then from there, it's whoever is in the top three, they make it to the semifinal round of tournament play and then they also look at the 100,000th score, which is difficult on an EM because there is no 100,000. Yeah, it rolls basically. Yeah, when it's a five real table. They figured out a way to do it, but basically it's whoever has the highest 100,000th point, then they get the, what you might call the wildcard fourth spot. Right. So anyway, I didn't make it on that table, which I thought I was kind of glad I didn't, but I was like, man, I actually might make it. The other tables that we played were, I'm trying to think here, Ghostbusters, Frankenstein, and Flash Gordon. So Flash Gordon ate me alive. As it normally does. Oh, my gosh. It was just like stupid how fast I was done playing that. and Frankenstein, I had really good games practicing. I thought, okay, I got this in the bag. Go to play tournament. It was like, done. I'm like, what the heck happened? Oh, yes. It's nothing worse than that. Yeah. And so then the, I'm trying to think, maybe it wasn't Frankenstein. No, I'm like going, wait, was it Frankenstein? I don't know. I was over and done with it so fast I don't even remember if that was indeed the table. I'll have to look it up later. But then I played Ghostbusters, and I had a killer game on Ghostbusters. And I don't have killer games on Ghostbusters. In that setting, I scored, what was it, 104, 106 million, something like that. Which was respectable enough to get me into the final or the semifinals on that table as the number one scorer. Right, okay. So this was after you going, oh, I never do. I'm just phoning it in when I do the tournaments, and then you get into the top one. Now, that being said, I have made it to the semifinals platform before and promptly got my butt handed to me and exited. Yeah. So I was like, oh, great, I get into this on a pure fluke, and now I'm going to have to hold up my end of the bargain, right? and I proceed to wipe the map with a score and post 103 million dominating the next closest score to me on the table was like 27 million so laying that smack down on Ghostbusters I'm doing the old thing I don't know guys I'm sorry I'm stomping on you but it happens I have no idea how this is happening I don't know what I'm doing I'm just having a really excellent ball you must have done the classic, just shoot the flashing things. That's soon encouraged. Pretty much. I somehow kept on managing to hit super jackpot. All the time. During multiball. That'll do it. Yeah, that'll do it. So that put me into the finals, which we were playing Flash Gordon. I went, oh, good God. I'm just like, of the four tables that you could pick, thanks. Wow, great. I'm looking forward to this like a punch in the face and so I hop on that thing and I'll be damned if I didn't take second place and only lost by 25,000 points really? you found out how to play it nope the only thing that didn't happen was because what was happening I was getting just cheap outlane drains prior and I wasn't getting cheap outlane drains and that was the difference. Somehow I was holding on to bonuses and I don't know. I still was flabbergasted that I actually scored what I scored. I scored 675,000 and first place took 700,000. And first place, it was his machine. Okay. Right. Well, that's pretty respectable then. Very, very nice. Yeah. It was impressive, to me at least. Yeah, that's very good work. Well done. I decided to – it was my birthday on Tuesday last week or this week, and I didn't really get a chance to celebrate it on the day because my wife was up in a township called Rockhampton, which is sort of up the northern part of Queensland. Okay. and it's about an hour and a half flight away. She was doing some consulting up there for a university. So I was home alone with the kids on my birthday. So you can't really do very much when you're in that situation. So I thought, okay, I'll just shift my birthday thing to when I'm back in the city because I went into work on Thursday again. I thought, you know what? I'm close enough to Fortitude Valley from the CBD that I could just hop on a train and just quickly nick over to Netherworld for a bit of a flip. And it turns out that... Oh, you hate going to Netherworld. I really hate it. It's just a terrible thing to do. And this particular time of year in Brisbane is when the exhibition is on. And the exhibition is like a rural show that comes to the city. And you have side shows. And it's like a carnival affair, basically. Okay. but, you know, it's mostly centered on agriculture, and they have prizes for knitting and cake making and all this sort of stuff and, you know, prizes for prize animals and stuff like that. So it's one of those sort of agricultural shows, but it's pretty big. And most of the places in Brisbane do something for the exhibition. Like if it's a furniture shop, they'll have mad Ecker Week sales and things like that. You know, they all cash in on it. And Netherworld was no different. so netherworld proximity wise the exhibition the the exhibition is probably like a suburb away from netherworld uh it's within walking distance so of course they're going to have a carnival themed week or two there and they did it really well what they had was you could buy a show bag there and it was 15 and you got five tokens and a little enamel pin and um a uh a couple of these custom done pieces of art from their local artists and stuff like that for 15 bucks it was really good little tote bag you can put your coins in which is really great so i bought one of them and they have um these uh show themed um meals going at the cafe and one of them was a dagwood dog dog so a dagwood dog for those people in the us i think you guys call them pluto pups over there um so they're basically the battered savalloy in in like this thick batter around the around the outside of it and so it was it was one of those the battered sausage in a hot dog with sauce in onions and it was really really good so i roped in one of my mates from work to come with me so he's a he's a bit of a video fan he actually builds his own video machines video cabinets and stuff so uh he was really into the video games and um they had the carnival themed pinball so they had zacharia clown there which i'd never played before which is a lot of fun to play um they had circus voltaire which was which made me realize just how floating gross it is on the pinball arcade um terribly floating gross on pinball arcade um and they also had fun house which is obvious choice for a carnival themed um thing and what was the other one they had. I think they were the four that were... Oh, yeah, that's right. They were the ones that were actually carnival themed. But they also replaced Lion... They didn't have Comet or Hurricane? Yeah, they did. They had Hurricane. That was the other one. Or Comet. No, Comet's the one with the little spinny thing in the back glass, isn't it? Yes. Yes. There was Comet. They had Comet there as well. So it was a really good line. No, excuse me. That would have been Cyclone. Cyclone has Cyclone it was Cyclone yeah so they had Cyclone there as well generally known as the good one of the three yeah that's right so it was a really good carnival lineup that they themed but they also had a table that I'd never played before which was an old 80s it was Barracora yeah yeah so I got to play Barracora for the first time and it was quite fun actually as all those 80s early solid states tend to be so I really had fun playing that so it was a good let's use scare quotes here hour lunch that I had on that day and I had a ball basically it was a great way to have a belated birthday nice yeah nice I realized that yes I was wrong it was not a Frankenstein because I was like I don't remember seeing that ugly model in the back No, it was Tommy. Oh, Tommy. Yeah, right. That's very different, Chris. You know how sometimes you just get that mental block and you're like... Something with flippers? Something. Something. I don't... Yeah, so it was Tommy. Tommy. That's fun. I like Tommy. If you find a good one, it's a good game. Yeah, it's a decent game. I honestly have no clue what was going on and how to do anything, and I never did get the blinder visor to come up, which I was disappointed. I wanted to see it again. But it was a slightly modded Tommy because he had made the propellers spin. So that was cool. Oh, that's actually a factory feature. No? Yeah, I remember them spinning on the one that was in the arcade back in the 90s when it was first released. Because he was saying that when he got it, there was nothing spinning and that was the first thing he did to it. was make the propeller spin. Interesting. Maybe I played on a prototype back in the day then. Possible. I distinctly remember the propeller spinning on the Tommy one that I was playing back in the 90s at playtime here in Brisbane. So there you go. This is why prototypes should just be made. Made. They should just be this thing. We should ignore the bill of materials, ignore the cost, and just put some little motors. Well, what I'm talking about, when it comes to digital versions, there are no costs, folks. There's no maintenance issue. There's nothing of that sort. Just put it in. Put it in and make it work digitally, which is basically no trouble whatsoever. Yeah. Yeah. But if you ever want to figure out what Firepower plays like with drop targets, go play Space Shuttle and Zacharia because it's virtually the same layout and it has drop targets. Well, that's what I'm telling you. I don't know why I didn't see it immediately, but it was the sound effects that hit me first. And then I looked and I went, wait a second, two angled banks, but they're drop targets, and behind it, four pop bumpers. Hmm. Looks like anything you can think of. Wow, I have to go and check that out because I've always wanted to play. And it came out the same year. Yeah, so Zachary went, don't worry about that. We got this. Yeah. I love it. We're not shipping these to America anyway. William Chicago, they'll never notice. They'll never know. It's just Italian customers. It'll be fine. Exactly. This is fine. Yeah. I love it. That era was so fun with, let's just call them homages to other pinball machines. Yeah. It's one of those things that we're, would you rather have an homage to a pinball machine or do what Gottlieb Premier did, which was an homage to the license that you couldn't afford. Yeah, an oh my God to the license. Yeah. I think I'd rather have an homage. I think I'd rather have an homage too because I really don't want to play that Miami Vice wannabe table that they had or the, what was the other, another one of their wannabes, their Top Gun wannabe table, where it's like you looked at the black back glass art and it was like a parody poster. He just went, that doesn't look attractive at all. It just looks cheap and lame. Yeah, I think it was Operation Thunderbolt was the shotgun. Yeah. That apparently interestingly in Brisbane here I had an operator who had that table and he said that was one of the most popular tables in gay bars that he ever put on location. Operation Thunderbolt was an absolute hit in gay bars for him. He just got so much money from it. Well, it reminds me also, because the photography and the models that they hired were just low rent. but what it reminded me ultimately of was straight to video movies oh yeah it was virtually the same kind of photography it was just like hard ticket to Hawaii they didn't get the Playmate models no they got the low rent penthouse models or whatever It was just like with just poor, poor costumes that looked like they went to Goodwill and found something trendy. Fashion designer from the late 50s. Oh, this is modern. Right. So long as we can tease their hair to within an inch of its life and make it look big, yeah, we're good. This is fun. Yeah. You know. Sure. Slap that T-shirt and a sports coat on the guy and roll up his sleeve. He looks exactly like Philip Michael Thomas. Yeah, exactly. Oh, dear. Yes. It's terrible. Just terrible. Yeah, give me homages any day. In the fun of this week in MoviePass. Oh, yeah. Oh, I had to ask you, speaking of MoviePass. Did you go and see The Meg? Yes, I did. Oh, I wanted to ask you. And I posted a review. I posted a review of it. I haven't read it. Please tell me what it looks bloody terrible. Okay. Here's the, here's the deal. The, uh, the trailer is exactly as advertised, right? It is the epitome of a summer popcorn movie is big, dumb, loud, and wildly entertaining. Oh, right. Okay. Wildly entertaining. It does not for an instant take itself particularly seriously. It knows it's kind of silly, and it just runs with it. It doesn't even attempt to be scary. But at the same time, it does a really good job of doing thrilling scenes. Like the other week I saw, and I think I mentioned it. Again, I wrote it in a review at least, The Spy Who Dumped Me. I said the action sequences were just like, great, yay, watch that happen. Boy, that was thrilling. You know, I mean, it was just totally, you know, it was just like things are happening and I could care less. Whereas this movie, there was moments where I was just like, I noticed myself kind of thinking, wow, this really has me gripped. Like, I'm genuinely excited about what's happening, you know, currently. What am I doing? Right. I mean, I was like, wow, they actually know how to kind of make a movie. Incredible. But on the flip side, it's by no means anything revolutionary. It's not bringing a single new thing to the table. Movies I thought about while watching The Abyss, because there's an underwater biology lab, and there's the hard-headed hero that's going to save the day kind of thing. So on that aspect, remind me of the abyss. Then you've got the rich billionaire and the prehistoric creature. So it had a little Jurassic Park going on with it. And then, of course, there's the obvious one, which is Jaws. And it essentially plays out as Jaws in reverse, meaning you start out on the big boat. And yes, they did get a bigger boat. So they start out on the big boat and then it winds up going to the beach as opposed to starting at the beach going on to the big boat. So it kind of went in reverse. But no, if you just want some dumb, mindless entertainment, go for it. It's the kind of movie that you can go see it with your kid. You can go see it with your parents. You can go see it with your duped friends. You can go see it with your girlfriend. Everybody's going to come out kind of basically smiling. It's one of those where it's the safe choice, if you will. It's not going to offend anybody. And everybody's going to kind of be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was fun to see on a big screen. But it's by no means anything that anybody's going to be just like, oh, my gosh, you've got to go see this. It's incredible. So there's that. But, no, what I was going to say about with MoviePass is they've been changing their Ryan Policky pretty much every week. Yeah, I've heard that they've been in a bit of trouble, eh? Well, yeah, they've been in a bit of trouble for a while. but last week it was there was only two movies per day that you could view and it would change daily what those were going to be and then they announced their Ryan Policky that there'll be more movies there'll be like six movies per day that you can see you'll have a choice between and those titles will rotate this will allow them to have the blockbusters actually play for a day so people can go see them and there's now a website you can go to that tells you the schedule for the next two weeks of what day the movies are going to be available to see. So they've pretty much taken the convenience factor right out of it. Yeah. Make it hard enough that people stop seeing movies and will stop having to actually pay the movie theaters for that. They're not stopping people seeing movies. They're just making it overly difficult to work out how to do it. Precisely. Now, I should also point out my Meg review has a bonus review hidden in it. Oh, okay. We'll have to go check that out on our website. Now, it's for a movie that came out last summer, which is Transformers The Last Knight. Oh, right. Now, I enjoyed the first three Transformers. I enjoyed them enough that I actually own them. Oh, right. Okay. the one that came after that age of extinction was kind of a bloated mess. And I wasn't really like, it was just an exceedingly long movie that needed a heavy amount of trimming. And I was just kind of like, you know what, we're just, this is playing more like a reboot than anything, but it's not really rebooting much. And so it didn't grab me, but all the same, I was like, well, I want to check this one out. And it was, you know, available for free on the various streaming services. So I, I gave it a watch. it is the most incomprehensible pile of crap I have watched in a very long time. Right. And I watch a lot of piles of crap. This thing literally makes no sense. And I'm not even kidding you. I was 20 minutes into the movie and my wife went, wait, this is a Transformers movie? She was in the other room and not just, not really paying attention. She goes, this is a Transformers movie? I go, yeah. She goes, are you at the end of it? I go, no, that was just the beginning. She goes, what the heck happened? And I paused the movie and attempted to explain, and I couldn't tell her what had actually happened. I couldn't tell her. So I start the movie, and I was going again. She winds up coming in and starts watching it with me. We paused the movie literally three different times, looked at each other and go, do you have any clue what's happening? Nope, not a clue. There is zero character development. Things just happen. you have no clue what is what or why or what anybody even wants my wife goes who the heck edited this well the answer is six different people and it appears different people and it appears that they were all working on a different movie wow something that i've i've seen happen And if you've ever watched like The Dark Knight or you watched Dunkirk and you were watching it on Blu-ray, these were optimized for IMAX. OK, and so a lot of times that they filmed it with an IMAX camera when those scenes because they they almost never film an entire movie with IMAX. It's just too difficult. And the cameras are loud. So they'll do it for basically your action sequences or whatever. And so when those moments, you'll also go from a 240 aspect ratio, big thick black bars on the top of the screen, to all of a sudden it filling up the entire screen. Oh, okay. And so sometimes you'll see it dance back and forth, but it's not terribly distracting or anything. It's just kind of there. This movie danced its aspect ratio within the same scene, and it used five different aspect ratios. What? And the thing is, sometimes it would be, okay, so you're looking at Marky Mark, because that's who the star is, right? You're looking at Marky Mark. He's in 240 letterbox. Cut to the angle of whoever he's talking to. They're in full screen. Cut back to Marky Mark. He's now in 185 letterbox. What happened to the 240? I don't know. I mean, that's how back nuts crazy this movie is. and then as we're watching at one point my wife goes well would i have had to seen the previous movie i go i saw the previous movie and i have no clue what's going on it's just by the time it finished we were literally slack-jawed and i want my hour and a half back no well here's the beauty part it ain't an hour and a half it's two hours and 40 minutes oh now you may find yourself not you Jared but those listening you may find yourselves going okay I gotta check this out for myself you're gonna hate yourself if you do that you seriously hate yourself it is not worth your time there is nothing of interest in the movie zero literally nothing do not pass go do not collect and here's the funny thing is people are going well, I don't know if it was before the movie got released or immediately after it got released, but Paramount Pictures, who distributes the movie, canceled the sixth movie that they were going to make. And they went, well, instead we're making this Bumblebee movie, which is coming out at Christmas. And I thought, well, that's kind of, before I had seen the movie, I thought, well, that's kind of odd. I wonder, seems weird that they did that. After watching this, I have absolutely no doubt this is... They went, oh, I think it's Jump the Shark, the old legal sort of... In my review, I basically said Michael Bay took a shotgun to the head of the franchise, pulled the trigger, exploded his brain matter all over the floor, and then tried to piece it back together and call it a movie. And the point is that once you're soup, you don't get back to being solid matter. Unless you freeze. yeah it's the worst kind of train wreck because you were watching the train wreck and then you got hit by the train yourself yeah and then you became part of the train wreck yeah wow that sounds horrible so in other words go and see the Meg yeah good times go and see the horrible Transformers movie I'm telling you it was free on two of my services that I have and I don't recommend even wasting I don't care that it's free. Don't do it, folks. Free is too much. Free is too much. They should be paying you as an apology for actually putting it on their service. If you watch this movie, you'll get a free rental. Oh, boy. So, okay, folks, we've wasted enough of your time. But, hey, you know what? You got a solid, solid half an hour of good stuff out of Mart from Magic Pixel. So, again, thanks, Mark, for coming by and gracing us with loads of good info. I know, folks, it wasn't the info that you were hoping for. What can we tell you? Not much. Not much. But, hey, why don't you give us some shout-outs and communicate with us? We love that. You can most easily do that by going to Twitter and looking up at Blockade. That is our show. and you can draw up a private message there. If you feel like interacting with myself or Jared personally, you can do that by going to at ShutYourTraps on Twitter or at JaredMorgs. That's how you do that. If you have a long essay that you would like to communicate to us, show ideas or anything of that nature, you can also reach us by email. That would be blah, blah, blockade. Ah, shoot. I botched it. I'm like, er, braveheart. Jared, please. blahblahblockade at gmail.com. Thank you, because then I was thinking about our website, which is where you can go to read show notes and timing notes and see lots of pictures that Jared posts that relate to things that we were talking about in the show. That would be blockadepinball.com slash episodes. Yep. Or you can do exactly what Mark did to me this morning, which was I was on Steam, and he looked me up on Steam. My username is shutyourtrap. and he messaged me that way. And I'm also on Steam now, so my username is JaredMorgz. Amazing how we keep it the same. We try. We try. Yeah. So, go hit us up. Have a chat. Please do. We enjoy it, and we enjoy communicating with you guys and letting you know what we think, and it's a good immediate way to see what's happening. All right. That being said, thanks for listening, folks. We'll be back next week. who knows talking about what but it's going to be pinball related i can't repeat that yes until then bye-bye bye wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10% off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blackade is delivered to. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some pinball.