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Episode 53 - Sowing Discord

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 20m·analyzed·Jan 15, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Eclectic Gamers EP53: Corrections on Multimorphic, P3 platform analysis, and Highway/Alien Pinball code update coverage.

Summary

Eclectic Gamers Podcast 53 is a long-form discussion covering podcast housekeeping, personal updates from hosts Tony and Dennis, and extensive pinball industry commentary. The hosts correct omissions from their previous episode (notably forgetting to cover Multimorphic's significant 2017 shipping milestone), discuss P3 platform challenges and prospects, report on local pinball venue closures and openings, and cover recent news about Highway/Alien Pinball's code updates and quality control issues.

Key Claims

  • Multimorphic shipped games in 2017, likely in batches of 25, totaling around 50+ units

    medium confidence · Tony discussing Multimorphic's year-end review; uncertain about exact numbers ('I'm not sure how many they've shipped')

  • Multimorphic is expected to announce 'Cosmic Kart Racing' at Texas Pinball Festival 2018

    medium confidence · Tony: 'my understanding is it is expected that at Texas this year they will announce Cosmic Kart Racing that might not be the exact name of it but I think it is'

  • P3 platform pricing at $10,000 has become more competitive as traditional pinball prices have increased

    high confidence · Tony: 'My initial concern with the P3 platform was the $10,000 price tag. As pinball prices, traditional pinball prices, have increased, as long as that price doesn't increase, they continue to look better and better'

  • Highway/Alien Pinball released a major code update that requires USB download and Linux installation, with mixed technical reception

    high confidence · Dennis: 'The other thing out of Highway and Alien was they finally officially released a major code update. The reviews so far, what limited ones I've seen, have been very positive...people had to download it from the website. You put it on a USB stick...Lots of people said that they're taking pictures of Linux boot screens, not finding the device.'

  • Highway/Alien Pinball LE models have experienced quality control issues including loose parts and playfield clear lifting after <100 plays

    high confidence · Dennis describing reports: 'weird things like, oh, this light, these lights don't work. And this came loose and this hole is wearing out...playfield clear was lifting off of the machines with less than 100 plays'

  • Capcade in North Kansas City has closed

    high confidence · Dennis: 'Capcade, North Kansas City, closed. They shut down.'

  • Nick Greenup has opened Solid State Pinball, a new local pinball shop near the 403 Club in Kansas City

    high confidence · Tony: 'And also locally, we have a new pinball shop that's opened up locally...Solid State Pinball. Yes, our very own Nick Greenup, who we know from competitive play'

Notable Quotes

  • “We completely forgot it. And there was really absolutely no excuse because they had a huge year. They did. Because they finally shipped product.”

    Tony @ ~6:40 mark — Expressing regret over omitting Multimorphic from prior episode coverage despite the company's major 2017 shipping milestone

  • “Lexi's no one's favorite game. No. It's just not an A-list game...Do I want to own it? No, I don't.”

    Dennis @ ~32:00 mark — Critical assessment of Multimorphic's flagship P3 game, highlighting gameplay concerns despite technical showcase value

  • “When everyone else's innovations is how many color-changing RGBs and laptop monitors you can sneak into a backbox and play field, I mean, this is on a whole other level.”

    Tony @ ~28:30 mark — Defending Multimorphic's P3 platform's innovation relative to other manufacturers' LED/display-focused approaches

  • “What if Total Nuclear and I – had been on the P3 platform...and people have been like, holy crap, that gameplay?”

    Dennis @ ~34:00 mark — Suggesting that strong game design (like Spooky's Total Nuclear Annihilation) could drive P3 platform adoption

  • “The pinball listeners butter our bread, so to speak, which is why we tend to spend a lot of time on the subject.”

    Tony @ ~18:00 mark — Acknowledging podcast analytics showing pinball content drives majority of listenership

Entities

MultimorphiccompanyTonypersonDennispersonP3productHeighway PinballcompanyAlien PinballcompanySpooky PinballcompanyTotal Nuclear Annihilationgame

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Multimorphic shipped first P3 modular pinball games in 2017 in batches of ~25 units, marking major inflection point in platform viability

    high · Tony: 'the big news was they shipped games this last year. I'm not sure how many they've shipped. I think they did a batch of 25 and were working on another batch of 25'

  • ?

    product_concern: Highway/Alien Pinball LE models showing widespread setup and quality issues including loose components, non-functional lights, and playfield clear lifting after minimal play

    high · Dennis describing reports: 'weird things like, oh, this light, these lights don't work. And this came loose...playfield clear was lifting off of the machines with less than 100 plays'

  • ?

    code_update: Highway/Alien Pinball major code update released via USB/Linux installation method created technical barriers and installer confusion despite positive gameplay reception

    high · Dennis: 'people had to download it from the website. You put it on a USB stick...Lots of people said that they're taking pictures of Linux boot screens, not finding the device'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Capcade arcade/pinball bar in North Kansas City closed; was running IFPA tournaments at 50-cent pricing with well-maintained machines but lacked food service

    high · Dennis: 'Capcade, North Kansas City, closed. They shut down. So they were running a monthly tournament...had really good, well-maintained machines'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Solid State Pinball, new pinball shop opened by known competitive player Nick Greenup near Kansas City's 403 Club venue

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.242

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, January 14th. This is episode 53. I am Tony. And I am Dennis. And we're going to be talking to you about the glory that is pinball and the joy and pain that is video games. Yes, but first, what do we always do? Introductions! Yay, it's introduction time! So it's time to get caught up in what's been happening since our last episode, which was in 2017. It was. So this is our first of the new year. It's the first episode of the year.
0:46
I have been mainly playing games I've already talked about. I've been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild. I've been playing a lot of Cold Waters. no actually I haven't been playing Cold Waters I've been playing Rule the Waves which is the spreadsheet my spreadsheets on the high seas where I've got to keep my budget balanced and design and build my navy and all that stuff while staying within budget and that's about it on the real gaming level I've moved on in my listening of audio books to the point where I'm burning through the Dresden Files books. Okay, I'm familiar with them. Which have been great fun.
1:37
The narration is done by James Marsters, who you might recognize as Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Except for he doesn't use his Spike voice because James Marsters is an American and that whole British punk thing. Yeah, that was an affectation. and there's a couple characters that you can hear it in it with a couple of his characters but it's not like the voice he uses standardly and he does a really good job he is really really good with voices um in addition to that i have been i'm not decided yet i'm debating we are 33 days from planet comic-con here in kansas city i'm thinking about going um they've got a good a lot of good people there uh that i some of whom i would like to see and i'd kind of like to i haven't been to a comic-con in years so i'm i'm debating it we're gonna see we're gonna see what happens i think i might actually have the phone that weekend so it might not work that's what happened last year right and the only other thing is um a promotion i've been waiting on the work finally came through. I hit my requirements to get a promotion. So as of tomorrow, officially, it will take place. Well, congratulations. Thank you. And how have you been doing lately? Oh, fine. It's been busy. I did not get a promotion. I don't think anyone got, there are no promotions to be had really. We're so small. But they did give us cost of living adjustment, which we did not get last year. I was a bit surprised because we're budgetarily, we're still underwater, but we're on a path to basically, well, it's not really that interesting. So we lost a contract that we kind of relied on probably too much for a really long period of time. And so we're in this process of transitioning to not relying on such subsidization. And so we did have to scale back on some staff and stuff. So my duties have changed. I'm doing a lot more repetitive sort of lower tier work now because we have no support staff anymore. So you are now Secretary Dennis. I do secretarial functions in part, yes. But if you say it right, you get to pull that whole big evil empire thing. I mean, you're Secretary Dennis. Yes. There you go. Maybe I can master that eventually. But so far, no. So basically, with not filling the post, those duties have been split apart across a variety of staff members. I mean, the executive director is opening the mail at this point. So because we have no one. We have procedures on how mail is processed. So he's doing the mail.
Nick Greenupperson
Solid State Pinballcompany
Capcadevenue
403 Clubvenue
Tapcadevenue
Texas Pinball Festivalevent
Bowen Kerinsperson
Lexy Lightspeed Escape From Earthgame
[name withheld pending review]game
HomePincompany
Jerryperson
P-Rockproduct
Eclectic Gamers Podcastorganization
Pinsideorganization
Steven Bowdenperson
Donperson
Stern Pinballcompany

high · Tony: 'And also locally, we have a new pinball shop that's opened up locally...Solid State Pinball...our very own Nick Greenup, who we know from competitive play'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Multimorphic's Lexi Lightspeed criticized as mediocre game despite technical showcase value; lacking shot appeal and hype; not generating platform adoption momentum

    high · Dennis: 'Lexi's no one's favorite game...Do I want to own it? No, I don't...the challenge that I feel we saw manifest on Lexi is, Lexi's no one's favorite game'

  • $

    market_signal: P3 platform's $10K pricing becoming more attractive relative to traditional pinball manufacturers as competitor prices increase; maintains collector-tier positioning

    high · Tony: 'My initial concern with the P3 platform was the $10,000 price tag. As pinball prices, traditional pinball prices, have increased, as long as that price doesn't increase, they continue to look better and better'

  • ?

    business_signal: Multimorphic's revenue streams beyond P3 platform (P-Rock system licensing, homebrew support) provide financial runway for slow market adoption and module development

    medium · Tony: 'They do the P-Rock system, which is what total nuclear annihilation uses to power its system...they've got another income stream so they can build this out. That's how they were able to last as long as they did'

  • ?

    community_signal: Eclectic Gamers listenership grew in 2017 but at slower rate than 2016; pinball content drives majority of audience; guest interviews and Multimorphic episode outperformed other content

    high · Tony: 'in terms of 2017 itself overall we did see that our listener base has grown...though the growth is less dramatic than it was in 2016...Bowen Kerins...His guest hosting episode was our best performing episode...followed by the, to me, infamous Spreadsheets in Space'

  • ?

    announcement: Multimorphic expected to announce Cosmic Kart Racing (or similarly named) next major full pinball game on P3 platform at Texas Pinball Festival 2018

    medium · Tony: 'my understanding is it is expected that at Texas this year they will announce Cosmic Kart Racing that might not be the exact name of it but I think it is and that one's been talked about for a while as the next Lexi-esque full pinball experience'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: P3 platform's actual software/hardware modularity positioned as fundamentally different from competitors' hardware modification approaches (RGB LEDs, LCD monitors in backbox)

    high · Tony: 'When everyone else's innovations is how many color-changing RGBs and laptop monitors you can sneak into a backbox and play field, I mean, this is on a whole other level'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Host sentiment on P3 platform conditional: modularity/innovation praised but platform adoption dependent on strong future game design; Lexi's mediocrity seen as adoption barrier

    medium · Dennis: 'The challenge that they have, though, is getting more and more modules...Do they own a system? What's the potential sales?...they still have some hurdles that most other manufacturers' don't

    • 4:32
    Wow, you have procedures on how mail is processed. We do. It's all part of our manual and how because we were subject to annual audits, as your employer is as well. so we just there are certain things that need to be adhered to and so the mail needs to be processed it needs to be stamped by the date it's i mean that's the main part it's not like i mean it sounds fancier the mail must be processed but it's really more like the mail must be stamped with a date stamp not just a postage stamp so you have to actually stamp the date on we received it on click click yeah the 14th yeah on the actual documentation not on the envelope so so it's just stuff like you know so there's a lot of payment stuff so since i was on vacation during our last record i came back and like no one knows how to print checks any who are there's no one left who knows how except me yes because it's 2018 yes checks or they found a checkbook and they wrote hand checks to get seriously i'm amazed they found a checkbook no i mean i have a checkbook and I do write checks. I write a single check a month as I have for the last five, seven years. I've written a single check a month and that is all I do. And that's just because my landlords don't have a way for me to do it any other way. My choice is to either go get a money order or write a check. And it's cheaper to write the check. Yeah, a good choice. So anyway, so that's been what's going on at work. Game-wise, obviously, there's a lot to talk about especially in the video game segment this time because as i said last time i would use this time to recap all the games the only real changes since then because in the last week in particular i have not done much i have finished quantum break and i have started south park fractured butthole so that's really the only change on that front then from the last episode yes i i i just the way i get through those south park names is i that one in particular is I just don't think about it. I was just thinking you broke your quantum and now you're fracturing your butthole. I'm all screwed up. It's been a rough new year.
    6:41
    Speaking of rough, I apparently made a couple of mistakes on the last episode. Corrections, as I like to do in the intro, I usually open with them, but I've tried to hide them deeper within the six minute mark of the show. What you're saying is we need to get a correction music that we play correction music and then we do corrections? No, I've listened to a couple podcasts that do that, and then they try and make words to the correction song, and then 30 minutes later they still haven't said anything. Well, that's how you get past it, and you're like, oh, we're out of time, we've got to close it up, thanks everybody. I mean, I don't know. If we break the 100,000 listeners an episode mark, we can do that. That's what we'll do. We get to their level, we can do that. So if we get to the this is our job level, Yes. So for those that don't know where we are referencing the Giant Bomb Cast and Giant Beast Cast, which I tried to listen to and they just frustrated me too much with their weird tangents. But they do have corrections music. Yes. And it is catchy. It is very catchy. Our corrections are there are two of them. The first was when we were doing our recap of the pinball section. actually both of the corrections are about that section the first one is when I talked about Thunderbirds I didn't say the right company the company's name is Homepin but during that episode I called it Hankin they have the license to produce Hankin arcades Hankin was an Australian company back in the day they did pinball and they did arcade games so Homepin has been manufacturing cocktail arcade cabinets I know that are Hankin, official Hankin ones. So I got the names mixed up because they both start with H. Because they both start with H, they're both almost the exact same, and they're both referring to the exact same thing. Essentially. But it doesn't say Hankin. Thunderbirds is not a Hankin-licensed product. It is just a HomePen product.
    8:39
    12 lashes. Yes. Yes, they've been meted out. So there was that. And then the other correction is, and this one was a much, in my view, much bigger issue, I totally left off Multimorphic. I felt so bad when you told me about this because as soon as you told me, it hit me. And I'm like, oh, my God, we did. We completely forgot it. And there was really absolutely no excuse because they had a huge year. They did. Because they finally shipped product. They had such a huge year and we were just – We interviewed Jerry earlier in the year. That's why – when you told me that, I was just like – like my gut dropped out. And I'm like, oh, no, how did we manage that? Well, and this is how. This is what happens when I get cute. And when I was writing up the outline, instead of listing all the manufacturers alphabetically like I normally would, I thought, oh, well, no, let me try and put them in like a flow order so we don't just like put in a bad news all in one huge blob. and so it's sort of like okay we need to put some space between things like uh highway and dutch and skip b they weren't all in sequence i needed to i felt i needed to you know space those out and so i did not i should have constructed the list alphabetically and then shuffled them yeah but i did not do that and instead i just relied on my memory you know just like oh yeah this one and this one and this one i mean we had a non-manufacturer like deep root in i know i know It was so bad. So we apologize for that, and we are going to give the P3 system its due in our pinball segment this time.
    10:17
    Okay, so beyond that, a little bit of local news. Apparently this – I could have known this in time for the last episode, but I didn't. Didn't look.
    10:28
    Capcade, North Kansas City, closed. They shut down. So they were running a monthly tournament. I only went to the first one. because that was worth fake Missouri points, and I don't generally bother playing for Missouri points. If I'm going for Whoppers, I only want Kansas Whoppers because I'll never earn enough Missouri ones.
    10:48
    And anyway, so that was too bad because they had really good, well-maintained machines, and they were all on 50 cents at that location, all the machines were. So there's still Tapcade in the air. I was going to say, isn't there like a Tapcade downtown, I think? Yes, and it's open. It has a full, like, Tap Cake North Kansas City didn't have a kitchen, or at least they didn't when I went. So you could, like, get goldfish crackers, but there wasn't really a, I don't know if it was easy to deliver food or what, but it was very much just sort of a bar.
    11:19
    And I don't know. So it was kind of like 403 where. Yeah, but I mean, they didn't even have hot dogs. Yeah. So I just, I don't know. It just, it didn't, apparently it didn't, it didn't last, at least for the time being, but. And also locally, we have a new pinball shop that's opened up locally. That's right. Solid State Pinball. Yes, our very own Nick Greenup, who we know from competitive play.
    11:43
    He maintains some of the machines en route at the 403 Club. That's great, so congratulations to Nick. We'll put a link in the show notes so people can check that. I haven't had a chance to get up there and check it out. It's up near 403. I didn't even get to the first term of the year this year at 403 because I was on call. You know what, I've been on call a lot lately. I didn't get, you know, normally we would report, you know, how we did at the, you know, briefly. We'd say how we did at the 403 club. I wasn't last. Well, that was the Chiefs playoff game that day. And they made the decision to push back the start time two hours. And no, I'm not starting at 7. Yeah. Because then I'm not getting back until probably 10. So it's just like, even on a Saturday, I just wasn't going to do it. Yeah. No, I understand. So, and, okay, so a couple other announcements kind of in our transition element before we move right into the pinball segment. First is T-shirts. We're getting more T-shirts. They're going to be orange T-shirts this time with lime green lettering. Tony's wife assures us that they look very sharp. Yes, she says they look good. I rely on her for all of my clothing choices where I make somebody pick them out because otherwise I just look terrible. So if I look bad, it's not my wife's fault. Right. And if I look good, it is my wife's fault. It is your wife's fault. Yeah. But in a positive way. It's a positive fault. She has stopped me walking out the door to go to functions before with the simple phrase, I'm not letting you go out like that. Go change. I can actually hear those words if I think about it. I can actually hear the tone and everything. I had some friends who came and picked me up so I could go to the – I went to see Gabriel Iglesias, the comedian. And they were in the driveway picking me up, and my wife was like, no, no, go change, as I was heading for the door.
    13:45
    So as we often do, because we don't sell our shirts, we do give them away, though. So we're running a giveaway. We're doing it a little more promotionally oriented than the last giveaway was. So there will be a link in the show notes. There is a form you can fill out or you can send us an email if you don't want to fill out the form. And the instructions on how to email are if you click on the link to the form, it'll tell you. It has all the instructions. But that will give you a chance to win a shirt. And in addition, you can get some additional entries for following us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, following us on Instagram, and leaving a review on iTunes. I do need to note for people about iTunes. It's leave a review, not leave a rating. Ratings are when you give stars, one to five stars. Reviews are when you actually write words. And the reason why – ratings are helpful for the search algorithms as well, and I would love to give shirts for ratings. The problem is I can't pull a list of iTunes user handles on anything but reviews. So if you left a star and you submitted, go in and actually leave a review. But we'll run that until the following Friday. I think that's the 26th. The exact deadline is listed in the rules. And so you can get up to five chances to win one shirt per person. So once you're done, we'll use random.org and we'll sort through that. I don't know exactly how many we'll give out other than I guarantee it will be at least four. We'll do at least four. I'll commit to that. and U.S. shipping only. So you have a couple options. You can either be a U.S. resident and ask us to ship it to a U.S. address or no matter where you are, if you are going to the Texas Pinball Festival, you can let us know that and we will arrange and I will give it to you at Texas. So anyone, Canadians or whatever, if you want one, feel free to do it that way. And we'll just arrange to meet out by the registration table or something and hook you up. So it's not a big deal, but we like to do it as a thank you for people who tolerate listening to us. And that's something that I tend to get shirts and batches anyway, because I like to offer them to all the guest hosts. It's sort of a thank you for actually working around our schedules and recording with us. So it's time yet again to do another order. So that's why we're doing it.
    15:59
    And the final thing is, again, technically our one-year anniversary will be the next episode. However, we are planning to have our two-year. Thank you. Tony's giving me, he's doing the sign language, letting me know that I can't count, and that's correct. That's right. I think you did that last episode, too. You talked about our upcoming one. I did. I caught it last time, though, and corrected myself. The only reason that it comes to mind is that we're coming up on our third Texas. Yes. That's basically how it keeps coming to mind. You keep track of them in Texas's terms. Yeah, that's a good way to count it. so yeah we'll be starting our third year of podcasting and so you know we actually we go ahead and we just spend a little bit of time giving you guys some analytics for the few that might possibly care a little bit of the behind the curtain stuff so in terms of 20 just looking at 2017 itself overall we did see that our listener base has grown it's it went up throughout the year, obviously higher than 2016, though the growth is less dramatic than it was in 2016. So we went up, but not by the same percentage. And so the only major change we did with the podcast this year is, and I forget what month or episode we did it in, but we formally dropped the regular recurring tabletop segment and went to just recurring pinball and video games. That's really the only major change we had. That was in, I think it was late April, early May, I think. And it was just because we weren't playing enough board games. I'm almost always busy on the local board game nights, so I don't get to go to them anymore like I used to. And other than our trek once or twice a year to a convention somewhere to play games, we're not doing a lot. I utterly failed at my plan to try and put together an ongoing pen and paper RPG game this last year. I might try again this year.
    18:01
    I've got ideas for D&D and Star Wars and Planet Mercenary. I'm just trying to figure out what would work best. Yeah.
    18:11
    So anyway, that's the shift up. In terms of our episodes and how they performed, the best episode in 2017 from a listener standpoint was number 34. That's the one where we had Bowen Cairns, the Papa Pinberg organizer, famous tutorial maker, mathematician to every game show under the sun. His guest hosting episode was our best performing episode out of all of them this year. Followed by the, to me, infamous Spreadsheets in Space, episode 30. That was our second best performing. That one doesn't surprise me because I kept seeing it popping up in the historic analytics. People just keep going and listening to that one for some reason. It's because that game is so awesome. I guess a lot of Excel fans are out there and just listening to it for inspiration. And our third best performing one, which adds the extra sting to the slide on Multimorphic, was the one where we interviewed Jerry. so that's also the one where uh you spent a lot of the video game segment talking about near automata yeah that was on the because some of the audience may have been that may have come for the near talk that near was a good game yep and our worst episodes because of course we had to have some worst episodes other than incidentally the year-end review uh there were no analytics on it because we released it on the 31st even though some people did download it that day the worst one was episode 28 that was the pre-Texas Pinball Festival episode where we talked about what we were expecting and also it was one where we spent a lot of time on Battletech and Overwatch PTR changes which if you listen to Don, formerly of the Link Cable Podcast and the Pinball Podcast talking about Overwatch is a killer there a reason we dialed We scaled it back We know we not an Overwatch podcast Well we not supposed to be And I don think my next big run into Battletech is going to happen until the game actually releases at this point. Though I might do some video stuff. I've been looking at doing some video stuff for that and a couple other games. But that's not going to talk about it a whole lot. and second worst episode was number 48. That's the one actually where we wrapped up the System 11 tournament. There wasn't really any highlight stuff there. We talked about Bomber Crew, War Door, Endless Space 2 was that episode. We also gave a small update on the street level stuff. That was not the main one where we did a deep dive on it. And the third lowest performing was episode 26. so that one had the tabletop section where you talked about an app for tabletop analytics and we briefly mentioned the uh the the pinball tabletop pinball showdown i think was the name of it i think that was one of our very last one tabletop section yeah and that one was it was real early episode two because we we talked about aerosmith and batman 66 on the pinball side so those were the worst episodes according to you all um let's see top listening countries in order USA, followed by Australia, followed by Sweden, followed by Canada, and Germany wraps up the top five.
    21:34
    And the top five website sources for listeners were Facebook, followed by our website, followed by Google searching, followed by our thread on Pinside page one, followed by our thread on Pinside page two. So now the analytics that SoundCloud puts together on that, incidentally, it's very frustrating. So it just really depends on how a site's organized. So, for example, Tilt Forms shows up a lot, but each post shows its own link in the SoundCloud stuff, whereas it's by page on Pinsight, it's by post on Tilt. So you'd have to sit there and add it all up manually. But Tilt Forms gave us a lot of listeners, and Fun With Bonus, which is Steve Bowden's site, gave us a number of listeners outside of the top five as well. So we do know that the pinball listeners butter our bread, so to speak, which is why we tend to spend a lot of time on the subject. But that's all I was going to go over on analytics because I don't think anything else is really very interesting about it to those not actually putting it together.
    22:36
    So let's go ahead and transition into pinball and let's talk about what we should have talked about last time. And that is the year end review for Multimorphic and their P3 platform. As we noted in our correction, the big news was they shipped games this last year. I'm not sure how many they've shipped. I think they did a batch of 25 and were working on another batch of 25. I'm not sure if they've gone past 50 or not. They had a big presence at Texas Pinball Festival where they unveiled some new mini games that were kind of going along with the modules that they already had developed. Lexi Lightspeed's kind of the one traditional showcase game. And then they had Cannon Lagoon, and then they've added a few others like Tutorial Style, the head-to-head play, one head-to-head across the world with the Internet. So they had a lot of features there.
    23:33
    I guess, Tony, what are your thoughts on P3? I mean, obviously, them launching, I would say, means 2017 was their best year. I would say so, yeah. What do you think is in store for them this year, in 2018?
    23:51
    I'm going to assume that besides continuing production and getting more out there, I said I don't know what kind of orders they've had and how many ones they've gotten out.
    24:01
    I wouldn't be surprised to see another big game and maybe some more mini-games appear for their systems at Texas.
    24:13
    and I hope they keep doing well. I mean, they've had a – I've liked their product every time I've done it. I've played with it. I think the whole point of it actually catching on is going to be once they get enough tables and enough stuff out there to make it – to really increase their sales and turn it into something that everybody's going to want. Right. my understanding is it is expected that at Texas this year they will announce Cosmic Kart Racing that might not be the exact name of it but I think it is and that one's been talked about for a while as the next Lexi-esque full pinball experience with a module sort of game so that one's been looked forward to for a long time regarding Multimorphic I think you summarized it very well where I think that where their challenge lies is on gaining enough consumers to actually adopt the platform and getting more and more tables built so that people will continue to see this as a really good deal. Because the whole idea, I mean, the technology aside, which I think is amazing. Right. There's nothing else like it in pinball. No one else is trying to occupy this space. So they're in a really good position regarding that. When everyone else's innovations is how many color-changing RGBs and laptop monitors you can sneak into a back box and play field, I mean, this is on a whole other level. So that's great. My initial concern with the P3 platform was the $10,000 price tag. As pinball prices, traditional pinball prices, have increased, as long as that price doesn't increase, they continue to look better and better and more competitive. I mean, the idea of it, I get the idea. It's like, well, yeah, you're going to pay more up front. because of all this tech, but you're going to be able to put in more tables over time. But you don't have more tables yet that anyone really wants. And that's where things like Cosmic Kart Racing, it's great that it's coming out. Is it going to be good? Right, and that's going to be the primary concern is how it plays out. I mean, Lexi, Lexi's a fun game, but Lexi's also the game that everybody's been testing and playing the P3 with. So it didn't have that special feel, I guess, when everything launched. Right, there's no hype around Lexi. There's no hype around Lexi. Because everyone's seen it. Right. But separate from that, I think the challenge, and this is a challenge for any pinball manufacturer, I think, but the challenge that I feel we saw manifest on Lexi is, Lexi's no one's favorite game. No. It's just not an A-list game. So I enjoy it. It's nobody's most hated game, I don't think. I hope not. I think it's a fun game. It shows off the tech pretty well. But I don't love how it shoots. I don't hate how it shoots. No. But, you know, it's one of those games like if it was on route, would I put money in it? Sure. Would I regret ever having to play it in a tournament? No. Do I want to own it? No, I don't.
    27:20
    So that's where you need some – I don't care if it's a known designer or not. You just need a – I mean, what if Total Nuclear and I – had been on the P3 platform. Sort of thing, and people have been like, holy crap, that gameplay?
    27:35
    I hadn't thought about that. Just as an example of a game that sort of, to a lot of people, came out of nowhere, but there are people who love, there are people who say it is the game of the year. Me. Right? Yeah. That was me. Yeah, I can't remember how I voted anymore on it, but it was definitely one of the highlights for me in terms of just gameplay itself. It's a really, really good game. And so they need something like that. The challenge that they have, though, is getting more and more modules, even if they're not the greatest, is another way to make it attractive because there's a lot of choice. But you have that challenge of who wants to develop for the system. Do they own a system? What's the potential sales? Like if they're getting a share of each module or something, well, there are less than 100 people, then there's less than 100 modules you could ever possibly sell. You don't want to run into the ET situation where you make more ET Atari cartridges than there were Ataris. Yeah. Or so the myth went, at least. I don't know if that was true or not, but that's what everyone thinks to this day. So that's where I think their challenge is at this point. But as long as they can keep getting more games out there, that critical mass becomes more and more viable. Yeah. So I think they're in a good position. The nice thing is much like HomePen, they don't just rely on this to make money. They do the P-Rock system, which is what total nuclear annihilation uses to power its system. All the homebrew stuff, it's either FastPenBall or P-Rock. And most, me not being in that part of the hobby, most of what I've seen is P-Rock. It seems most people turn to that. So they've got another income stream so they can build this out. That's how they were able to last as long as they did, I believe. So they can build this out. They don't have to be in a rush on it. Yeah, it's not something where this is make or break. If it takes a little bit longer, we'll be okay while it takes longer. Yeah, I think they're in a decent position. It's just they still have some hurdles that most other – versus if they were to have been like HomePen and said, well, let's just launch and make a traditional table. and it will win or lose on the strength of its quality because the price point would have been more in line with other pinball machines, whereas this is at the upper echelon, not SLE in the Stern speak, but we're talking collector's edition pricing. Yeah, it's definitely up there. Yeah, you're at 10K. The modularity and everything else is like an actual modularity as opposed to that little thing that Highway tried to do with the swappable play field and all that, where that was just, this is actual modularity. Yes. So.
    30:12
    Okay, so we covered that now. There's not a whole lot of pinball news this week. There were a few little happenings I thought we should go ahead and touch on for those that rely on us to learn about what is going on in the hobby.
    30:25
    Alien and Highway Pinball, you just mentioned them. They have shipped more limited edition models out.
    30:32
    I've seen some posts, mostly from, maybe entirely from Europeans who are getting their LEs, but issues with them. Yes, it seems that there are still set up issues. I know you're telling me there's an issue with a highway. Again, nothing catastrophic, just weird things that people just have the weirdest things like, oh, this light, these lights don't work. And this came loose and this hole is wearing out. Some of the news separate from the LE stuff where people were showing in the play field clear.
    31:05
    It sounds like a stern issue. The play field clear was lifting off of the machines with less than 100 plays. Just lifting out. So and people were like, should we put Mylar down? Again, it's just stuff. It's just stuff. The other thing out of Highway and Alien was they finally officially released a major code update. The reviews so far, what limited ones I've seen, have been very positive of the code update. I've always heard very good things about the Alien code, and that's what stood out to me when I played it at Texas last year, was I thought it had some clever coding.
    31:42
    The issue, though, is people had to download it from the website. You put it on a USB stick, and you put it in. For those that got it to work, it went really fast.
    31:53
    Lots of people said that they're taking pictures of Linux boot screens, not finding the device. There's a lot of IT people who are into pinball, and a number of them are on Pinsight. As near as I could tell by the time we went to air, the issue seemed to be how they named the file on their site confuses some operating systems. And so it's like automatically getting decompressed and it needed to stay in its compression file, but they didn't name it in a way that it would always stay that way. And then the file inside the container file was the same name as the file of the container. It's just a different extension. So people would get mixed up as to which file they were working with. And so people are like, you need to use the 10 megabyte version and not the 16 megabyte version. Well, mine only always says the 16 megabyte version. And then others, it sounded like it wasn't downloading right, and you'd get a corrupted download, which I've been to a few scrub websites where that happens. VP forums, actually, for virtual pinball tables would sometimes do that. In this day and age, I mean, come on. You shouldn't have an issue with a corrupt download. Come on, man. This is 2018. Yeah, come on. That download should have taken four seconds. So, yeah, so it's just like, so, I mean, that or alien owners as a collective have the worst USB sticks ever. And then you go to Micro Center and buy some more USB flash drives. Maybe. Just everyone had bad USB drives that weren't FAT32 formatted. I don't know. It was weird. It was just a weird issue. They could have like an anti-technology aura and they just make stuff fail. Yeah. Are the people with the USB problems people who also have an inordinate amount of trouble with both their computers and their pen ball machines? Who knows? I didn't do enough research on it.
    33:40
    It was so reported by so many people. It's not the USB sticks. It's not. It's highway. It's highway and how they stored the file. And maybe it relates to how most of the browsers interact with the file once you download it because of its compression format. But anyway, so that's all the news on Alien.
    34:02
    Stern Pinball is at CES, Consumer Electronics Show. Or I guess it's done now. I would kind of like to go to CES someday. Yeah, it's interesting. I hear they lost power this year for a while. I did not hear about that. And they also had some other issues. I know Samsung, I think it was Samsung. Gosh, I wish I'd remembered the article. I think it was Samsung had a robot. yeah it utterly failed it was like Crash and Burn worst thing of the show type thing I'll have to read up on that like not understanding commands the guy was giving it like 4 and 5 times standing right next to it that's too bad especially in a world of echo dots and everything yeah anyway the news out of that they had some of their traditional pinball machines there and what articles I saw that mentioned it those go over really well tech people love pinball Oh, yeah. And they also were showcasing some of that Stern Pinball Arcade VR stuff, which I've already heard pretty positive things about the VR experience. I'm not buying VR stuff because it's way too expensive and gimmicky. Yet. There's nothing that makes me want to do it. There's no killer app. Yeah, there's nothing huge yet. But I have interest. But we're not there yet. I don't think we're there yet. I think. I have seen where people have done and built their own custom rigs so they can set it on a table, and it's got the buttons and a plunger on it so they can do that in the VR. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's kind of awesome. I'd like to be able to just download it, put it on my cab, and hook it up and actually stand up. Yeah, now if you could do, oh, if you already had a virtual pen and it was something that you could rig your VR to it. Well, let's go ahead and let's cover the second round of our shame tournament. That's right. We've had some interesting results. Maybe. It's all shameful, so maybe it's not. I wish I had a bell right now. I know you do, but you're here at my house and there are no bells here. So let's go over the round one results real quick, and then let's talk about the round two matchups. For round one, Game Show did beat Hardbody with 87% of the vote. That's the widest margin of victory out of any of them, by the way. That's a pretty good-sized margin. It is. And not a surprise from everything I've heard about the game. As I recall last year, or last year. Well, yeah, no. That's right. Technically, it was last year. I haven't played either of these games, so I skipped this voting on a specific one. Yeah, no. A game show I think is fun.
    36:30
    WWE beat Rescue 911 with 61.5% of the vote. I've played Rescue 911 virtually, and I've played WWE really, really, and I don't agree with this. Well, I've not played 911, I don't think. I might have. It was a season five game in Pinball Arcade, by the way. I might have. I don't know. I don't remember. Genie beat Time Fantasy with 56% of the vote. Actually, Nick with the Solid State Pinball Supply, he contacted me about Time Fantasy saying, I guess he has one. Really? I think so because he was like, or at least he felt I should play it. He was familiar with it. And I was like, I voted Genie too late. But he says it's fun So now it's got to join the list of games I had not before heard of Or on your list of must-plays It's time to start game hunting Sure, I guess so Always watching for projects I thought we'd have seen more sale games now That Christmas is over Of people who bought too much Christmas stuff and need to unload But I'm not seeing much yet Maybe the cry card bills haven't come I've seen a couple games for sale Since the turn of the century Oh, yeah, I've seen that as well. That made me wish I had a stack of cash sitting in a wallet somewhere. Yeah.
    37:51
    Genesis beat Roller Coaster Tycoon with 56.5%. That's a surprise. Yeah, I'm not either. Sorry, Don. I know Don, back when he guest hosted the first time, mentioned Roller Coaster Tycoon was a kind of lesser-known game he really liked. Yeah. But Genesis is interesting. I have played both of these. Again, Genesis only virtually.
    38:13
    Big Buck Hunter. it beat El Toro with 82.6%. I have not played Big Buck or El Toro, so I didn't vote in this. But given El Toro's reputation alone, I am in no way surprised. In no way surprised.
    38:27
    Dolly Parton did beat Silver Slugger. I'm kind of surprised by that. I'm not, but only because, while I have not played Dolly Parton, to my knowledge, I think more people have played Dolly Parton than Silver Slugger. So a lot of people probably don't know Silver Slugger. I can see that. And I am curious now to try Dolly Parton. Maybe it is better. I don't know. I do enjoy Silver Slugger. I like the shots. I think they feel good. And then Sharky Shootout did beat Vegas with 70.8% of the vote. And this doesn't surprise me. Well, it's one of those cases where they actually made fewer Sharkies than Gottlieb did of Vegas. But it's like no one has any familiarity with any street-level pin other than hoops. So I'm not surprised that Vegas didn't fare as well.
    39:18
    I just think people voted for Dolly Parton because of the backlash. It wouldn't surprise me, but they're allowed to vote for any reason whatsoever that they want. It's an interesting backlash. So the round two matchups, it's going to be the Valley Game Show versus WWE. I know you haven't played Game Show. I know you've played WWE. Are you going to vote on it? You know, I think I will. I'm going to vote against WWE. Okay.
    39:45
    Having played both, I agree that Game Show is the more enjoyable game. South Park will be – oh, I didn't mention that from round one, apparently. I can't read, and I skipped it, incidentally. South Park did win, obviously. It beat Raven with 53.8%. I think Raven's the better game. I do, too. I think, again, I think it comes down to back glass, a reverse back glass situation. Yeah. Where people just think that that back glass is corny, because it is. Yeah, it's terrible. But I think the layout's okay. And South Park boring to play But anyway South Park going to be up against Genie These are both really boring games I don It is the shame list It is but I wanted people to pick better shame games I disappointed Basically, I'm disappointed. You supposed to pick shame games that were fun and excellent. I'm disappointed. I don't know which one I'm going to pick here. Genie's whole left half is so boring. South Park is shoot toilet all day boring.
    40:39
    But it's shoot toilet all day with terrible call-outs. Yeah, that's a thing. Yeah, I'll probably go Genie just because it's okay to listen to.
    40:49
    Genesis is going to be up against the Big Buck Hunter Pro game. I really wish I had played Big Buck Hunter so I could say something on it. I think Genesis is okay, though, having played it as many times as I have virtually. So I do lean that way. And then Dolly Parton versus Sharkies, I would go Sharkies. Well, yeah, Sharkies is a great game. I like Sharkies. And I don't know Dolly Parton. So that's going to be round two of the matchups. Link in the show notes to go and vote in that round. And the last thing I thought I'd go ahead and just stick here in the pinball segment is two of my games are down right now, actually, which is unfortunate. But I'm waiting for parts still. You just have to learn to be gentle.
    41:35
    Well, one of them was probably me being a little too violent. And that was because it was the start of the year. I went to change batteries. I only have two pinball machines that I need to change out the alkaline batteries in, Jurassic Park and Superman.
    41:49
    And I think Jurassic Park, they did not want to let them batteries go. The container module that was installed on it was just holding on too tight. And when I got them out, I think I broke a connection loose because putting in the new batteries, the system no longer remembers the settings every time it thinks that I put in new batteries or that there are more likely no batteries. There's no batteries. So rather than taking off that board and soldering that, I'm just going to put in an NVRAM chip and be done with it. But I didn't have any of that size, so I'm still waiting for those to come. So it's not much of a flaw, but rather than fix that, I might as well just make no more battery on it. I can't do that with Superman. They don't have an NVRAM compatible with those boards yet.
    42:28
    But Superman's fine. The other game that's down is – no, Superman's not. I was going to say. It's not related to the batteries. All right, Superman I've chosen to take down because it's always on occasion had squirrely scoring. There's a kick-out hole in the game. And sometimes I always notice when I got it, on occasion the game would get confused. And I thought maybe it was a software thing where the ball would go in, and even though it's only lit for 5,000, it gives 10,000. But now it very consistently is like 10,000 for 5,000, 20,000 for 10,000. Two extra balls when it's an extra ball. And I'm not supposed to get two extra balls. It doesn't remember the two. It doesn't remember the two, but I hear it play through the cycle twice. The connection on the board, I can tell some of those pins are bent. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think in theory it's not the, I think they're straight enough. I think that there's probably some solder that needs to be reflowed. But I've ordered new pins just to change up the whole pin set rather than try and straighten all that crap out. So anyway, I'm waiting for my pins to come. Okay. Because they're coming from China. Of course. On the slow mode. With my NV RAM. On the slow mode. So, yes, they're all on the slow mode. Because you don't order American. Why do you hate America? I don't know. I haven't decided yet. Because I like to save money because I'm cheap. So that's going on with that. I had another drop target break on Sharky's. This time the bottom of it broke. And so there's a plate that gets lifted up to reset all those drop targets. So the target would go and fly up and it would be like three times higher than any mortal drop target should ever be. and then it was out of its channel so it wouldn't fall back down.
    44:09
    Apparently they get very brittle with age. I should have changed them all. When you did the – When I replaced – Did you do it this time? No, no, because I didn't think about it. And I'm cheap. I've got a bag full of – I have enough to do the whole thing. Okay. Yeah. No. You have enough to do it. We're just going to break it. All right. I'm going to break it one at a time. It's going to break it. Let me explain. There's no reason. Let me explain why. Here's the thing. No, you don't understand because there are decals on these stupid little things. And I have the padded decals, and I have the second set, but they're like $25, which is stupid for decals. But that's how much people charge because they like to rip pinball people off. And I have to – so I reuse the old ones. And what I have to do is I have to take a freaking laser – laser. A laser. I take a laser, and I just blast everything. No, I take a razor blade, and I cut it as thin as I can, lose as little bit of the foam as I can, and then move them over. And I have to super glue them. And it's a – I didn't want to wait for all that many and cut that many. I was trying to watch Overwatch League, but we can't talk about Overwatch because Don will get mad. So it was a mess, and it took an hour just to do the one and take it all out because I have to pull like 30 screws to get that thing out. But if I have to do it again, they're all going. I'm changing them all. So we have to break one more. That's the rule. There are still three old ones, maybe four.
    45:26
    Let's see. Widow Target is new. The one is new. The two broke. It's new. The seven now broke. It's now new. So I guess three, four, five, six. Okay, four. I've done half of them. You've done half of them, which means you've taken it all apart that many times when you could have just sat down and done it once. Well, the widow target is on a separate control thing, so you don't get to count that. Oh, okay. So instead of taking it apart. I've taken it off three times. So three times. You've taken the whole thing apart. There will only be a fourth. Maybe. Maybe the last. Who knows? When you look at them from the top, they look good because I cleaned them. You can't tell. It's only underneath you can see their yellowing and the chips, and you'll be like, why didn't he do it? Because. Just trust it. Trust it. So, anyway. I think that's it for the pinball segment.
    46:17
    So, okay. So let's go on over into video games. You have a Nintendo Switch. Wasn't there a big Nintendo event? I won't go big. Wasn't there a mini Nintendo event? Nintendo had a mini event. There's been rumors floating since late last month that around sometime in the middle of January there would be a Nintendo Direct, which is how Nintendo does their announcements now. They do their own little direct thing instead of doing like E3.
    46:49
    Why are they too good for everyone else? Because they're Nintendo. Okay. Yeah, Sega had that attitude once too, I'm just saying. Well, yeah, and that's the same general thing that Sony does now. Sony's at E3. Well, Nintendo's at E3 also. No, they never have an official booth at E3. They had a booth last year. Their show is never a part. They do the Treehouse special Disney channel thing. They don't do the big where they take over. But Sony does. Sony does, yeah, that's true. EA didn't last year. Yeah, but EA's not a manufacturer. No, that's right. Of course I'm right. I'm just telling you, Nintendo is acting weird. We talked last year with E3. Yeah. E3 is starting to lose its importance. Poor E3. But, yeah, no, Nintendo does their directs several times a year where they do it all online or in some place and stream online. And this is kind of what they call a mini direct. It was unannounced.
    47:51
    There was rumored, but it was unannounced. They didn't make a big announcement. We're having a direct on this now. It was just they kind of just dropped it. and it's not anything big. They're not listing any main games. This isn't talking about the Metroid that they know is coming and everyone's expecting to hear more about sometime this year. It's not talking about the oft-dreamed-of major console version of a mainline Pokemon game, which may or may not ever happen. It's not talking about an Animal Crossing. This little mini-direct was literally nothing but DLC and ports. Okay. So... Anything cool? It depends upon what you think is cool. It includes things like the remastered Dark Souls, which seems to be the biggest thing that was part of it, as far as I can tell, game-wise. And now the remastered Dark Souls is coming out on Xbox and PC. It's coming out on everything. Why? That game's not good. I don't know. I've never played any of the Dark Souls. I thought you owned it. No. Huh. Okay.
    48:57
    I was going to say, we should have an episode where I make fun of Dark Souls and how it's so overrated. Overrated game of last generation, Dark Souls easily. Yeah, I've never played any of the Dark Souls games. You might like it. Probably not. I hear it's hard and silly. It's hard because it's broken. That's the part that makes it stink. It's, in a lot of ways, poorly programmed. And some people love it because there's no difficulty setting. And it makes them feel like big boys that they won it. So I had to go and get every achievement in that game. on the Xbox 360 to prove that my dislike of it is in no way related to inability to play. I know how to play games, especially poorly programmed piles of junk like that.
    49:39
    Holy cow. Does it have a fan base? So a lot of people would be really happy. It has a massive fan base. It makes sense to remaster it because of its popularity. Yeah. And purportedly, From Software is not doing any more Dark Souls games. they've had things that look like Dark Souls call it that like the one that came out on Playstation last year or the year before FromSoftware, it's strange they have a relationship where sometimes they do Sony exclusives and sometimes they do like this Dark Souls has always been multi-platform before Dark Souls was Demon's Souls which was Sony exclusive and a lot of people were hoping that would be a remaster that appeared instead of the first Dark Souls game but for Nintendo purposes they never have been on Nintendo before this is another game like Skyrim and this and that that have made appearances on the Switch that are very much trying to move a lot of Nintendos away from just being the Mario, Zelda, Kirby games and I think a lot of it is I think it's a good idea I think the remaster announcement was a good idea I think that in the case of these other developers, besides the numbers, I mean, the numbers on the Switch make it more attractive than the Wii was. Of course, the Wii had great numbers as well. I think the difference here is that the Switch has enough power to run these games, but not enough power to run what's coming out in 2017, 2018. So that's why they're only getting this older stuff. But, hey, it's stuff. It's stuff. So that's good. Anything else out of the mini? Mario Tennis Aces is coming out. Apparently, there's a lot of people looking forward to this game from what I've read online. I did like the last Mario Tennis game I played. That was over a decade ago. Yeah, I mean, they're popular games. So there's a port of Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze and Kirby Star Allies are coming. Some people like Kirby. It's core Disney stuff. They're ports of games that have already been out. They're just putting on it. They're getting more content on there, so that's good. One of the other really big ones that people have been talking about is, once again, a port. It's a port of an old DS game. It's called The World Ends With You.
    52:02
    Extremely large fan base. Very popular DS game. I've never played it. I've heard of it. It was a Square Enix little RPG thing. I don't know. it takes place in like Akihabara and it's supposed to be kind of crazy and fun. I don't know. I've never, uh, never played it. So we'll find out. I don't know. I may or may not get it. We'll see. I'm not going to get it. Okay. Well then I guess, I guess we won't find out. Um, cause I'm not. Payday two.
    52:34
    Pay. Well, if they can get the multiplayer vibrant on the switch, that's payday. Two's claim to fame is they have a heist, like a heist mode multiplayer. It was in the first play day as well. I believe, and that's really all I know that that game is known for. Is that? It's having a really fun, unique style. It was one of those instances where it was like PUBG, where it was a multiplayer that no one else had.
    52:58
    Wasn't Payday 2 the game where they were like, we'll never do microtransactions. Microtransactions are evil. We love microtransactions. Please give us 75 cents and you can have this special thing. It seems everyone has microtransaction now, so I can't. I'm pretty certain there was a big to-do because they swore there'd never be microtransactions, and then they added microtransactions. I think that was Payday. It might be another game completely, and I apologize to Payday for that. Okay. Well, their feelings may be or may not be hurt. We don't know. I don't know.
    53:31
    They're putting out a mini-game for Super Mario Odyssey. There's some DLC for Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Pokken Tournament. A lot of people like the Mario Rabbids game. I have played a little bit of it, and I enjoyed it enough that it is on my wish list. It's on my list because I'll play it because I thought it sounded so dumb when I saw it, but after I actually played it, it's like, hey, this is actually a lot of fun. I've seen Pokken Tournament back on Wii U. I didn't think it looked good. No, I didn't think it looked good.
    54:07
    It's a fighting game, and I didn't think it got enough of what it needed to get to be a top-tier fighting game. Right. I mean, that's what I thought. When I first heard about Pokken Tournament, it's like, oh, cool, that's awesome. Pokemon fighting game. And then when I actually saw Pokken Tournament played, I was like, oh, that's boring. Yeah, I mean, why get that rehashed when you can get Dragon Ball FighterZ? Right, which is not coming to the Switch yet. No. Maybe there'll be an announcement someday. That would be nice.
    54:33
    They're also getting what's probably Nintendo's very first fan service game. So Nintendo has definitely decided to embrace an older demographic And a more perverted demographic Because they're getting an S&K Heroines tag team frenzy Which is the S&K girls and you fight each other in Skimpy Clubbing Well, at least they didn't just make it the Dead or Alive beach volleyball And not even make it a fighting game It's just about collecting swimsuits Yeah, that is very true We might be going that way Or so I've heard Yeah I've never finished it I've never platinumed that game. That's supposed to be a hard one to platinum.
    55:16
    Because I think you have to get all of them. All the outfits. You've got to get every single one. They have to all be your friend. Man, I don't think I've got full achievements on any game ever. I know I've got games that I've got a lot of achievements on, but some of the games I have are those games where some of the achievements are literally impossible to get because servers are closed down. I might have full achievements on some little games that have like 5 or 10 achievements, but I've got a couple games that have like 300 achievements, and I've got like 160 of them. The last game I've got full achievements on was probably Far Cry Primal. Yeah.
    55:56
    Killed enough eagles and lit enough fires and stabbed enough stuff with spears. You control the eagle and you are one. You don't kill the eagles. Well, there are some eagles you can kill, mean eagles. There are not very many, though, and I don't think they're worth an achievement. Speaking of Far Cry, this is a good one. There's a new Far Cry coming out, isn't there? There is. There's the one where you fight the people, the Pentecostals. I was going to say.
    56:16
    The Pentecostals. Yeah, yeah. It's the cult one. The one where you go and fight Scientologists in Montana or something like that. Snake handler type. Pentecostal.
    56:30
    I don't know if the Pentecostals did the snake thing. Speaking in tongues is Pentecostal. I had a great grandma who was Pentecostal. I don't recall speaking in tongues to me but she did yell at me once when I used a knife to cut open a biscuit you monster I should have just torn the biscuit instead of sawing and leaving crumbs you monster anyway I didn't even name more biscuits in front of her it's just the way it had to be that's how you solve the problem just take the problem away there were a couple other games announced Fee is coming and Celeste is coming and Giz 8 Lacrimosa of Donna? I don't know. Nothing I care about.
    57:13
    Well, hopefully. Now, the interesting thing is from the insanity that is the online Internet community and people who track SADATs for no bloody reason, according to everything I've read, there has never been, Nintendo, since they've started doing directs and mini directs, have never had a mini direct without having a full-scale direct within 20 days. So that's the new giant charge of, oh, there's a direct coming within 20 days. And, you know, Nintendo's fanboys are going kind of nuts with all this Switch stuff lately. Yeah, that's an interesting statistic. I don't know.
    57:51
    I'm going to, I'll just go ahead and, I have no thought on whether they'll have one in 20 days or not. I don't know if that proves much of anything. How many have they had? I mean, is the sample size very big? They normally have a fair number. It's not like they just have one or two a year. I think normally they've been having. Maybe there's a corporate strategy to do that for whatever reason. I can see them having a full-size direct before end of the business fiscal year, which is typically in March, as I recall. So having one in February or at the beginning of March would not surprise me at all. especially to give big game announcements for the summer release schedule and this and that.
    58:32
    All right. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. Well, I don't have any other video game news, so this would be the part where I guess I just start going over games I've been working on, or mostly stuff I played that we could have talked about last time, but there was just no way with year-end review I could dedicate much time on it. So I thought I would start with Halo Wars 2, which, as I had mentioned before, And anyone who's possibly familiar either with it or way back with the original Halo Wars, it's an RTS, real-time strategy game. The first one was put out by Ensemble Studios. It was a very interesting circumstance because Microsoft closed Ensemble before Halo Wars shipped. Really? Yeah. But it was a pretty well-received game. Obviously not like any mainline or any shooter variant of Halo because RTS fans are a very small subset. Yeah, that is a niche group. a subset of gamers and console rts people is not a demographic that has ever really been cultivated there are rts games that have been ported over into consoles usually with very mixed results but this was uh the first halo wars and this halo wars 2 were built with console controls in mind so there there's a simplicity to it compared to what you would be used to with all your rts background Or my background, I mean, I PC Gamed for a very long time, so And RTSs were one of my favorites So Total Annihilation, baby Well, I was not a Total Annihilation person I played it like twice But the So the story sort of continues on For those that aren't really familiar And I don't want to go too much into Halo Mythos, which it's I'm not strong on Halo I'm not strong on the Halo mythology I still haven't finished Halo 5 it's still sitting I started it but it weird because you bouncing back and forth between Master Chief and Locke and no one likes Locke They want him dead And so I I think the only Halo game I ever finished was when we co ODST which was fun Yeah, that's one of my favorites, actually, ODST, even though you don't play as a Spartan. Yeah.
    60:43
    But in this, there's a whole plot thing where that ship got isolated. You're working from a ship, and you've been dealing with the Covenant War, but the ship gets isolated away from everyone else and I believe by the end of the first game spoilers, you don't have the ability to do any sort of faster than light travel. So it's crawling back to Earth space. It's like 30 years out. It's okay everybody, if we're going to make this work, we all got to bang. Yeah.
    61:19
    They could do that strategy, but instead they chose It's a new movie, new game. It's weird. Instead of being a real-time strategy game, it became one of those visual love-love dating sim novels. It's like Fallout Shelter. It's Halo Shelter. Yeah, it's Halo Shelter.
    61:34
    But instead of electing that path, they chose to use the cryo chambers they had instead. So at this point, it's now, I believe, caught up with the modern Halo era. But you're still, you're using all this old tech. Yeah. And trying to deal with an aspect of sort of separate from the Covenant. You're dealing with a splinter faction that broke away. There were a lot of really cleverly done commercials that were live action when this game was first announced, involving brutes and showing a brute trying to be a used car salesman and stuff. It was really weird stuff. And that's because the brutes are the main antagonist in the game. So the story's pretty good. Really nice cutscene stuff. The RTS mechanics are good. they felt really smooth I played on the default difficulty I only had one mission where I failed and had to redo it does checkpointing so you don't have to totally restart a lot of achievements if you want to do things on much harder settings and not lose things, do things and set time limits there are a lot of bonus objectives to really push you if you're one of those RTS people that are like no no no no, I want it hard oh they'll measure you on all sorts of hard but But it was a – anyway, I had a lot of fun with it. I haven't played any multiplayer on it. It was one where I really only wanted it to go through the campaign. I don't – I've never done a lot of RTS online. It's always been local LAN RTS or single player. Every time I've done RTS online where it wasn't like a local LAN RTS, I've apparently come up against one of those guys who has the special stuff because they're doing, you know, like 3,000 clicks a second doing – where it doesn't make sense. It doesn't even look like a human's doing stuff because their screen's barely even moving. They're just hot keying so many things that everything's just happening. It's like, how can you even move that fast? That's what it seems like. The last one I did online was actually a console one on 360. It was one of the mech-themed RTSs. And I did the... This happened to me once in World of Warcraft 2 in a LAN party. We had someone and he basically Zerg rushed me with his initial peon and I had no defenses yet. And he destroyed my whole town because I – like he sucker punched my peon and I had no resources. And he destroyed my town hall with his little peon or something. Yeah. So I went and you had like a starter unit and I was a faction where the initial thing that could found the base had an attack laser. I took it over to the Harris and I just destroyed everything. He quit out. He quit out and I won and I got my achievement and I was done. Because I was like, yeah, beat you, loser. You thought we were actually going to build.
    64:30
    I've done that in Total Annihilation a couple of times. Sure. Always got to be ready for that. so anyway that's Halo Wars 2 I know there was an Xbox game that was a real time strategy game that let you do voice commands and that wasn't Halo Wars was it no you're thinking of Tom Clancy's it was a Tom Clancy game not Ghost Recon I'll have to think about it for some reason I was thinking it was Halo Wars but the more you were talking about Halo Wars, it's like, I don't think so. I don't think I ever played Halo Wars. I think I even have a version of it on computer. I think somebody gifted it to me. But I don't know if I've ever played it. I might have played it a little bit.
    65:18
    Another game I worked on was Plants vs. Zombies 2. Have you ever played any of the... I played the first one. The Plants vs. Zombies, the Garden Warfare? Yeah. I played the first one. I should clarify, this was Garden Warfare 2, not Plants vs. Zombies 2. I've played Plants vs. Zombies and Plants vs. Zombies 2. Plants vs. Zombies is better because 2 is kind of micro-transaction. Yep, that was the rep. I've played Plants vs. Zombies, Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, and Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2. I've played Garden Warfare, the first one, and it was enjoyable. Yeah, this is that. They have a story in it now. I played through the campaign. You do campaign as the plants and a campaign as the zombies. It mostly gets you familiar with the modes and stuff. they've added a few new characters on both teams, so they're more diverse rosters now. Yeah. And I did put in some online matches. So I don't really have a lot to say on it. If you're interested in a third-person shooter, I don't want to say, there's a lot of commands and stuff, so I don't want to call it simplistic, but it's not a cover-based shooter like Gears is. So if you like a little more death-matchy style, I mean, they do objective play and all that. It's just different. It's not Doom run screaming at everything there is ahead of you and just wail and destroy. Right. It's not overly fast, but it's not overly defensive either. Yeah. So it paces itself pretty well. I kind of think of it like a third-person Call of Duty. Of course, I haven't played Call of Duties in so long. I'm probably wrong on that comparison. But that's how Call of Duty used to be. I've thought about it. I saw a sale on Infinite Warfare. I thought about getting it just from the single player, but the sale wasn't big enough for me. No. A third game I had mentioned, and I think you've played this one, South Park Stick of Truth. I've beaten it. Well, I've beaten it now as well. So what were your thoughts overall on South Park? I really enjoyed Stick of Truth. I thought the jokes were good. I thought the way it played was good.
    67:14
    I don't know how much on replayability because I never did go through and replay it. I kept wanting to replay it with a different class, but I never actually did it. But I enjoyed it. I thought it was a fun little time waster. I did almost all the side quests There were a couple I didn't finish I didn't find all the kindergartners I found all the kindergartners as I recall Because that was one of those games Where I was trying to get almost everything done And I think I ended up looking up the kindergartners Because I was missing one But like I said it's been several years ago So I don't remember for sure But yeah so anyway It was fun I thought the way they did The turn based combat was enjoyable Some people don't like turn based RPGs I do. I like both. So I thought they – because they've got the whole hit the right button at the right time. So it kept you engaged. You had to think while you were doing it. The party compositions mattered. I do wish that it had been bigger parties. Yeah. I don't – and they do that in Fractured But Whole. It's four. It's four instead of – It's groups of four. Yeah, instead of being two. Yeah. So – but overall, yeah, and they have the humor. I don't regularly watch South Park, but sometimes I'll go because they put all their shows online for free. So you can go to SouthPark.com and catch anything you want. That's how I've – I haven't watched South Park regularly in, I don't know, like a decade.
    68:35
    But every once in a while I've done that. Or when somebody talks about a specific episode, it's really big. because that's what I did on the Sea Shepherd, the Dolphin and Whale episode,
    68:50
    making fun of Sea Shepherd and all those guys. I went and watched that one because a bunch of people were telling me to on their website and a few others. I feel it stands on its own. Most of the references are gaming references. There's references to anime fighter games. there's a whole thing in Canada which is done up like the old style 8-bit Final Fantasies where you're walking around on the overhead view and everything so yeah I had a lot of fun with it I looked at the achievement list after I finished and I was like no all sorts of like be this character while doing this evil thing to this other person sort of stuff you'd have to do a different playthrough for each one of some of these things it'd be grueling another game I played and finished that I mentioned, and it was my kind of runner-up game to Wolfenstein 2 for my game of the year was Resident Evil 7 Biohazard.
    69:44
    They actually, this week, yesterday, just wrapped up Awesome Games Done Quick, which is the speedrunning for charity. They ran Resident Evil 7. It was on a school night, as I selected. It was on a work night, and they started that one pretty late, so I could only watch part of it. But that one actually got featured as one of sort of just after prime time runs of someone going through and doing that as fast as possible. How can you speed run? How, how speed running can it get? I mean, it's not like, I mean, I was last year, I watched the doom speed run where you can speed run doom apparently with the right glitches in like, uh, like 20 minutes or less. Yeah. Um,
    70:23
    it's while I'm at drink run. Excuse me. The, the speed run was, uh, within two hours, I think. I don't recall, because I only caught the beginning part of it.
    70:41
    A lot of it is when you don't know where things, like when I was playing through it, and I don't know where things are, trying to find this key to get through that, so, you know, there's this puzzle, and you find this piece of, you know, the puzzles aren't really puzzles like a puzzle game. It's more like, oh, look, this obvious thing is missing. You need to find that obvious thing. So it's a Resident Evil game. Yes. Yeah. It's the, hey, look, there's an obvious spot where there's a large gear that should be here, so I should probably go somewhere and find the gear. Yes, yes. So there's that. And also, from a speedrunning perspective, there are things like there are VHS tapes you can find that will let you play through and learn more about what's going on. You don't have to do those. Yeah. They might be helpful to you, like, the first time through because they'll let you know what's coming up, basically, because they give you different exposure to the house before you have access. It's much like the first Resident Evil. You're exploring a big... In this case, you're not exploring a big mansion. just seems like a house upon a house upon a house. It's more like, here's a shack and here's a shack and here's a house. The next thing you know, it's like a military base. It's massive. So it feels.
    71:42
    And as I noted on the last episode, I really like how they went first person. It really helped with some of the horror of it. The controls, best feeling controls, I think, yet for any. They've gotten progressively better. Resident Evil, I don't think, ever had very good controls. Oh, no. No, Resident Evil's controls are... I never finished the original Resident Evil, and it was because the controls just angered me. That's kind of my issue with Code Veronica, which I got a remaster of. I couldn't get through it. I was just getting too frustrated. Bad camera angles and all that. I did better when you were just mobile turrets at that point. You go forward and plant and shoot. The ones we played co-op, those had much better controls. Yeah. And were more fun. I don't ever remember which one that was. We probably did five. the issue with those was Resident Evil was at that point I call it, that's why my turret reference is you're like a little bastion you always had to stop before you could shoot, you couldn't run and gun now you can might not be smart because you're still trying to hit things in the glowy spots you gotta hit the glowy spot, by the way we only gave you five rounds you've got four glowy spots it's really atmospheric and it's got good dialogue it's well written I had a lot of fun with it Good. I've heard a lot of good things about it. Yeah, it's good. And then Quantum Break, which as I noted at the start of the episode, I'd finally finished up.
    73:05
    That's a mix. I think that the gameplay mechanics are interesting. Interesting in a fun way. You get a lot of time manipulation stuff. It feels very different than most other games I've played. I've played a couple other games like Time Shift where I do have time control in some regards. And so, you know, it's the sort of mechanics where it'd be like, I don't think this would ever work in multiplayer, but in single player, let's go at it and let's have some fun. Yeah, no, there's a lot of games that have fun things like that in single player that you can work out that would never work in multiplayer. Yeah, there was one that had an interesting multiplayer mode that had some stuff like that. I can't remember the name of the game, though. It was sort of a Russian-themed, like, I don't know if it was Chernobyl Fallout gave time. I don't know. It was weird. It was a good campaign. I used to play this game called DEFCON, which is basically war games, just the nuclear launch attack part of war games. And it looked like the thing from war games, but it had a multiplayer component, but it also had a time acceleration component so you could accelerate time. And that's what the multiplayer always ended up in, because to accelerate time, everybody had to agree to accelerate time to the same amount. and it would accelerate time to the time wanted for the slow, agreed to by the slowest person. So, if everybody's got said, oh, we want times five acceleration and one guy's on times one, you will be on times one until that guy decides he wants to go higher. And there were games I played where I'm pretty certain the guy left it on times one because he figured eventually everyone would quit out and he would win. Yeah. Yeah. That's mean. But anyway, so gameplay wise It was fun. I thought the story was pretty good as well. The movies between the acts, they had live-action movie stuff.
    74:59
    Probably would have dropped that. It's just the concept was okay. It just feels pretty low budget, even though they got some names. Like Littlefinger, of course, is the big one. They got another guy who I had his name, and I don't remember it. I always think of him because he plays the chief of police on the Amazon show, Bosch. And so I've seen him in a number of things. They had some good actors. Some of the performances weren't so good.
    75:29
    It's all tied in really well. So the stuff that happens in the movie, you can skip the movies, so you don't have to watch them. But the stuff that happens in the movies is not like rehashed in the game. Well, that's good. You don't re-experience it in game. But does it affect? Yes. Okay. So, and you make it basically at the end of every act, generally speaking, you're, you're playing, you're, you play one character, you're the protagonist, but sometimes you take Littlefinger, I'm going to kill on Littlefinger, you take Littlefinger at the interludes and he, because he has time powers as well. The plot is he invites you – I mean the basics without any spoilers are he invites you to help with an experiment because he's having trouble convincing your brother, who is a scientist, and you are a who knows what.
    76:18
    You're a journalist, I think. You're a janitor. I've covered wars, you know. So he wants you to help run the experiment and help, I guess, convince your brother that this is – it's ready. Well, it doesn't work right. so you end up getting time powers and Littlefinger ends up getting time powers however he was you were like in a residual effect hit with this time stuff he was in the machine so his whole issue is he comes out of it basically and or you don't see him come out of it all of a sudden you see an older version of him later who's been around the whole time while his paradox his younger self has existed and it's like you know he's i mean he's the bad guy now and the issue for him is he said he says he's gone and he's seen the end of time so he's trying to save humanity from the end of time and you are trying to stop him because you think that you can change whatever has happened and he thinks anything you've seen cannot be you deal yes it deals with that whole issue with people think about time and the you the theories of everything's predicated on the path of time. You could never – time travel is pointless beyond viewing things because you can't ever really change anything because that's not how time works. And other people think, oh, yeah, you can make a difference. And it deals with things like that or things like maybe you can't change the past, but anything that hasn't happened yet in the stream can be changed. Who is it?
    77:51
    Right, right. So it's got all that stuff going on. So at the end of every act, you are as Littlefinger, and because of the things that are happening in the game, you have to make between two choices. Those choices influence the movie. Those choices also influence the game, including what enemies you may fight, who may be helping you versus who may be hurting you, the community's response, all of that. So overall, it's a decent game. I'd rather have an Alan Wake sequel than another Quantum Break sequel. I'm not aware of either game getting a sequel. No. It was made by the Alan Wake people. You can't even play it on Wake anymore. You can't even get a disc. Yeah, if you had a disc, you could play it. Yeah, I might have a disc, but only for 360.
    78:37
    I don't. I have it on Steam. Yeah. Well, did you have any games you wanted to cover? No. I played spreadsheet games, and I talked about it last time. Oh, okay.
    78:49
    I'm sure there's not people who want to deep dive into such a massively niche game. If there is, let us know. I can sit down and talk about rule the waves for a long time. But it's not something I assume very many people are super interested in. Oh, well.
    79:09
    Well, next time. Yes. We'll include a link. We have set up a Discord just if people want to chat with us. Discord, yes. There's a few people in it. Us, a couple of our guest hosts have been in it. It's mainly somewhere where we just throw memes and jokes and stuff. Yeah. But we'll include a link in the show notes for it. It's not as clean as podcast, though. No, no. FYI. I am not.
    79:39
    I warn you now, in the Discord, my filter is at 50% as opposed to here where my filter is at 95%. And as opposed to my real life where I don't have a filter. Yeah. We filter. We filter for the iTunes reviews And next episode Assuming it doesn't fall through We do plan to have a guest host on And we will probably have Most of the episode focused on competitive pinball So be prepared for that Of course we were pretty video game heavy this time Because I have a lot of video games to talk about So in addition to all those Links we mentioned Including to the t-shirt contest Go ahead and enter if you want a chance to win one You can always reach out to us eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com You can also follow us on Facebook facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast We're also available on Twitter and Instagram both as eclectic underscore gamers. And well, we'll see you guys in two weeks. Bye.