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episode 23. Gspf and other cool stuff.

The Spinner Is Lit Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·2h 16m·analyzed·May 25, 2019
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Golden State Pinball Festival recap with tournament results and community highlights.

Summary

Spencer Klingin hosts episode 23 of The Spinner Is Lit Pinball Podcast, featuring detailed coverage of the Golden State Pinball Festival (GSPF), including tournament formats, machine diversity (335 total games), volunteer experiences, raffle winners, and community highlights. The hosts discuss the pump-and-dump tournament format, key tournament results, and the festival's cultural significance as an annual gathering for collectors and players.

Key Claims

  • Golden State Pinball Festival had 335 machines on display, up from last year

    high confidence · Big Dan stated this as a fact about festival attendance/machine count

  • The women's tournament was won by Leslie from the Bay Area, with Marianne Rusty taking fourth place

    high confidence · Spencer and other hosts confirmed the women's tournament results

  • Lonnie from Seattle took first place in the A division with over a billion points on Guardians of the Galaxy

    high confidence · Spencer announced the A division finals results

  • Stephen topped out on Funhouse at 25 million points, earning top qualifier and seventh place in A division

    high confidence · Spencer recounted watching Stephen's qualifying and tournament performance in detail

  • Mike Vinicore from Stern worked at Bally Williams and discussed Attack from Mars mold casting issues with plastic materials breaking during the original development

    medium confidence · Spencer relayed a conversation with Mike Vinicore at the Friday dinner about Attack from Mars casting problems

  • Chris Poon (the pinball pirate) received the Steve Charon Spirit Award at GSPF

    high confidence · Spencer announced the award presentation during the Friday dinner recap

  • Josh won a Fishtail machine in the Saturday raffle; this was his second game and first Williams game (he also owns a Rob Zombie)

    high confidence · Spencer confirmed raffle winner and Josh's pinball collection status

  • The pump-and-dump tournament format charged $10 for 10 plays, with option to buy up to 30 additional plays; volunteers received extra games

    high confidence · Multiple hosts confirmed the tournament entry structure and pricing

Notable Quotes

  • “335 machines, which I think was up from last year. Big thanks to Marco and all the people who brought their machines at this show.”

    Big Dan @ early in episode — Establishes festival scale and thanks major contributors

  • “That second room, as soon as you cross the threshold from the first room to the second room, all you hear is just roar. You don't hear anything except the roaring of the games.”

    Rusty (Marianne) @ mid-episode — Describes the sensory experience of the festival venue

  • “It sounds convoluted... But when you're actually playing in it, and with the level of technology that these guys brought to it, it made a lot of sense when you were playing in it, and it actually ended up being really fun.”

    Kendra @ tournament discussion section — Reflects on how the pump-and-dump format initially seemed complex but worked well in practice

  • “He is just a good, good pinball dude who shares his knowledge and expertise with everyone and promotes pinball in a really positive way.”

    Spencer @ Steve Charon Spirit Award presentation — Explains why Chris Poon deserved the community award

  • “And so at league night the other night, she walked up. She's like, okay, we need to talk about Demolition Man. What does this do? What does that do? Why does this work? And how does this work?”

    Spencer @ raffle winners discussion — Illustrates new machine owners engaging with their pinball games

  • “When Andre Massinkoff didn't do well, like, he took a walk... but he came back, you know, and, you know, shook hands and, you know, super personal.”

    Spencer @ tournament finals discussion — Describes world champion's professionalism and sportsmanship

  • “You know, when it's qualifying, it's your chance to, you know, see what you can do on it. Big Game, a game that I touched maybe once before in my life, was my best qualifying game.”

    Brian Kass @ tournament strategy discussion — Reflects on unexpected success and importance of trying different games in tournaments

Entities

Golden State Pinball FestivaleventSpencer KlinginpersonChris PoonpersonMarianne RustypersonBig DanpersonKendrapersonBrian KasspersonLesliepersonLonniepersonAndre MassinkoffpersonStephen

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Golden State Pinball Festival reported 335 machines on display, noted as an increase from previous year

    high · Big Dan: '335 machines, which I think was up from last year'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Pump-and-dump tournament format ($10 entry for 10 plays, up to 30 additional plays) received positive reception from players who initially doubted its appeal

    high · Kendra and Brian both noted the format was confusing initially but enjoyable in practice; multiple hosts confirmed entry structure

  • ?

    competitive_signal: GSPF featured multiple tournament divisions including kids, women, B, and A divisions with varied formats; Lonnie from Seattle won A division with strong Guardians of the Galaxy performance; Andre Massinkoff (world champion) competed but did not place first

    high · Spencer provided comprehensive tournament results across all divisions

  • ?

    community_signal: Two raffle winners were new pinball machine owners (Roxy and Jim with Demolition Man; Josh with Fishtail as his second machine), indicating FOMO/entry point dynamics in collector community

    high · Spencer highlighted that both raffle winners were locals and first-time machine owners actively learning their games

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Mike Vinicore (Stern) shared that original Attack from Mars molds required multiple casting iterations due to plastic arm breakage issues on the Martian figures

    medium · Spencer: 'Mike Vinicore had worked at Bally Williams some years ago, and we were talking about Attack from Mars. And they had to go through two or three different castings with different plastic materials before they could get it right.'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.410

0:00
Here we go. Welcome to the Spinner's Lift Pub Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Klingin. Tonight's episode, episode 23. Golden State Pinball Festival for review and other crazy stuff I want to start out the show tonight with a shout out to the show's theme song creator and composer Mark Scott who's sure good to see at the Golden State Pinball Festival last weekend and had a lot of fun you get great in the tournament by the way anyway let's move forward tonight with the introductions just to my left is well you can hear him panting Bud the Dog who was in the trash earlier tonight. No, really, he was. To his right is Brian Kass. Howdy, folks. And Kendra. Hello. My lovely wife, Marianne Rusty. Hey. And Big Dan. Yo. Okay. Guys, we know what we're going to talk about tonight.
1:16
Golden State Pinball Festival. It was a week ago. Woo! Good, good, good, good show. Oh, amazing show. And I'm still suffering from pin lag. So, Dan, why don't you start us off? Give us some highlights. Well, the weather did not play along for two-thirds of the show, which was a bit of a bummer, but inside, where it was nice and dry, we had 335 machines, which I think was up from last year.
1:47
Big thanks to Marco and all the people who bought their machines at this show. So we have, like, what, eight Black Knights, Sword of Rage is the tryout, Munsters, Iron Maiden, a lot of cool stuff. Deadpool, Beatles. Yep, somebody brought a Beatles. And also Chris Tint, the pinball pirate, brought a bunch of new sterns. He brought, like, all premium. Well, he brought the Beatles. He brought a Deadpool premium.
2:15
Like, all his games were premiums. He brought all the JJTs except for Willy Wonka, which was somebody SoCal brought up. I forget who. Ace Goge brought the chain. Ace Goge, yeah. Thank you. Thank you to Ace Goge. Yeah, no, that was a huge gift. It was really, really good to see that. And was it Don who brought the American Ball? Yeah, he brought Houdini and Cobra Cosa. So we had all of the big new releases up here. Yeah, we had two Al's Coopers. There was one thing to say. No J.J. Peepers. Pirates. Yeah, there's no pirates this year. Nobody bought a pirate this year.

  • “It's always been fun since we first started it. God knows how many years now... I remember the first one. Then we started letting people like these guys in.”

    Spencer @ barbecue history section — Notes the growth and evolution of the Sparky's Barbecue community tradition

    • person
    Joshperson
    Roxyperson
    Jimperson
    Mike Vinicoreperson
    Tanya Kylesperson
    Mark Scottperson
    Practical Steveperson
    Wilder Neffperson
    Sharkyperson
    Adam Fesslerperson
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Pacific Pinball Museumorganization
    Worlds of Wonder Science Museumorganization
  • ?

    event_signal: Weather disrupted GSPF (rain/wind Sunday morning, tent and pop-up damage), but community morale remained high; barbecue was shortened due to weather but quickly completed

    high · Multiple hosts discussed rain, tents flying, pop-ups being destroyed, but noted it did not dampen spirits; Spencer noted the barbecue wrapped quickly and attendees returned to playing

  • ?

    content_signal: The Spinner Is Lit Pinball Podcast episode 23 provides extensive GSPF coverage with multiple co-hosts and community perspectives; noted as long-form, meandering discussion with interviews and anecdotes

    high · Full episode structure with Spencer, Big Dan, Kendra, Brian Kass as hosts providing varied perspectives on same event

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Players initially skeptical of pump-and-dump tournament format's complexity and appeal discovered it was enjoyable and engaging in practice

    high · Kendra: 'It sounds convoluted... But when you're actually playing in it... it made a lot of sense... and it actually ended up being really fun'

  • ?

    venue_signal: GSPF featured diverse game lineup including recent releases (Oktoberfest, Willy Wonka, Deadpool, Beatles, Black Knight remakes), classic favorites (South Park, Monster Bash), and emerging platform games (Multimorphic with Lexi art package and Cannon Lagoon)

    high · Multiple hosts referenced game variety; Dan noted recent releases, Rusty mentioned Oktoberfest and Willy Wonka as highlights

  • ?

    community_signal: Sparky's Barbecue has evolved from ~30 people in early years to ~90+ people, reflecting festival growth; described as 'old home week' for community members who only see each other annually

    high · Spencer: 'I have some old pictures from the barbecue from like six, seven years ago where it's like 30 people... It was really huge... like 90 people'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Stern Pinball sent Mike Vinicore and Tanya Kyles to GSPF Friday dinner; both described as 'complete gentlemen' and engaging with community

    high · Spencer: 'The Stern guys were complete gentlemen. They were engaging. We actually talked about stuff besides pinball, but we talked about pinball, too.'

    • 2:54
    I bought Chris Bannister personally. Yeah. But it was really, really good. Yeah, it was an awesome show. And it was pretty amazing to finally get some flip time on that game. And I can't wait until we talk about it a little bit later in the show. Anyways, yeah, I volunteered for several shifts, working behind the counter, watching people check their games in, check their games out. And, you know, you've got to give the lion's share of the credit to the collectors who, you know, brought their games up and brought them and put them on the show floor. You've got to give a lot of credit to the techs who ran around and kept them running. Trust me, we were always busy. And it was an absolutely fantastic experience this year. So, great show. Rusty? I loved it! Had a really good time.
    3:50
    Our Black Rose kept acting up. She always has to be that way. That was minor. It was. She is. She is, truly.
    4:00
    But, no, really, really enjoyed seeing all the new, new, new, new, new games. October Fest. Willy Wonka. Now, Willy Wonka and I need some serious one-on-one alone time, but I'm thinking everybody's saying that.
    4:16
    Just to, you know, be able to hear it. Of course, you can't hear anything at the Golden State Pinball Festival because it is loud. Yes, it is. It is a roar. That second room, as soon as you cross the threshold from the first room to the second room, all you hear is just roar. You don't hear anything except the roaring of the games. which was really nice that one of Marco's black knights had headphones, so you could plug right in. And I do believe Spencer got called a maggot once or twice. I did. It was cool.
    4:52
    So he didn't call me any names, which is very nice. He was very considerate of me, although he did encourage me to learn how to play pinball. to see all our old favorites were there again. There was South Park. We had a good South Park. Oh my goodness, Kendra's freaking out. I was just doing your little aliens on the show. Oh, my aliens, yes. Don Hiley had brought one of the new remake Attack from Mars. Also the new Monster Bash. And the new Monster Bash remake. Yeah, but we had everybody. Everybody was represented. Things were represented. And, you know, like Dan, I put in some volunteer time. I like to do security work, so I volunteered Thursday night so that everybody would set up games and nobody would play games. And, of course, as soon as my shift was over, everybody started playing games because I was the only security officer on. and then Friday just as everything was opening to make sure that everybody came in safely and got out safely but everybody follows the rules real good so it's a really nice crowd it's always like old home week we just see people that we only see once a year and it's such a treasure because that is the Golden State Pinball Festival as well as the people absolutely Kendra great show I mean it's the one I it's what we look forward to every year it's what we spend all year getting ready for and then it's over and where did it go yeah it goes quick and like Rusty and Dan I did sign up for three volunteer shifts and then I did about 12 voluntold shifts because every time Brad saw me this weekend, oh, good, you're here. Come with me. I've got a job for you. You guys, you know, you, Rusty, and Roxy, man, I mean, you three ladies really killed it on the volunteering this year. You went above and beyond the call of duty. So, bravo. Hats off to you guys. And then, you know, I think I can count on my hands with fingers left over how many games I played this weekend, but it was still it was a blast and hats off to Michael Hozier for bringing in the women's tournament. Yeah which my lovely wife Marianne Rusty took fourth place in the women's tournament. Yay!
    7:33
    Thank you for listening to the Black Knight learning how to play pinball in time. I know. You know that feedback really helped. You should thank Steve Ritchie. I really should. I really should. Well it turned out you know I was the worst of the best. Well, I don't know if we're going to be talking more about the tournament, but it should be said that this was a heck of a tournament. Yeah. It was. New format, you know, so the pin golf format. They did, what is the format actually called? Pump and dump. Okay, that's what I thought. The pump and dump format. You pay $10, you get 10 plays, and you can buy up to 30. Now, if you volunteered or brought games or volunteered to be a scorekeeper, which I did all three, you got extra games that way. Yeah, I think we got like 24. Yeah. And it cost $10. Yeah. But it was, I never played in this, I mean, I've played in some competitive pinball situations now, but I've never played in this kind of tournament. Me neither. And it doesn't sound fun. But it is. It sounds convoluted. Like, you know, it's like, okay, so you can pay, and if you're scoring, blah, blah, blah. You know, if your score is higher, then you take the score. When you're actually playing in it, and with the level of technology that these guys brought to it, it made a lot of sense when you were playing in it, and it actually ended up being really fun because I didn't get to the actual tournament because I wasn't that good, but the qualifying is what I think me and Spencer actually played in. And, you know, you basically are just kind of competing against yourself. You're watching your score. You're making sure that, you know, you're attacking the games that you see the most opportunity in, and you're trying to hit a points threshold to be one of the qualifiers. And it was really actually super, super fun. And by the end of the day, because I started off scorekeeping, and that kind of, you know, gave me the crash course. I don't know how this is going to work. And by the end of the day, when I was done playing my plays, I was like, I was looking at the standings. I was like, am I going to make it? And I didn't. I wasn't even close. but it was really, really fun to actually be involved and I would definitely consider being involved in something like this again where before I was always just like, it sounds complicated, it sounds expensive it sounds stressful and I don't think it'll be fun. It's actually it can be expensive, but it's not as complicated as you think it's going to be and it is a lot of fun. Brian, just like the IJ just thought.
    9:58
    Brian, any thoughts? I had a great time I didn't volunteer simply because you guys know I have one day every week where I absolutely can't be at the show you know you can only volunteer for maybe one or two shifts on a day where you do anyways it was great there's a lot of other things behind it but it was great I got to play all the games I wanted to play I loved Oktoberfest I think that was the clear I liked it more than I liked Wonka and I liked Wonka a lot got to play some old favorites. I played Bradstrain Science because I've got a weird, almost unhealthy fascination with that game. I love that game. I play it.
    10:44
    It's weird. It's quirky. It's weird and it's quirky. It's one of those ballads like Blackwater that I just like. It was great to see everybody. I see people I only get to see once a year. Maybe twice if I'm lucky. Got to see the massive Antar. the 10-month-old Bigfoot that Rob Anthony's hauling around behind the shows. What a beautiful dog. And it was great. The rain didn't dampen anything, in my opinion. No, not at all. I think one of the points to key on is the rain and the wind and tearing up Camp Silver Ball pretty good early Sunday morning didn't dampen anybody's spirits. Everybody was like, all right, well, rain, all the tennis and pop-ups are tracked. Hey, let's go play pinball. I don't know if that's true. But what I will say is I got to give a lot of credit to some of these guys who camped through it. Like, I mean, there were a lot of people in RVs. And, I mean, you know, naturally, you know, hopefully you have a good RV. But there were quite a few people who stuck that night through in tents. Yeah. And it was not just rain. George was one of them, George Gonzales. It was in tents and tents. Yeah. It was complicated. There were pop-ups flying around. Yeah, one landed on Dirty Donnie's trailer. Yeah, there were pop-ups flying around, and there were tents being blown around, and it was nuts. They weren't in Kansas anymore. The thing about it is, you can't hope for it to always be sunshine. Right. And, you know, a lot of respect for the people who, they just commanded it out.
    12:22
    And a lot of respect for the people who were smart enough to get the hell out of the rain. That would be me.
    12:27
    Me, I dragged my two littles and my oldest kid, and we were out of there. Yeah, they went home. I stayed in the banister's trailer. He captured her. You're welcome, by the way. That wasn't sound advice. I was like, you should pack it up. Let's just do the big ride. So, yeah, you know, it was, I mean, every year it gets better and better. I'm thinking, what are we going to do to top it next year? You know, set off a live volcano in the EM room? We can arrange that. My thought was on the machine raffle, rack one of them, have it be a surprise. That was a neat idea. Yeah, we had two machines that were raffled off like we do every year, Fishtails, which was won on Saturday by Josh. That was awesome. Yeah, it was awesome. Donated by the pinball pirate. Donated by the pinball pirate, Chris Poon, who was also the recipient of this year's Steve Charon Spirit Award. and then on Sunday it was Roxy's boyfriend Jim who won it. So it happened to be this year two people that we knew. He won the demolition man. Michael Hosier. Yay, Michael. And that funny thing was going to be the project demolition man that we were going to talk about that I sold. I can find another game. Yeah, I know. Project Demo Man. The good news, the really cool thing about the Roxy situation and the Josh situation for that matter too is that this is Josh's second game. Yeah. He has a Rob Zombie. Yep. And so it's his first Williams game. And this is Roxy and Jim's first game. Yeah. And so at league night the other night, she walked up. She's like, okay, we need to talk about Demolition Man. What does this do? What does that do? Why does this work? And how does this work? And so they're really into it. They're, you know, experiencing the joys, quote, quote, of pinball ownership. And it's really exciting that both of those games went to locals. And just so Chris knows, it was in no way fixed. Right, right. Not at all. It was completely random. With running rumors on Facebook, Dan. No, it was completely random. No, no. See, the Facebook thing legitimately was, I said, apparently you have to be in Lodi League and buy tickets. But that didn't work for me. Right. And Chris took it as like I was saying it was a fix. Well, okay, Jim technically is not in Lodi League. He's come one time with Roxy. Oh, yeah, but Roxy gave him the money. So, really, Roxy won. You know what? It's great when people win their first game. I remember a few years ago at Pinnagogo, a man came with his young son, and they had fun, and they played. And they bought, I think, one or two tickets, and they won. I forget which EM it was, but they won an EM. They won a pinball. They didn't own any games. They just said, wow, this sounds like a lot of fun. We'll go play pinball for the day. And they took home a pinball machine. How cool was that? Super cool. Yeah, super great. It's really a good idea. Yeah, and the proceeds, of course, go to the Worlds of Wonder Science Museum, and then the proceeds from the tournament go to the Pacific Pinball Museum, and then the proceeds from the Flippin' Friday Kickoff Dinner and presentation of the Steve Charles Spirit Award, those proceeds go to local Girl Scout Troop 130 of Lodi, who helped prepare the meal and serve it, which if you went this year, the food was phenomenal again. I mean, the main course, the entree, everything was great. The hors d'oeuvres were great. The dessert was off the chain. It was fresh strawberries and Mars Capone whipped cream. Mars Capone, Mars Capone. I'm going to say for the record. And a Girl Scout cookie. You can love strawberries as much as you want, but that is not a dessert. So, okay. Boo this man. All right, boo. Boo! So, yeah, we presented the Friday night. I presented the, you know, I hosted the dinner. And we had the two pin leberties from Stern Pinball at our table, which Kylo. Kylo, why did I say Kylo Ren? No, Kylo Ren. Good God.
    16:34
    Tanya. Yeah, Tanya Klyce. I'm sorry. And Mike Vinicore. Sorry about that, Tanya. I'm tired. Whoever you are. I'm tired. And sober, because I've got to get up real early tomorrow, so I'm drinking sodas. Anyway. That's your problem. The CERN guys were complete gentlemen. They were engaging. We actually talked about stuff besides pinball, but we talked about pinball, too. One of the neat things they kind of hit me, too, was Mike Vinicore had worked at Bally Williams some years ago, and we were talking about Attack from Mars. And they had to go through two or three different castings with different plastic materials before they could get it right. Because the original molds of the little Martians, they kept breaking. Their arms kept breaking off. When they would jiggle. When they would jiggle, their arms would fall right off. Yeah, yeah. Or when you'd hit them with the ball or whatever. I guess just when they jiggle, they would fall off. So, you know, and I got another great inside scoop, which I'll tell you about shortly, with Dirty Donnie, which was really cool. and Donnie and his lovely new bride Jennifer were there lots of pin leveries were there John Osborne who had worked at Gottlieb for several years who else was there?
    17:53
    All the Marco crew was there yeah it was a great night Kathy Sharland of course, big shout out to Kathy came in from Steve's wife came in Idaho to share everything with us, share the evening with us. It was a great evening. Good food, good camaraderie. We presented the award to Chris Hinnance, the pinball pirate.
    18:23
    We're trying to convince to do our show art next year. There you go. We had our own Greg Owens speak about Chris. I did a little bit about Chris's background. And then we also had Michael Sheets from the Pinball Museum come up this week. So, Sheice, Sheice. I'm bombing with names here. Sorry, guys.
    18:47
    Well, you know who he is. He's a righteous dude. And it was a great evening, and we presented the award. He was very humbled by it, and you could see he was quite touched by receiving the award. And well-deserved. Absolutely well-deserved. I mean, he is just a good, good pinball dude who shares his knowledge and expertise with everyone and promotes pinball in a really positive way. So congratulations again to the pinball pirate, Chris Koontz. So anyway, moving on, because I lost my place, so I'm filling time here with no – With ums and ahs. Okay, anyway. so yeah so we started the tournament you and I were qualifying were you qualifying Friday night?
    19:38
    no I don't think I qualified until Saturday because I didn't volunteer my scorekeeper gig was early Saturday morning like I started Saturday morning yeah I did my scorekeeper gig Saturday evening I was playing when he was scoring yeah I started playing Friday early afternoon and then I jumped, shit, because I had to get ready for the dinner. When we did the dinner, when that was over, I jumped back and played some more. And of course, by that time, as soon as I'm walking into the tournament area, guess who walks right past me? Andre Massinkoff, world champion. Hell of a nice guy. But then I'm like, because I was doing pretty good.
    20:22
    You know, I had a really good game on goalball. And I had a good game on a couple other games. we're talking about the strategies I kept avoiding one game and that one game is Walking Dead not because I don't, I like the game a lot, but I just like, man, I can't, there's no way I'm going to put up scores like some of these other guys are in that game, so I kept avoiding it and I got down, I had one play left and I kept replaying stuff and then just I kept bombing out because I couldn't beat the earlier score I had I said, alright, well I played everything else I'll play Walking Dead what's the worst that can happen? Might put up a really good score. Yeah, you got to get in there and play everything.
    21:02
    It's still in hell. Well, your strategy could be like, I'm going to look at old games, or I'm going to look at new games. But it was the same thing for me. Like, Star Trek, especially when I was scoring, Star Trek was always five deep at the end. Yeah. And I was like, I don't know why all these people are playing Star Trek. I'll go play something else. Right. But when I played Star Trek, I ripped off a good game, and I probably got 50 points off of it. And I was all like, oh, well, you know what? And I was judging, like, because all these hardcore guys, and this was before the Andres and the Lommies and all them showed up. Right. Like, I was just kind of going against, you know, like, Simon and some of the fact-town regulars, guys who I know can play pinball. And I was just sort of judging on that. I mean, I think at the end of the day, what it kind of goes to show you is, you know, don't avoid stuff. You know, when it's qualifying, it's your chance to, you know, see what you can do on it. Big game, a game that I touched maybe once before in my life, was my best qualifying game. And honestly enough, it was my best game last night at league, too. And I'm just like, I couldn't have told you crap about big game before the tournament. Yeah, except for it's surprisingly fast for its size. Boy, isn't it? Yeah. That game is a wink. Yeah, it is. Well, it's set up right, waxed clean. But the final tournament was pretty exciting. You know, and there were, what, three or four tournaments? There was a kids' tournament. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations to Wilder Neff, who was a grand champion of the kids' tournament. And then there was the women's tournament. And I, do you remember what the lady's name, who won it was? Shannon. Leslie. And Leslie won out of the Bay Area.
    22:42
    And then Sharky's from Idaho. It's her first time out here. Yeah. So congratulations to all the ladies. And then I don't remember the B champion, but I know that our own Adam Fessler took fourth. Yay! It was a gutsy performance. I watched the whole finals for that, and it was pretty exciting. And then our own Stephen took seventh. Yep. In the A division. Stephen took seventh in the A. In the A division, yeah. And then in A, yeah, we had Stephen up there. He was gutting it out. He put up a 25. I was scorekeeping, and I'm checking other people's scores because they give you, like, pads to do the scorekeeping on. It's really cool. Like, you're talking about real modern technology. Everything flows real smooth. And I'm looking, and I'm like, oh, he's still on that game? And then I went, he's on his first ball. And when I looked and realized he was still on his first ball, he was at $22 million. He topped out on Funhaus at $25 million. Which was top qualifier. Yeah. And what's exciting about that was he was right below the line. and this was, I think, like his very last play and he gutted out a huge performance on that funhouse. He delivered, man. And he powered into A and he made a good showing. And then in A, Lonnie from Seattle took number one with just a brutal game on Guardians of the Galaxy. He put up over a billion and Andre just couldn't hang. and yeah, it was pretty exciting. It was really cool to be. It was fun watching the finals, like when Rusty was playing the finals. It was real exciting. Not just seeing it on a stream or listening to a podcast or something, but to actually be there and watch these guys play, I mean, it's pretty cool, even though, you know, in our case, it was just sort of like we didn't have a stream run in, we didn't have cameras so we couldn't see the play fields. We're just sort of watching the displays and the body language. And, you know, when you get down to it, any competitive environment, right, there's a lot of emotion there. Yeah. You know, you would see the thrill of victory and you would see the agony of defeat. You know, people beating themselves up when they did bad. Right. When Andre Vosvallen didn't do well, like, he took a walk. Yeah. We were joking, oh, he's already back in San Francisco. You know, but he came back, you know, and, you know, shook hands and, you know, super personal. But once the competition was over, he moved on. Yeah. He seems to be a good dude So Of course you know Friday Actually the weather cooperated Pretty good The weather was beautiful on Friday Yeah we had a little bit of sunshine Early in the day Saturday of course the weather wasn't so great But it never dampened anybody's spirits But we did catch a lucky break at the annual Sparky's Barbecue brought to you by Mark Sparky Malmberg And with help from JJ from Game Exchange of Colorado. Shout out to you guys. Huzzah!
    25:39
    We got through the barbecue and the group photo and then it started raining about five minutes later. Oh, it was starting to sprinkle while we were doing that photo. Yeah, but I mean it didn't do it. Yeah. I don't think the heavy stuff's going to come for a while. You know. Mind you, as we're all standing there hollering at Chris and Adam. Run!
    26:01
    Run! They were running across the field to get to the stage. Yeah, the barbecue was great, as always. And seeing old friends and making new ones. We made another new friend this year. Fletch. He lives. He does live. Hell of a nice guy. So we made a new friend. We make a new friend every year. And seeing old friends year after year. I mean, there's so many people I want to name, and I'll be here for six hours. So if I don't name you, I'm still thinking about you, and it's always a pleasure seeing you every year. So please don't feel like, you know, I'm just kind of burning through the day, the highlights of the day. You know what's funny about the fact that it rained is normally Saturday ends up being mostly the barbecue. Like you go out for the barbecue, and you end up being out there for four or five hours. Right, eating, drinking beer. Drinking beer and talking to people and seeing this person, seeing that person. And in this case, because everybody just wanted to get back in out of the rain, you know, it really worked out pretty well in terms of like, man, I'm not going to stand out here. I'm going to run back in and finish my qualifying. And there was, I mean, it wasn't, we had over 300 games. So it wasn't like it was ever too, too crowded. And a great lineup, such a diverse lineup of games. Yeah, no, I mean, with 335 games, you're going to have some variety. I mean, you know, we also had the Multimorphic, which we should be representing. Jerry showed up on the Multimorphic. Had the new art package for Lexi. Which is really pretty. That's improved. Yeah. And then had Cannon Lagoon. I was really hoping he didn't bring Cosmic Cart racing. I was really hoping. We were really hoping. I know everybody's really looking forward to that. Cannon Lagoon is interesting and like a redemption type game. And it would be great for little kids, but for adults, it's... It just shows the variability of the platform. Yes, yes. You know, wouldn't it be great if you had one of those to set up Camden Lagoon so, like, you know, a newbie could play it or a kid could play it? Right, or the little kid. You know, and then when it's time to play it, it's a lot more, you know, Lexi's. Yeah, I think Lexi's a fun game, but I really look forward to seeing that. But, I mean, it was still good to see him there. He's a terrific guy, great show supporter. So, you know, that was good. Yeah, bring up a good point about the campout or the Sparky's Barbecue. It wasn't an all-day event this year. It was like everybody huddled in, ate, you know, said hi. Practical Steve. Big shout out to Practical Steve who brought really nice. Practical Steve. Huzzah. Who brought really nice map photos of last year's group photo from the barbecue. Yeah, I can't wait to see this year's photo next year. Right.
    28:44
    But above and beyond that, a huge shout out to Practical Steve for all of the social media work. Yeah. Yeah, all the social media work. That dude was hopping. Yeah, he was. He still is. So he never stops. And he's got, you know, he's got a family. He's got two beautiful little kids. You know, he's got a lovely wife. You know, he has a life outside of pinball like we all do. God bless him for all the hard work and effort he puts into the show every year. One more note and shout out on the barbecue. Everybody brings food, right? So a big thank you to everybody who brought food, beer, you know. So it is. Sparky headlines it. He brings the brats. JJ provides the spot. But everybody brings a little bit something. So again, it's another community event, just like the games. Which, when packing up Sunday, I went around and tried to talk to all the vendors, shake their hand, thank them for coming like I always do. And I was talking with Tim Mezzle. Mezzle Mods. Shout out to the Mezzle. Measle. The Measle Mods. Tim is a lovely wife. His name I'll remember eventually. I'm so sorry. She's a lovely wife. Mrs. Measle. There we go. I was like, next year bring more beans. I only got a cup. I'm like, I'm sorry, man. I said, you know, next year I'll make sure we bring a double order of my wife's delicious Jeremiah Stone Beef and Potato Company Barbecue Bean. So next year, double order on those. We'll make sure to save some extra back for the Measle family. Maybe we just need to get the recipe.
    30:14
    Yeah, I'm the last one who knows how to make it because everybody involved, I think, is dead or forgotten at all. So you're killing people to keep your recipe a secret? Yeah, it wasn't my recipe to start with. But it's mine now. What are you sitting on the couch for? Get in the kitchen. Get my butt in the kitchen. Start making some beans. Hey, you know what? My husband's so progressive, he lets me wear shoes. I know. We're coming.
    30:42
    Bye. We're still recording, man. Actually, I think the highlight of the Saturday for me was honestly the snicker salad. Oh my god. Just listening to Adam's nephew say salad has to have at least lettuce in it, I thought it was great. I missed most of that. I was running around trying to get something done and Mickey was covered in it. Watching Mickey eat the snicker salad off of a sucker. Yeah. That child was... Every diabetic in a 50 mile radius is going, why my sugar level is up so high? Actually, I had to take insulin because I watched them eat it. It was pretty scary. But it was great. You know, I got to the barbecue late. Life happens. And it was just good to see everybody. Yeah. And it was fun. It's always been fun since we first started it.
    31:34
    God knows how many years now. We're going over like a dozen people. Yeah. I remember the first one. Then we started letting people like these guys in. I have some old pictures. I didn't do it. I have some old pictures from the barbecue from like six, seven years ago where it's like 30 people. Yeah. You know, I have the picture from the last year that Steve Sharma was at the barbecue with us. And, yeah, it was like 30, 35 people. And then when it first started getting big was the last pinagogo we – Oh, no, it was big before the last pinagogo. But, I mean, it was really huge. You can look at the pictures. It was like 90 people, Jersey Jacks in that photo. Yeah, it was big. Eric and Cheddar in his grass skirt. Yeah. Best picture ever, and Rusty took it, is Cheddar in the cowboy hat. Sexy cowboy at the pump. It's such a great, it just, he just, she nailed the shot. I still want to know, he's like a dollar in his G-string. Right? Well, Cheddar's such a sexy beast. You know that with his south lip. That's what I thought. So, shout out to the almighty Cheddar. Anyway. So, yeah, so, you know, Sunday was a women's tournament and the final raffles. I mean, so much good stuff going on. The silent auction. So many great classic games. So many great new games. You know what was really popular with people? What's that? Was that weird little horse racing game in the EM room.
    33:03
    Yeah. I don't recall. Which one did they have? Was it Hayburners? No, it wasn't like a Pimhol's Upright. No, there were a couple of the Upright. Oh, I saw that. I didn't get a chance to play it. People kept coming up to me going, I've only played that game eight times. I want to play it again, but it's not working now. I see the techs over there fixing it again. You know? I mean, it was an old game, but people used that game. What was that? I mean, Joust was real popular. Well, Joust, too. And, oh, big, big thanks. Who was fixing Joust all weekend? Wasn't that Kyle? Who wasn't? Kyle Spiteriano worked on it a lot. I'm not sure. I got a lot of tech alerts on it. Yeah. Rusty and I got to play a game on it. Yeah, everybody wanted to play it, you know? Yeah. So whoever brought that again, thank you. Yeah, that whole head-to-head pinball thing, that's actually really kind of cool. It is. Yeah. It's funny that there are a few games like that. Yeah, like War, there's Joust, and there's that old Gottlieb. The old Gottlieb with the tilting play field is by far the coolest one. I've never played one of those. It showed up at a Pinagogo maybe 10 years ago. Yeah. I don't remember who brought it, but it was a blast to play. and it was different and I wanted one and they were like oh yeah like you know 12 of them or some god load of them Right Yeah
    34:17
    But, yeah, Joust is always a crowd pleaser. Always popular. You know what was interesting this year is we didn't have a lot of the cocktail games. Like, last year we had a big section of cocktail games. Yeah, we only had a few. Last year we only had Joust and Night Moves.
    34:32
    My wife comes up to me after the show. She's like, we should get a Night Moves. It's a great game. Night Moves, it was Roy Clark. It was the one and only. You could get those for like two cigar boxes of old marbles and rusty nails. You used to be able to. Now they're like $700, $800, $900. People figured out that they're actually kind of amusing in their own weird way. Especially like Roy Clark. He's like Roy Clark. Because, you know, he entertains. He is the entertainer. You know what? God rest his soul. He was an amazing musician. So let's get to the new games. because they were all pretty much represented. Real quick, before we get to the new games, I want to report to everybody that the patron saint of the Golden State Pinball Festival, Spanish Eyes,
    35:16
    got played a bunch, came home absolutely working. Yay! Which is a huge shout-out to the various techs who worked on it. I call BS on that. That game never hits 100% work. I think Dan's lying.
    35:29
    Like I say, my whitewater house is broken next. Don't listen to him. No, yeah, Spanish Eyes is a fantastic game, and it was pretty durable. There's no show without Spanish Eyes. Yeah, no, it actually did pretty well this year. It had a sticky 10,000s relay, which was awesome. See, I started having a sticky relay, and I haven't done virtually nothing to Surf Champ and brought it to the last four shows. When I played Surf Champ at the show, and I had a great game on it. It was playing like a champ. Yeah, it's starting to have issues. I just got to go through it and clean it real good. We need to bring Spanish Eyes over to hang out with it. We could do that. Set up our games. We could do that. We got a lot of work. I haven't even touched the game since I got home. How's the Spanish eyes going to get over that fence up there? Really? It'll jump. Yeah, yeah. I got this tunnel. You know what we'll do? We'll just strap it to the butt. We'll say, butt, and it'll just be good. So, yeah, so new games. Okay, what do we enjoy? I'm going to let Brian start with this. Wonka.
    36:33
    Cool. I really like the feature underneath the Everlasting Gobstopper where it would turn for different modes. I thought that was really, really, really neat because it's never been done before. Yeah. That was sweet. I loved the game. It was fun.
    36:50
    I liked it. There's nothing more I can say about it. It was a fun game. Definitely a good game. It was hard to hear.
    36:59
    And, you know, it was the New Jersey Jacks that was on two ball like it always is. but it was still a great game to play, even though I scored under 1,000 points on two balls because I suck at it.
    37:12
    Kendra? Love it. Like, I played – I got a couple games in on it Saturday morning before it got, you know, jam-packed with people. Right. And, again, like Brian, my scores were nothing to write home about, but, you know, there are features in this game that we haven't seen before. Which is nice. Yeah, it's nice to have something new, and at the same time, it's a Jersey Jack, which, if you know my brother, you know it's Jersey Jack. Right. You know, so I'm hoping that one of those magically appears. I definitely want to get some more time on it you know, get to understand it better. Right. I definitely liked it and it was a highlight for me.
    38:07
    Oh absolutely. Rusty? I only got one game on it and it, like many of Jack's games it's very busy. There's a lot going on, there's a lot to shoot at, figuring out where but again, without being able to hear it, only having two balls, not, you know, and of course you kind of have to, we had to kind of bunch up and play in a group just to keep the line moving, which is a great way to make new friends, but not a great way to get one-on-one time with a machine.
    38:44
    So, yeah, again, back to you know, I just need some one-on-one time with Willy Wonka and to see all that it has to offer. But it looks like it's going to be a winner. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a good game. It's a Lawler. So, I mean, if you're familiar with how a Lawler shoots and plays, you know what you're getting into.
    39:09
    I'm not a huge Willy Wonka fan. Like, it was a movie that I grew up with, but it was never like, oh, my gosh, let's go watch Willy Wonka. So, the theme doesn't win me over. So the game has to be good. I walked away wanting more. So hopefully I'll get a chance to spend some more quality time on it. But, yeah, there was always a big line on it. There were a lot of other things to play. So much like Rusty, I played my game. I experienced it. I actually had a really good ball, but I kept going for a while.
    39:39
    Really good flow. I mean, it's definitely got that Lawler stop-and-going-ness, but it's also got a couple really good flow shots. Yeah. That will keep you coming back. and the quality is of course off the chart right you're not going to have a Pat Lawler design built by Jersey Jack that feels like anything less than the best that Ballywood was putting out in the 90's so I think that it would be nice to hear it I know that in the streams the sound wasn't amazing but it's an integral part of the pin box experience but for a first impression of a show you know not bad and you know for $7,500 for that base-level game, you know, I think that it's going to bring some people over to the jacks by the fours. We have cookies.
    40:27
    You know, you bring up a great point about that, and I was going to bring that up too. You know, I played one game on it with Rusty. My first ball was a house ball. I had one flip. It bounced off a post straight down the middle. My second ball, because it's a two-ball game, I hadn't even looked at my score so I had no idea what my score was but I had real good, I locked balls I never locked them in the Wonka Vader I locked them in the Super Secret Machine which is a great feature and I got a multi-ball and I kept it going for a bit and I got a lot of cool stuff going on but I was just trying to take it all in really enjoy the flow because I'm a huge Lawler fan too and one of my all-time favorite games is Whirlwind because it's got stop and go action but it's also got some amazing flow shots It's a perfect mix. Right. And I think Wonka's kind of got that same thing going on. But I'm also looking at it for the perspective you talked about, $7,500, a little lower price for the base model. I never even saw the Wonka Vader work, you know, while I was playing it. And that's okay. I know.
    41:27
    But the mechanisms look, you know, like something we've never seen before, but still simple and durable to be on location and not break down. So I think they really put some extra time and thought into this, and I'm hoping this does know it out of the park for them. Yeah, it's not the visual punch in the face that Pirates is. Like, when you look at Pirates, it's like, holy shit. Like, look at all this stuff. It's insanity. You don't look at this game and go, oh, it looks barren. But you don't look at it like you did Pirates and just go, like, what didn't they put in this? But at the same time, I think that that will work to its advantage because some people feel that Pirates is a little overstocked. My guess on that was I think maybe they learned from Pirates. Yeah. I don't know the background on it, but they had a very short production run.
    42:25
    In this game, it's not, like you said, it's not as packed with stuff. But at the same time, they didn't have anything. They were like, oh, this isn't going to work on Wonka. We've got to take it out. I know we want to think grand thoughts about how they probably learned from Pirates, but the truth is, this game was designed, probably finished being designed, when Pirates was hitting production. Maybe in Whitewood, I don't know. So, I mean, it wasn't going to change anything that late in the game. I mean, if they had sat down to redesign it, we wouldn't have seen it as quick. This game was ready to go. Pirates was delayed, obviously. And maybe, you know, during the long production of Pirates, it changed some stuff. But, I mean, nobody knows that except for Pat Lawler. And I seriously doubt that Pat Lawler looked at anybody's work and let it influence his own, because that's not the kind of view Pat Lawler is. Pat Lawler, you know, I'm not going to say he's an egomaniac, but I'm going to say he's earned his spot. Right.
    43:20
    Before we get into the next game, which is Oktoberfest, I want to throw this. This is a really cool story.
    43:27
    After the dinner, actually the next day, I was talking with Donnie some more. I said, hey, thank you again for coming for the dinner. and I said, I love you. I love coming to these shows. I try and never miss because this is just such a fun show and a fun group of people. And we were talking and I said, I don't know whether you know it or not. You probably do or maybe you don't. I don't know. I said, but you pretty much save pinball art and single-handedly. He's like, man, that's really nice of you to say. Thank you. I mean, he's a very humble guy. With Metallica? Yeah, with Metallica. And he told me the original Metallica. Right, right. With helicopters. Right. But thank you. Yes, it did. Helicopters and then the Metallica one-off game that was a re-theme of Shaker. Yes. But he had told me a great story. And the great story is this. when Stern approached Metallica about doing a game and said, great, but it's Donnie or nobody. And they didn't, Stern did not want to use Donnie at first. And Metallica was like, you got no Donnie, then we got no game, pal. Metallica's got that kind of pull. Right. They're doing the music industry. Oh, right, right. So it worked out well, obviously, but when you think about the pinball art landscape, because even he brought it up, because ACDC said, fantastic game. It was one of my favorites. He goes, but there are... I'm like, yeah, it's not that. It's maybe one of the ugliest games to ever exist. It's one of the best at the same time. The premium's not bad. They're all bad. It is just not a beautiful game. So I wanted to tell that story. Well, I can deal with it. And thinking about, you know, because like when you talk about, you know, we're talking about Wonka and Decisions and Pirates, and it's like, you know, and I brought this up before, and I think it kind of got derailed in a previous episode we did. it kind of sort of got derailed a little bit. I think, I don't think people, it was the last episode, actually, when I said, you know, are we asking, are we as the pinball buying public and the pinball fan base, are we asking the manufacturer for too much? And everybody was like, no, especially not for the money. But, I mean, you know, even with the technology, and Pat Lawler said this years and years ago in an interview, you know, a toy or a mechanism's got to work on a game flawlessly for hundreds of thousands of points and be reliable. You know, you can make the coolest mech in the world, but if it breaks down every third game, you know, then that's not going to help the home player or especially the route operator. You know, that's a death knell. But art never breaks down. Art never breaks down. And true love never dies. And that's one of the things where you're kind of running into in the industry now. I was talking with somebody the other day, and I don't remember who the conversation was with, but we were talking about Franchi.
    46:13
    Oh, it was with Mike. And the fact that Franchi seems to be rubbing some people the wrong way, and that Stern seems to be distancing themselves from Chris Franchi. And I'm like, I don't feel like that's a move Stern can afford to make, because I feel like in this day and age, Chris Franchi and Zombie Yeti are the dudes who are selling Stern's games. Yeah. Because it's the art packages that are making it happen. And, you know, when you look at the actual content of the games, there's less in the game, but because of the great art packages, there's more on the play field. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I can agree with that to a point. It's code and art. Right. Almost more than play field design these days that are driving games. Batman 66 is a humongous success story, right? Which did you see? I'll interject. Jeff, did you see the Catwoman artwork got released? Yeah, I did. That looks pretty cool. Yeah, not bad. But let's be honest, right? It's like, does Batman 66 shoot all that high? It's okay. I mean, it's a fun game. I enjoy it. It shoots okay. It's not a great shooter. But it's got great code by Lyman, the best in the business. Right. And it's got great art by Chris Franchi, arguably the best in the business. And that's what's been driving that game for years now. Right.
    47:33
    You know? So I think that you can't underestimate what this art revolution in pinball has meant. And, you know, yeah, Dirty Donnie was the dude who brought hand-drawn back to pinball.
    47:46
    Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. So let's get into, thank you, Dan, and everybody. Rusty, let's start you off at Oktoberfest. I loved Oktoberfest. It was fun. It had a neat shot. I wanted to watch somebody else play because they were better than I was which is almost everybody watch them hit open one of the doors and they chose the what was it called the food it was the food frenzy F U D which I stay around my house all the time F U D it's food F U D it's a feud You have to have some feud. And in feud frenzy, it lights all the switches. So you have to count down all, you have to hit all the switches to get everything. I thought that was just really cool because you could, you know, and if you could put it together with a multi-ball and then just flip like a crazy person and just keep those balls going, you would hit most of the switches without even really trying. so no it was loads of fun it has plenty to do a nice deep rule set lots of great shots to make shooting trying to time it right to get your what do you call that very first shot the skill shot yeah that's cool skill shot right into underneath the dude's head of the barrel underneath the guy's head But the music, because it was kind of sitting off by itself, you could actually hear it a little bit. The music, it has this mix of old world German Liederhosen music going on with some undertone rock and roll. It was really, really awesome. Beer Barrel Polka. It was awesome. I love it. Honey by me, Oktoberfest. I'm working on it. Better than Wonka. Yes, I like it better than Wonka. Controversial statement. A lot of people are saying that.
    50:08
    So, Kendra. I didn't get to play it. Oh. You got to look at it, though, right? Yeah, I was in line. Kendra's in the penalty box for the next three minutes. I was in line for Oktoberfest, and Brad found me. Brad, I'm going to play Oktoberfest. Go away. I love you, Brad. You got to remember, he's not the boss anymore, so it's okay to say no to him. No, not... Did you try that? Yeah, it worked. It was amazing. It did for me. It felt so good, I want to rub it on my face. Love you, Brad. Mean it. See, Dan, I got, oh, good, you're here, and dragged.
    50:42
    He would literally grab me by the arm and just pull me along. Brian, you played Oktoberfest. I love that game. It blew my expectations away. As dumb as it is, I think my favorite thing about it is that left ramp is massive. It goes from the bottom almost all the way up to the top of the glass. Yeah. It definitely dethrones the G-Ramp as the new hardest ramp to shoot I've ever had to shoot. Like, the G-Ramp on Guns N' Roses is notoriously steep and difficult, and that ramp goes down the water. It's incredible. I would love to get one of that and Houdini. It's fun. That's all there is to it. We played some more Houdini on Sunday. Who was the designer on Oktoberfest? I always forget his name, but he's done other games. He did Wheel of Fortune. Not Wheel of Fortune. But Wizard of Oz. Didn't he do something since Pinball Party? No.
    51:34
    I'm trying to think now. Anyways, he was the guy. That's his passion project. When he wanted to make Oktoberfest and American Pinball said make it, I hope it sells. You know, I think. Because I feel like it's the ultimate expression of, like, I want to make something that nobody else wants. I want to show you what I like and hopefully you like it too. and I hope American Pinball doesn't get punished for going against the grain with an original quote-unquote theme. And to be honest, it's a hell of a game. I mean, there'll never be a lot out there because American Pinball is a tiny outfit, but, yeah. Well, it's an original IP. They can make that thing for five years. Well, right now, people have to buy it, right? American Pinball, if you're listening, add in some strange root quotes from when they're having to deliver the beer to the beer fest, and you guys will make it even better. Oh, exactly. But, yeah, it's really good. And, I mean, just like Houdini, right? Except for, like, when I first played Houdini, like, I didn't like it. And I had to put 10 games on Houdini before I was like, okay. Start figuring out the shots, yeah. Like, I want to like it, but it's just bricky. And then I'm like, no, it's not really bricky. You just have to make the shots. This game is what, like, you want the new generation of pinball to be. There's fun to shoot. There's crap everywhere.
    52:53
    The theme integration is great. And it's just, you know, it's sort of like if you think about something like Medieval Madness, right? Like, you know, it's kind of a Monty Python and the Holy Grail ripoff with that generic castles and, you know, princesses and dragons theme. And this is beer and food and tents and fun. And it's super good. And I want Spencer to buy one for Rusty. So I can come over and play it a lot. So, yeah, super good, and yeah, it's a really good excuse to have sausage and beer parties.
    53:26
    Wait, we need excuses for that? We don't need any more excuses. We don't. Besides the fact that we need to eat. Right.
    53:34
    And I'm going to point this out. Well, this goes for all the new games. You cannot judge the artwork with pictures or video. They never do it justice. Right. It's totally different when you're standing up. The Oktoberfest is beautiful. And it's not too busy when you look at it in person. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of, like, Comet, Zycode, and Hurricane, where you have that overhead. Absolutely, yes. Of the theme park and all the little things. Yeah. Yes. And you know what? Everybody loved those. Oh, yeah. Those are from the group. It reminds me a lot of that. It's a pretty hard era, but it's great. The bumper car pop bumpers, and they were, like, done in, like, a glitter paint. It's great.
    54:10
    Yeah, same with Wonka. It's a stunningly beautiful game. But Oktoberfest, it's quirky and fun. We're talking about that one. The art of Oktoberfest is better than the art of Wonka. I was completely underwhelmed by the art on Mocha. You know, it's a theme, and I'm fine with it. It's not knocking it out of the park, but it's not that. Well, it's just pictures. It's that picture of Gene Wilder with his arms kind of spread and then, like, a lot of dots and sparkles. Right, candy and sparkles. But tell me, I got a cool mode when I was playing it.
    54:39
    I got beer chugging mode, where you're looking at your beer mug and you're chugging it, and you've got to make the lit shots, you know, so it's really easy to know what you've got to shoot at, and you've got to go against the computer player to chug your shots. Now, you know, there's been a lot of talk about... Am I remembering correctly that that game has a one-handed mode? It does. So you can drink your beer while it's playing? It does have a one-handed mode so you can drink your beer. Come on, people. This is genius. Oh, yeah. Give this game a chance. And more people, the more shows it goes to, the more places it ends up on location, and it's $7,500. And the more people play it, I think it's going to end up being a pretty well-respected, well-loved game. The video display, there's a lot of controversy. A lot of people don't like it. It looks fine. Most of the scenes look fine. There's one where it shows just a crowd and Oktoberfest on stage. It was real fuzzy and blurry, and I went, eh, yeah, not that great. But you know what? I'm not spending all my time looking at the screen. I'm looking at what's on the play field, which just nails it. But if you can get anywhere to a show, to a barcade, arcade, to a collector's home and play this game, I implore you, do it. I don't think you'll regret it. You may end up not loving it. You may end up not ever owning one. But I think you'll at least say, wow, man, pretty good second effort. Oktoberfest is the business. It's the real deal. It's top shelf. You got anything to add to that, Dan? No, man. I mean, I think we've covered it kind of in depth. Yeah. For a first impression, like, it's a super good game. Oh, yeah. Up next is Beatles. I'll start.
    56:20
    I like that it's of the early years, which I liked that better before they got all high and crazy and, you know, whatever. Let me jump in real quick. Okay. Have any of you guys played it outside the show? No. Okay. What I am going to say is you missed half the experience. Okay. Because if you can't hear that game, you've missed a lot of what makes it fun. That said. Okay, good point, and I couldn't really hear it very well. But before I. Jamie played it, and she was like, man, I really wish I could have heard the music. And I'm like, oh, yeah, man, it's fucking awesome. I mean, excuse my language, but it's amazing because it's super, super well integrated. Oh, just put the M on there. There we go. Right at M. We had one, so we're at a PG-13 right now. There we go. And no nudity yet. Can we get some full frontal? Hold on. There we go. I'm both going to try and... You guys are aware that when I record shows alone, I'm either in my bathrobe or completely naked, right? God damn it. The way that was TMI.
    57:18
    It's not me to hear that. I didn't need to know. Just like you're at 1 o'clock in the morning or something. You did not need to hear that. Okay, let's reroute the show. Back on track. Hey, it's not video. We've leveled up now. Oh, they know now, so... Spencer, how much was that alone time when now you're doing the show naked? That's why I thought sloppy against your legs sounded like that.
    57:39
    That wasn't butt in the garbage. Yeah, you're playing with butt. I can't think what that was, Rusty. Right, ooh, boom.
    57:51
    The only way you can get a Rusty is possible snoring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's in bed at 8, 8, 39 o'clock every night. So, anyway.
    58:01
    What are we on to? Oh, Beatles. We were just talking about Beatles. We were talking about Beatles and then we did Elm. Okay.
    58:07
    The topper. Did anybody notice the topper? I did notice that there was a topper. And that was Chris Coons. That's an add-on. It's an add-on. Yeah, it costs money, probably $400 or $500. I don't know the exact amount. But it had the foreheads in the wrong spring, so it kind of showed kind of a la Diner. But it also had Beatlemania. And as people were playing the game, I was watching, and it would light as you're hitting the shots. it would like the letters of Beatlemania? The game is technically called Beatlemania. Okay. I think. Because you know it's got Beatlemania's everywhere. Yeah. And I think that, like, the thought process is, if you heard Kamikau's interview, he sort of seemed to intimate that there could be future Beatles titles. I had heard something about that. Which would make sense with the cost of the license. Right. Maybe if Beatlemania is a big hit. That and Beatlemania is, you know, the syndrome of all the collectors. Right, but if the Beatlemania is a big hit, then maybe you'll see that later era. Yeah. Oh, God, are we going to have a white album pinball machine? Wouldn't it be hilarious if they did do a white album and it just had a white sidebar? There's a Supreme on Sotheby's auction, and it's already up to like 50 grand or some crazy amount. Yeah. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Anyways. Anyway, so. Beatles. Okay, and you know, if you don't know, loosely based on a previous game, Sea Witch,
    59:35
    early 1980s Stern Electronics game. They've added a few things, a spinning disc, 45, really cool way to do it. Adds to the gameplay, a couple of magnets, multi-ball. I really, really enjoyed playing it. The killer for me is the price. If it was a $4,000, $4,500, maybe $5,000 game, but at $8,000 for the Gold Edition... I can just go play Sea Witch. Yeah, those are going up like crazy too now. It plays better than Sea Witch. Way better.
    60:07
    Fantastic flow, lots of fun, good action, but simple enough for a casual player, non-pinball player, to really enjoy their self. So I think it hits it out of the park in all the aspects, except the price. And again, the license was crazy expensive. But, you know, and somebody, I think it might have been you, Dan, brought it up. Make a Sea Witch 2.
    60:30
    Yeah. 2.0. Yeah. Sea Witches. God or Sea Witch. Sea Witch goes to college. Sea Witch joins the Navy. Sea Witch goes to college. I have that to do.
    60:44
    On Bayer Batch. It's a simple game. It's a flat game. Is it $8,000 worth of game? I think that you have to kind of look at it as what am I buying? If you want to buy pinball, no. You can get more pinball machine for less money. You know, like I said, look at Wonka, look at Oktoberfest. If you are a Beatles aficionado who likes pinball and wants kind of the ultimate expression of that, it's pretty good. I mean, I think that was probably their aim, Dan. Yeah, and I think exactly. Yeah, it wasn't the casual or the pinball collector really.
    61:25
    Yeah. There was that little teeny cross section. That's why they're making 1,900 of them, right? But here's the thing. I've played one at a local collector's house.
    61:37
    Shannon. No, not Shannon. Shannon doesn't have it. He plays in Folsom. For some reason, I am blanking on his name. I'm just guessing. That's terrible. That guy plays in Folsom. Shout out to the guy that plays in Folsom. That was really good. He took second in Texas.
    61:51
    Ridgeway? Mike Ridgeway. Oh, Mike Ridgeway. Thank you. So I played in his house. and just... I can go that night. It's a super fantastic game and just like I can see, you know, can you quantify the price of fun? I mean, it might be $8,000 worth of fun, kids, but you have to kind of spend with your own wallet. Right. You know, and to that cross-section, yeah, it's going to be worth it. You know, so I think Beatles is a cool game. I had a last point on it. I played seven or eight games. I would love for something like that to be like Fort Grant. Oh, yeah. You know, and that would find its way into people's houses. We played it, and I put up a rather good score. Yeah. I don't remember what it was, but. No, she didn't roll well. You know, it was fun to play. I had a good time playing it. It was understandable. It wasn't like, you know. Yeah, you've got five modes. Exactly. And each mode has a thing you're supposed to do, and each mode is assigned to a song. So one of the modes is a spinner mode. One of the modes is a drop target mode. One of the modes is an orbit mode. Right. And then one of the modes is a multiball. and then when you do all the other modes you get to play I wouldn't call it the wizard mode but you get to play the last one. I mean, like I said, I did well. I had a good time playing it but for the price point, I don't see it. That's what kills it for a lot of us.
    63:11
    Rusty? I'm actually fairly cold on it. Just the theme itself kind of chills me out. Although I like Sea Witch okay. I guess I know that's practically sacrilege, but... I don't think Sea Witches... I don't think it's the end-all be-all. I didn't really... First time I played it, I hit that orbit thing, where I kept slapping it, and it kept orbiting and orbiting and orbiting. It's great when you get a good orbit shot going and just keep hitting them. I love it when the magnet will grab it in your orbit and drop it. It's so cool. but no, I was cold on it, and again, for me mostly it's the theme, I've been so burnt out on the Beatles for the past ever, forever I understand, I've been burnt out on Richard Pryor no, you haven't how did you do anything more to add on Beatles?
    64:11
    it's fun it's not $8,000 worth of fun, and I prefer secrets I know it doesn't play right, but well, because of it said, I'd play something that would play great. Yeah, here's the thing with Sea Witch, is that it's almost a damn near old 40-year-old game. Right. You know, if you find one that has a, is somewhat clear-coded and touched up the playfield, and you stat it, and it played, it would meet your expectations. I know someone who does have one like that. It would meet your expectations. I like Sea Witch better, and like Rusty said, Beatles, man, like, I like their music, but I'm not like this uber fan. It's not like I am with Iron Maiden. Right, that's where I'm at, you know. You know, and it's not an $8,000 game. I'm sorry. Yeah. You know, like Dan says, single-level play field, the spinners, the magnets, does not equal a grand worth of funds. Right. And, like, there's just – but, again, pinball people were not the primary target for that. Right. It was that cross-section of Beatles fans and then pinball people were going to buy that.
    65:15
    Exactly. No, you all make great points about it, and I love everybody's opinion, you You know, it's honest opinions. And that's what we're all about. Just, you know, care for our games. I don't care for our games. The thing I could see them doing, like, Dan said, because the license is expensive, is I could see them doing code updates for different eras of the Beatles. Yeah, yeah. So that could be something really interesting. Oh, there you go. You know, like, get into the point where they got into the drugs and everything, or, you know, just progress through the era. And there's other stuff you can do now with just a simple code update. You could accommodate that. I'm just hoping more than anything to see this play field become one of their contract play fields.
    65:54
    Like they did with Supreme and like they did with Primus. Right, right. Like, so when somebody wants a pinball machine, like, Boom, here's what you got. One of the styles. That's a great idea. That they can pick. That's a great idea because the engineering. Because it would be nice to see this play field be out there for more than, you know, at the most 1965 machines. Right. All right. Well, up next we got Munsters. I'll let Rusty start. We play both the pro and the premium. Yeah, ew.
    66:23
    It just doesn't do it for me. I try. Because I really want to like it. Actually, I play the pro, premium, and elite. But anyway.
    66:34
    Weren't you special? No, not really. I'm douche pool. You're douche pool. So, now, for me, I just, and I didn't do well. Spencer did very well when we were playing. We found one in a bar. And Spencer did very well. In fact, he did so well, he went through each and every mode and then started over again. That, to me, is not in-depth. that, you know, I mean, again, I didn't do well on it, but I found it boring. Wasn't, and I could be wrong on this, but wasn't the goal of Munsters was to be more open to the casual? I believe it is, because it's a simpler rule set, which is making a lot of the home collectors very unhappy.
    67:23
    But yeah, it's more accessible. Now, the flow on the game, the artwork's beautiful. Chris Ranchi. How fantastic does that premium look? It looks gorgeous. The people who were complaining about the black and white premium need their eyes checked. That is striking. But they're doing a color one now, aren't they? They are. I could care a crap about the Munsters. Like, I was never a Munsters person. Adam's family all the way. But, like, wow, that's a great-looking game. It is. It shoots nice. It shoots beautifully. And, like, you know, you've got Spotted under the ramp. that's a cool little feature. You know, the Herman toys. What do you expect from a Sturm? I don't hate the game. I don't love it. It's like, okay, it's fun to shoot and everything. Again, great to play on location. Probably a nice league night game. But there's just no wow factor there for me You know The Little Caesars pizza pinball Oh that hard Wow That cruel to Little Caesars
    68:31
    No, not these cruel Little Caesars. The box tastes better than the damn pizza. I didn't touch it with the show. I didn't either because I'd already played. No, I did. I played one game on a premium because I wanted to play the premium. That's what I did. I played the premium and it just... You know... I think it's a good game. I think they did a great job on the lower play field with the amount of stuff they packed into it. You've got a VUK. You've got a ramp. Both returned to the flippers. You've got lots of little targets.
    69:00
    That's probably the best part of the game is the premium. I mean, the pros. Definitely an improvement over the family guy. Absolutely. They did a stellar job on that. For sure. Yeah. Because I don't like the theme, the game had to win me as a player. I think it plays great. I think it looks nice. Again, you know, another one for Franchi, you know, good call. Yeah. I don't mind the code. Like, I know, again, everybody expects every game to be the sense of spin ball party. You know, I think they were going for more of a getaway where, you know, you'll see Red Line Mania two or three times when you're having that super good game. And if you look at a lot of, like, the stuff that he put in it, like Secret Mania, Monster, was it Monster Madness is the final mode. Yeah. I mean, it really seems like maybe Dwight was going for that getaway. Yeah, my first game ever on my second ball, I got to Munster, Maine. And that's the idea. You know, if you want to make that game brutal, where did you play it at?
    69:59
    The stadium bar just downstream from Adam's house. They probably didn't jack it up and remove others and try to make it hard. They want people to play it. No, I put five bucks into it, and then Rusty and I left a bunch of games on it because we kept winning games. But at the end of the day, it's just one of those games where, it doesn't do enough for me to go like, I need to have one. But it doesn't do so little that I'm like, well, Stern's lost their touch. They're going out of business tomorrow. You know? Right. If they put a better license on it, I would be more into it. I'm not going to sit here and say that, you know. Bye.
    70:33
    Everybody's into interrupting you. They are. They really are. I'm just not supposed to talk tonight.
    70:39
    No, it played all right. It played well, but the theme is not something that I'm 110% behind. I'm not going to walk away from it if it's what's available, but if I've got multiple choices, it's not going to be my first choice. Yeah, it's pinball, so it's good. Yeah. But, yeah. A better theme would have sold that game to me. I was shocked when they even said they were doing the monsters. I was more shocked when people started getting excited about it. Yeah. I mean, I don't hate it, but like Spencer said, I don't love it. I barely tolerate it, you know. Red-headed sketch-out. I can't really get into the Munsters theme. I always felt like it's because everybody hears the Munsters and thinks the Addams Family. Exactly. And while people think the Addams Family, you know, you think of the best-selling machine of all time. I think that it was Association. And everyone's like, oh, no, that's bullshit. and I'm just like, everybody thought this was going to be Stern's Addams Family. Yeah. And I maintain Stern's Addams Family was Monopoly.
    71:45
    Or Jurassic Park and the Daddy East Days. Yeah. Well, that was really kind of, you know. Our next game is actually Alice Cooper, even though the prototype was there last year. Excuse me. With the new code.
    71:58
    Before that, I want to touch on Deadpool, which is also a new game, because we didn't have it last year, because it hadn't come out yet. I played Rusty and I played the pro quite a bit the pinball pirate Christians brought a premium very rarely do I get more excited about a premium or an L.E.A. so usually the pro is more than you know I usually end up liking the pro in most games most turns better oh we're going to talk about that we'll get there that's coming up we're going to get patience to it brother I did bring my box don't lose your head Augustus anyway I still love Deadpool Pro I put up a $330 million game on one, playing with the banisters. Still didn't get on the board.
    72:39
    Had a monster game. And the new updated code, I love Deadpool. Love, love, love, love, love Deadpool. Love the theme, love the gameplay, love everything about it. It's just the premium, really awesome. And I love the disco multi-ball because you've got the mirror ball. But I still go with the pro problem. Okay, one thing I was going to say about Deadpool is it'll never happen, but it'd be great if they did an adult version based on the movie like they did with Family Guy. Yes, that's been brought up a lot and who knows what'll happen down the road. I'm sure somebody will walk up with a recorder and get... I'm sure Ryan will do it. I'm sure he'd be down to do it too. Say something about your balls. Come on, he did Detective Pikachu. That man will do anything for money. He actually did the Honest Trailers for Deadpool as well. So, if you haven't seen that yet, he's actually... I think there's a lot of screwed up commercials for this suck-ass mobile game. Yeah. Like, just all over the place. So, anyway, so, any quick thoughts on Deadpool? How much has Cove saved that game? A bit. Like, when I first played that game, I was like, oh, man, the play field's kind of weird, and that's cool, but it is just not fun. Like, what... And I was like, oh, man, what is Stern doing? this is the beginning of the end. They took this wonderful art and just threw it away and I played it again and I was just like, man, there is way more to do. There is way more interaction. There's way more reward for the things that you do. It's really saved the game. I still feel like the collectors and the premium don't really bring too much more to the table. The diverter, so you get kind of an awkward loop is kind of cool. The disco thing is stupid. I'm sorry. I love it. The molded action figures are fine, but the stand-up lats look almost as good. But seriously, it's like, if you love Deadpool and you gotta go that way, go that way. You're not gonna be disappointed. But man, the code has really brought that game around. The mech suit multiball, tons more callbacks. I got that. Way more animation. Yeah. Like, the Wolverine mode, where the Berserker rage mode with Wolverine, where he's like losing his mind cutting up this turkey and eating it and like fighting ninjas at the same time. is hilarious. Yeah. Like, super, super turnaround on that game from something that it's like I would never, ever own to, oh man, you know, this would be a cool game if I had a big collection. You do have a big collection. If I had a bigger collection. I love the premium, believe it or not. I mean, I wouldn't mind owning the pro, but I do love the premium. Orbit at the top is nice. I like it. It's not, because on the Pro that top thing gets clunky. Oh, the RAM? Yeah. So why would you spend $1,500 for a disco ball? Well, you get more drop targets, too. You do get drops. More drops. Well, you get drops besides the mini-devil. The EADPOLRL drops. If we were gonna have it, we would probably have the girl model and be all, you know, just as entertaining. So, again, I always need that one-on-one time. You gotta have time to date and touch and fall in love, you know. But no, I do.
    76:10
    And that's why I'm married. I think you're sitting by me tonight. Hello. Hello. I saw your Tinder profile down. I see white.
    76:23
    So, yes, I do love me some Deadpool. It wasn't horribly mean to me in the tournament. Yes, I took fourth place. Thank you for being mean.
    76:35
    And we got to play on Deadpool. So it's a fun game. It's not only fun for to play. It's actually a game that, you know, if you're just digging the thing, It's fun to watch other people play because you get more, as an observer, you get more out of the screen than, of course, than the player does because if the player's not watching the field, they're going to lose their ball. Yeah, I agree with that. That's the nice thing about the screen is that if you're waiting to play, you're playing with a friend, there's so much cool stuff to see.
    77:15
    And then Spencer noticed on the premium, that's the one that had the topper? Yeah. If you saw the topper again, thanks to Chris Koontz, it had like a little baby Deadpool and it had the Deadpool logo in the middle and on the, well, if you're facing it, it'd be on the left side. It had Deadpool and he had his hand. And when you're playing, if you're doing well, he gives you a thumbs up. And then it'll go like this. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and then if you're just sucking. Going like this, he's holding his thumb sideways. Yes. And then if you're really sucking, he gives you a thumbs down. And it lights up. It's real pretty. It's a beautiful topper. That's kind of cool. It is really cool, yeah. That's kind of jerky, though. If you're, like, bricking shots or, like, drain your ball, get a ball set, he'll just thumbs down you. So, it's really cool. So, from, like, across the room, people are going to see that you suck at pinball. Yeah, pretty much. Well, I mean, you're paying $500 for it, you know, it may as well be something. It might as well tell you how much you suck. Which reminds me, I came up with a new joke. I was talking to Jim.
    78:15
    That narrowed your time. I know. I'll take it. He bought a new Ghostbusters. There are more Jims in there. I know. He's, he's, oh, God. He's the Jimmy Buckyway. It's a new joke. You're talking to Jim. Did Jim buy the Ghostbusters? Yeah, he's a regular. He comes to most parties sometimes. He's a Bay Area guy. Oh, God, I can't think of his last name. He the Stilt? Huh? Jim the Stilt? No. Anyway. He always wears a Ta-Kamara shirt or jacket.
    78:40
    Anyway. We were talking about his new, that. He's like, yeah, it's a shame. I never got a chance to get anything signed, you know, because he made some great games. You all know who we're talking about. And I'm like, yeah, but you can still get new stuff he's working on, you know, license plates. They go, oh, God, that is so good. I just, like, in a random, hungover, pin-lagged haze Friday morning, right, already suffering from pin-lagged Friday morning.
    79:08
    Mostly hangover. A few months, and I know that he won't. The last two guys. Because I erased all of them. The last two guys I think standing up in the campground that I saw could have been others, but the last two I saw were me and Vince, and we were shooting the coffee-infused Patron tequila. And, like, we finally both called it a night at 1.30 a.m. on Thursday night. So, yeah, it was Friday morning. That does not sound good. Which has nothing to do with Deadpool. Which has nothing to do with Deadpool, but where was I going with that? Nobody knows what you were talking about. You were talking about Friday morning when you were hungover and saying that they could get, you know, original license plates. Yeah, you know, so if you're really a fan of that particular designer, I won't mention his name, you probably know who he is. He designed Ghostbusters. Now he's making license plates in the Illinois Penitentiary. So, you know. So, the, okay. He's the new Toby at stake. Hey, hey, we don't put down the pieces here. He's a new something, all right. Anyway, are we through talking about Deadpool? Yeah. Yeah, because I'll pass. I didn't play it. Okay. If you played it at all? Yeah, I didn't care for it. Okay. Fair enough. Try it with a new code. You played it, right? I played it with a new code, too. I just didn't care for it. All right. All right, we'll move on.
    80:25
    Oh, Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle. I'll start because I played a game of it, and I was bricking terribly, and couldn't get anything done. So, again, it was like early Saturday morning. I was exhausted and wet. and I went over to Chris Bannister I was like, man, I love Charlie I love Spooky, it's a beautiful game the code's working great when you get it to work I mean, you know, it was working fine but I couldn't play for shit he's like, go play another game later so I did, and I had a much better game and I really think, it's just, the shots aren't tight but, wow the animations on that are phenomenal the music, because we had two of them one was off in a corner by Rob Anthony's booth and I could hear the music and I could hear the call outs, which was great huge improvement. Spooky, why did it win a Twinkie Award for art and sound packet, or not sound packet, well, art and display animations is beyond me because that game nails it out of the park. Bravo, spooky, and I can't wait to see what you do next. Anybody go. I love it. I played the prototype. It was fun. It was the new code update. I was playing by Rob's booth because A, it was quiet. You could hear everything and B, there was nobody around. So you could sit there and get a couple games. Yeah, nobody was really paying attention to it. Yeah, I saw that one getting played a bit, and the one in the main hall getting played a lot more. Yeah, I played the one at Rob's for maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes straight, and there's nobody else around. I look back, okay, cool, playing again. Awesome game. Like, it's killer. I would love to be able to afford one. It's fun. And just like I said when we discussed it last, the cab art on that is right behind Big Bang Bar. Oh. It's just like the best. Stunningly beautiful. Yeah, my favorite cab art right behind Big Bang Bar.
    82:03
    Yeah, it's fantastic. I think for a lot of the people who are looking for pinball to do something more akin to storytelling, and they're not looking at this game, they're crazy. Because the way the whole game works is like a video game. Left lane, right lane, take you to different rooms. Shots will find items. Shots will start boss battles. If you find the item, you go into the boss battle, you kill the boss easier. It all happens in a pinball framework. Yes, the shots are tight. That's why I keep telling people to make a Dragon Slayer. It lends itself perfectly, and most of the animations are done. You probably have to get the rights to it. Yeah, and Bluth will sell those rights for a wink and a smile. Yes, the shots are tight. Yes, they're makeable.
    82:49
    It's by far Spooky's best effort yet. Like, just a super cool game. I think a lot of people don't get it. You know, I think a lot of people are either looking for more of a tournament title or the Alice Cooper itself, like, you know, they look at it and they go, oh, I don't care about Alice Cooper and the music, and they don't realize that it's like a haunted house. Like, if they said, hey, you know, this game, if they just called it Haunted House or something like that or just Nightmare Castle, I think it would have actually probably helped them sell it. But it's cool, and it's a clear triumph for that company. Oh, yeah. And they've sold it. You know, there's no more to sell. I think they sold all 500. Oh, did they? I knew they were close a while back. Everybody who wants it, you know, is getting it. We have two or three in our group. Yeah. And so, you know, hopefully we'll get a chance to play it. Ladies? More. I did not get to play it this year. I played multiple games last year, you know, and loved it last year. I, you know, I definitely want to play it with the new cove, but I just, I didn't have time. Yeah, I know. We were pretty busy. Maybe someone quit grabbing you. Right. Love you, dude. Hope to see you soon, Brad Sirius. And happy birthday to Brad, which Brad's birthday, I think, was on Sunday. No, happy birthday, dude. 21 again. Third time. Love you, brother.
    84:15
    On to, all right, get ready for Battle Royale, the night on the couch, kids. Black Knight. Sword of Rage.
    84:24
    Rage. Okay, Russ and I, I guess, we'll start because we played it, what, first thing Friday morning, huh? Something like that. And we played the premiums first, because they had two premiums and, like, what, four, five, or six? I think we had eight pros that were. That many? Yeah, we had a lot. That were all, like, that were all bought as show specials. Yeah. So a big thanks to everyone who takes care of that. Half of them, half or more from our guys. Yeah, well, I don't know if our group really took them home, but big thanks to everybody who does that. Yeah, thank you. It's really an amazing gesture to let your brand new, I mean, and I know you're saving money. But it's an amazing gesture to let your brand new game be open and put out there to get whooped on for three days. Yeah. And whooped, it does get whooped. I think most people are pretty respectful. Well, no, I don't mean people are beating the game. They get played. Yeah, they probably get 600, 700 plays easy. I think Adam actually told me that his maiden got played in the 300s. Oh, wow, really? It was lower than you'd think, but I guess if you think about the fact that there's like seven or eight of them. Right. Maybe it spreads it out. That makes sense.
    85:33
    Love the premium. I want to point out the artwork. Again, you've got to see it in person. Even the pro. I mean, the artwork on that, the play-filled artwork, the cabinets. All the games are gorgeous. Yeah, they're just absolutely stunningly beautiful artwork. It is metal as hell. The music soundtrack is off the chain. Scotty and the Vamprax just absolutely unleashed a fury. Yeah, Scott Ian and the Metalocalypse guy. Metalocalypse guy, yeah. You know, the music's great. The call-outs are fantastic.
    86:06
    Yeah, Mr. Ritchie at his best. Well, and there's also Barenaked Ladies. Ed Robertson does call-outs. Yeah, he's like the spinner skeleton. He's not the knight. I know, but it's, you know, they're still cool. I got called a maggot a lot. That was cool. But not by Ed Robertson. No, by Steve Ritchie. Not even as the Black Knight. He just calls you on the phone. Yeah, for Playfield, I like. Of course, it's a Black Knight game, so it has to have enough for Playfield, or does it? The lock's cool. The loop's cool. But to me, it just feels like, here's what it feels like. Black Knight 2000, just updated. That's what it feels like to me. Which, there's nothing wrong with that. It's fantastic. But then I played probably at least 12, 15 games over the weekend on the Pro, on the one where they had the headphones so I could hear everything. and I'm giving the nod to the pro.
    86:57
    Especially for the... You are high. Not high. It shoots. It's tight shot. You are high on the... It's not bricky. Mo, love you, brother. Play better.
    87:08
    It can be bricky, but if you hit the shots, you know the shots. I mean, it's cool. The toys are cool. You know, the night toy.
    87:17
    For the price point, that's a hell of a good game for that price point. My only critique, which is everybody's critique, the magnus-a-button doesn't work for beans in the position it's in. Please, Stern, your next game, just make it without that silly button because it's overdone. Come up with something new. In fact, do a special limited edition or a vault edition two years down the road and put the damn magnus-a-button back where it belongs on the right side of the cabinet. Rusty? I like the pro. And what was it that Jamie said, Dan? I have no idea. We were talking, and it's like, if you're going to, I don't know. And I understand where Jamie's coming from. If you're going to spend the money, spend the money.
    88:11
    And this isn't dogging on the premium in any form or fashion, But I like the clean look of the pro. I like the feel of the pro and how it plays. That's just my take on that. You can't even hardly keep track of the ball. It is a really super game.
    88:33
    And the shots are tight. But like Spencer said, they are doable, but they're tight. You have to kind of pay attention where stuff's coming off your flipper. So, yeah, I'm all pro for the pro. You just told me you would spend $1,500 more on a Deadpool premium to get a disco ball. It's Deadpool. So what you're going to turn down is an upper deck with a lock mechanism, a loop, a target, and a third flipper. You know, Rusty, I'll go give you an upper deck. I just need, like, five bucks. I've got an upper decker. Upper decker, yes.
    89:12
    The pro was fine. You know, if I was spending $6,000 and I looked at all the Sterns, including Deadpool and Munsters, and I put Black Knight side by side, I wouldn't buy Black Knight Pro. Because the problem with it is it's half a game. It's a bunch of lanes. It's three drop targets. It's a couple of kickers and one wire form and one sweet-ass knight toy. And the knight toy is great. And the burning bat board. That is a love down. I'm glad you brought that up. Aren't those great? That is so freaking sweet. But where you get the nuance and you get the gameplay is when you have the upper play field. And the reason that you do is because you have the stackable multiballs, you have the loops, the loops are big points, they weren't working in the first stream, so nobody thought they did anything, but they do score points and you can combo them, and you have the target to light lock. The video. It doesn't spend a lot of time up there. It comes right back down. It's not, I mean, I'll be honest, man. I went to this show to play Black Knight Sword of Rage oh I know you did I was going to buy one I played it I promptly spent my money on another game here's the deal, it's an awesome game I own a Black Knight 2000 does everything Black Knight Sword of Rage does in 1989, it doesn't have the cool software, it doesn't have the amazing display effects but at the same time it's just like, I've got my lock shot, I've got my upper play field, I've got my third lever. You know, someday I am sure all of the swords are ready. But it didn't end up needing to be my first new inbox, which is what I swore it was going to be. So, you know, it's cool. I like it. The animations on that. And again, the storytelling. But the pro's garbage. The storytelling.
    91:05
    Kendra? Okay. I'm going to be called a Blastformer. all day tomorrow. However, I'm sorry, Dan, the pro. You don't need to be sorry. I'm sorry for disagreeing with you. It's an open... Nobody's going to stop you from being wrong.
    91:26
    I'm not wrong. Because you're looking at it from the point of view of... That's subjective. Black Knight has to have an upper playfield. No, no, see, I didn't say that. Everybody else has said that. Everybody else has said Black Knight has to have an upper playfield. I was saying going into this, you know something? The Pro looks pretty cool. I might be happy with that. I might spend the $5,100 and get a show Pro. And then when I played the Pro, I was like, oh, wow, there's really not a lot to it. Like, there's a bunch of lanes, and there's three pop bumpers, and there's three rollovers. And that was the whole game. When you put that upper play field on there, you got the gameplay variety that you expect in a modern game. See, the way you feel about the pro is the way I feel about the upper play field. There's very few shots. Right, and the upper play field by itself is not a game. No, it doesn't. It's the thing that pushes that game into the good realm. See, I disagree. Yeah. And you're allowed to disagree, but I'm just trying to make sure that you don't misconstrue what I'm saying. No, I don't. Because everybody's coming at me with this, it doesn't have an upper plate, though, it's not a Black Knight game. And I'm like, dude, I never said that. No, but that has been said to me. My wife says that. My brother says that repeatedly. And to be honest, if you really do want to get into the semantics and the history of the franchise, what does every Black Knight have? It's got an upper plate field, and it's got Magnuson. and the only reason that that happened is because there's been three games now they've all got a variation that has those things you can argue and I think Brian kind of is they also have all three games have well the premium upper loop shot you know right I mean that's just sort of the nature of the beast but to me it's like I'm willing to make the break because let's be honest every Black Knight game hasn't had a Black Knight in it right the game's sort of like the personification Okay, the Black Knight talks to you from the game and all the games, but this is the first one with a knight. So it's like, I'll break with tradition, but I won't break with the fact that the pro isn't enough game. If it was $4,000, single level, great. It's not. It's a full-priced pro. That second level in the BK3K interrupts the flow of the game.
    93:52
    Without that second level, the game flows. it all goes in one direction, up. No. Yeah. Because every shot that takes the ball to the upper level puts it on the wire form and takes it back to the flipper.
    94:06
    If you want a flow game, buy Starcraft. If you want a flow game, buy Spider-Man. None of the Black Knight games are traditionally 100% flow games because they have software and they have locks and they have things that stop the ball. Now they have one. And I think it's just, and maybe it's more aesthetic for me because I do, I just love how it just all, it all glides up. Well, that's what the pro is more of a phobia. You just missed that entire conversation, Spencer. Don't be a star.
    94:47
    You didn't continue the podcast while you urinated? We're all disappointed in you. I just, I feel like, you know. But again, you don't need to be sorry to me because I respect Rusty's opinion of liking the pro. I respect your opinion of liking the pro. I don't really respect Spencer's opinion.
    95:05
    But I'm secure enough with myself to allow all you guys to be wrong and not have it ruin my night. I feel like the upper play field really doesn't add that much to the gameplay that I would want to pay the extra for it. So before we can say that, we haven't seen the completed code yet either. Fair enough. So that's something you always have to remember because everyone says, oh, this shot doesn't bring anything to it. This doesn't do anything to it. We haven't seen the completed code yet. So we don't know yet what they're going to do with that upper play field. Right. If anything. And back to something Spencer was saying, in the story and the theme of it, when you're in the upper play field, you're in the Black Knight's castle. That's when you're assaulting the Black Knight's keep. That's when you're loading the catapults and you're beginning the battle. You don't get any of that in the pro. You just get five or six straight shots. I love Black Knight.
    96:01
    Black Knight 2000, when I first saw that game in 1989, I fell in love with it. I bought it once. I sold it. I bought it again. You know, it was one of those things where it's like, it's bolted to the floor. It's not leaving my collection. Swords of Rage is a cool game. It does not defeat Black Knight 2000 for me. Even with the premium edition. Even with the limited edition and it having an upper play field. You know, but there's a lot of magic there. And I can see why people like it. You know, the funny thing about it was, I think we talked before when Deadpool came out. And I was like, ah, Deadpool's 10 million. not so great. When Seth, you know, ended up passing on his Black Knight, he passed his Black Knight Premium to another pro, to another collector who needed it and is picking up a Deadpool and I said, I think he made the right choice. Because, you know, in my world, it's like, I think that the Deadpool Premium at this point or the Deadpool Pro at this point brings so much more gameplay to the table than the Black Knight. I will agree with that. If I was going to buy a skirm pro right now, it would be Deadpool pro.
    97:12
    I'd buy an Iron Maiden pro. You have an Iron Maiden pro. I know, and I'd buy an Iron Maiden pro every single day. Because it is the best place. Yeah. Out of all the pros and premiums they've done, that one for me just, it feels the most complete. You're not missing a terrible amount of stuff if you go to the premium. You're missing the lock shopping a little bit more difficult. You're missing the underground shot, whatever the hell that's called. And the only thing. In the world. Oh, and you're missing the Newton ball. But the only thing I wish that the pro had that it doesn't, but the premium and the LE does have, is the can I play with madness multiball. That's it. And the lifting ramp, launch ramp.
    97:53
    See, I don't really miss that. So I think we've covered the Black Knight. It's awesome. It is awesome. Brian didn't get to tell his opinion. I'm sorry. The pro's okay. But the premium, I love. It's so much fun. I love the spinning mace, whatever the hell that thing's called, how it can reject shots. But if you can squeeze it in there when it's spinning towards you, it feels great. Yeah, how great is that night toy? Like, no matter what, pro, premium, limited, a size, like, we can all agree that that night toy whoops large amounts of ass. You've got the shield here, you've got the mace here, and you have the knight, right? I love, and I love the upy-downy shield. That is so cool. I like it because it'll hit the ball, and the ball will kind of go flying at you. It's one of the most, I mean, other than like, you know, your rafter kicks, stuff like that, it's one of the most openly antagonistic pinball machines. Like, it's trying to take the ball through the cabinet and put it into your guy. Yeah, it's trying to, it's there, what pinballs are to do, take your money. And that's excellent, you know, super, super well done. It's there to take your money and screw up your game, and it's great. And great, great, great animations. Oh, absolutely. It's easily their best video package yet. Oh, yeah. I wish that they would go back and redraw some other games that kind of still sort of have generic e-fonts and stuff like that. It's all super drawn, you know, with the Black Knight e-fonts. It's all, you know, super well animated. The monsters are really cool and imaginative. The Knight's super imposing. The tilt animation where he bitch slaps you is hilarious. Yeah. Oh, when you get a ball lock and you have the knights, you know, they step up into their thing and sword. I'm sure everybody in Radioland saw that one. But they put down the sword and they're holding the pommel with the blade into the ground. And it's just so, it's so cool to watch it just happen. And I agree with Dan. The animation just keeps getting better. And you can see the same thing when D&D's came out. Like, I had a Gilligan's. Were the animations good? No. Hell no. But it's your first out of the gate. You can see the improvements even go back to, like, what, Aerosmith. They go like this. Can't see me right, but they just kind of go back and forth. That's it. And now you have the Black Knight with the awesome ball lock. You got Deadpool now with the fighting and the turkey. You got the Iron Maiden when they're running through the forest. Every game gets better.
    100:23
    It's just I would love to have Dan says, I would love to have him go back and do it. they're not going to, but it's always interesting to see what the next one's going to be, because it's invariably going to be better than the one before. And we did touch on it a little bit, but I do like the fact that this game has a lot of nods to Black Knight history. Oh, yeah. You know, it's got the retro mode, but on top of that... The coins that Black Knight's taken from you over the years? I think that was just something that Tim Sexton said in an interview that he just wanted to talk about. Oh, yeah, you're just getting the money back. But he, you You know, in Black Knight 2000, there was a multi-ball called Double Knights Challenge. In this game, you have Triple Knights Challenge. And you have the classic mode where the back glass comes up, and it has a little retro style display. You know, it has a lot of little touches. You know, it's got the lightning bolts and the, oh, God, I can't remember what they call the. The mouse wheel? The lightning bolts. Yeah, the nice wheel. Well, you know, tomorrow. But, yeah, it's got all that stuff. Do a shout-out to Vallejo Vine. I'm in Vallejo, California. He has a whole buttload of really awesome football machines. I met the owner. His name alludes to me, but he was super cool. He's a nice guy. Mike. I believe it was Mike. He's a really nice guy. Yes. And a shout-out to them. They're doing a Triple Knights Challenge tournament tomorrow where they're going to have all three Black Knight games. And I'm going to be on site. Yes. Original Black Knight, BK2K, and Sword of Rage. That's really cool. That is really cool. So, you know, check that out if you're going to be in Vallejo or in the neighborhood tomorrow. I think it starts at 1. I'll get the podcast up tonight so people will be able to hear about it, you know, 3 a.m. Yeah, night, night. I'm going to get two hours of sleep so I can drive to Vallejo and play those games. Does anybody else feel that they missed a huge opportunity by not calling it Black Knight, Swords of Fury, and having a crossover with Swords of Fury and Lion Man?
    102:17
    Maybe. That would have been amazing. They could always add that to the code. Someone boo this man. Boo!
    102:23
    Boo! Huzzah! Why do people always bring rotten vegetables to a podcast? Right. They run sale. Okay before we close out and finish this I want to pose a question Well but if you pose a question we not closing out We going to start talking again Does with the games we played the new games that have come out, that we've had time to a chance, really, to play, does this change your, if I had all the money in the world and could have any game I wanted, does this change your top pick?
    102:54
    Are you talking in terms of all the new games you've discussed tonight so far? No, just in general. He's getting to play the newer games. does this change your dream game of all games? No, I'd still want a Star Sir. And a low honor so we can get you one of those. Kendra, the thing is, there's so many games out there and a lot of us here have been playing since we were kids. And you have that really, really hard idea of nostalgia to get over.
    103:27
    You know, if I had a dream game that I could get, it would be a midway ABC bowler because that's what I remember playing when I was a little kid in my grandma's basement. And I would take one of those over any pinball machine in a heartbeat just because you have that nostalgia tied into it. You know, it's the same reason I got a funhouse that I'll never get rid of. Like, when I die, that game's going to be burned. Like, sorry. We'll bury you in it. Yeah, we'll put it in the forest and we'll have a tree grow out of it. There we go. Yeah. Not early, by the way. I'm making off with that game. Seriously? Yeah, it's going to be a fight. It's going to be a fight. I can't do it now. But you have that factor to get over. I'm like, Spencer, favorite game ever? Surf Camp. And you have that nostalgia factor tied into it, which is really hard to conquer. Now, people who just started playing now, you know, maybe within the past couple of years, they don't have those memories or experiences. I bet it does change. Because their nostalgia maybe is tied into, oh, I remember playing, like, 24 or Simpsons when I was younger, and they're, you know, maybe they're in their mid-20s now or something like that, and their young games they remember playing were the games that Stern produced when they were, you know, Lord of the Rings and Simpsons, and that was all you could find. I can see Wonka or Oktoberfest being a dream machine that somebody has to have more than any other pinball machine, and maybe they don't have the nostalgia, you know, throwback feelings that some of us have, but I mean, you know, with these new games, yeah, there was nothing, you know, that really got me so excited that it's, you know, wow, man, I should probably just sell Twilight Zone and buy one of these. And I'll admit, you know, in the lead-up to Black Knight, I was really hyped and hard. Part of me was like, you know what? That's another statement. I could probably get $3,000, $4,000 for Black Knight 2000 right now and, you know, make a decision. I would hit you over the head real hard. I don't think any of us would allow that, Dan. I pretty much, yeah, decided, well, you know, I think I would really regret it too much if I got rid of it. Yeah. And so I did.
    105:34
    You can get caught in that kind of weird life cycle. Yeah. Because, okay, for me, I have nostalgia from playing games as a kid. Yeah. You know. But above and beyond that, if I had all the money and all the time and all the knowledge, my game would still be Alien. Oh yeah, we didn't have one of those this year, did we? No The rumor mill is flowing fast on Pennside that that game is going to get remade very soon You mean made? It did get produced They did make Alien They didn't make a lot of them but there are production models of it I wouldn't consider it a remake though unless it really got drastic with Jim Anybody play Lebowski this year? It was broken Oh, Rustin, I got a game on it. You know what? I didn't play Lebowski, and I was standing right by it for a lot of the show because it was over by my games. So while we were playing it, somebody left, like, the Tron LE next to it. Shout out to Kerry Carmichael of... Carmichael? Oh, man. Let's go ahead and talk about the Monterey Pinball Crew. How great are those guys? Those guys are just bitching. They're amazing. And how freaking hardcore are they? There are. There's two Fs now. Okay. Oh, so hardcore that they left the show, Campground, Monday morning, immediately went home, set up their games, and had league night. Immediately. Those guys. Bravo. Those guys, like, they brought a ton of great games. They brought a ton of great drinks, which reminds me I have a liquid death for you at the house. I have one. Will it really kill me? It's just water. Water was a really fucked up commercial. Is it from Flint, Michigan? Ah!
    107:18
    Bam! But those guys were just absolute beasts. Yeah. And, yeah, it was really good to have them come out in force at the show. I mean, they come in force every year, but this year they really brought it. They brought it. They showed up this year. They showed up. So I was playing the Tron.
    107:36
    He's like, don't give a fuck, Dan, but I was playing Tron, so shut the hell up. The thing about Star Wars. He's like, I'm the host, so stop it. No, no, no, no, finish your thought. It's over now. So I played Tron while Rusty's playing her ball, and for the first time ever, I actually really enjoyed playing that game. Yeah. Tron is a... I've never been a fan. Tron's a great game. Terry's has said it perfectly. Tron is a ridiculously overpriced great game. Yes. Like, man, I wish those games sold for, like, normal $2,000 pro prices. Well, yeah. The pro goes for, like, what? $8,000 now? Something like that, yeah. One of the sevens. Like, they're sliding down because the vault threat's always there, but, I mean, if those games were, like, you know, $3,000, $4,000, like, I'd have one. But, man, just they're so expensive. But the soundtrack is so great. I know for some of the 80s kids like me and Brian, the Tron theme is just kind of unbeatable. Yeah, I love Tron. Like, that's all there is to it. I love it. Oh, and before we go anywhere, since we're kind of moving off, you know, all topics, Excalibur. I had never seen this before. Yeah. And there was two. Mm-hmm. And I thought it was a really nifty game. And again, more one-on-one time with it. I thought it was really neat.
    108:59
    I got to play a Bad Cats. Meow. That was incredibly fun. Bad Cats is a good old System 11 game. and what I really wanted to love because I'm the queen of toys. I love toys. The more toys you stick on a machine, the happier I am. And it was Surf and Safari.
    109:24
    And here I am plunging the ball and it's like, where the hell did my ball go? Because it's buried under all the toys. Well, plunge gently, the game tells me. It's like, what? What? Surf and Safari has always been like a pretty hot Gottlieb. Yeah. I remember, you know, Steve Faith, you know, he was pulling one out a long time. I think it was Steve Faith. The guy, it's an old pinnacle. The guy was trying to buy it before he was even like in the show. It's always been one of those hot Gottliebs. That one and Stargate's always been the one. Stargate and Frank Thomas' Big Hurt, which I absolutely love that game. It's got great flow. It's got fun shots. That's better than a white body. Yeah, could have been. It's got a great skill shot. Yeah, it does. I did really good on that one last year. Yes, you did. Yeah, which brings us to the topic of favorite classic game you played at the show. No, look, I'm there. You're there. I got there already. Oh, man. Nippet.
    110:26
    I didn't get to play Nippet. I love Nippet. I have great memories of playing that with Al Garber and his son at Pinnagogo. Yeah. And we were on that game at that show for at least an hour.
    110:39
    And it's one of my, you know, beyond the happy days crap. I don't care about that. It's just a fun, fun EM. And it's got the gator grabber. It's like one of the – About a gator. Yeah. I think it's one of the first games that had a toy. You know, and it's player control. And it's just fun. I actually got really introduced to it during the tournament. and that was Mars God of War. That's a good game too. And because the way the computer set it up, myself and another player, Amanda, who was doing real good, Amanda, where'd you go? Anyway, so... We love you, Amanda. We ended up, the computer doubled us back to it. So we played Mars God of War, which is a real good, nice icebreaker there, but then we got to double right back to it. So Amanda and I had both played, but our other two competitors had not. I played it earlier. We were kind of. It was my first game and then my last game. Ah, see, the whole double back thing. And that one, I have, my thing is flippers. I catch balls. I, you know, catch balls, find holes, put balls in holes. It's very difficult. and uh but with this but with uh but with mars got a four you can't catch if you catch the ball it will roll right off the back of your flipper and and drain and then you're minus a ball so i so i'm sitting there playing going balls and holes batter up batter up balls and holes batter up so when the ball comes flying i whack that bad boy just for all i'm worth but yeah uh so that was probably my favorite classic as far as real classic games go was Mars God of War. There's so many you know for me and it's hard it's like it's literally pinball overload. The pinball museum brought a ballet kiss and when I was in junior high I got out of junior high and I'd walk down the road up to the main street of town down the street for about a half a mile to my dad's bookstore and just in the other end of the strip mall, before I'd actually hit my dad's bookstore, there was a Rico's Pizza. And they always had three or four video games, five or six video games, whatever. But at that time, they had the two hot titles, well, they had Space Invaders, because it's 1978, and they had a Kiss Pinball. And sometimes I'd play Space Invaders, but usually I'd play Kiss Pinball. I'd play one or two, I'd always have a quarter, 50 cents in my pocket, and I would play one or two games every day before going to my dad's store. The game was in good shape. The play field, you know, it had a little tiny bit of planking, but I mean, overall, a good original condition. It played great. I played a couple games on it and had a blast. Like we're talking about with the nostalgia for just a few minutes, it brought me back to 1978. It was great.
    113:46
    So. I didn't play many classics this year. Probably my favorite one that I played was Your Surf Champ, and my favorite kind of mid-classic was probably my shadow. And I would like to thank the five people besides me who all bothered to bring Doctor Who.
    114:05
    Yeah, but one of those guys didn't work the entire show. I don't know. I haven't. Oh, yours is still soldiered up. I know it's still soldiered up because all the hardware for it's inside of Whitewater. But, no. Yeah, I didn't play a lot of older stuff. I put a game or two on your Black Rose. I put a game on my shadow and just to kind of test out some stuff that I had to adjust during the show and besides that I was mostly playing Black Knight Swords of Rage and the hot new stuff. So weird for me but I did spend some time in the EM room because honestly enough if you go to this show if you go to any show and I know that the hot pig is always DMDs and everybody would always be in the 90s Valley Williams and the new stuff by Stern and the LCB games, make sure that you break away and you go to the EM section. And you play some EMs. Because, first of all, you know, it'll show you the evolution to what you're playing now. But, second of all, it will show you why faster is not always better. It will show you why louder is not always better. And the amazement of just how great a room full of chimes going at the same time. It's magical. And how almost relaxing it is when you go away from the dull roar of like 50, 80, 100, 200 machines all wailing at the same time to, you know, just the beautiful, you know, symphony of chimes and mechanisms. Yeah. You know, when you start a game, it's like.
    115:39
    You know you're. Yeah. And the other thing is with those EM games, they're not easy. They are incredible. No, yeah, we're not going to step up to a lot of those games, especially like, you know, for me, I think where I lose EMs, if I lose EMs when they have the mini-flippers. Like, I need a full-size flipper. I love the mini-flippers, but those games are hard because once that ball drains, you reset. Like, oh, I was halfway to getting a special. TS, try again. Yeah. Like, there's no, it's not like the new games where you have Virtu-Lox or any of that stuff. It comes, you know. it's raw and it's visceral and it'll knock you down a peg or two if you think you're a complete ultra pinball badass when you're going to step up to like a Gottlieb World Fair and score 50 points. It's an equalizer. But I will say, again, I'll put the stamp of approval on it. My favorite classic game this year? Sir Champ. Wow, awesome. Because I own it. It is a fantastic game. I always play Brad Starjet because that's just a fantastic game. It's got multi-ball.
    116:45
    You know, if he has two saucers, you lock the balls in, you hit the right targets, do multiple. I played, was it State Fair?
    116:54
    Gottlieb's World Fair? World Fair. I played World Fair. Yeah, right next to his. I played, I played, I played, was it Bronco or Mustang?
    117:03
    Oh, yeah, yeah, that was there. And, yeah, I love that. One that wasn't there, Steve Faith owns, or did own. Jungle Queen. Well, Jungle Queen, and the other one is Sheriff, or Lawman. I didn't see that. Lawman's a fun game. I love that game. Yeah. I love that game. That's a good game. I played, I did play Spanish Eyes because I played it whenever I wanted. Oh, how do you not play Spanish Eyes? I know. I played, I played. In fact, to be honest, I played a game or two. I played Al's Fireball because I always do. You got it. I played Heat Wave because that's just a phenomenal game. I played a couple others. You know, I spent quite a bit of time. Little Green Men. Brad's Little Green Men. Yeah, that's a fun one. I did not play that this year, but that's because I can go to Brad's and play it whenever I want. You know what I forgot to do? I forgot to go to the flea market and look for a backdoor. I did not go to the flea market either this year. I guess Adam was a little mad. He missed out on the devil's care backdoor. If any of our many, many, dozens upon dozens of listeners happens to have a backdoor for a Spanish eyes, or that will fit a Spanish eyes, email Spencer. at gmail.com or we can just take the measurements. I know a guy with a metal shop. We can have one made. Oh, there you go.
    118:19
    We can just take them to head. Well, we have no trip report tonight, but when we stopped Kendra, they were classic.
    118:28
    Probably the only one I really got to play was Mars Got a Board in the tournament because I just I was running. Yeah. every time I turned around I was running somewhere else yeah we love you for it you get caught into overly volunteering I know I did this year it was a lot of foot time and not a lot of pinball time but at the very least we could rest easy knowing that we made the show work like every time I walked into the back room Henry's over at the tech desk by himself I'm like Henry Go take a break. Oh, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. I sit down, and within two minutes, do you mind covering the port for a minute? That happened to me like a dozen times. I was like, yeah, Henry, that's why I'm here, bro. That's why I came over, Henry. Every time I come back here. By the way, I want to throw a huge prop out to Henry, who bought my Ghostbusters this week, which I sold so that I could buy Indiana Jones from a local collector, Gary, who cut me a Supreme deal on it. but Gary helped out with loadout and didn't even go loadout. Gary was a gangster didn't even come to the show and helped load a truck he had to work all weekend and he loaded games to the truck the story for how that happened was I found out through the grapevine probably through Spencer that Gary had not sold his Indiana Jones I decided not to buy Black Knight that that had to be mine he's been chasing that Indiana Jones since I've known you Henry came through with a supremely quick sale bought that game from me so I could go buy it and just like, that dude is just a pinball hero you know, and I'm sure that my Ghostbusters went to a really good home I only had it for three months so super, super cool thing for Henry to do, and for Michelle to tell Henry, what's up kid, buy it but yeah, that dude is the kind of guy who the show is built on the back of, like, he's got that desk a lot of hours he's watching, you know, when you're at the tech deck, it seems like weird because you're back at the corner and you're sort of away from a lot of stuff, but a lot of things are running through you, and, you know, what your ultimate responsibility ends up being is that, number one, the games are here, and number two, the games are running. Yeah. And if you are a... The code set up is great. That was smoking cool, yeah. When people would use it, you know, trust me, we were doing a lot of handwritten notes and a lot of people walking up saying, this game's broken. and it's like, well, we got four of those. Which one?
    121:02
    And a lot of giving up and running over. I put the wrong label on my games. I had them written. I noticed that for you. You did. I didn't notice. It was one of those things where it was just like, that dude runs that tech desk probably 60% of the time for the whole show. At least, yeah. So big ups to Henry Nando for everything that he does to make that show work. so we got any more shout outs and thank yous folks because that's where we're at and we're at two hours and one minute. Actually I have one and it has nothing to do with the show or anything I just found out about it and I haven't done anything with it yet but some hero out there in the pinball community redid the rules for Roadshow so it's not linear anymore. Really? Yeah. Wow. I'm so stoked. I hate Roadshow because you always start in New York or Miami and somebody updated the code where it's a random start. Neato. And I can't wait to get it so I can slap it into my dad's roadshow and see if it makes me fall in love with the game again. You know what we could do? That's a great game, otherwise. Yeah. We could set up that computer that great game let's say two years ago with the ROM burner. I have no internet access. You don't need internet. I'll download the ROMs. We just need to set up the computer. I gotta find all... So... We'll talk about that after the show. But here's the thing. We don't have to do that because Cheddar will burn it on its own.
    122:23
    Whoever came up with that, thank you. Just thank you. Out of all the games that could have used a code update, that's probably number one. Because that really is like the kitchen sink game. It has everything but that stupid Miami New York start. They made some very questionable coding decisions on that game back in the day. I remember watching a special about the announcement thing that they did.
    122:51
    The promo video. Yeah, and they were talking about how that game was designed to get you to continue. Right. Oh, sure it is. To put more quarters in. So, yeah, the fact that somebody would fix that game to give us a little bit better roll set is amazing.
    123:06
    Awesome. Oh, and, of course, anybody who volunteered, brought games, helped out, brought food, gave me a beer, whatever. Anybody who puts time and effort into the show, thank you. Yeah, thank you. It was great. I wish I could do more. Everybody makes that show work. And I'm sorry for my white water being broken the entire show.
    123:25
    We tried. Everybody tried. Well, we'll have it up and running for next year. This works flawlessly. I know. Last time I was over at your house, it played perfect. It's not been a problem since I bought it. The only problem was when Dan broke the Translight glass. That's not even close to the only problem. That's the only problem that I know. I can't say that's true. It's been bulletproof. I went to the show and it was just like,
    123:49
    You think your game works? F you, pal. You know what's funny is, you know, kind of getting back into the show, but my games both pulled just over 400 plays. I brought a Doctor Who and I brought a Shadow. And both worked pretty faultlessly the whole time. Shadow was getting pretty tired towards the end. I remember. The mini play field was getting stuttery. The sanctum wall was getting stuttery. And so I went and I made some adjustments. I disabled a couple features so it would keep playing fine. Got it home, plugged everything back into day. works like a top.
    124:22
    Probably, you know, you've got to consider that even with what we do to the games now with, you know, the LED jobs, the keep down, just those games absorb, you know, 200 plays a day. Where is a game in that day and age going to get 200 plays in a day? It's going to be a show. That's all it is now. Yeah, yeah. If you brought a game, you know, with the best of intentions and it decided that they didn't want to work the whole weekend, you know, that's just... That's pinball. Nobody hates you. You know, you bothered to strap that thing together, soldier it up, let somebody throw it in a truck and schlep it, you know. In the ring. Yeah, in the ring this year to another city. You know, that's a hell of a show of faith with a game that's worth, you know, $4,000, $5,000. Right. You know, so, yeah, don't feel bad about that at all. Big props to Brian for bringing the games. Yeah. For everybody. Everybody. Yeah. Ladies, you got any shout-outs? Thank you. Mine's kind of funny, but... Do it.
    125:25
    Our random homeless dude. Yeah, the homeless guy. Random homeless guy. The homeless guy. Tell the story. The pinball hobo. The real hero. Yeah, share the story. Our pinball hobo who was walking up and down Cherokee, I guess, telling people, hey, you know they're having a pinball show there today, right?
    125:44
    So, I think... A minute ago, a homeless guy told you about a pinball show? Yes. That's classic. So, the story has come around, and now there is talk about, you know, if that dude's not there during that next year, we need to get him a bra and a t-shirt.
    126:00
    I will verify, because we were hanging out with Kendra while she was doing an entrance poll. How did you hear about us? That people legitimately said, I heard about you guys from a homeless guy.
    126:12
    That is epic. Pinball hobo. He's a real hero. You know what? If we can find that guy next year, get him a shirt. And a bra. Yeah. Mark the bra. We need to get that guy every last year, or those guys, every last year's shirt. Like, both charity and advertising. There you go. So, and that's a win-win. Rusty, you got anything?
    126:39
    Shout out to the Golden State Committee. NCPA. The board. Yeah, the Northern California Foonball Association, the board, yes. Yeah, those guys tirelessly, you know, strive. Monday morning, there's everybody breaking down, cleaning up.
    126:59
    You know, even grumpy old Brad. Love you, Brad. Just let's put it all back together so we can, you know, put it away for a year to bring it back out again. They just, they were just on top of everything all the time. So a big shout out to them on the board and to the volunteers and everybody who just gave so much. And the owners of the pinball machine too. Boy, you know, when those trucks come pulling up at 11 o'clock at night, at 3 o'clock in the morning, and they're there to dump off games, and they're tired, and they're stressing, and they're just like, I don't want to lift yet another 300-pound pinball machine. I feel for everyone, every one of the loaders and unloaders, and just this. but without all these people working together in concert we couldn't do this, not at all when we're showing up to drop off your games at 11, 12 at night and we're so punchy that we're quoting freaking Blazing Saddles Blazing Saddles, the whole drive back to Lodi was the empty truck and I'd like to thank, and I'd also like to thank everybody who told Spencer he could not drive the big truck and they were all Prius owners yeah, that's all it was He crashed one Prius. He's aiming for them now.
    128:33
    Well, hey, and I want to throw a shout-out to Spencer, who is definitely the hardest-working son of a bitch, who got involved, is not a board member, but probably should be. He is all over this show. It is covered with his DNA. It is sticky with his DNA.
    128:51
    That's my job. Everywhere that I look, Spencer was there. There's been so much information I didn't need to hear tonight. You know, huge props to you, boss. Thank you. Everything. You were legitimately doing so many jobs. I was blown away, you know, so. I multitask well. Humongous props to you. And, again, it wasn't all the glamorous, like, people are going to see you stuff, you know, like, there aren't any glamorous jobs in this. But, like, you know, packing games in, packing games out. Setting up. Breaking down. Every time that I looked, I needed a wrench. Spencer was holding one out. I'm, you know, back behind the tech desk. Spencer's walking by, asking me what's going on, asking me if things are good. Got to run. Got to host the dinner. Okay, going to come outside. Going to eat a brat. Got to get back into the show. We're not done yet. You know, good, you know, good man. Thank you. Tremendous, tremendous job. and even the rest of the year you're keeping us up to date on what's coming, when it's coming how many days 357
    130:05
    357 spearheading our pin side presence which you know it's about time to make the kill the 19 thread and start the 20 thread oh I started the 20 thread halfway through Sunday because I knew once the show ended there would be no time so yeah you know tremendous this tremendous output from you, sir. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you.
    130:24
    It's a shame your podcast kind of sucks. Yeah, it kind of does. You know, maybe we had better people. You know, I hear this guy Dan's kind of a... Oh, I shout out to Joe Abate, who sought me out at the end of the show because I literally had to see him or talk to him and said, you know, I've been asked to do a couple, three other shows. I said, no, because you asked me first a year ago at the show. so in the next week or so I'm going to reach out to him, we'll get something set up when he has time and Joe will be on and the first question I was asking was how do you actually say your god damn name yeah he's a Joe he's a rioter which I'm going to get to on my shout out we did the practical Steve Frizzle shout out so I have that written down I have cue cards for this part, everything else nine of them the NorCal Pinball Association members who are the organizers and the board for the show. And that's Brad Grant, Chris Bannister, Eric Neff, Steve Faith, Greg Ong, and Michael Hosier.
    131:31
    Andrea Songy Neff and Girl Scout Troop 130 of Lodi for serving the dinner. And just amazing food. And congrats again to the pinball pirate, Chris Toontz. And shout out to his two helpers, Kyle Spiteri and Jenny, whose last name I don't know, but you rock, and watch your hot dog around Cheddar, because bad things happen. If you don't know about that, Cheddar was showing a video of the storm damage,
    132:01
    and he started to drop his phone, he tried to catch it, and knocked the big hot dog right out of her hands, and it went everywhere, all over her. And she was a great sport about it, God bless you. But you guys are awesome, and such great assets to the community of the show. And thank you for all you do. Kyle was like that. He was everywhere. He was wrenching on games the whole weekend and keeping them working. And Jenny was, like, just such a good ambassador and setting up all of Chris's games. And boxing all of those games. And setting them up, making sure they're staying working, wrenching on some of the older games. To all the vendors, Rob Anthony, Pinball Pirate, The Flippin' Room, Marco's Specialties, Dirty Donnie, Multimorphic, Measel Mods, Don Hiley, Scorebill, Pacific Pinball Museum, Jersey Jack Pinball, The Retro, Metal Mods, Virtual Home Arcades, Iron Transfer, R&T Amusements, and Pinball Collectors Resource.
    133:05
    Thank you guys so much for always being there and supporting the show and supporting the hobby. and then the sponsors of the show Denhart's International Farms did I say that right? I can't read my own writing folks 104.1 The Hawk Sacramento Coin Op All Pure Water who provided us with wonderful pure drinking water all weekend, thank you folks that was great Clute Oil JJ and Game Exchange of Colorado, Marco Specialties Her Life Magazine Pacific Coast Producers Capital Public Radio the guys there stayed and played pinball, some of the Hawk radio guys Rob Anthony again, Measel Mods again Pacific Pinball Museum and Westco Graphics to all the route ops I only know a few of you by name but Joe Abate Steve Burrell who operates games in the Sacramento area and up on the 101 corridor. Fanny Hounds. Fanny Hounds in Sacramento. Steve, just like Joe, keeps his games in pristine condition. They're better than some home collections.
    134:19
    Go out and spend money with these guys. And then Lauren, whose last name I got from Alex, but I can't find it right now, who operates games in the Davis, Vacaville area as well. And Greg Creech, who's down there. Greg Creech, thank you. Thank you, Greg Creech, who operates games. All these guys work really hard to put games on location. They keep them in really immaculate shape. And so make sure and support your local route off and play pinball on location. Also a shout out to two wonderful people that I didn't mention on the last podcast when I was talking about me and beating the Reaper a few years ago. Not cancer, but an illness. my lovely wife, Mary Ann Rusty, and our good friend, Chris Bannister, who both beat cancer a couple years ago. So, you know, just kind of a quick shout-out.
    135:11
    And there's like a hundred more that I probably have, but I mean, my mind's still just racing from all the awesomeness that is and was and always will be the Golden State Pinball Festival.
    135:24
    I was going to do show shout-outs for other shows coming up. Pacific Northwest show coming up to the end of the month, beginning of June, and I know there's a couple other shows. Tacoma, Washington. Yeah, Tacoma, Washington. You know what? Go online, check out, look for pinball shows in your area because we're at like two hours and 15 minutes. And go on pinballmap.com and see where you can play cool pinball machines in your area. So support your local show, support location pinballs. Anybody have anything else before we close it out? California Extreme is coming up real soon. Yeah. California Extreme. more new games coming. Everybody get hyped.
    136:02
    I know there's somebody I'm missing. If I missed you tonight, I'm sorry. I'll catch you on the next episode. This show is brought to you by the letter P. The letter P, yes. Number 12. There we go. That works. This has been episode 23 of the Spinner's Lit Pinball Podcast. You guys know it. Say it with me. Play pinball. Keep America strong!
    136:28
    Thank you.