All right, welcome to the inaugural Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name's Alan. I'm one half of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon. And joining me is my co-host, Alex, the water boy. What's your relation to Wedgehead? Why are you on the official Wedgehead podcast? I'm just a really big fan and conceited enough to listen to myself talk every week. So this is why I'm here. But yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, looking forward to this. All right. So our first episode, we're going to talk about lightning flippers. And for those that don't know, lightning flippers were something that happened in the early 90s. Each flipper bat was one sixteenth of an inch shorter than the standard three inch flipper, which means that the combined gap is now one eighth inch wider, right? yeah okay a significant difference that you'll hear many people complain about what's funny what's funny is when you hold the bat up like i have a picture on our social media that you can look up but i took the bats and i held them on top of one another and you can see the difference it's so hard though just with the rounded edges of the flipper bats i mean i have one sitting in this room and visually they really it's hard to spot the difference if they didn't have the big embossed uh lightning bolt on the top i don't think anyone would ever catch it you'd just think the game was being mean that day yeah you know that is the interesting part because well one the lightning bolts are badass yeah like very cool i like that they like molded it's cool that they gave them a name they didn't just call it like that you know they kind of made it established thing rather than it just being like the europe flippers or something which yeah too but which i which i think is what they officially called them like in manuals like i believe that that's how they put it on parts logs and in some of the manuals it's like eu flipper short for your flipper but i think the standard nomenclature is lightning flipper because of the lightning bolts yeah on top of them the history of them the lore is that there's a french distributor was touring the williams factory and got to play some games that were still in development uh the famous one is fish tales and he said that he liked the game but that it played too long for the french market and apparently in the 90s europe was a bigger market than the u.s which yeah it's kind of nuts to imagine so they got games first and i heard figures where they're they estimated as europe was 60 of the market okay yeah so it makes sense that they would cater to them and take the big distributors seriously it's it's fascinating because in today's time i can't imagine anybody getting the clout to be like this game's too fucking easy well yeah i mean i've been screaming about it i'm pretty sure there's some kind of story with jersey jack because before he started jjp right he was a big distributor of stern's and i think he was part of the reason they made family guy in Shrek as a dual theme because he didn't think family guys would sell in big enough numbers and he wanted a family-friendly alternative oh so yeah that was kind of when Stern was struggling so I think they're open to input because when did that game come out that's like right before 2008 which is when they almost died so yeah it is funny when the you know when the manufacturers actually appreciate customer input though yeah I think it was such an on-location business and clearly pinball has become we're in your house and you have five pinball machines here yeah right and that's becoming common yeah it's now the home buyers are kind of driving the market at this point yeah and so what happens is people play pinball they're like this is dope and then they get online and they're like what game should i buy right like and it's immediately like let's go buy a game prior to yeah prior to playing anything for more than a few games there are on facebook groups or pin side asking which stern they should go drop seven grand on yeah yeah which is it's a very different market than it was in the 90s which is fascinating but uh but back to lightning flippers they were so they listened to the distributor and they made a bunch of games which I think at first were only supposed to go to the European market. They developed these shorter bats, and what happened was they just had these bats. Like they got too many. I don't know. They had them, right? That's the classic pinball. Anytime we can't explain a decision made by a manufacturer, it's like, well, they had leftover parts. There's a fucking box of them, right? It's like, why buy? Someone must have decided. I mean, someone up the line must have decided these games are better with the lightning flippers, right? Yes. So the game. Well, let's say the games that came with them. Right. Are Bram Stoker's Dracula, Fishtails, Popeye, Doctor Who. And apparently and all those games shipped from the factory in the US as well with lightning flippers. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Apparently, Black Rose only shipped to Europe with the lightning flippers. That'd be kind of a mean one with lightning flippers on it, because it has that ramp right up the middle that rejects. Oh, yeah, that'd be brutal. Or that, it's a hole. There's a shot right in the middle, though, that rejects. Yeah, there's that cannon shot straight up the center. Funny. And so, those are the games that came from the factory, and the argument is they're very divisive. Yeah. They're divisive because players hate, well, bad players hate them. Right? Because it'll make it really hard to save a ball going down the middle. Yep. Yeah, like we were joking about earlier, that eighth of an inch difference really is noticeable when you're playing the game. Yeah. And more than noticing it missing, I would say when you play a copy of those games with the full-size flippers retroactively put on, you realize how easy it becomes. Yeah. Maybe I'm jumping ahead in the conversation. No, I think you're right. Yeah, we're here to talk about how you feel about lightning flippers, how I feel about them, because I know that you and I are pretty much on the same page. But it's like, I think that we're the minority. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It'll be interesting. It's hard to tell because within our friend group, we've beat into everyone's head that lightning flippers are awesome and these games are unplayable without them. Yeah. But if you get outside of our small group, you see a lot of fishtails on location and at homes with full-size flippers in them. Same with the Bram Stokers. And those are the two games that shipped with it that I have a lot of experience with And both those games are horrible when they set up too easy Totally Because the rules fall apart They shallow rule sets And making a game play too long when the rules aren there to back it up just makes it bad pinball machine. Yeah, I agree. I think that because both of those games don't have wizard modes. There's no like most of those games were starting to have wizard modes in the early 90s. Right. But Fishtails, Bram Stoker's Dracula, they have things to do. But if you can just loop super jackpots or monster fish over and over and over again, it just becomes a very boring game. And I think a lot of people that play, say, Fishtails in particular and think this game sucks is they play a copy that's just really easy. Right. And our Fishtails, we have the factory lightning flippers on them, and it's fucking hard. Yeah, it's a hard game. It's fucking hard. And it's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. You never get sick of that shitty music when you're only hearing it for a minute at a time. When you go play one that's set up easy with a loose tilt and long flippers on it and you're playing it for 30 minutes, you're going to start finding all the flaws in the game. Yeah. That's not shortcomings of the game. It's just, I think, I guess I would like to know more of the history if the software decisions were made after they put the lightning flippers on there or if it's just a happy coincidence that the shallow games got them. I think I so here's my argument when because I'm sort of an evangelist for lightning flippers. I think that they're like the games they came on should always have them. Yeah. Like especially Doctor Who, Dracula, Fishtails. Like I had more experience with Popeyes, but I've never I think I've maybe played two games on that in my life. Yeah, I haven't played it much. Those guys over in Pops on the East Coast, there are fans of that game out there. We're going to have them on and they'll have to defend that. But counter-argument is, these games were developed with standard flippers. Right. So put the lightning flippers on them was a bastardization of the designer's intent, right? Like it's bastardizing Barry Ousler or Mark Ritchie's design concept. right? But the way I argue it is when you play those games, yes, when they're building their whitewood, they're using the flippers they have. They're not going to create fucking fake flippers and then be like, manufacture these for my new game. But when they're play testing it and when they're building the game and they're coding the game, I think they coded it to the shorter ball times it sure seems that way with the objectives in those games and if that's wrong if someone writes in and they're like no i worked at williams and the code was complete before they switched those out sure i don't care because they're better with the lightning flippers and that's i think kind of where i feel with the lightning flippers is they're just a tool to make games that play too long a little bit harder it's like opening drains or something and it's like you can go into the audits you can see how your center drains look versus your outer drains or whatever and if you don't have enough balls going down the middle in between the flippers you can put lining flippers on and even it out and it's just one of those things that it depends on how you like your games i guess yeah i agree like i'm the same way like i want the game to be hard and i do think that it adds just that little bit of challenge i don't think that it i'm of the mind like you said earlier i don't think that they make them harder it just takes an easy game and makes it right yeah that's how i feel about them i don't curse at them i'm not like these fucking lightning flippers man i can't fucking play this game i want 100 if if i had known what they were when i first got into pinball i would have been blaming them for it's a great crutch like it's a great it's in in pinball we're like everyone's looking you're always looking you're always leaning this way it's leaning that way it's too steep it's too flat it's in a lot of people's nature to just look for anything to blame that it can't be them it can never be their fault that they drain it's always the fucking game yeah and lightning flippers give you that you get to be like dude i got a i got a six billion score on bram stoker's dracula and you can't even start a single you can't even start miss multiball right like yeah on on a proper one your your arcade bar uh wedgehead is kind of known around the city for being so difficult and you go look at the games and none of your games are set up intentionally difficult almost all of them are just factory settings the difference is when you go to play other copies of bram stoker's they're set up with full-length flippers and silicone rubbers and stuff and it gives these inflated scores and the people that hold those inflated high scores are the ones that'll complain about lightning flippers they're the ones that actually have the strongest feelings the casual players they just think they don't know the difference right they don't know all pinball is hard for them so they would never even think that the flippers might be smaller it right it's kind of funny yeah but they but they love to hear it right like yeah like if they ever find their way to this podcast they're gonna be like i knew it that's why that game fucking sucks it wasn't me after all damn lightning flippers and then they're gonna be looking for lightning bolts on every game you play for the rest of their lives now i wanted to talk about like you got a game an old em called grand prix by williams it's a great em from the late em right before they switched over steve kordak is that i'm not good with em designers so i probably you know i didn't look it up yeah we should have done some fact checking but yeah anyway it's a classic one they made a million of them it's a famous one it's a formula one uh theme yep theme yep very cool art package on it it's just a beautiful bad class it's an em in the entire point is ripping spinners so best game of all time you know just gonna get the chimes over and over i'm sure it's hard to argue that yeah but you took it you took it home and you were playing it and this is an em where they had modern three inch flippers on like that's how the game was designed but your copy has lightning flippers on it yep yeah and it's funny because i didn't notice at first and now i'm wondering how easy the game would be with the full-length flippers because i've played grand prix a bit you know over the years but i've never sessioned it a ton so i don't really have a threshold for like what my scores would be on a normal copy or anything but i think it plays great with this i'm able to roll it but it's hard um i don't know it works really well it doesn't seem to mess with the geometry of the shots or anything so it's a good case you know a good argument for putting lightnings on games where you wouldn't consider it normally yeah because you never you and i would never be like oh an em that's it needs lightning flippers right most of these ems are brutally hard compared to modern games anyway but this does have modern kind of inlanes even though it does have a gap at the end yeah it does have the cutout so you can't do too you know spicy of drop catches or anything yeah it is as far as the lanes go it is friendlier than something early 70s or 60s for sure oh yeah so yeah it kind of nice because it especially that game now that i thinking about it it doesn have a way to change the outlanes or really anything you could do on the play field to make the game play shorter So this was really one of the only options. Yeah, it doesn't really have adjustable post on the outlanes like more modern games do. And so that's the last topic I think about lightning flippers is in big tournaments, what a lot of tournament directors will do is they'll put lightning flippers on games to make them play shorter as part of their toughening up, their tightening of the game so that you don't get these marathon game sessions. Yeah. And what's interesting is you see that a lot of the time. I'm blanking on the name. There's a big arcade that runs a lot of tourneys down in California. Oh, Linz. Linz. Yeah. I'd love to visit Linz because I think they put lightnings on a lot of stuff. Yeah. You kind of see it more on solid states in the tournament sweetheart games anyway. And I'm surprised people don't do that more on Modern Stearns. But the modern Sterns, I guess... Now we're getting to the meat of the issue, because I want to talk about games that we would like lightning flippers on. I want to preface this with saying, at Wedgehead, even though I'm a fan, I keep the lightning flippers on the games that came with lightning flippers. I don't just swap them in. I know Linz does, and I think that's rad. Like, I really do. Like, I wish we could, but you know people. We get enough heat as it is, dude. You put a tight tilt on a game, you make the slings pop, and you make the game steep, and people just cry anyway, right? Like, even though the games are on free play. Like, you just play it again. But it's like, they already cry. If I put lightning flippers on Godzilla, they'd freak out. Like, people would freak out. and i think there is i mean like we're talking about matching the difficulty of the game to the depth of the rule set with some of those shallower games it makes sense to shorten them up i think the problem with making a modern stern too difficult or too short playing is that people will complain because they're never going to see a ton of the content of the game yeah because They're being coded with modes and modes and modes and multiple wizard modes that you'll never get to see. But those games are coded for how they're set up, which are long playing, very friendly games on average. yeah uh i find it's honestly hard to consider a modern like a modern modern a game from the last you know eight to ten years from stern that's truly difficult like or or short playing yeah like maybe walking dead walking dead yeah but you're already pre-lcd at that point that's true talking about the last because when did they switch when did aerosmith come out 2013 or something and maybe after that ghostbusters was the last dmd game okay and that game is is a short play hard that game's hard yeah and that has a wider flipper gap it has the full-size flippers but it's the gaps a little bit wider which is its own thing which is creating lightning flippers in and of itself right like it's doing the same thing and you see how much people love to blame that wider flipper gap as soon as they learn about it oh my god it's just like they'll never yeah they'll never i mean people will just quit playing that game once they once they realize there's a like an actual tangible reason that it's difficult yeah because it's like before that i think a lot of people just kind of assume all pinball is the same difficulty or you know i think when you're starting out every game feels like every game like you just you're like i'm just not good at this Like I'm bad. Like I'm draining my balls. I suck at this. Maybe I shouldn't do this in public. The discussion of which games from modern sterns are actually difficult. One of the first games I started playing when I got into the hobby was black night, sort of rage. Yeah. And, uh, great game. That game. It's a great game. Once you can find shots, it's really not as hard as some people make it out to be. But when you're starting pinball and you're hitting posts like crazy, that game punishes you. Unlike, unlike many other modern sterns so i think at some point we'll do an episode on black knight maybe the black knight series but you and i both love this game in the pro in particular yes um i love black knight because it is a game where all the shots are easy all the shots are backhandable but when you miss a shot it'll fucking punish you yeah like and that's kind of i love that about a pinball machine that's the perfect Steve Ritchie oh my god like model right yes like the shots you can hit on the fly the rule sets the best richie games always have a rule set that rewards hurry ups and flow playing and then when you miss a shot you feel like an idiot because you're either scrambling for control or just immediately drained yeah and i like that it makes you hit the three it's like a throwback to his firepower where it's like it makes you hit his flail the target in front of the knight or his shield which are all shots you don't want to hit but you're not going to get anywhere in the game if you don't hit them yep i guess we should we should wrap this up with black knight doesn't need them ghostbusters doesn't need them be cool it would be cool right As soon as you open that door, it's like, well, shit, like a lot of these games, if you don't care about seeing all the content in the game, which you should never, you know, you really shouldn't. A lot of people feel like, oh, I can't quit playing this game or whatever the game, you know, I want to see everything. And you don't have to. You can enjoy a game short. You can enjoy like, you know. Oh, my God. Some of my favorite games are like high speed getaway. Yeah. I was like, I could get to Redline Mania on ball one. then it's just like can i do it on ball two and ball three like can i get a hundred loops right like it doesn't matter that i've seen the whole game right it's just fun i'm saying even with the deep rules on sterns and knowing that they're set up difficult enough that you're going to really struggle to see some of that in-game content i think a lot of the layouts would i would enjoy them more if the games were set up harder i agree so i will say that carte blanche the average stern could definitely use lightning yeah and i don't know i've got a pair sitting here that i've been meaning to swap on to my ultra man just to kind of that's a good one down and i don't know a lot of the games that play long i think and ultra man is a good example because there's not that much content in the game like it's pretty easy to see most of everything that's in there at the moment right and it's long playing yeah right and so it's kind of a good one there's a good reason it's like if you're getting into the wizard mode often then it's like definitely think about setting up the game harder it'll be if you're like us and you're a mass assist to some degree it'll be more fun yeah and otherwise it'll give more legs to the game because you're not constantly just beating the shit out of it yeah i lose interest in a game when i walk up to it and just kick its ass right like i wish i had considered when i had a lord of the rings i really wish i had that's the game i wanted to bring up yeah that is the game to me that man you might even want like thing flippers right like you may you want to want like this like little twilight zone someone was running a charity tournament it was a cool idea for a tournament so they kept all the games was a private collection but they put all the games on coin drop and then the coin drop was given to charity oh so i was like that that pretty cool idea but they had a stars a stern stars which is a brutally hard game and they put two inch flippers on it like the safecracker flippers they put those bats on there and i can't remember the guy said they still dropped like 100 bucks in there everyone just kept playing it yeah because it's like it's addicting and to me that's kind of what pinball like when i got hooked on pinball it's when the games were beating the shit out of me yes and i don't know and then you feel like you crested like when you finally do a thing right like if you tour the mansion on adam's family all of a sudden you're like wow i'm a pinball god like right like this isn't to say that setting up games easy especially if it's your own personal game or anything that there's anything wrong with that sure you like playing long games and getting through everything but i sure wish i saw more games set up tougher because i feel like i think personally or easier you never see anyone make a game hard except uh like and even us we keep it factory but the reason why we have the reputation we do is it's just tight tilt because i'm not gonna let you thrash a game to steal a high score and i'm and and we just adjust the slings and we rebuild the flippers that i don't like think many people realize how much it'll change a game oh my god you have sensitive slings the game will be infinitely more difficult every feed from orbits or what things that would normally graze past it if that causes it to firecracker back and forth yeah that's what makes a game hard yeah and to us i mean we kind of use hard as the same like as a synonym for fun because yes to me it's like that struggle for control that makes pinball pinball and it's like you go back long enough in pinball that's really all there was like you go to early ems it's a constant struggle for control and you're like that's the fun of pinball to me because that's kind of like the ball handling everything it's not just memorizing an rpg's worth of rules and then making easy shots and getting perfect control of the ball back and it's yeah there's a place for all of it i think so well i think we covered it pretty well uh yeah i don't think i ever actually said uh monsters if i was going to pick one modern game that would benefit from lightning flippers it would be monsters because it feeds down the middle so you would feel the effects of them that game has shallow rules it's underrated so yeah someone with the monsters if you're about to sell it because you're sick of it put lightning flippers on it and let us know what you think damn that's a good one yeah i like that one i would say of the games you're gonna see on location a lot i would say deadpool like yeah deadpool is so easy like that would be yeah and you have to hit pretty safe feeds because like i'm thinking the scoop ejects safe if most games anyway i mean there's always some variable there the little deadpool sometimes wants to go down the middle and that would aggravate people yeah but um i think you should have to fight for control more on deadpool i think it plays too friendly too long i think it's a fun game that is that i don't personally want to play mostly because i don't want to be there for 45 minutes like that's really it is a fun game like the shots it's got those gomez yeah buttery like awesome very cool shots it's just it's also got the gomez tendency to play along because he knows what a lot of people like and no he knows he definitely he definitely airs on that side he did ever back when he worked for williams too like the difference between monster bash and attack from mars is like they're both fairly easy controllable fans but monster bash is way easier right right like way easier i remember that was the first wizard mode i got to was monsters of rock like that was the first one playing on location where i was like oh i got there oh my god like right like and now looking back i'm like i get that on ball one yeah right like funny i always am embarrassed if i get to a wizard or a monsters of rock without getting all of the instruments or whatever and you're like oh man yeah what a waste and yeah just funny how that goes well i think this was a good first episode we talked about lightning flippers i'm sure they'll come up in the future oh i did have one more factoid about lightning flippers that i share and I'll share and then we'll get out of here. Apparently, I couldn't substantiate. This is all like he said, she said on old Pinside thread posts. Apparently, Whitewater shipped with lightning flippers in the goodie bag in the cabinet. So they weren't installed, but they were included. Dude, the rejects from that left ramp would be so much. That would be brutal. so what like i'll just say like full stop like white water is my favorite game i love that game i think it's the best game ever made we can get into that in a later episode i don't you don't think it needs them i don't okay hold on hold on hold on i have played white waters where they are incredibly easy like i have and and to me that sucks but the one we have definitely is not it's not easy i would say yours doesn't need to be any meaner that's what i think there are games that i think are hard enough but i will say that if i ever got one for my personal home yeah i'm fucking putting lightning flippers on it dude i'm putting lightning flippers on it Because it's like, that's another game where it's like I've done everything in it. I've gotten to Wet Willies, the 100 million super jackpot. I've scored in the billions. I've done the vacation jackpot. And I would love to, like, get one raft away from Wet Willies and then lose a ball because I couldn't slap save it. Like, I would be like, ugh! Like, you know, like, that's like. but those are the moments that like keep you coming back yes right yes it's yeah so i i'm not gonna put it on ours i just saw that and i was like i've never seen a single white water with lightning flippers that's i would love if some old guy some old head someone that actually opened one of them in box could tell you i feel like if that was the case we would know but maybe i know I don't know it is maybe in the future I mean I didn't realize any outside of the four games ever came with them and then you're saying um Black Rose did so Black Rose did something every day yeah well that's it for episode one thank you Alex for agreeing to host it in your house with me and until the next episode get out on location and play some fucking pinball yeah support a local business. Lightning flippers on it, right? Yeah. And if your operator doesn't have, if they're a coward that pulled the- If you play any of those four games and they have full length flippers on them, you go submit a complaint. Yeah. Formal complaint. No, but go out, play some pinball and location. You'll meet some people, you'll have some friends and you'll support local business and that's pinball in its natural habitat. So go support it wherever you live. Go find a pinball machine and play it. Yeah. All right. Cool. Have a good one.