This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap, and joining me halfway across the world, as always, Jared Morgan. Hello there. Howdy, howdy, howdy. but now I'm just snotty and gross so the play continues wonderful you would hope that it had been gone by now but oh well I don't know what's going on I might have to get to maybe Bilex or something like that alright coughing up lungs at the moment is the order of the day apparently so yeah, fun yeah we just had here in the states the good old turkey day on thursday did you have lots of turkey um i had a a you know a normal amount of turkey but then i cut myself an obscenely large piece of costco pumpkin pie with tons and tons of whipped cream on it so that's like a thing you guys do we actually have those things here pumpkin pie and i saw someone basically get one go to the food court and just start eating the guts out of it Oh, my God. Right through the food court. It's pretty white to get home. Just got it there. She was American. You could tell she had the time. And she was just honing into that thing. Yeah. Smashing it. Good buddy as to what's right. Well, I was really disappointed because I'm one of these people that with pumpkin pie, the proper amount of whipped cream is when you can no longer see the pie. Okay. So you must cover the sides and, you know, cake the top until you just cannot see the pie. and so we of course had leftover pumpkin pie but we'd had it over at my sister's and she had the whipped cream so we still had whipped cream here at the house and so I go to get a slice and my wife had already had a slice and she left me this just obnoxiously large slice and I'm like sweet and she goes but there's almost no whipped cream left I'm sorry I can't eat it she's like I even used a lot less than I normally would just because I knew that you would throw fit. And I was like, oh, and I'm shaking the can. They're like, yeah, you can barely feel anything. I turn it over. I was like, I barely was able to cover the top. And I was like, oh, no, I'm going to actually taste the pumpkin. Hang on. So I'm going to taste the pumpkin. Why do you eat pumpkin pie? Have an apple pie instead. No, no, no, because the pumpkin pie is purely a whipped cream delivery service. Oh, okay. Why don't you just go and squeeze it into your mouth? because the pumpkin pie also acts as a filling so it's a little more filling than just whipped cream in the mouth but you know I don't know if you're doing it right Chris I think I'm doing it exactly perfectly right there's no doubt about it I'm also one of these people that I need my pumpkin pie refrigerated I don't know how people can stand to do warm pumpkin pie I don't know it's like drinking warm soda to me. It just gives me the shivvies. I don't think I would do pumpkin pie warm either. Apple pie warm, yes. Pecan pie? You better believe it. Warm that puppy up. But yeah, pumpkin pie doesn't... No. Not speaking from experience, I've never eaten it, but I would imagine the texture of it... You've never had pumpkin pie? No. Because, you know, if I want to have pumpkin pie, I've got to buy the Costco size. If I hate it, then that's a lot of pie to go through. It's $6 for the entire pie. Maybe in America. It's like $15 here. Oh, okay. I was going to say it's ridiculously cheap here. I know. Food in general is ridiculously cheap over there. Yeah. Makes sense because you guys might have a big country, but a lot of it is just bear it. The way they could get around cost here is actually have bullet trains that just run the length of the country left or right and just allow cargo to be shipped around quickly. Have tubes. Tubes? Yeah. Pumpkin pie tubes. Like at the bank of the vacuum tubes? Yeah. They actually had those at Costco. Speaking of, they had those at Costco. They've taken them out. I don't know why. But they had a whole vacuum tube network at Costco, but they've ripped out all the vacuum tubes. Obviously, no one was using them. I've been fascinated with those since I was a little kid. And it makes you wonder, how come nobody's ever put one of those in a pinball machine? Vacuum tube. Wouldn't that be cool? You lock the ball, a little door comes down, all of a sudden your ball just goes... Well, because it requires a vacuum system. Fine. They could do it with electromagnets. That wouldn't be a vacuum system. It would look like one. Wouldn't be quite as exciting, that's all I've got to say. No, it wouldn't be. So last week I talked a bit about the beta that was going on for Volume 2. Since then, they dropped a new beta on us, and they made some improvements. So I thought I might comment and let you guys know where we are with the Volume 2 beta. I still haven't sold it I still haven't played it you'll get to it eventually when it releases on December 4th the first thing of note was that the general on Attack from Mars, the animated general last time he was in blue and pretty much everybody's comment was hey what's the cop from the getaway doing on this table and it was like I know that that's the colors that are on the slingshot? Because, you know, the colors on the slingshot means that they only have like an eight-color printing process, so they had to choose the colors carefully. Or maybe 16, I don't know. It was limited. Fortunately, they went and they adjusted it. He's now wearing a green shirt and tan pants, you know, khaki pants. Looks like an army general now. And it looks so much better. Among other things, because his color scheme now matches the rest of the table. Oh, cool. Whereas before, when of his blue. That was the only blue thing on the entire table. So now he actually blends in with the color scheme. Not like blends in camouflage, but looks like he's part of the same design element. Let's put it that way. Yes. The other thing is they made a big point of saying, hey, make sure you check out Stroh Multiball. We fixed it or did some things to it. And me and you had this big old discussion last week. So here's the deal. Because in my mind, I had an idea of what it was like in Pinball Arcade because I was able to adjust the lighting and everything. And so first I, you know, it's one of those things that, boy, it takes you a long time to activate strobe multivol when that's what you want it to activate. My God, I don't know how many games I played trying to get that thing to finally cycle up. Because it's not. It's random. Yeah, it's random. It's really random. Yeah. and so I finally got it and sure enough basically what the effect that happens now the general illumination goes a little bit more dark you might say so the table itself takes on a darker character the room surrounding it doesn't get any darker but the table just looks like it darkens more and it less that there's overhead lighting affecting it you might say and the flashers are much brighter. Oh, good. And so that flasher effect was really nice because it spreads also outside of, instead of just being contained directly under the saucer, which is where that one flasher is, the light is spilling out and affecting the ramps and stuff behind there and kind of glowing. So that's really good. However, you still can pretty easily track the ball. one of the things that I when I first got it the mode I had on ball trails well that made it ridiculously easy to track the balls so then I determined, okay so I had to turn off the ball trails and then throw a ball again how many games that took to get it to finally go and then I had it, that was much better playing without the ball trails and it made me think I really wish that you could table by table determine if you have ball trails or not. Because the thing is, on a table like, yeah, like on Medieval Madness or, say, Back to the Future, where when you're in multiball, all of a sudden the balls lit out flames, if you turn off ball trails, that turns off the flames also. And I'm like, well, no, that's a really cool effect. I want it there, but then I forget to turn it off, and I start playing another game where the ball trail is just a ball trail. It doesn't do anything special when you light up any particular mode. And on those tables, I'd prefer not to have the ball trails at all. So it's one of those things where, hey, you know, if the game can remember what our camera angle is that we choose per table, because you can have different camera angles for each table, and it will remember those. Can we maybe have that functional, where we can turn on and off ball trails depending on the table, so I don't have to remember as I'm playing, like, oh, this is one of those that I wish I had it on or wish I had it off, you know. Yeah, that wouldn't be that hard for them to do. is this another value they've stored? Yeah. The other thing that I would just or, in the case of Attack from Mars, just automatically no choice about it, they turn off the ball trails during strobe mode. There'll be some people out there going, strobe body balls, hard. I want the ball trails on it. So I compared it after seeing it and going, okay, it's better. Still not what I was hoping for. I was like, okay, I got to look in Pinball Arcade. I got to see what I had it set up there. So my settings for Attack from Mars were 20% ambient light and 40% on the bulb brightness. And during normal gameplay, the table's kind of dark and there's a lot of stuff in shadow. Just the Dancing Martians in general are silhouettes. Yeah, I mean, they're dark or whatever. Strode Multiball starts, and I went, boy, that looks identical to what is in Zen Pinball with Pinball MX3. So truth be told, they had it as dark as I had it set in TPA, which still wasn't as dark as I would like, but I had it set to that darkness because otherwise, during normal play, the table would be way too dark. Right, totally. And even with all those lights on, it is kind of a washed out. It's not a vibrant color the way that Pimble Arcade has it. So I think in a lot of respects, it's a good compromise for what you were saying, where it's like, hey, in an arcade, that's how I only ever experienced it. and I was wanting, and I actually posted a link in our own private chat for the beta. Somebody posted on YouTube. If you look it up on YouTube, look up strobe multiball and there's a couple people that have it with complete lights out. I'm like, but that's what I want because what's great is the strobes glint off of all the chrome. It looks awesome. It's brutally difficult that way too, but it looks awesome. so but I understand that a lot of people would then throw a tizzy over that because it was blacked out room, blacked out table what's crazy though is when the mode ends and all the lights come on you realize just how bright all the illumination is even in a blacked out room so I recommend giving that a look, go look it up on YouTube I'm going to check it out just type in Stroh Multiball and there's a couple of variations of it and there's actually one in there that is a fairly close approximation of what zen has done where it's a fair amount of light but it's still dark enough that you get the strobe effect so i watched the um they were doing there when i was doing the the post-production for the last episode i decided to have a look at the twitch stream because i linked that in the show notes yes um and sort of fast-forwarded to through a bit of all the stuff getting started and looked at it and they were even straight and multiple i thought yeah that's how i remember it looking um at that point you know, just the whole back of the play field lights up with the strobe shot. And it sort of bleeds out from underneath the saucer and hits some of the ramp surfaces. And I go, yeah, that's pretty much how that thing looks when you're playing in a well-lit room. And it's sort of like, yeah, yeah. Like for me, it was like, yeah, that's correct. They've done it right in that lighting, with that lighting. And that was the first beta. So I'm on to the second beta, which is even darker than that. so yeah it will look good i'm looking forward to playing it when it goes to general i'm just i'm not going to bother installing the beta at this stage it's too late um i'll just i'll just wait until it hits general availability and and uh be surprised and delighted with everybody else it is of note also if you look at tpa you can you can really see the difference in how the light throws in FX3 as opposed to TPA because again, just with that one single solitary flasher going off in TPA is contained entirely within that wedge, that box underneath the saucer. It does not spill anywhere else. Whereas in FX3, it spills beyond there as it should because, again, FX3, their lighting is using a full 360, if you will, three-dimensional lighting bloom. It's not a plane. Right, and TPA is a flat plane. Yeah, it's just a plane. And the plane only afflicts flat surfaces. Yeah. So it's either a horizontal plane or a vertical plane. Yep. So, yeah, this one has actually got proper, what would you say, almost like a dome effect. It's volumetric. That's all I can think of. It's volume rather than a two-dimensional one. It's like all the lighting effects and stuff in TPA. They're like an overlay over the top. That's it. Like an animation cell. They're animation over the top of essentially a static asset. Kind of So yeah it interesting Whereas it almost like then everything is a 3D render, which I mean, I'm sure that everything in FastSight's play field and toys and everything, they're all 3D renders. They have a 3D scanner. But it's something about the way it's implemented. It just takes it to that next level. They've just got something a little bit extra. Yeah. and that's it plays a huge effect in the look of things it breaks that illusion the realism illusion and it makes it like oh yeah okay I'm looking at a real table here and once again going back to it's such a jarring experience to go from the FX3 version of AFM into TPA I couldn't my timing was completely messed up. The, it, it just has such a bizarre feel. It doesn't, it doesn't feel natural. And, and it's so weird to me because prior to this, I had no issues. It played fine. I liked it. It played better than, you know, other pinball games that I had played. And so I was perfectly happy with it. I thought it was just fine, but man the tuning that deep has done is absolutely incredible and to me feels like how a pinball table should feel should play yeah and that's it doesn't matter if i'm playing in the arcade mode with you know the new physics or if i'm playing in same player standards then just the way the ball moves is it feels better well it's not floaty no it's not floaty it has weight yeah and like they said when they did the arcade and tournament mode, they also did a different surface for the ball to roll on. And I think that plays a huge important factor. So it's not that the ball is just gliding like an air hockey puck. It's actually rolling on the surface. It's got some friction coefficients added to it. Very interesting. The secret sauce of Zinj. It's what it is. And as these tables come out, I can go play any other TPA table. Provided it's not in Zen, it's fine. Exactly. I can go into it, and so long as it hasn't been in Zen yet, my timing is still pretty good. And although I can recognize that the physics are a little bit different, I can play it just fine. But, man, yeah, the second it drops in Zen, and then you go back and try and play it, you're just like... You may as well uninstall the table, because it's like, nope. Yeah. so another thing that happened with uh this started in our in our thread on digital pinball fans that we always post announcing hey the new podcast is out um you know gives people just another way of contacting us and within that there was some question about oh what can TPA do in terms of future tables? And what they can add in? Because we had mentioned that again with, hey, if you want to make an impact, you've got to put a good title in of Stern, and then you've got to put some non-GotLead Premier GotLeads into the game, and that'll make everybody happy. So I started thinking about it, though, and there's a big hypothetical out there that seems to be pretty rock solid, though. And that is in regards to licenses that Xen has already done preclude Farsight from being able to then do that license. So the big obvious one is Deadpool. Deadpool, yeah. Xen has already got a Deadpool table. Stern just came out with their Deadpool table. Farsight has the rights to do Stern tables. But once you bring it into a digital platform and there's already a digital pinball table called Deadpool. That's when the lines start to get blurred. Right. And licensors, these days especially, they don't want any confusion for their audience. They're not multi-channel on the same ecosystem. Right. Yeah. I mean, you think about it. Stern has the Caribbean table. Jersey Jack pinball is about to release or has released their Pirates of the Caribbean table. I guarantee Stern, who's not selling their Pirates table anymore, is not going to be able to come out with a vault edition. No, you can't have those two competing pinball machines out at the same time with the same license, despite them being a different company. So the same thing is going to apply to our digital. We've done one anyhow because the other Pirates of the Caribbean is far superior to the one that they released back in 2007. Something like that, yeah. Something like that, yeah. It's quite a bit better, so they wouldn't bother. So anyway, that's what you're kind of dealing with in terms of things that Farsight immediately gets eliminated from in terms of tables that they would be able to choose from the Stern library because Zen already has a license active for that property. so I started making a list of what okay well so eliminate those tables and here's what's left and what's the possibility of what Farsight could do and everything and as I'm making this list I'm going holy crap there's like not much that Farsight's able to do so I wanted to talk about that with among you our audience because I don't think people have really realized just how dire things are for Farsight and the certain license. If we understand correctly how licenses work. Correct. So we're going off this assumption, but we have heard hearsay from even employees at Farsight that something like Deadpool is off the table. They can't do it. So again, going with this theory, right off the bat, Farsight would not be able to do Family Guy. They would not be able to do Spider-Man. They'd not be able to do Iron Man. Can't do X-Men. Can't do Avengers. Can't do Walking Dead. Now, Walking Dead is an interesting one because obviously it's based off the TV show. Yeah. As opposed to Telltale games. It's HBO. But it's what? It's HBO, so it's not Telltale. No, it's not HBO. It's actually A&E. Oh, A&E, whatever. Yeah, I don't know what it is with you guys. But even though it's still the Walking Dead brand. And it's not like it's called Telltale's Walking Dead. No, it's not. It's just called The Walking Dead. So, again, that off the table. Yeah, it's tricky. Star Wars off the table. Guardians of the Galaxy. Nope. And then Deadpool. So there's all your big titles right there. Bye-bye. Well, not only that, but in terms of the LCD screen, you know, when we're talking about, hey, they're working on that. well, no Star Wars, no Guardians, no Deadpool. So now you're like, okay, what have we got going on left? Well, there it something is. Yeah, so then I started thinking about, okay, let's break this down some more. Let's go into the music licenses. We know that Farsight's not going to be able to afford those. And this is in terms of tables that Farsight would be able to do without having to do a Kickstarter or outside funding, if you will. so with the music licensed Elvis, Rolling Stones Metallica, Kiss, Aerosmith Iron Maiden, no way in hell are they doing the Beatles boom all those are off the table because again when you think about Metallica we've been begging for Metallica for years if Farsight was going to do it you would think that they would have done it by now then you start getting into okay let's talk about the Disney Fox tables because Fox is obviously being absorbed into Disney can't get Disney on the telephone that eliminates now believe it or not this will eliminate Simpsons Pinball Party 24 Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones Avatar and Tron right think about they've not been able to get a hold of Warner Brothers that eliminates Austin Powers Terminator 3, Lord of the Rings, Sopranos Game of Thrones, Batman. What's that leave them with? Well, they have had a relationship with CBS, Paramount, and Sony. So you have Wheel of Fortune, CSI, Transformers. And then you're left with what I call the one-off licenses. So you've got Striker Extreme, which actually isn't a license, but it was formerly an NFL table. So it's just rethemed into soccer. Sharky Shootout, which is, for all intents and purposes, an upgraded version of 8-Ball Deluxe. Right. Monopoly, Rollercoaster Tycoon, which Monopoly and Rollercoaster Tycoon, why have they not done those yet? Again, those should have been done a long time ago. If they were going to be able to do them at all. Both of those are much better than Big Buck Hunter. Right. That's too serious. Right. Playboy, no way in hell are they doing that. NASCAR, I don't know how costly that is. Obviously, they were able to do the Indy 500. No, it's fine. They just did the Grand Prix international version of that table. Probably. World Poker Tour, I don't know who holds the rights to that or how difficult it would be to get those, but there's that. Shrek. There's your Family Guy table. NBA? No. No. And Wrestlemania. I could see that happening. Wrestlemania would be interesting. I've heard that as a table, it's actually quite underrated. The premium version of it is actually okay. So, better than Buckhunter. Right. So when you think about it, after eliminating all the things that are no way going to happen, here's what you're left with that is within the realm of possibility Wheel of Fortune, CSI Transformers, Striker Extreme Sharky Shootout, NASCAR, World Park Couture, Shrek, WrestleMania There's your sand table folks That's what's left guys That's the and let's be frank that's bottom of the barrel stuff that nobody cares about It is and you'll notice that Not a single one of those is an LCD table. They're all dot matrix. They're all dot matrix. And coming up is rumored to be monsters. Yes. Okay. They could maybe possibly get that license. That's, you know, obviously, Zen has not gotten themselves that license yet. So that's a possibility. Is it universal? Who is monsters? I have no idea. That's one of those things. when you start getting into those old TV properties, who knows who holds the license rights right now? Who owns Popeye? Sure, it's King's World Syndication or something like that, but who legitimately owns it? Because at one time, there was three different studios developing a Popeye animated movie. So, I don't know who actually owns it and how difficult it would be to get that license. You know? but oh and uh so beyond monsters the next one is the rumored elvira table yeah um which again could they get it i don't know but all zen has to do is quickly swoop in and lock up the rights for their williams valley collection collection and again boom that would be taken off the table so now you might be asking yourself okay so what do we got here we got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 tables for far as I can pick from well why don't we expand the scope then and go into you know Data East and Sega tables all of which are licensed all which are licensed for the most part and the situation doesn't get much better because music license Guns N' Roses and Tommy. Yeah, good luck securing those for the cheap. Yeah, I'm getting the Who. Disney and Fox, you're back to the Simpsons table, Star Wars, Independence Day, and the X-Files. All those are going cheap. And some of those actually are probably, they would actually have arrangements with Zen. Oh yeah, exactly. Well, Zen already has contacts with Fox also, so that helps. With their Fox table, yeah. but, uh, uh, and then you're looking at CBS, Paramount, Sony. Well, you got hook. Okay. That's a possibility. Um, Star Trek, a terrible table. It is really, really bad. Yeah. Uh, Star Trek. Well, you had to kickstart the first time. You're going to have to kickstart it a second time. Uh, and that's not worth producing. That thing is no fun. Right. Uh, Godzilla. You could do it. It's, it's only got two actor likenesses on it. I don't know what's in the call outs, you know, voice wise, except for there's one issue. Isn't it? Wasn't there a thing with spooky and stern wanting to do Godzilla and a big old fight over the license rights? Yeah. Well, right. But my point being that was just to do the real pinball table because they were battling with Toho studios. How do you think it's going to go with them trying to secure a digital pinball rights? It's not going to go easy. No. So that one might be off the table. Because if they're going to do Godzilla, if Stan's going to do Godzilla, and they still are factoring into their licenses, digital versions of the license, then that's an idiot, Tim. The pattern is full. Yeah. And that's an urging of movie memes right there for your pleasure. And then there is South Park, which Farsight had the opportunity to do years ago because they weren't able to do an original table. That got pulled off the selection, and then Zen went ahead and did theirs. Zen obviously had their license removed. I know the reasons, and I'm not actually able to tell you why, but it's not nefarious. And there actually a possibility that it be coming back With luck With luck But what I ultimately saying is there no way that Farsight getting the Southwater license either. Interesting side note, just read this. So they announced the Primus pinball, which is basically the skin of Wonelli. Wonelli is now becoming the Eldorado of the modern age. Well, when I was doing my research on Data East, there is a whole bunch of one-off tables that basically were reskins of Data East tables. Like Lethal Weapon? There was a Lethal Weapon that was reskinned? Well, like there's an Errant Spelling Table, there's a oh god now I can't remember any of them, that was the most famous a Richie Rich Table. All they was was just a reskin of an existing Data East table. So this isn't a practice that is brand new by any chance of imagination. But you haven't seen it happen ever since Eldorado, like in the modern age of pinball. Like you didn't see any reskins of any of the Belly Williams tables leading up in the heyday and certainly no reskins of tables in the 2000s and 2010s. So this is now becoming a thing now where we're reskinning again because for some reason they think the reason why they were reskinning tables back when they were doing Eldorado reskins because the demand for tables was so high they had to. But I question whether in the modern age of pinball we're in now, whether that demand actually exists. It's now a collected demand instead of an operated demand. Right. But what I was going to say with regards to the Primus pinball, so apparently, because Primus does the theme song for South Park. Yes. As a thank you, I don't know if it was Trey Parker or Matt Stone, one of the two boys, gave to Les Claypool a South Park pinball machine as a thank you. So now they're making this Primus pinball. They're making 100 tables for sale, and then there's eight tables that are for the band management, basically their own little private pool. and one of those tables is being sent to the guys from South Park. Oh, really? As a fast payback? As a fast payback, as a full circle. So I thought that was kind of cool. That is cool. That's pretty interesting. Okay, back to tables that will never happen. For Farsight. If you dip into the Warner Brothers tables, there's Maverick, Lethal Weapon 3, Batman, again. I mean, I guess Maverick... Well, you're dealing with Warner Brothers, which is the issue that I guess we're dealing with here. Then you have Batman Forever. Again, another really crappy table. I would not want to purchase anyhow because it's rubbish. Batman Forever, Space Jam, Twister, and Lost in Space. Well, yeah. I mean, are any of those iconic? No. Not really. Not really. With Universal, you've got Jurassic Park. Nope, that's off the table. Back to the Future, that's off the table. King Kong, which there was only nine made, I think was the magic number. So now you're up against A, trying to find somebody that actually has it that you can model it off of, and B, securing the King Kong license. And then you've got Apollo 13, which would probably be a processor nightmare when the 13 pinballs are on the table at the same time. No way they'll be able to keep up frame rates with 30 pinballs on the table. no they would they would that would be a technical impossibility with fast life engine no way in hell although the thing is that you wouldn't even know anyhow because you lose them in a matter of five seconds anyhow it's actually probably okay they could probably wing it because you know then you'll get to a six ball multiball and you can probably pull off a six ball multiball yeah um and then you get to the the other one-offs uh from data east and sega uh tales from the crypt it's not based off the HBO show, it's just the comic, that is very much a possibility. But again, why has Farsight not done it? That thing's been being asked for since the second season. Yeah, it's great. I'd love that table to be produced. There's another WWE table, Royal Rumble. Royal Rumble is fun. Rocky and Bullwinkle. I would think that that's an obtainable license. Yep. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Well, it's loaded. it's I know it's not even the Nickelodeon version it's because if you look at the back glass it's not based off of I don't know the Eastman and Laird comic series probably is what it's licensed through but that being said again, who knows who controls the license now it certainly would be Eastman and Laird right Robocop which well the new one was by Warner Brothers the old one is was originally by Orion which my DVD copy of it is put out by Fox so who knows again who owns the rights to that one and is it worth going through the hassle another Playboy table not going to happen Monday Night Football not going to happen Baywatch again requested but it hasn't been done Is that CBS? No, it's completely independent. Oh, is it? Yeah, that show was... It aired on NBC the first season, but it was not produced by NBC. And then it got cancelled, and then it was entirely independently financed. Oh, right, okay. Oh, there you go. That would be a nine-meter track down. Probably. Maybe that's why we haven't seen it. GoldenEye. Yeah, do you think they're paying for the Bond license? No. No. Boy, that would be expensive. Viper Knight driving? That'd be fun. But they didn't pay for the Corvette license. Yeah. You know? And that leaves you with... Basically, what that leaves you with is the four completely non-licensed data e-stables, which are Checkpoint, Secret Service, Torpedo Alley, and Laser War. Okay. So, again, things are a little more dire than we might think. The first thought, yeah. So let's start rolling out those EMs, I guess. You know, and I guess my point was that we'll see. I've been saying give Farsight six months. Let's see what their actual plan is. And that means. When? That was back in September. So basically I'm giving them until March. Yeah. We need to, because we knew that there wasn't going to be any new tables for the rest of this year. Yeah. So within three months of the new year, there's gotta be, they gotta put out something. Otherwise that's too much of a gap between what they've been doing. They've been promising that, no, we've got things that works. We got things that works, but they haven't announced anything. Like I said, when we asked them about the LCD screen, they said, yes, we have a plan, but clearly for what table would you even use it? Yeah, there's nothing up there. That you're going to be able to afford, that we know of. Yeah, I... I don't know, man. It really made me just go, oh, wow, I didn't think it was that terrible. When you scratch the band-aid off, it's like, hmm, okay. So, what do you want? yeah I mean literally it reminds me of that movie The Jerk when Steve Martin is being the carnival barter and the people ask him hey what what prizes can we win he's got that giant shelf of prizes and he's like you can win anything from this shelf to this shelf between this toy and this toy but nothing above this and this and it winds up getting down to basically a box of chiclets or something like that Yeah. And that's kind of what it is for Farsight. Yes, there's a lot of tables that they could do if they could pony up for the license. We know they're not ponying up for the license. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, meanwhile, over at Zen, things are looking rosy. well yeah I don't quite know what to say it's a little like yeah I mean I guess it's feast or famine but yeah I've got nothing except to say I can't argue against what you said Chris and it's a little bit distressing yeah we love the speculation but this is kind of a sad speculation. We don't love this sort of speculation because unfortunately it's a little bit real. Yeah. So, well, you know, like I said, I hope that Fireside Bulls will rabbit out of their hat. I would love it if they just said screw this, we're doing Capcom. Hey, that's fine with me. Yep, shut up and take my money. It'd be 20 bucks a table but shut up and take my money. We've coined in Smithberries but shut up and take my money. Yeah, you know, so So, like I said, we'll see exactly where it goes from here, what they're able to do. Yeah. I guess another three months will tell us. That's what I think. Because if we don't hear anything in three months, that to me is... Like anything? Like a newsletter? Yeah, that to me is... No one's been tuning into their streams that they've been doing? Like they haven't talked about anything in there? Because they have been twitching. Right. So I noticed the tone in some of the Twitch messages that they sent out on Twitter. I'm going, that's very strange. But anyhow, it seems like, hey, hey, come look at us. We're giving away stuff and things. And hello, we're here. Is this thing on? Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. It's a bit like that. I don't know. It's awkward. So what's something good we could talk about? Something good. Well, for those of you watching on the YouTube here, you might have noticed something blue and striped behind my chair. And it's not Sonic the Hedgehog. No, and if I move ever so slightly, you can see that there is the minicab painted. You'll notice the little white area there down to the side, and that, I'll just angle, is the start of throwing the logo on the side of it. We're trying to figure out good ways of doing this, because I didn't want to... I could have done vinyl stickers. Yeah, but they're expensive. Yeah, we're talking like $20 a pop. So $20 just for decoration? No. So... It's like all my Chicago Bounds and stuff, right? Yeah, I mean, so basically was looking for a solution that could be painted on, and so we're trying some things out. You know, you could have done the classic 60s, 70s, and 80s thing and just made a stencil. I could have. But then you'd be like, nah. Well, you know what I've discovered during this whole process, too, is I suck at painting. Right, yeah. It's hard, right? Well, I did this all with a roller. Oh, you did? and taping it off and not really thinking about the fact that once you do it with a roller you've immediately created a textured surface and so then when you go to tape off for stripes because it's textured, no matter how hard you seal that tape, paint up underneath, so I had to do touch-ups on both the black layer and the white layer so that sucked and then I made a essentially a stencil for the side, but I didn't want to roll it on, and I decided to brush it on, and that kind of made the paint lumpy, and I realized I should have sprayed it. So this is why this is the prototype box. This is the alpha. This is the alpha of the cabinet. This is me learning what works and what doesn't work, and what to do next time will be better. what you'll do next time is just get a whole lot of rattle cans and spray it with a color that looks mostly what you can get from Home Depot I mean I have a spray gun it's more of my laziness of not wanting to have to clean the spray gun after the fact but here's a case where let's say five people end up wanting one of these well you just spray it all in one hit yeah spray it all in one hit now I'm not throwing in just a tiny bit of paint for what I'm going to spray, I'm going to need a larger amount, and so it's not going to feel voluminous. Volume works better for the time spent. As my friend said when we were cutting this on the... Not on the CNC machine, but there were parts that we had to rip on the table saw. And he goes, look, we're spending 20 minutes setting up the angle blade, setting this all up, pulling it out, getting it all ready for the cut. and he goes the amount of time spent to cut one is virtually the same as if we cut ten so clearly the more that I'd be making at the same time the easier it is over the long haul rather than if I was doing one by one by one that would be brutal you'd have to save up the orders and just do it all in one hit yeah it'd be nuts otherwise because you have to pay this bloke right because he's doing it as a solid for you now. No, you ain't going to do it as a solid after this, no. No way. Well, I mean, especially like we, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but just doing the cuts on the CNC machine for all six sides, five hours. Five hours? Five hours. Wow, for one box? One box. Oh, yeah, right. So that's a lot. But the thing is, you know, if you're doing an order of five, you could actually plot out on the piece of ply exactly how you get the same side five times out of that piece of ply, and it'd probably be a lot more efficient. Just even cutting the circles into the side, I mean, it's doing it layer by layer, if you will. I watched as it did one panel It took a half an hour just to do that one panel So it doesn matter how many you have laid out next to it It takes that long for it to grind down. It's essentially like a massive router, isn't it? It's a router on a computer-controlled arm. Yeah. So, yeah, it doesn't slice through it like a saw would. It grinds it down. Yeah. other things that I discovered so my legs which were that you know silver but dingy I want to spray in a texture coat and like also this is the hinge that's going to be on the back of the you know it's just a piano hinge it's going to be on the back of the lid well I sprayed that into this lovely black hammer you can kind of see the texture there in the as it catches the light so I did that I did that on the legs came out really good. So then I also did it on the faux coin door and the coin door, if you remember, uh, was 3d printed, but unfortunately it's too large of a surface to be done. Um, it had to be done in four pieces and which it was then glued together, uh, plastic filled and primed a little bit. And so I sprayed that exact same stuff onto, onto it. So here it is, but it split it. Oh, what? How did it split? So it reacted somehow to the glue. And I had this outside in my garage. It wasn't a particularly hot day, but the sun was shining into the garage, but this was sitting flat on a flat surface. And the scene here all of a sudden warped up by a solid inch and started splitting. So then I heat gunned it back down into place and thought it was all cool. Let it sit for two days in the shade, not anywhere near the sun. I went to go pick it up and it just split. So we're now thinking of doing this entirely out of wood using the CNC machine. Oh, really? Oh, right. Okay. So wrapping that. okay and then we'll actually be able to use screws to hold it in place rather than double-sided tape um so we'll see how that works that's it that's such a shame you're here sorry dude i broke your like eight hours worth of masking filling and well it was as he turned it was four hours of sanding and filling it actually took the printer 24 hours to print all the pieces oh man in fact That's probably, I don't know, it may take the CNC, let's call it two hours to route that out. Yeah. That's probably more cost efficient in the long run, right? That's what we figure too, yeah. So it could actually be a happy accident that that happened. Right. Because we were never, never going to do more of these on a 3D printer to begin with. That was just not time efficient. No way. No. so then that means this coming week hopefully I'm going to start wiring we'll see because the box is there you can start shoving stuff in it exactly so that's all that's pretty much left to do on that so other than that's exciting yeah yeah get it going and actually make sure it works make sure it works is the most important bit, yeah. And see, this all seems so backwards to me, where it's like we're doing all the cosmetic things first and not doing the functioning things first. You know, this is probably quite different to what they did when they were building the pin cab initially, because they did it out of foam core, they whacked it together, they got essentially the proof of concept done, but you're looking at the actual finished product first and then adding what is essentially the proven bits onto it. Right, because we don't want to have to get it all wired and then take it all apart to allow for paint. That's right. And also some of this got started because I was waiting on parts to show up. So it was like while I was waiting, might as well get started on this other stuff. But you would probably do it differently if you were doing a production run of these. Absolutely. Yeah, very differently. Absolutely. It would be very interesting. then you might want to actually work up another medium post about your lessons learned today and say, this is how I do this if I wasn't doing, doing it like ad hoc. Right. I had everything, I had my bill of materials, I had an order, like a set of orders, and I was going to embark on this like from now and then describe it. Cause it would probably be very different to the way you've documented it up until now. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely going to be a different approach to it for however I would do the next, the next volley. Um, but I also discovered something with my, with my legs that I have. Cause I remember I folks, I got them used. Two of the legs have holes that will fit the, the leg mounts, the leg levelers, two of them. I think the holes just plain got drilled out. And so there's no thread for them to go into at all. They just go in, slide in. Oh, okay. So I guess I need another nut. But then I started thinking about it. It was like, do I even need leg levelers? Probably not. Probably not. If anything, I just need a piece of, of plastic or, uh, rubber for the bottom of them, you know, for the floor that I'm sitting on, but I don't need those really, really, it just get one of those really big, um, rubber discs that you put under there, you know, like a, yeah, rubber dome things. Yeah. And yeah, it'd be fine. So, I think I'm not going to bother even worrying about that. I do. I get one of those. I get four of those solid rubber door stops and just put a bolt through them and then bolt them to the bottom of the leg. That's what I'd do. I'm thinking more like the furniture moving pads. Oh, yeah. Because I do want to be able to slide. I don't want to just be rigid on because then if you go to nudge it, if it's on rubber foot, that's going to put a lot of torque on where the legs are in as opposed to actually being able to slide back and forth like it should. Okay. That would be something that you're going to have to test as well. What does the accelerometer require? Right. That's an unknown at the moment. Yep, complete unknown. You might end up finding that you have to put some sort of crazy spring mechanism on the legs that allows the legs to pop in and out when they're actually moving around. Put the legs on casters. the whole thing just rolls or just you know back off the leg bolts just a little bit so the whole thing's just a little bit slop to it so you can actually move it around really easy I don't know it's going to be weird there's going to be some experimentation there for sure yep so that's where I am on that and we'll be progressing from there but unfortunately no news on my front yet the last I heard was yep I've got those pop-up boards I'll just do those up as well and I'll rejuvenate the displays so on that I was curious because I've heard through the guy that I've got the table through he was going oh yeah what they do is they hook it up to a car battery the displays and I was going huh what how how does that what does that even do and it turns out that on those Gottlieb displays, if they're left for a period of time, they sort of get this buildup inside them that's like an oxidization on some of the things. So connecting it up to power, what it does is there's like in the glass display, there's these four essentially heater lines that go across the display. Okay. And they're like thin strips of metal, basically, and they heat up, and that's what basically ignites the gas inside and makes the numbers work. so what happens is the it gets built up on those heater wires or it gets attached to the other part and the gas just sort of settles so what you want to do is you've got to apply about 10 or 11 volts to the outermost pins onto the display and what that does is it reheats the gas and makes it alive again essentially okay so people when they get these old got leaves they've been sitting around in a shed you know they go oh the displays are cooked i'll you know get rid of them but they're they're not like you can nine times out of ten bring them back to life just by connecting them up to a power source and letting them run for like 10 or 15 minutes to heat up the gas interesting very interesting because i was going surely there's someone out there on youtube doing this and there was this guy that that showed the process of it and like it was like the displays were not working and then at the end of it they all were so it's like okay that's very interesting science indeed gases noble gases noble gases must be energized or some something like that yeah so there you go i learned something the more you know all right you know the rainbow goes across the screen All right. Well, see, we gave you a little uptick news on the beta, a little down news on Pimble Arcade's future, and back to some positive news on things happening on actual physical items for our house. So there you go. So there you go. No, it's a bad news sandwich. Maybe that's the name of the show. Bad news sandwich. No, no, I think Box of Chicklets is much better. Box of Chicklets. I didn't know what chiclet was. I'm going to have to do some research. Well, I guess there's a reason why you won't know, but it's a gum that is made in Mexico, in Tijuana, I think. There's just these little square candy-shelled pieces of gum that you need about six of them in your mouth at the same time just to equal one normal piece of gum, and they lose their flavor probably within 20 seconds. Yeah, right. It's a very, very cheap quality chewing gum. yes okay so we have that over here too and usually gumball like anything in a gumball machine basically chew that for 30 seconds the flavor goes and it's disgusting basically that's what chicklets are right I've learned something today I've learned never to have chicklets no no I mean you gotta try them sure if you ever see them go for it you know give it a shot and it's not like it's disgusting it's just it's okay for a little bit and then it gets disgusting yeah alright folks well we're going to call that a show but before we leave you why don't you go ahead and visit redbubble.com type in blockade in the search up will pop up some merch that you can go ahead and pick and customize and enjoy spread your love of the show that way Jared had pointed out on Twitter just the other day that there was a Black Friday sale that was 20% off. I don't know how long that runs for, but that is a good reason to follow us on Twitter, at Blockade, because announcements like that will go out and we'll alert you when that merch goes on sale. That's right. Now, I don't know how the spice flows as far as the money there, but I think it's basically absorbed by Redbubble. So I still think we get what we normally do. The couple of bucks is just that Redbubble cover the promotion. Yep. Yeah. So, uh, you can also follow both me and him on Twitter individually. I am at shut your traps. He is at Jared morgues. Send us an email at blah, blah, blockade dot. Excuse me. Blah, blah, blockade at gmail.com. My address is mixed up because the other important address is to go ahead and visit our site. Blockade pinball.com slash episodes, because that is where you will find all of our shows as well as the show notes that Jared talks about, anything that we talk about in the show regarding Internet stuff, Jared always pops a link on. And there is also the posts that I do currently regarding the micro-keb and the progress of that. All good stuff to follow and pay attention to. I would be remiss if I didn't mention, and it's probably again going to be over by the time this gets broadcast, but right now Zen is having a major sale on all of their tables. Virtually everything is on sale. Up to 70% off, I believe, on a couple of the tables. Most of the stuff is 50% off, I believe. That's for the Steam Autumn sale, but they were also running the sale on Xbox and PSN. I don't know if they were doing it on Switch or not, probably. but again, those things are things that we retweet on our Twitter feed. So get on it. At least follow Zen. You gotta at least follow at Pinball Effects so that you can get some. And at Zen Studios. Yeah, at Zen Studios. Yeah. Alright. So that being said, hey folks, we appreciate you listening to us. As always, we enjoy recording it for you. We will talk to you again next time whenever that might be because, as we mentioned before, it's December. Things are going to start to get hairy. I've got a feeling that I think not next week, and I don't know about the week after. It's going to be interesting. That means I might do a solo show. Oh, boy. Oh, no. We can't have that. I'm going to have to wake at work. I'm going to have to recruit one of... Call Sven and be like, hey, do you want to do a podcast for your one in the morning? Yeah. He'll go, uh, okay. Or maybe I can recruit Greg from Species Arcade. I don't know. We'll figure something out. We're not going to make you go that much of a distance, especially with the game actually releasing on December 4th. Yeah, I've got a birthday on Sunday 2nd and some other stuff. Like we said, we don't know when the next one will be coming out, but we'll hook you up anyway. We'll get something out there, folks. Alright, until next time, bye-bye! wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter bugs easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and play some pinball you