it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teoles you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher and check us out on instagram at pinball profile This is going to be fun for episode 250. We did it for episode 150. Let's do it again. Find out an update from Kaylee George, who joins us right now. Hey, Kaylee, how are you? Hey, how's it going? Or should I call you Kyle as they do it? Maybe the post office and you just roll with it. Yeah, usually people pronounce my name Kyle or something or Kylie. I don't know. Cracks me up. Well, Kaylee, Jorge, I'm glad to have you on here. It's going to be a lot of fun because the last time you were on here, We were certainly talking about exploits. And before we get to that, boy, it's been a pretty good year for you. I know at one point you were the number one player in the world back in 2017, but you've creeped back up into the top ten. Well, you've been there a lot, but what an Indisc performance you had with some major scores there, a win in Classics, a second in the other Classics, and just overall great high stakes in the main Open. You love that tournament, don't you? Yeah, Indisc was awesome. I first started playing that back when it was at a different location, and a bit smaller event whenever I had the opportunity each year to go, and it was great. And the organizers, which kind of started with Carl D'Python Anghelo and Jim Belsito, that's expanded into a bunch of people now that are obviously running that. But those guys are great competitive players, so I think they understand what the good competitive players want out of a tournament, and they understand how to set up games and the risk and reward of choices there and all sorts of great stuff. They like to pick the right formats and all those things. So even just from a conceptual level, it's a great tournament, and then they really execute. So it's really fun to go to that because I think it really provides a good platform for the best competitive pinball. You said they picked the right formats. They're a big believer in the old pop-a-ticket format in which you have to play in the open five games all on one card. Hopefully you don't have a bad one, and then that will determine if you make the open playoffs or not. The ticket, I've said it before, I'll say it again, the hardest format, but the one that really benefits the better, more consistent players. And it showed with all your great finishes there at InDisc. Yeah, I think that's one of the best, and also most grueling qualifying formats. It's super tough. I mean, you can obviously have a really good game, and then a really bad game, and then bust your whole ticket. But for people that don't know, the qualifying format there is about stringing five good games together in one grouping. And those kind of stand as one entry into the tournament. And if you don't do well enough with that, well, you've got to go back and you've got to try a new set of five that stand alone all on their own. And hope that you can get all five games in because you also have the element of going into queue and these queues get longer and longer at certain tournaments. That's true. Luckily for the main event there, somebody should probably be able to play all the main open qualifying entries they want. It gets a bit more hairy for classics, and I'm not sure that that format works so great there with the limited time and single-day tournaments going on there. But it's still a great format to decide who can play good pinball at a consistent level versus who can have one good game here and there. It's funny because my first game on the ticket that actually got me into the playoffs, was terrible, and I thought, I should probably start over again. I know it's the first one, but this is really bad. Definite bleeder, which means every time somebody plays that game, I'm going to lose a point because they're definitely going to beat my score. And I kept it, and I thought, oh, let's just see how I do in the next one. Blew up the next game. I'm like, all right, well, let's see. And it was enough just to squeak in, and I say squeak in. I think the top 40 made the playoffs. I was definitely high 30s. And I had a game on there, Rescue 911, which we saw a lot of people quickly blow up. You avoided doing certain modes. You just kind of shot up the right ramp and rinse and repeat while you're cradling up. I saw Keith Elwin do it, and then everyone started to do it. But that was one of my worst scores on my ticket that counted. So I was like, okay, what am I going to do? I'm going to go back with another ticket and play that game and hopefully do very well on it. Because if I play it, it's not going to affect my score because I'm going to avoid the ticket. and hopefully I'll just make it when the qualifying stops. Well, I played, I think Zach Sharp was next, and then Jack Tadman, and the three of us on that one game played for a combined almost two hours. That sounds about right. So that helped me because that's two hours of people not attacking this score of mine. So there's some real neat strategies, too, when it comes to the tickets. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you'll see a lot of experienced players, you know, They'll play a bit until they get a ticket that they think might be good enough to qualify. And that's kind of like a learned skill. Like, well, what is good enough to qualify? And you might be on Thursday and qualify and go through Saturday. Playing these types of tournaments and qualifying formats, you kind of get a good sixth sense for what's a good score now and how good is that score three days from now? How does that stack up with the rest of the games in my ticket? Players are at this event. how many qualifying spots are there, things like that. And so people usually play until they have a ticket that they think is probably good enough to qualify, and then they might still want to play a little bit more to either boost their qualifying position or hopefully get something better and guarantee their qualifying spot. And they'll often make different game choices there to protect their good ticket. You know, you have over ten games in a bank. You only need to play five on a card. Well, if you have five good games on this one ticket, you can start playing five different games on other tickets because all those scores count against each other. You might get first on one ticket with a bunch of other bad games. Well, that score there, I was eating first place versus anything else you're playing. So there's some interesting decision-making there. Plus, it's also practice, too, in case you have to play those in playoffs. My favorite thing about Indisc, there were a lot of things I loved about it, but it was young Jared August who did very, very well at Expo. And here he is coming to California first time. He plays his first ticket. I think the first game he played might have been Indy 500, a game you own and love. And he blew it up. And he told me that he got maybe one of the highest scores on there. And I said, oh, you did really well. He goes, yeah, I've got that game at home. Mine plays a lot harder. So then he played the rest of the games. And I think he qualified like third or fourth. That's how great his one ticket was. That's not a walk-off shot many of us can say we've done. But that's what Jared August did. And it just made me think of when he talked about my games were set up harder. and somebody once told me about your games and i don't know if this is true so you're on the program right now let's ask you have your games i assume set up very difficult somebody said even two balls or something like that uh yeah i'm not sure if i have any set up right now like that we have uh often i'll put some of my games on two ball just one to kind of like shorten the game times but two it's kind of fun if you've been used to a game that's set on two ball it helps you constrain your strategy on a certain game so if you only have two balls like sometimes you're thinking about strategy and a certain score target on a game and you're kind of thinking about that context with like the three bullets you have to spend to get there you know the three different balls it's going to take when you narrow that down and take one of those away and you're at two ball you start seeing different parts of the strategy to get different scores and that can really help when you're in competition and you have like a house ball ball one it's not so much that like oh i don't care that i got a house ball it's more just like okay that doesn't necessarily impact the scoring strategy that I have or it doesn't necessarily feel different or insurmountable to come back and reach certain score targets. So that can be really great. And setting games apart, I think, is really beneficial as well. The old Papa tournaments for a few years there went pretty apeshit. Setting up their games, incredibly difficult, to the extent that it was kind of egregious and not necessarily even competitive at times in their qualifying setups. But, you know, that forced a lot of players, competitive players, to go home and set their games up extremely hard. We're talking about, like, pulling out line posts, swapping flippers for shorter flippers, really tight tilts, really steep playfields, really hard rules installs. Once you start playing on games like that at home, you know, I mean, I can go up to any attack from Mars at any tournament pretty much and play it, and I'm just like, wow, this plays easier. Because of how you're used to it. Yeah, or any game that I own, you know. It's like, oh, well, I've played the hardest game X. there's no way this one is any worse than that. So when you're talking about game choices, you're thinking about, oh, do I want to pick this or that in a finals, or this or that in a qualifying? Well, if you play the hard version of something, the very hard version of something, it's pretty rare that something you're going to come across in the wild is any harder than that. And if you're comfortable on the hard one, then you're good to go. It's funny because I see newer players go to a tournament, and they do very well in their leagues, let's say, or maybe on their home machines, and they go to a tournament where there are difficult setups, and they're just cursing the games or not even so much their own play, but they haven't realized the games have been altered. Rubbers off, ball saves removed, center posts, all of those type of things. I remember going to ECS last year and playing Batman. I thought, okay, I can put up a decent score. And this is not a ticket, but you had to put up 10 good scores. So really it is like a ticket, right? Because you had to play 10 different games. For sure. Batman 66. See if you can beat this at home. 2 million. that's what i put up because they removed outlanes on i think every ball went into an outlane immediately you had tight slings too never saw a multiball never saw a tv mode might have got lucky with one ramp who knows i don't even know how i got two million probably missed some skill shots too but it was that bad and i was like that just really destroyed my game but you got to get used to the things that might have been a little bit of overkill when it came to making the machine difficult, but you've got to get used to it at these tournaments. A lot of players will come up to a game that's set up difficult like that. Most players, even experienced ones, will play a game like they're used to playing it at first. You might be used to taking a certain skill shot or plunging a certain way, and then you kind of have your rollout, or what's your initial gambit for that game? And then the game is set up different or set up very hard or something like that and you get completely destroyed. Well, you can't look at that and say, okay, this game sucks or is set up terrible or whatever. You have to look at it like, oh, it's set up this way. What strategies do I have to play it different? On Batman 66, that might be, oh, maybe you normally plunge to the pops for whatever reason. Maybe you start plunging super skill shots and loop past the ball into a cradle on the right or live trap it or something like that. And depending on which feeds you're doing what, maybe you're deciding that the only risky shot you're going to take is to start your major villain or something. So you shoot Catwoman ramps and then the first out-of-control shot is up the middle to start that. You're going to be very calculated about when you start that TV mode off those right targets, because that's going to send the ball out of control every time. There are certain players that might just be used to just plunging away, shooting TV targets, and that's it. It's funny because I have a game at home, ACDC, and when I play at home, I'm always going for Encore, which when I play ACDC in a league or in a tournament or a pump and dump, I forget how to play the proper way because I'm used to doing what I'm doing at home, and that might not be the best strategy. so you really have to know the formats that you're in like a case in point escher who just won pin masters on star wars when he got the hole in one to win it he took the leia strat now if he's at a pump and dump i don't know if he'll do that strategy he'll probably do r2d2 i would assume but because he had a target score of getting 250 million and trying to do that in one ball which he did leia strat was the best way to do that so you really have to know the format of the tournament the game setup, and really, is it match play? Is it a pump and dump? Because those are different attack modes for you as a player when it comes to playing that game. Absolutely. Yeah, and that's critical. Yeah, the Leia thing in Star Wars is hilarious. For people that don't know, you pick a different character up front in that game, and then they alter kind of which state of the game is kind of pre-completed in terms of the different modes of Hoth and Endor and Death Star and things like that, which modes are available. And there's also some obfuscated background scoring crap going on that is completely not transparent to the player at all, but exists. And one of the things with choosing Leia is that shots to light modes, not necessarily within the modes, the shots to light them are actually increased in value substantially. So in that game where, you know, head-to-head or in match play, You might, you know, a billion points might be a really good score. But, you know, getting a couple hundred million is pretty solid. You know, and you pick Glea and you just light three different modes, you're at about 250 million. That's not even playing them. So it's only about nine shots. So something like pin golf, that's a great strategy or even head-to-head play. You are the kind of guy, I assume, if I were going around Seattle, I would see your high score, your GCs on many different games. But when you're playing something like Pinberg, and you've done very well there before as well, that's a match play type tournament. So what are your strategies on those? I guess it really depends on the games, but you're probably not going for GCs. You're probably looking for some quick points, some safe points, too, to not take a zero in that game. What do you do, Kaylee? Yeah so in a tournament like Pinberg you really trying to protect your position in the tournament and play well at all times And you're trying to avoid playing poorly. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going for GCs or destroying every single game you're playing. And so it's actually somewhat similar to the Papa card qualifying format, where you want to show consistency and not a lot of variability. So if you're player four and you're on ball three, and right now you're currently sitting in last, but the next objective to get one point is to beat that person in third place, but you know with a couple of risky shots, I can take first. What's going through your head at that point? You do those things in order. First, you gain ground a little bit at a time. First, you take third. Then you take second. Then you go for first. You don't try and go for first right away. Okay, that's good to know. So you think about a game like Attack from Mars. We roll up on that on Pinbird. Let's say it's an attack I've never played before. Regardless of what the other players do, because there's basically nothing I'm going to see on that game that changes the way I play, I'm thinking, at minimum, I want to get a lock on every single ball. That means by the time I get to ball three, I'll lock ball three, I'll start a multiball, and in multiball anything can happen. Like I could roll through five supers and blow the game up. I would definitely have the opportunity to probably take third, second, or first at any time in that multiball by just playing better. And that just opens the game up for a lot of scoring opportunity. Progress for Total Nuclear Annihilation? Yeah, and Total Nuclear Annihilation is dead to me. Really? I get thrown out the window. Yeah, why would I want to shoot four different shots when I can just shoot one all day? I don't know. Okay. Yeah, like Total Nuclear Annihilation, you're hunting to dial in essentially every shot on the play field in single ball play before you get to a multiball. Regular multiball on attack, you're hunting for one single shot repetitively in single ball play. And then once you start multiball, you hunt for the other ones. So in terms of walking up to a game cold, it's much nicer to dial in on one thing, get consistent on that. And then while you have less risk and you have more balls in play, then do the exploration of finding the other shots in the play field. If I can ask you a question, when you have ball save on attack from Mars, which depending on the tournament, you probably won't if it's a higher end tournament. But if you're going for the super skill shot, are you going for that barrier three or the right ramp, which completes all of those difficult shots? I'm curious. Definitely going for the force field on the saucer. There's a lot of value in having that force field down. The first time you get into a multiball would be when I'm starting to shoot at the saucer. One, you're going to get good points out of saucer one during that multiball. Two, you have an opportunity to lock a ball behind there for dirty pool, which means you could potentially be playing a multiball in single ball play. Three, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier about kind of like progressively adjusting your goals in match play like that. My first goal might be to get to multiball. And then depending on the other player's scores, it might be to get to another multiball. and then another multiball, and I'm kind of progressively trying to get towards first place or something like that in that tournament. But at some point, you know, there's going to be times in Attack from Mars when you're hitting some of those other shots. It's not like I'm not good enough to only ever shoot the lock. I wish I was. But, you know, at some point, you might only have a couple shots left to Total Nuclear Annihilation. And at that point, then the risk-reward totally flips. Then it's like, well, I've got six shots to start a multiball, but I've got three shots to start Total Nuclear Annihilation. I've already played a bunch of multiballs. I've felt out all the shots in the play field. I'm going to go ahead and try and complete total and play that. Less shots, I know where they're all at. At that point, you definitely want to try and pick it up with the highest hurry-up value to start that mode. And if you've deleted the right ramp from that, then your possibility of getting a billion payoff on starting Total Nuclear Annihilation is gone. So you're kind of pulling points out of the long game by completing that right ramp. And also, it's kind of dead to me until way deep in the game anyways. So I don't really think about it until then. Makes sense. That's good. Speaking of AFM, what do you think of the 2020 version, Stranger Things? Is that what we're calling Stranger Things? I think that's like an insult to Attack from Mars. Stranger Things. There's a lot of similarities there, no question about it. Certainly same designer, too. A lot of the same layouts, but your thoughts on Stranger Things? Stranger Things is, you know, there was, like, one of Stern's, like, dark periods was when they, like, released, like, NBA, coming into, like, Avatar, things like that, you know? It's like, I don't know the real details, but, you know, people were like, oh, like, is Stern going to survive, you know? Downturn's got these types of problems, you know, they're not selling a lot of games, they're having to pump out games that are simpler, stuff like that. It's funny that Stern's gone through, like, a boom now, and my understanding is that they're doing very well, and then they released, like, a donkey, like Stranger Things, which is like one of the least inspired playfields I've seen in a long time. And it doesn't feel good or shoot well. And the rules are terrible. And the main toy in the game is also a big donkey. Like, how did that leave the factory? Like, every single Stranger Things out there, it's almost impossible to shoot the ball into the little hole on the Demogorgon. Kaylee, what do you really think? But I don't know. It's like it's as if somebody was asked to make a game and then they said, OK, great. The best way to make this is to send you off and put you in a little box off to the side and you're not going to interact with anybody and nobody's going to give you feedback and you're just going to make something. And then you're going to come back to manufacturing with revision 0.1 and we're going to build that. there's so much stuff on that game where it just seems like did anybody even play it before they made it? Because everybody who's played it says the same stuff. I don't see how they didn't hear that internally. It's really weird. I don't understand it. I'll just remind everybody, as I do on every single pinball profile, this is a chance for my guests to offer their opinions. I don't always agree or disagree with anybody. I just let people, I believe in freedom of speech. So, Kaylee, this is your floor. Let's dig into something interesting on Stranger Things real quick. Okay. So, where are the codes at now? I've played through the whole game. I mean, technically, I guess you could call them the mini wizard modes, and you could technically call it the wizard mode. But, hey, spoiler alert, they just award points. Okay, so if you get through every mode on Stranger Things, and you light the mini wizard mode, when you go ahead and start that, it awards you a shitty amount of points, and then that's it, and you get to continue. And then you go to the next mini-wizard mode, and you get a shitload of points, and then you get to continue. And then if you've done everything to get to the main wizard mode in the game, it just awards you points. So, like, as somebody who is a software developer, I don't understand it. Like, that game has a mode that is trying to be an homage to Total Nuclear Annihilation, which is their total isolation mode. It's a multiball. It actually has some interesting rules. It's worth some good points, and it's kind of cool. Why would they not duplicate that mode, essentially? maybe put a scoring multiplier on it and lay it into those mini wizard and wizard modes per version 0.1 or whatever the code is at now, rather than just ripping the player off with point awards. It doesn't make sense to me. It just strikes me as being lazy. Well, Kaylee, you know, they're still at early code. They're not quite there yet. So when you offer this opinion, and others do, maybe they'll listen. Maybe there'll be some changes. Case in point, Black Knight Sword of Rage. You were at Expo Flipout. You were seventh in that big tournament in Chicago in October, and you saw what happened when Alexander Kazmarchuk and Escher just beat the living hell out of that premium Black Knight sort of rage, but they've since made some changes to that. So when you offer opinions about Stranger Things and other games, I have a feeling some of the designers, some of the coders, like yourself, might listen and go, okay, yeah, that's a to-do list we have to work on. Sure, yeah, and I don't think, I mean, I'm sure everything I've mentioned, they already know. You know, it's things that they're already thinking about and already wanting to do. And it's not necessarily fair to say, hey, why did you step in, you know, this point award for this? I mean, you know, also as somebody who's worked in similar industries and software stuff, like there's always reasons that you're doing certain things when you're shipping software. You have all sorts of different costs to weigh and you're always having to make hard decisions and you're trying to ship on time and you have to pick X over Y, you know. So that all makes sense. But it's tough when, you know, in pinball, when people are getting these games, they're going out there and, you know, the fun of a pinball game is the discovery of the rules, the adventure of finding your path through the game and discovering, you know, how to score well. And, you know, you only get kind of a few shots to have a player's first time hands on with different modes or different games. And when they run into roadblocks that are a disappointment, that's tough to come back from. But yeah, looking at Black Knight, it's an exciting game because there's been other Black Knights, and this is the third one. Just kind of like that from a high level sounds really cool. I don't think that that game has landed well. Even with the code updates, it's hard to put your finger on why a game is or isn't fun. But I think for me, that one comes down to the layout feels uninteresting to me. And I'm not sure that they can fix that in software, which is pretty rare for me to say, because I actually think you can probably fix any game in software. But so far, Black Knight hasn't done it. Black Knight has something that a lot of games are showing nowadays. And I've talked about it before, but I've never asked someone like yourself. I talk about that action button. Now, in the case of Black Knight, it's not that big of a deal. It's for MagnaSave, although I think I might have a 10% success rate on that thing because my hand is nowhere near that when the ball needs to be done. I think of Star Wars where it's basically a video game trying to hit TIE fighters. I'm okay on things like Jurassic Park. Big deal. You know, the ball stopped. It's a missile. No big deal. Your thoughts on buttons that are not at the side of the cabinet? Yeah, it makes sense why it's there on Black Knight, right? You can't retool everything in your manufacturing line individually for each game. You know, you've already got a third button on a lock bar just sitting there on a shelf. You can use it in your game. you need a third button, well, why not use the one on the lock bar, right? So it makes sense why they would choose to do that. I think it's an unfortunate choice for Black Knight because it's a novelty to put it there versus an actual useful thing to the majority of players. You know, it's really difficult to identify that the ball is in jeopardy, make the decision that you need a Magna Save, then move your hand over to the middle of the game in time to hit that to resurrect it. You know, that's a skill that you can develop, but it's extremely difficult. and so much so that it kind of feels like a rip-off because you almost feel like, oh, I recognized it was going to drain and I wanted to get the Magna Save, but then I didn't have the time and it's in the middle and it's annoying and like, man, that just sucks. But I think like there's opportunities there for that middle button to do cool things. I think it's less about it being a single action and more about it being an interesting choice for the player. I would have preferred to see that developed into something like getting a ball saved by the Magna Save is worth something really cool. And I know that there's a rule now where, like, if you hit the MagnaSafe button and then it rolls over the right in-lane switch, it gives you some stuff. But it's not actually detecting whether there was a MagnaSafe. It's just looking for that circumstance. So you can shoot it by shooting a ramp or something and hitting the MagnaSafe and having it go down there and give you that stuff. But, yeah, I just think that, you know, there's opportunities to dig into the creativity of what's going on with that button and turn it into interesting choices for the player rather than one-off actions. Well, tell me something. I know we've talked before about games that you feel should really benefit the skilled player versus some random luck. And when we were talking before about certain formats and lineups of banks, some EMs that may be all house balls certainly don't favor the skilled player, and there may be some luck. Think of volley. If you can plunge five balls on that game and not hit all three lanes up top, you're at a major disadvantage. Mitch, I wonder, in the last five years, we're talking modern games right now, what are some of those games, Kayla, you think really benefit the random or lucky player versus skilled player? Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I think, like, when you talk about which games are random or lucky, I think just that it takes more time to determine who is the most skilled player on certain games than others. So if you look at older, say, electromechanical games like Volley, those can determine who is the best player on them. say, in a competitive format. I think just that a lot of people refer to them as lucky because if you played like one ball on them, it might not be the best judge of who's the best at that game. But if you played a thousand balls on it, that'd probably be a pretty good determining factor of who's the most skilled player there. Now, on a more modern game, it might not take a thousand balls. It might take only ten balls or only three games or something like that or whatever. That's probably an exaggeration of the disparity there. Do you know that's a game, whenever it's in a pump and dump. I refuse to play it. As much as I love volley, I played it in league the other night. I put up, I think, 260, so a really good score. And obviously, in that game, I must have hit those lanes early on and then just start pegging off the targets, hopefully one at a time, as opposed to hitting two at once and not getting that extra 5,000 points. But at a pump and dump, I refuse to play it because of the, I don't want to say luck factor, but if you're not getting that center lane and maybe going up, hitting the pop and going back up and down and up and down and getting a few points that way forget it Look at all the scores at pump and dumps for volleys and they all kind of 130 is a decent score if you playing in match play let say but it might not even make the top 50 in a pump and dump. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's things there which, like, I think one of the things that makes some of those older games feel lucky is that, you know, The ways in which you might score big sometimes seem to come down to things that were not necessarily in the player's control or maybe just like physical random chance that opened up an opportunity for bigger scoring. You know, you plunge on volley and you get some of the rollovers, but maybe you just need that one and you get some pop bumper action and it throws it up. And oh, gosh, all of a sudden on ball one, you've completed all the colors, you know. and that was just through some nice chants through the pops or something like that. And I think where you see some of the common threads with that in modern games, where I think they do favor, quote-unquote, some luck, or require more games to determine who is better, are the games that have leveraged things like scoring multipliers in ways that can be activated repeatedly without player intent. So look at a game like Stern NBA. You've got scoring multipliers On the MVP drop targets Which are kind of straight up the middle of the playfield And they can be hit by the ball Just exiting where the plunge is In the pops So you can have a player who's like down against another player They get into a multiball They're about to shoot a super Ball randomly hits MVP Starts it, they weren't trying to do it They hit the super jackpot Everything happens to drain out at the same time Oh look, they won by 100,000 points Right? And that's just because they got a double super. Were they trying to get a double super? No. Did they just randomly get one? Yes. And I think that's unfortunate. You know, you see, like, I think one of the really cool things that the guys at Stern have kind of developed over the last years is realizing how cool it is to do, you know, set up risk and rewarding games based on multipliers. You know, you see Batman 66. You can, like, determine where you want multipliers all over the play field. You can get play field multipliers and multipliers on top of multipliers. And that gets really exciting. and that's probably the apex of crazy multiplier choice. And then you have something like Star Wars where you're determining where you want at the playfield and you're selecting which multiplier is where, but at the same time, balls randomly hitting some stupid stand-up grid boost the value. You can watch two players play that game and somebody can be at 40x playfield and somebody can be at 2x and they've essentially done nothing different. It's just how flaily they've been against some stand-up targets and that's bullshit. Kayla, you've been a top player for so long, but do you see the end of days coming soon? Because this year you turned 40 and it's all about the youth now. Ouch. Hey, you know, in-disc shows, I'm still relevant. So I'll just leave it at that. But what do you think about all these great young players? I mean, look at that Expo alone, the top four all under the age of 19. Yeah, well, I think it's great. It just shows that there's a whole new generation of players that are interested in pinball. And pinball's great. It's not about age or sex, anything, race. It's about people enjoying games, playing them well. We're starting to see a lot of players from all sorts of different walks of life and age in the competitive community, and I think that's really awesome. And it's really cool to see these young players who are extremely talented getting the opportunity to show off their play. We're definitely seeing the growth in young players. We're definitely seeing the growth in women players. And your wife, Yasmin, she is an outstanding player. I like that both of you are great players, but also I want to point out I really enjoy when you both are commentating. Yeah, it's always fun. Commentary is great. Usually I'll get on there and about 30 minutes later the hook will come in and pull me off the microphone for bagging on the gameplay too much. You were calling shots, I noticed, during Pinmasters. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Sometimes the sixth sense pops up and you're seeing ten bounces ahead. It's always nice to call it out when somebody's got about five seconds left in their ball. Yeah. But it's a real thing. You can watch the body language of players, and sometimes when they're in certain situations where there's a lot of pressure or certain things are developing on the play field, you can tell that they are extremely uncomfortable and out of their regular gameplay style with what's happening on the playfield. And usually that just is an indicator that their ability to execute has gone way down, and their ability to essentially problem-solve on the playfield has also hit its all-time low. And so usually that just is a good indicator that things are going to potentially go south quickly. It's funny because those people that don't know you and maybe watch you play, they think of you as this really serious player. And obviously you're concentrating, and that's true. But to me, you're a real prankster, actually. You've got a great sense of humor. And maybe some people don't realize when you're joking and you're not joking. I get it. Yeah. I don't know. It's all about having fun, right? Yeah, I like goofing around. I love having a good time. Even during competition, keeping things lighthearted. There's a joke here in the Seattle pinball scene about asserting dominance over another player. And the best way to do that is when you're a shot away from winning a match versus somebody. You trap the ball up, you look away from the game and look at the player, and you shoot the shot without looking at the play field. That's how you assert dominance in a match. That's pretty cool. Well, that's dropping the bomb for sure. That's awesome. And, you know, half the time that results in a break to train, which is even funnier, which keeps the whole thing lighthearted, right? So it's good. Yeah. So the last time you were on this program, now everybody's waiting for the Cayley exploits. We talked about whodunit. We talked about Congo, CSI, Theater of Magic. Yes, Indy 500. Well, Indy 500, you said there was an exploit out there that no one has found. that you were last on here in a full program almost two years ago. Has anybody found that exploit? No, nobody has. So get wrecked. I still got that one in my back pocket. One of these days there's going to be an intentional multiball plus turbo boost and some stream, and the cat will be out of the bag. So we'll see when that happens. Some stack, right? Yeah, so come on, start putting Indy 500 in tournaments, and maybe we'll see it. It'd be good. It was at Indisc. You didn't have a chance to use it there? Yeah, you know, I played Indy 500 in my qualifying run, but didn't get an opportunity to get towards it in finals, which was fine. It's actually a tough game to pick in finals. There's kind of a lot to weigh there with, you know, that one was set up nice and mean and hard and tough, and the risk of, you know, making sure you get to multi-malls and can execute and stuff like that can be pretty tough, especially with, like, the outline super wide and things like that. So it wasn't too high on my list of picks. Have you dropped an exploit since we last talked in the summer of 2018? No, I don't think so. I mean, gosh, there's been a lot of nice new games. Maybe you're running out. Stern's doing a good job of validating everything the moment you plunge out of the shooter line. But there's still some out there. I noticed that with Keith, too, especially on Iron Maiden, on some of the secret skill shots, too. Even if you just hold up a flipper, it's gone. I thought that was pretty clever. Yeah, I think it's good. I like it. It's good times. I think there's something just to be learned kind of from like a game development standpoint that what's interesting about, you know, kind of some of the more goofier exploits on games like playing with Valid Playfield on Jackbot or, you know, some of these other ones, it's less about like, you know, the fun there isn't coming from the fact that it's like an unintended way to play the game. The fun's coming there because there's a really interesting strategy that the player can come up with and that there's clear rules around how they can execute it and there's potentially big payoffs or rewarding payoffs for doing things that aren't necessarily front and center in the game. And I think that's really fun. There's been games in the past where there's been unintentional scoring opportunities that have been coded out later and the games have gotten worse for it. Like, absolutely. Like, I don't even think you can argue. Like, look at 24, for example. It wasn't necessarily something that took a lot of knowledge to pull off, but the nuke jackpot in that game used to be huge, and that was based on some error where it would build over time across multiple games rather than being reset at the start of each match. And that actually made that game super fun. It was extremely hard to get the nuke jackpot, and when you did, it was super valuable, and it would build even more for the next one, and it made the game, like, awesome. And then it got nerfed down to a value where it's not interesting at all, and the game is super boring. It was really the only redeeming factor of that game was the nuke jackpot. Not the call-outs? Yeah, the call-outs that suck and are one of the worst of all time. Yeah, you've also got that going, too. I'm not sure why most games don't literally look to Attack from Mars as the poster child for amazing multiball call-outs and do that. The player wants the game to scream and get excited, and it should do that. I recently had Saron on who does a lot of those modified ROMs. And what do you think of his mods? And also, what is missing that needs to be fixed because of exploits we don't know about yet? You got to give us some goods here. Yeah. For the most part, I think I dislike the ROMs that he's done. What? Yeah. I like when he's fixed very clear bugs, like detrimental bugs. Okay. Stuff like, bonus on this game doesn't score the same for all the players. Things like that. A place where maybe you would get in a state where a mode won't start because X, Y, and Z, and now it just works the way it should. Or the game can get in a bad state with unlimited ball save, and now that's no longer a possibility. Those are good. Game-breaking bugs, those things are nice. In a number of cases, a lot of those mods basically are just like, hey, I've fixed this game, quote-unquote fixed, by changing all these rules. And that's cool as just like a side ROM or an interesting experiment. But aren't they done for equal playing fields? Like something like Radical too, so that it's the same for everyone? Yeah, so there's stuff like that, again, like giving the option for a ROM where there's a fixed jackpot or something. That's cool. That's fine. No problem with that. What about Sudden Death on roller games? because, I mean, that's not fair if somebody gets sudden death and the other person doesn't. Yeah, sure. You know, that's cool. Let's just say that anything that reduces randomness in a game, fine. That's great. Good. But when you're talking about, like, essentially saying that this game is bad and we've changed the rules so that scoring strategy X, Y, or Z is no longer as valuable because of personal opinion and it's been changed in certain ways. I mean, let's look at Theater of Magic, right? It's like, oh, shooting the left orbit has been determined as a strategy that is not interesting to certain people. So now there's a ROM floating around out there where that's been changed. OK, but not only has that been changed, like a number of other things going on in the game have been changed. And it just it's just boring. And also, I think there's there's something to be said about, you know, there's enough games out there that are competitive in all sorts of different ways. Some games kind of require you to do, quote-unquote, the thing to really blow it up or, you know, to be competitive. Okay, what about newer games? They're doing updates all the time and scoring changes on things. I mean, you look at a game like Ghostbusters and Game of Thrones, those recent code updates really changed the game entirely. Yeah, and, you know, I think that's fine. That's just iteration on a product, you know, by a designer. I mean, let's look at this example. There was a funny, you know, you can look through the old rec.game.pinball archives chats, and people would always discuss Whitewater. And they would talk about how 5X Playfield on Whitewater has a bug. And they would say, when you get 5X Playfield and you shoot the multiball lock to start multiball, the timer's counting down in the background, and that's a bug. So when I start the multiball at 20 seconds, and then by the time it serves the ball to the upper flipper, I've only got 12 seconds left. this is the worst bug ever. It's like, really? Like, are you sure? Because to me, that just seems like part of the fallout of like the risk and reward of how that game was. Maybe it wasn't intentional by the programmer, but maybe the programmer also just didn't care because you could be burning those seconds to do something else. You could be going for Bigfoot Hotfoot. You could be going for River Raft Awards at 5X. But no, you decided to go for Multiball, and with Multiball comes the price of burning a number of seconds off your 5x multiplier, right? So there's been ROM updates that people have done where it's like that doesn't happen or there's a ball save for X, Y, or Z. And it been touted as like a fix for the ROM And it just like things like that Who cares Like the game works fine you know And that actually a good example where one of those ROM updates actually made it when you hit the Bigfoot hotfoot targets there was this chance where the game could reset. You know, so all these people were putting this ROM out in tournaments for a while there, and then games were resetting under really weird circumstances. So it was almost like this update was infecting the pinball community. Well, ROM updates aside, I think what we've just learned from that is not about the different variations of the games. Kaylee, do you do character voices? That was quite an impression there. I do do voice acting here and there. That is true. Okay, you've got to give us some exploits. People are waiting. Oh, gosh, yeah. Earn your pay, kid. There was a good one on Munsters, but they fixed that, right? Yeah, that's right. I should stop telling people about the goods and all the good exploits that are out there. There was a great one on Munsters where you light these super jackpots at the collect on the left, and when you shoot it in there, you have an opportunity to cancel it by holding down the lock bar button because you may want to stack more supers, which makes them more valuable, and wait until later to collect them. Well, there was an exploit where you could shoot it in there, and if you held down the button and canceled it at the right time, they would remain active, but you would still get their reward. So you could collect them multiple times. Okay, that's been fixed, but how did you know when that perfect time was? Well, I don't know. He programmed games enough. You come to recognize areas where there might be some wiggle room and things. Usually people are basing stuff like scoring events. Well, sometimes people are basing things like scoring events off like animations, when those are completing. You need to put checks in there for different things. Yeah, there was something about the way the animations were all running in there where it seemed suspect that there might be a window of opportunity to let that collect and also kill it, and sure enough, it was there. You know what you remind me of? You remind me of that movie Catch Me If You Can, where that guy, a true story, where the guy was finding weaknesses in banks or whatever and foraging and all that kind of stuff. And then finally, the government hired the guy to fix everything. That's going to be you. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I just really, I think what I enjoy most about those type of opportunities in games is really just the discovery of interesting strategy in pinball. and it doesn't have to be an exploit or something unintended, but I think that's what makes a lot of games really fun is being able to kind of look at the rule set and figure out the things that you think are best when you weigh risk and reward and come up with your strategy about how to execute there. There's something interesting actually about it that I can't really put my finger on with Iron Maiden. I think it's a really good game. The key put together. I really like the rules, I like the play field, I like everything there. There's something about that game where it's extremely well-balanced. I think kind of outside of going for world record, huge, amazingly crushing scores, if you kind of choose an avenue in which you want to execute in that game, it's going to be effective towards getting a very good score. If you're plowing through modes, you're going to get to two minutes to midnight, and that's going to give you a lot of scoring opportunity. If you're stacking modes with multiballs, that's going to give you a good amount of scoring. If you're just shooting stuff on the playfield, you're going to get towards a really good multiball by completing all the power items. There's kind of no bad choices in that game as long as you're shooting shots. And that's actually kind of funny. I found that I think I enjoy that game less because it's hard to choose something that I think is better to do than the rest. Do you think there's less strategy? I think what makes the game great is, though, it still requires amazing skill. It does. I still think there is strategy. It's different. And for some reason, I haven't quite mastered it on that game. So I think my parachute there is just shoot loops, and that's good enough. Way to poke the bear, Kaylee. I'm dying to see the next time you and Keith play each other. Oh, well, he'll just destroy me, as usual. So I don't know what my winning average is versus him, but I think he beats me 8-1 or something. So that's fine. Join the club. although most of us don't have the one. Anyway, all right, let's talk some other exploits. One of the all-time greatest games ever, you see it on the top five of Pinside, if not at the top sometimes, Monster Bash. All right, what's up with Monster Bash, Kaylee? All right, so Monster Bash has kind of an amazing exploit in it, which is really fun. It does give you a pretty substantial amount of extra points, but it's not completely game-breaking. So, you know, in Monster Bash, you have the different characters from Universal, and you're kind of like starting each monster mode. And if you started all the monster mode, you get to play Bash, which is a good multiball. It's kind of the mini wizard mode. And if you played all the monsters and gotten their instrument, well, you get to play Monsters of Rock, which is the big wizard mode where all the monsters play music and you get a bunch of points. Okay, so it's possible to have some of the instruments and have played all of the characters, and then you can go play Bash. And then when you do that, it's possible to kind of finish the instruments during that and then transition to Rock. So with Frankenstein's character, he plays a multiball, and you need to Bash him enough times to collect his keyboard. Well, the multiball is over, and the keyboard has not been collected. then Frankenstein will give you an opportunity to kind of like continue his mode in single ball play to try and give you a last chance opportunity to get that keyboard. Well, the game state you can set up is play every monster except Frankenstein. Which is weird. Normally you stack that. Yeah, so you play every monster except Frankenstein. And then what you do is you have Frankenstein be your last monster to play. And you start Frankenstein and you get him close to completing his keyboard. but you don't complete it on purpose. You trap a ball up and you dump all the other balls in the drain. Now, what's going to happen is multiball's going to end, bash is going to light up the scoop, but also Frankenstein's going to open up and say, hey, don't you want to finish your keyboard? So you shoot it up that ramp. It starts the last chance for Frankenstein. Before you complete that keyboard, you dump it in the scoop for bash. Now, the state that happens there is, a lot of people don't know, but you can collect multiple keyboards during Frankenstein's multiball. Well, now you've stacked Last Chance Frankenstein with Bash, which means that for the totality of Bash, you can collect as many keyboards as you want. So you can jack the number of keyboards way up. Then when you go into Rock later on, you get an extra payoff of $5 million per keyboard, and you get a big payday. Holy cow. So you want to see how you get 35 keyboards in Monster Bash. That's how you do it. I can't believe that hasn't come out in all the years that Monster Bash has been around but I guess it's because people go for that Frankenstein right off the bat to try to stack it with Wolf or something Yeah, absolutely People are getting pretty good at eliminating a lot of the big exploits but there's some fun stuff that's been left in in a lot of games, even some of the new ones that lets you get into very rare opportunities where you can stack different things with stuff that normally seem like they can't stack. Like on Batman 66, you can stack your TV wizard modes with villain escape, which seems impossible to do up front, but under the right circumstances, you can make it happen. And actually, Raymond Davidson figured this one out, which is great. And I'm sure other people have as well. But the way that works is you've got TV wizard mode, you need to complete a TV mode from each season, and when you do that, it lights the left orbit for a wizard mode. And Villain Escape, you complete all the villains, the major villains, and it lights a mode up left orbit that's big. What you can do is you can set up your TV wizard modes. The last thing you're playing is Egghead from Season 2, which is a mode that you can complete or set up to complete by pressing the button on the lock bar. And you can start that mode, then complete your last major villain, set up Villain Escape on the left orbit and start that. During the first stage of Villain Escape, you can complete your egghead by hitting the action button, and then you can complete the final shot and start your TV Wizard on the left orbit, and now you stack it with Villain Escape. So, enjoy. Although, the debate is actually whether it's better to just stack that egghead with Villain Escape. That's how you get, like, 100 billion Egghead collects. I had a funny discussion once with somebody running tournaments, and I said, oh, this game's not in tournament mode. And they said, what do you mean it's not in tournament mode? And I'm like, well, the awards aren't random in this. It's clearly not in tournament mode. And they're like, but I turned off extra balls. And I'm like, but did you turn on tournament mode? And they're like, yes, with a weird smile. And I'm like, well, let's check it out. And so we go into the menu and I go to tournament on off and they're like, what's that? And I'm like, that's tournament mode. Like there's people that like, you know, are running a lot of events and don't understand yet, you know, all the technical details of setting up machines and stuff like that. And that's totally cool because, you know, it takes a while to learn all this different stuff. But they'll see online somebody post like this is the tournament ROM or something like that. Just be like, oh, well, I guess I should be using this in tournaments because it's the tournament ROM. right? But the decision making behind it or something might not be, might not be clear to them. So I've seen a lot of events where people are just like, Oh, well we got the latest, the latest whatever for this. Cause it's a thing. And it's like, but you know, this, this and this. And they're like, Oh, I didn't know that. Yep. So, so I'm not sure whether or not we'll see any of these exploits coming up at a future tournaments when they may happen. But I know there are formats you certainly love. You've talked at end about loving the pop a ticket format. Is there one that you're not a big fan of, the format? Yeah, that's a good question. I pretty much like most of the major formats out there. Some people will say that some formats are less competitive or favor players with deeper pockets. That's usually what's said about a pump and dump tournament, but when you look at the stats and the results, players that usually do well in one format, pretty much are doing well in the other formats. So I think most of the major formats out there, Papa Style, Pump and Dump, long match play tournaments, you know, those are all nice and competitive. The ones that I don't like, or the one that I don't like, are short, very constrained four-player match play tournaments. Usually those consist of, like, players are put into four-player groups, and you play on a game, and it's one game, and you get points, and you do that for like five to seven games for the whole qualifying, and then people qualify and play head to head or more match play or something. Like, I think like seven games of match play is a total joke. That's like as if we decided to decide who qualifies at Pinburgh after two and a half rounds or two rounds, you know, like that seems ridiculous. In that scenario, are you talking about that match play being set up Swiss or the better players play the better players or random, which I find you can get lucky depending on who you play? Yeah, I've played both ways. Most of the ones I seem to encounter are set up the Swiss style where you're playing the players that have a closer point total to yourself. But I don't think it really matters. I just think with that amount of data, so to speak, it's less conclusive. And there's a lot more value placed on the random picks of game in that event because you're not necessarily going to play all the games usually at a location there, and some players are going to align with more or less playable games. Usually formats like that are run on locations and not like a dedicated weekend tournament that's being set up. And so that often means that there are games in various states of disrepair. so you get on a game that's just funky or broken in some way, maybe even just minor, and that all adds up to making that experience, I think, less desirable. You want to talk about a format where you play random games. That would be flip frenzies, which are really huge. Have you played many of those? I've never played flip frenzy. I remember it being discussed, and I've read about it. I don't know if this is the case, but the only place I ever heard of it being played in the past was in Japan, and now I hear people playing it around here, and I just don't see the appeal. Like, it seems like the biggest, like, I don't know, just like, I don't know, donut of a tournament. Like, you just, like, spam games and then somebody wins? Like, Jesus. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I can get what you're describing. I find the perfect flip frenzy match, dedicated time, and probably a minimum of two and a half hours. Okay. Okay, and then you have to have a playoff format. Have to, have to, have to. because unlike Swiss, you could be playing whomever. You could be playing whatever machine and playing that several times. If there's a mix of newer and older games, you might be stuck on a newer game. Like imagine you and Zach Sharp playing Batman 66, both playing long game. Well, you guys might be on there for 45 minutes while other people have played eight games. Yeah, I just think like pinball should celebrate playing pinball.