Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today's Sunday, June 4th. It's episode 36. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk to you about our normal things. What are those things, Tony? that their table thing with the ball and the flippers, the things go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, and those things them no good kids like or they play with, and it's got the dutes and the beeps and the stuff. Oh, okay. So robots. Exactly, robots. Awesome. I don't trust them. I don't trust those machine overlords. But before we get into our robotic discussions, let's go ahead and get our intros out of the way. Tony, it's been two weeks. What's going on? Oh, I've been playing a little bit of the Battletech beta, which I'll talk about later in the video games. I have been burning through large sections of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere books. Specifically, I just finished his short story anthology and my reread, or in this case, we listen to his, one of the little Cosmere sections, because Cosmere's got, you know, like Mistborn and Elantris and Warbreaker and Shard. And that's the one, so I've been burning through just one or two of them at a time. Been getting, starting to clean the house up because we're going to have guests next weekend. so we have to do some cleaning or a lot of cleaning. Yeah, I know how that is. That is about all I've really been up to. I mean, in work, I was on call last week, so I spent most of my time staring at the work computer going, please don't call, I don't want to go to work. Did you luck out? There was a lot of rain. I'd never had to go in due to the rain, but man, I took a lot of phone calls. I was very short on sleep last week. Yeah. But I was able to fix most everything just sitting at the computer. I didn't have to go in and actually do anything. Okay, good. Well, I have made no XCOM 2 progress, well, next to no XCOM 2 progress since the last episode. I do have another video game I will touch on when we get to that segment. main things that have been going on were the weekend of last was Penapalooza so I think we've mentioned that before that's a big social pinball event that the owner of Big Daddy Enterprises Todd hosts and he has over 90 games in his personal collection so we normally try and make it, your work schedule blocked you this time from being able to do so yeah I've got the sad clown tear running down my cheek because of that Yeah. Outside of the Texas Pinball Festival, it's the biggest what I call pinball shindig that I tend to go to. They run a couple IFPA tournaments. I tried to help out with the survival one this go, but there's also a main tournament style, which they vary the format each time, it seems. So it's a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of people kind of in this central Midwest area that turn out for it. And for those that don't know Big Daddy Enterprises, they specialize in pinball repair kits and related electronics. So I've got a link in the show notes if anyone is interested in that sort of thing, if you want to read up on it. In addition to that, this week, I guess sort of starting today, but technically starting tomorrow, I am taking a week off of work for no reason other than I have amassed far too much vacation time and I need to spend it down. That sounds like a terrible problem to have. This has been a long-term problem. I'm carrying almost 800 hours of vacation, and it's just not – I couldn't get paid for it all if I were to leave. So we can carry beyond our actuarial liability. So I'm trying to spin down to where I'm allowed to essentially have a pay-for balance of up to two years' worth of vacation, and I have more like five. So I'm trying to chip away at it, but historically, it was always a problem because we had contracts and such where I could only miss certain days. and that just it wasn't always practical so i'd just be like okay well i'll just work um so i'm not really planning to do anything which means i'll probably end up being chores because i have to keep myself busy somehow but uh i lucked out because the air conditioning for our floor is going down again it's kind of working and apparently they reported to me on friday that the unit is actually broken and needs replaced so it's probably going to be really hot out there It will be hot in Topeka, and I will not be there to witness it, which is good. And you're heartbroken by that, I am. I am. Sure. You hear the tear, the sad clown tear, I believe, as you describe it. But I guess kind of as a segue issue, I went ahead and put this in here in my notes section. But before we jump into pinball, I had a question come in. They wanted to remain anonymous on it, but it's pretty brief and sort of interesting. is, hey guys, I've been putting some thought into starting up a podcast on pinball. What do you think makes for a good pinball podcast and what makes for a bad one? That's an interesting question, especially because we're not a purely pinball podcast, but we do know where you're coming from on it. And I guess I was going to say, Tony and I, I'm sure anyone who's listened to it long-term knows, we have no qualms about name-dropping podcasts when they have interesting content that we want to share. We don't talk bad about other podcasts on the show. Think of it as professional courtesy. But in terms of broad strokes, I'm more than happy to chime in with some opinions. But Tony, I think a lot of these, it's not being pinball versus being anything else. I don't think there's a lot of difference. It's really just sort of what makes for a good podcast. So Tony, what are your thoughts on it? Because you've actually listened to podcasts a lot longer than I have. I think the big thing to any podcast, no matter if it's about pinball or tabletop or books or movies or whatever, is you have to actually enjoy it and enjoy what you're talking about so it doesn't become a drag. I think it's like video games or anything else. When it ceases to be fun and starts to just become work, unless you're actually getting paid for it, it's probably you need to make some changes. I mean, I enjoy doing this, and that's why I am in it and I keep doing it because it's fun. I like talking. I like interacting with people. So if I wasn't having fun with it, I wouldn't be doing it. But I know there's people who get into doing stuff, and they might not be having fun with it. And there's no point in doing it if you're not having fun with it. The other thing is to, I know the real popular thing lately has been a lot of single-person podcasts. and they work pretty well because you are able to just kind of do stream of consciousness and then edit around it a lot better. But at the same time, it's always good to have people to bounce stuff off of. So other people to talk to, it helps the flow, I think. Only certain people have the ability to pull up that I'm just talking by myself and it works thing. And I think it's important to find out if you're one of the people who can do that or if it's better to have someone about something off of. Yeah, I those are I think those are great suggestions, especially about you need to like it. Given that you've the listing here is for pinball in particular. Just understand the hobby is too small for you to to make money podcasting at it. Most podcasts are it's a hobby. It's going to cost you money. So just go into that being aware that, you know, it's like any hobby, like pinball itself. You're going to have to spend some money in it. And speaking of spending some money, I'm going to some things. I guess what I would suggest is the main thing, because I'm going to go into it, assuming you really like the topic and you really want to share things. So from a practical standpoint, sound quality, you need to get good sound quality. I personally cannot stand podcasts that do not invest in proper sound. so you want to at least have a headset before you start i mean you can get a decent headset for under 30 bucks but you need you don't want to use like a built-in microphone on your laptop or anything you need to to show a little respect towards the sound because here's the thing you're you're not really doing anyone in a way you are but you're not really doing anyone a favor by hosting a podcast and thinking like the listeners owe you something you you owe them this is your project You're speaking to them. You need to put some consideration towards them. There's over half a million podcasts available out there. Obviously not in pinball, but there are so many choices that there are a lot of people that actually show respect by actually trying to get the sound right. So try and get the sound right. If you can't handle it with hardware, that's fine. Fix it in post. But listeners don't owe you anything. So try and give them a competent show. And that's the main one that sticks in my grill is when I hear really bad sound quality. I expect to hear improvements over time. It's fine. You're going to start off rough. We have going back, you can hear our old episodes and hear how terrible where we were trying to figure things out. That's normal. But just try and make it better. Other main thing I'd suggest is get on a schedule and stick with it. There are Tony mentioned the about doing the single concept, single person stream of conscious style. And if you're by yourself, obviously, you can be pretty prolific. And I'd say if you don't want to follow a schedule, that's fine if you are prolific. But if you aren't or if you're working with people like how Tony and I work together, you need a schedule. Listeners want to be able to know when to expect you to release. I don't care what your schedule is. I mean, if you want my personal stance, it is if you can't at least do the show monthly, you probably shouldn't be doing a podcast. There's next to no excuse for being unable to produce once a month. You can't do 12 a year. This is probably not the hobby for you. That's my personal stance. I listen to a few podcasts that go longer than that, some of them because they try and do monthly, some of them because they are extremely long podcasts that are putting together like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. He gets an exception because his show is awesome. His show is awesome. And yes, he might only put out, it might take him two years to put out a six episode series, but you have to realize that every episode is going to be between four and six hours long. Yes. And when you hear the sound quality, the fact that every uh and er is edited out, it's like a book on tape. It is that polished. And we don't do that. We're conversational. And most of the pinball podcasts are not in that realm. So, you know what, that's my suggestion to you is try and do it at least monthly. Other stuff's pretty basic, like decide what your short format is going to be. No harm in changing that up as you go along. Pick what you're going to focus on. Pinball, even though it's a fairly niche hobby, there are different categories of it. Do you want to talk about the hobby in general? Do you want to talk about pinball news? Do you want to talk about collecting? Do you want to do competitive pinball? You know, kind of find what your home is and build your show around what categories are of interest to you. and that's really it I mean I don't know if you're wanting ideas for a show you really need to go back to what Tony said and do what you love if you want a flat out raw suggestion that I would give the one thing I think that the pinball podcasting community is missing is and I think I've said this in a past episode is a news source there is no true news source for pinball and what I mean by that is no commentary no opinion just recounting the news of the hobby. All the rest of us who do this, we're biased. We're all giving commentary. We use the news to inform our opinions, but we still give opinions. So again, I have no idea if that would be popular or not, but I sure I would listen if there was such a podcast, but there is not. PNN, the Pinball News Network. There you go. You can have that idea. Welcome to PNN. Yeah, try and get James Earl Jones to do it, do that intro. It'll be awesome. Okay, well, anyway, thanks for the question. So let's go ahead and jump on into Pinball directly now. I had a... this was an interesting one. I was contacted originally on our YouTube page by and I'm hoping I'm going to say his name right, Olivier. He's from Portugal. And it was regarding the Space Gambler footage. I put up some gameplay of Space Gambler. And for those that don't remember, Space Gambler, that's a 1978 78 Playmatic game, which is a Spanish company. And my mom and dad got that as a pinball machine for my brother-in-law. And it lived with me for a little while while my dad and I were repairing and restoring it. So anyway, Olivier was curious about my thoughts on the gameplay. So I, you know, I responded to him. But as the conversation was going on, what I learned is he was looking at a space gambler to buy in Portugal, except it wasn't called space gambler. It's called Flash Baseball. and I had never heard of Flash Baseball, which was intriguing because I researched Space Gambler when I was working on it. And so he sent me some photos. The game is completely identical. The only difference is the back glass. And I had no idea about such a thing. IPDB does not have Flash Baseball in the system. It has a pitch-and-bat version of the same name, which came out earlier in the 70s, but not by the same manufacturer or anything. And Olivier explained that what happened is Portugal had really strict laws about importing gambling devices, which we in the U.S. are not unfamiliar with the notion that pinball was branded as gambling in a lot of places. But there was a workaround in the case of Portugal. As long as the companies could – as long as they could claim – a company could claim that it was manufactured in Portugal, then it was okay. so what would happen in the 70s in particular is there were portuguese companies that would import spanish pinball machines and then modify them slightly claim they were thus portuguese made and then it was okay to sell them so okay yeah so anyway and i uh in our internal notes i have a picture so tony can see it but but in the case of flash baseball i mean the the cabinet art identical the playfield identical all they did is they stuck on a new back glass the back glass says that it was made by a company called ermacor and uh which i guess is the name of the portuguese company that was taking the manufacturing credit and it sort of got a baseball-esque theme but it's funny because when you look down at the playfield it's totally dice it's all gambling theme all over again just like space gambler was they stuck some dice on the on the back glass on the left by the player scores but otherwise there's absolutely no relationship to gambling and the rest of this back glass and so anyway i just i thought it was a fascinating story i i suggested to olivier that he if he gets the game in particular uh to sort of document what he can and turn that into ipdb so it can be in the listing but there's just it reminds me there's just a lot of uh nebulous sort of lacking information regarding these these uh these manufacturers these spanish manufacturers I have no idea who designed Space Gambler. I couldn't find it. I'm not even sure for certain that it was the first solid-state gameplay Matic made. So I know everyone likes to talk about Bally and Williams and Stern Electronics and Gottlieb, but there are a lot of these other manufacturers where I think this information is going to start to get lost as we get closer and closer to not having anyone alive who still worked for these companies. So I'm hoping that we can capture at least some of this stuff, and it's the European sections that I think we're weakest on. So anyway, it was really weird, and it was neat to learn about. But I thought I would mention it because we talk about pinball. Well, that sounds – I mean, it's interesting to me the way they do the importing it and then making some changes. It sounds kind of like the light truck tax thing. I think it's actually called the chicken tax, but like light trucks in the U.S., if they're imported, they have a heavy tariff on them. So a lot of times they'll be imported as passenger vehicles or brought in in pieces and assembled in a factory so they're domestically produced. Or like Ford will bring in the transit vans and they'll have seats in them and windows and stuff. and then it's cheaper to pull the seats out and pull the windows out and fill it in with metal and then sell it as a cargo van than it would have been to pay the import taxes to bring it in as a light truck. Yeah, that's an interesting comparison. The thing that surprises me is that the Portuguese law was, I guess, loose enough that simply sticking a new piece of glass on it was enough of a change. They sure didn't seem to have to jump through very many hoops. so um i mean obviously they went with it they make it portray as a significantly different if you look at the backlash you're going to think oh well this is a totally different game than a game called space gambler but it's really obvious that it was designed for space gambler it's got the little light tube in the upper right i mean they didn't change anything else about they didn't change anything about the hardware at all so it's just you know even the add a ball versus the uh replay games where you could um where you could where in the u.s they started to sell games so that you you weren't allowed to win a free game that was gambling so they'd like some of the games would let you add a they'd add a ball to play instead that at least had some mechanics usually in the back that were a little bit different you know a new reel or a new wire connected or something they just slide in a new sheet of glass go okay done we made this now i made this yes look i i am a great pinballer. Pinball is not hard. Pinball is easy. Well, speaking of how hard pinball is, let's go ahead and transition. We got three pinball news topics to go through. Wow. There is some serious news here. There is. It's heavy. Yeah. Yeah. Understatement of the year. It's heavy. Let's start with, I guess, the semi-optimistic one, I suppose we could describe it. Semi because we don't know if it's going to be optimistic or not, but we'll start with highway. highway pinball manufacturers of full throttle and as of i think we last reported to people the manufacturers of alien pinball we talked a little bit about our opinions on alien pinball from texas pinball festival where we stood in line played it and we noted that they've been in production there were a few that were released well apparently the few that were released and thanks to this flippin podcast because this is where i got this information i do not regularly track the status of Highway because I'm not actually personally interested in the games, so I don't follow it as closely as I do some of the other companies. But one of the co-hosts for that podcast has an alien pinball. And so he had noted on their show that by his count, there are less than 15 of them that have been circulated. And the official production began months ago. So that's pretty sparse. uh other information that had been announced uh before this latest news drop that that i i'd seen a couple days ago is that one of the distributors for highway dropped them already citing poor customer service on the part of highway and that coin taker had delisted alien from its website they still had full throttle there and they were still servicing any alien uh deposits that they had, but they weren't advertising for the ability for more alien purchases to go through them. So that was what I knew initially. Pretty concerning stuff. Then the announcement came out on Pennside that, and it was confirmed by the Highway Pinball account, by I guess Andrew Highway's account, but that investors have come in and they have taken control of Highway Pinball. There was already an investor group that existed, but they didn't have controlling interest in the company. And from what Andrew Highway has indicated, it's the group that consists of existing investors. I don't know if it's exclusively existing investors, but that they have kicked in more money now. What they have indicated is that the documentation is still being in the process of getting signed. So legal documents are not all finalized yet, and it will be a little bit, a few weeks before they can likely tell you everything that they plan to do. But what they have said so far is that Highway Pinball will have new leadership, it will be under new management, and it will have a new funding source. So I guess there's injecting cash, but we don't know how much. But that's the latest news. And a lot of people apparently on Pinside, again, in a thread I don't really follow, had been indicating that for a while now, I'd say at least the last month, communication between customers and highway has been very, very lacking, like a lot of silence, a lot of radio silence. And that again, getting back to this flipping podcast, the one, the host with the alien machine had noted he would gain, even if he didn't always get a fix right away, he would get information. He would be informed when he had reported on something, but even that was no longer getting just, you know, one of those sort of perfunctory responses. So I guess in terms of our discussion, this obviously is a pretty major shakeup. New leadership slash new management, I think, is clearly conveying that Andrew Highway will not be in control anymore. What do you think is going to happen here, Tony? I know we're magic eight balling it big time, but hey, that's what we do. well I think this is definitely this isn't the first time a company's had to go and get extra help or or more investors and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't JJP's had to get extra investors and they're doing fine it did not work out so well for Magic Girl but in this situation I think it's going to be a wait and see. I think the question is going to be, are they able to go through with their commitments? Are they going to be able to support the existing machines, both full throttle and aliens? And honestly, will the company survive enough to make another machine? Those are the kind of questions we're not going to know until they give us more answers. I think coin taker dropping highway is a major blow for them. because as far as I can tell and from people I've talked to, Cointaker is a major distributor in the U.S. So that loss is going to hurt them. I hope for the best. I hope it works out for them. I really do. I just really can't say. It's concerning. It brings the question up with the change in management and new leadership being hit so hard. that brings up the questions of is Andrew completely out? Is Andrew still going to be there in some reduced capacity? I mean, what is going on? I mean, those are all questions. And until they let us know everything, which apparently is not going to happen until the paperwork is signed, which makes sense, is going to be kind of up in the air. I would say if it was me and I was deeply following Alien and I was deeply concerned about it This is something that I would have cautious hope for but until we know everything, I can't make a good guess for sure if it's going to be good or not. I have hope for them. I enjoyed Alien. I thought it was a fun game when I played it, but I think all in all that they have not had good luck, they being Highway, when it comes to games with the delays, the announcement problems. Full throttle wasn't that great of a game. There are people who have had major full throttle issues. The whole original layout plan with the whole interchangeable playfields suddenly not working because you have to upgrade because they changed board sets when they changed machines, stuff like that. That's all hurt them. So that's all stuff that the investors and this takeover and this new highway are going to have to fight against to try and maintain their position. Yes, there's a lot to unpack here. And until we have more information, it is really hard to make much in the way of a prediction that we would ever feel comfortable standing behind. regarding the distributors given that the news of the distributor drops were prior to the investor group coming public and saying that this sort of takeover had occurred they may get the distributors back on board so that part might be solved i i don't know yet if the one that flat out said we are dropping them they're not engaging in proper customer service so we can't represent highway anymore that was a smaller menu a smaller distributor than coin taker i don't remember the name of it. I don't know if they're back on board or not. Cointaker still was kind of on board, but obviously you're not going to sell new aliens through them if they're not listing them. And will they go back to listing them? I think that depends on what the news comes out from the investor group. My thought regarding the part you asked, Tony, about whether or not Andrew Highway is involved anymore. My sense will be he probably will be in some way because he still has I'm sure he still has some share of equity in the company he started, but that he's probably not going to operate as president, CEO, or make any of the major manufacturing part acquisition decisions. And again, a lot of this is just what people are reading. I don't know how much of a speculative about that part of Highway Pinball's problem is that they had a lot of supply chain issues, that they weren't buying parts in bulk. They weren't getting as many discounts as they should have, that they weren't always that good about negotiating how they were acquiring the parts, so they were paying more than they needed to. But I think the main problem that they've probably faced and why it had to come to this point is that Alien is just way behind schedule, just way behind schedule. And when you're not putting out a product, how can you make any money? And I don't know how many full throttles they put out. I have heard under $100, but I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not. But if they sold $100 or they sold $200, that's not a lot of dollars to stretch along for a game that's over a year behind schedule. Because there was this assumption that Aliens were going to be a lot... It wasn't supposed to be a 2017 thing originally. It's way behind. so just like you mentioned with jjp and they're you know they had financial issues and they need outside investment stern even had to do that that was back before you and i were in the hobby but they had to do it uh just a few years ago and so it's you know that it happens uh so i guess you know looking at it broadly this is a good sign in the sense that if this didn't happen based off of what was going on with customer service and everything i think bankruptcy was going to be the only course of action because there was no other plan. The thing is, what can be accomplished with this is the investor group. I'm curious about what their goal is. I imagine officially their long-term goal, their long-term hope will be, let's write the ship, let's get Alien through, and then let's march on as a company. Maybe their more conservative view might be, let's hope we get Alien shipped. Get those manufactured, basically recoup our investment, and then perhaps shut highway down after the alien runs done. I don't know. Because how far along is game number three? I mean, what else is there? I don't know. I'm not sure how aggressively they were working on another design. Now, alien should be a really good seller. But given all these issues that have now cropped up, and you mentioned the problems that were faced by some owners with full throttle, and we've reported on that before because we had an area owner who got rid of their full throttle because there were issues and they weren't they weren't happy with how it was going and it's just i you know there's going to be if if i were in the market for an alien pinball i would be really concerned about parts acquisition at this point like okay let's say they they get me the alien is how are we going to be around where am i going to get parts from there aren't that many full throttles out there. It's the same thing you face when, well, like when I was working on that space gambler from Playmatic. Playmatic's not exactly a common company out here in the US. It was a big issue when my dad and I were going out to check out the machine. He told me we were going. If those displays do not work, he was not going to get it. It was going to be too hard to source the part. And it's sort of the same thing here. You can't just throw in a bunch of Williams parts into a highway pin. There's not enough machines out there to strip machines down to fix ones that start to break. So my guess is there may be, I don't want to say a run on the bank, but I mean, if I was a depositor, I would pull out at this point. I would take advantage of the investors coming in and I would take my money, I'd get my money back, wait for them to prove that they're shipping machines and then get back in if and when that's the case. And I think they're going to be stable. I think a lot of people are going to do that. They're going to play it safe. Get your money back. We've seen too many. You mentioned Magic Girl and the J-pop situation. We've seen too many get burned. So I think a lot of people are going to be like, okay, good. This gives me a chance. It helps build confidence, of course. If they can get their money back, they won't be embittered to highway pinball. But they'll have to perform to a degree that people will be willing to throw in that investment. And whether or not they can Carl Weathers that, I don't know. This gives them a chance, though. So overall, I think it's a good sign. But yeah, the future is murky. Yeah, it's definitely going to be a touch-and-go situation, and one that I'm sure we'll be talking about a lot more in the coming months as we find out more. I am curious to see, I've seen on forums and stuff a lot of pre-order people talking about requesting refunds for the last several months with no answers and no refunds arriving. And I'm wondering if those people will continue the refund push with this, if their refunds will be honored. If anything will be honored, depending on how this comes across with the new investors. Yes. And my guess will be that the refunds will be honored. But I'm trying to envision how much of a cash infusion this must be. I mean, if they're going to do that, if they're going to actually get the line moving, get the machines built. See, here's the thing. Every single, from the way it sounds, again, kudos to this Flippin' podcast for covering it. And it's great because one of their hosts actually has a machine, though I think I saw that he listed it for sale on Pinside now. He's still been a wealth of knowledge on it. And the issue is it sounds like every single alien that's out there is not, quote unquote, final ready. They're all, in some degree, prototypes or using some strange set of parts or they're having particular issues on mechs that haven't been totally finalized, which is a little weird because the machine is in production, but it's not really in production. It's like it's still – they didn't work out all the kinks in it is what it – I don't know. I've never – again, I should have – and that's on me. I should have done a better job tracking this, but I just didn't like how it played very much, so I didn't. But I don't know. The whole thing with the ball lock and the alien tongue thing, it sounds like that has still been an issue disabled by and large. So I don't know if it needs more R&D or not. But, I mean, if it starts breaking, if they go and make runs and it starts breaking and that's what news comes out is that, well, it's not fully working yet. That's going to put a lot of people off that might have been inclined to get back in. But, yeah, I think most of the people who want refunds, I don't think that's going to change. their opinion just because this investor group comes in. I think it will give them at best an opportunity to actually get the refund per what the refund Ryan Policky said. And so they'll know that they won't get burned and that will leave them with obviously a less bitter taste in their mouth than if they lost their money. But I don't know if a lot of people, if anything, I think maybe more people would want to pull out. But there might be some people that will see this as a positive sign and say, oh, okay, well, now I'm willing to stick with it. But I don't know. I I can only speak from my perspective, given what I've seen with other pinball companies who have failed. This sort of second chance with the money would make me want to get out and wait and just for them to prove it without my preorder money, basically. And of course, this is a case in point of a blow to the to the preorder system yet again, as if we needed to see more of them. But there are a lot of people that have money tied up in the machines right now, and they're pretty mad. And I am not surprised. And I think it's a situation we're going to see because I don't think pre-orders are going away, no matter how much I think they probably should, or at least be reduced. My question is how people are still putting pre-order money down with these unknown or very new companies and are being surprised when something goes wrong. especially with the brand new untested companies and they're throwing all this stuff at it and it's like, oh, that's, hey, look, it's three years later and I don't have a pen and I don't have money and the company's gone. Now, I did think, you said that the investors could likely make more people pull out. Now, do you think that would be because they see that there's money there now so withdrawing their pre-order might actually get something since there's actually money in existence or do you think it's something that they sat through what was obviously even not paying attention. We knew that Highway was having issues. And now that they're looking to a complete shakeup and start over, them just saying, no, no, I've waited long enough. If I want one, I will buy one from a distributor later. Just give me my money back now, and we'll see where this rolls out. Do you think it's more like that, a covering all the bases thing, Or do you think it's something where they're just surrendering on something? Now that it gets better, they're like, nope, too little, too late. Oh, yeah, I see what you're saying. I think in terms of my prediction about possibly seeing more people withdraw money, I group it in two categories. I think that way for two reasons. One would be that there may be some people who were buyers who didn't know that things were this dire. And this announcement of the investor group may tell them, oh, gosh, I did not. I just thought they were slow. I didn't realize they were having that many financial issues. So if this this that could prompt people to say, I want a refund and then if they can get it, great. And they and they get the refund and they didn't. So sort of the the operating from ignorance. They didn't realize the company was was having a problem. They just thought it was being slow. And now that they know that there's financial trouble, if they can get a refund, go for it and get the refund. So that's one category that I could see resulting in an uptick. Then the other category could have been some people who suspected that there was an issue. And we're going to get to Dutch pinball later. And I've seen this come up in the Dutch thread where some people are like, well, what can we do? You either hope they succeed and you get your pin or you acknowledge they can't and that your money is probably already gone and you're out of luck. So there may have been some people in on Alien who just assumed the money's spent. The money's already spent. And so there was no hope of a refund. All they could do was stay hopeful that they'd eventually get their pinball machine somehow. If there's now money on the table to fund refunds, they may never have requested because they just assumed there was no chance. But now that that chance might be there, those requests may come in. So there may be more demand for refunds than Highway knows about in their pending list of people who've requested because there were some who had no hope. They gave up hope on getting a refund, but now they may have hope to get it. So I think they're two different classifications. That's just my theory on it. And with the new level of investment, do you think that was thought out with the fact that there could be a lot of refund requests or could they get so many refund requests that the new level of investment still isn't enough to maintain what they're going after? Could that alone break the company? I would say it could, but I'm basing it off of the fact that people who are affiliated with Highway are coming in and saying that the investors group has a lot of business experience. And so giving them the benefit of the doubt on that, I'm going to predict that they went in with a plan assuming that there would be a high demand of refund. But I don't know. I mean, in the ideal world that I would envision, this would be a cash infusion to the degree that the investors could handle the refunds and handle the build and then make money on the back end, like how normal companies do it. Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how much money they'd put in in the first place. Now that they have control, I assume they put in a lot more. But, I mean, we're talking a serious sum of money if they're basically going to front the construction costs and then try and sell the machines out. But I think that's the best way for them to try and do it because then if people know that they could call Cointaker up and say, I want an alien, and Cointaker says, all right, you'll get it in a week. But just pay us, and we'll do it. And it's already built. that but i don't again i don't know if they have to how much money they might have to pour into getting the machine perfectly right because it's not exactly working the way that it sounds like it's supposed to be or if you just push that to the side and say no we just got to go and we'll sell them as is it works well i mean i don't know that starts getting into those those nuances that i would be more concerned with if i was in on one but um yeah i yeah until we see the details and obviously I don't think we're going to know how much they paid and such, how much this bailout essentially was but ideally, yes, I think they would have factored in the refunds and speaking of interesting pinball companies we're going to move on to Dutch oh boy, we've never talked about them except sometimes no, never at all I guess we would probably classify this as more negative than the highway one. But again, I guess it depends on your perspective. Let's see. This information purportedly, I have to say purportedly because I saw it on Pennside, but I believe it's a quote from the Dutch Pinball newsletter, but I don't get the Dutch Pinball newsletter. So I haven't read this firsthand. I read it secondhand. But, oh, and incidentally, we'll have a link to that in the show notes, this newsletter quote on Dutch Pinball and also a link regarding the investor group for highway. so people can read up on that if they need more information. Be in the show notes. But Dutch, we had reported on a prior episode that there was a parent company to ARA, the contract manufacturer, called Nivoji. I'm sure I'm saying all of these names wrong. Every other podcast I have heard on Pinball says ARA as A-R-A, and I just refuse. I refuse to bend to their assumption. It's ARA. It's ARA, folks. I've decided. Anyway, Dutch Pinball has rejected the Nivoji offer. And for those that don't recall, Nivoji wanted 51% of the company. And in exchange, they would arrange for the Big Lebowski run to be built. According to the announcement as posted on Pinside, in the explanation, I found it somewhat odd. because the language really, it focused on a whole bunch of the deal downsides that Dutch Pinball was saying, here are all the problems that we had taken this sort of deal. And that the way it was phrased, it was that those lists of downsides came from Big Lebowski pre-orderers and that only two or three people who had pre-ordered the Big Lebowski wrote to them and said, take the deal. Just take the deal and get me my machine. so the whole write up is very I would describe it as very polite but very very defensive but again that's my assessment of it and people can go read it from the show notes link and make their own determination obviously it's an enigma as to what next steps are going to be in the newsletter Dutch lays out the notion of going back to what they had originally said prior to the ARA termination of that contract manufacturer or contract manager the manager for the contract manufacturer i should say and uh about finding a new uh contract manufacturer to build the machines people may recall that the plan that they had indicated was that there was going to be that bride of pinbot 25th anniversary and they were going to use a different manufacturer other than rf for that and that maybe that manufacturer would be able to build big levesque's after the bride of pinbot runs and now none of that was discussed here just that they may turn to another manufacturer for the big lebowski's uh and that's that so but the in the newsletter they're still staying by the position that r is the one in the wrong um you know that they have the contract law on their side though it still sounds like they're not actually pursuing anything through the legal system okay tony i kind of word salad did that a bit that you you get you get the gist of it what do you think i because i don't know what to think anymore if highway has been struggling and needed outside help dutch has been floundering and they really need the help but the problem is is they seem to be in so much trouble and the fight at least from this side of things it looks like they're pretty much losing this fight over the manufacturers. And I think this would have been a good hope for them. It would have destroyed them as a company, obviously. I mean, 51% of the company would have let them finish the Big Lebowski, and then the company would have lost it. They would have lost their control. It would have been completely to Nivoji or however you say it. I mean, they would have had de facto control. No matter what they said, they would have been the end-all, be-all. And I can understand completely why Dutch did not want to surrender their company and their vision and their thoughts to this in what could almost be considered blackmail, the way they're offering to exchange the TBL run. But I think Dutch is dead. I mean I think this was Dutch's best chance to get the rest of the big Lebowskis out and get people that had pre-ordered their machines short of a massive investiture of money coming from outside which could happen short of that I don't see how Dutch survives their whole little bride of pinball. No, it doesn't work. I mean, it's not worthwhile. It looked like a money grab. Everyone I've talked to thought didn't like how it looked, and they thought the whole thing just sounded super fishy. Everything about Dutch anymore just sounds like they're wallowing in the muck, trying to claw their way out, just grasping at any straws they can. I would say that the best chance for pre-orders of the Big Lebowski to get their machines are gone. That money is gone. I think it's done. I think we're watching the death gasp of Dutch, and I would be in complete shock if Dutch is still around next year. Okay. Okay. Well, one of the things I was going to ask you, though, it was fairly clear from your statement that you think Dutch Pinball is dead and further clarified when you flat out said about the money issue here at the end. But as I try and track the information via Pinside discussing Dutch Pinball, it does appear that there are at least some people who still seem to suspect that Dutch actually has the money to do this, that they're not out of money. whereas highway again not having said anything but given the investor takeover at this point it's very clear that highway does not have the money to have accomplished building the alien pinballs so there are some people dutch has never claimed that they're out of the money yet and so now people haven't been getting refunds unless you know they've gone through a deposit through a distributor and that money hadn't been shipped over to dutch but i i take it you don't think that Dutch Pinball is sitting on a huge pot of money here and they're just being really frugal in that they actually can accomplish what they claim they can do. It's just taking time because reasons. No, I don't think they are. I think, I mean, I could be wrong but even with the increased money that R was asking, I don't see how setting here going well, no, you can sit on those 40 machines, I think, that were completed and ready to ship and just sitting here for a year and lying. I mean, not just being, oh, cagey, flat out lying to their owners and lying to their fans about what was going on in the background. No, I don't think they're setting on the money. Or if they are setting on a bunch of money, I would say that their management has bigger issues. They've hurt themselves so bad up to now. They've hurt themselves so bad with how they talk, how they act. And I don't really see how people trust them. But I don't understand how people think apparently anyway. But no, no. if they're sitting on money and not willing to even pay to get the 40 machines out and change distributors or pay to get the 40 machines out or anything to protect their, uh, game purchasers, they just want to sit there and go, but, but, but, but they, they won't give us our machines. And we didn't tell you that. And we lied about it. And we said it was a board issue when the actual issue was that we didn't pay for the machines. And I understand that there were contracts in place and they tried to increase the cost. That's going to be completely decided and have to be decided like in arbitration about whether it's a contract violation or not. But if the contract allows them to increase the cost of machines due to increases in cost of manufacturing well there nothing Dutch can do except for sit there and stomp their feet like a little kid saying they're going to take their ball and go home. I mean, if they didn't protect themselves and their contracts, then there's nothing they can do. And if there's nothing they can do and they're sitting on a ton of money, they should be just covering it because this makes them look worse than trying to get things out as it is. I mean, if they're sitting on enough money that they can get these machines out, then they should be doing that instead of trying to run up with another company and start a new production of the Bride of Penbot 3.0 that they want so much money for. It's just everything about that Bride of Penbot thing screams so much, we need money, give us money, please, please, please, please, I need the money. And I can't believe that they're sitting on some hidden nest egg of money. I just don't believe it. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think Dutch Pinball should have taken the Nivoji offer. I know I'm saying that from a position of ignorance. I don't know all the details regarding exactly what was in Nivoji's offer. I'm only hearing the side from Dutch Pinball, which has from the get-go, I think, always been fairly negative towards the offer. And I understand why it would be, given the obvious slap of the 51% is very specific. It's very much an amount of we just want enough to take control. You don't get control anymore. And I can understand why they wouldn't want to give that up. The thing is, I'm having a lot of trouble seeing how there's a Dutch pinball like you. I don't. This time next year, I think that's generous. I don't see how they ever make another machine again. Even if they get the machines out, if they keep control, I don't see how they ever have another run of anything. But let's be honest. I can't envision how the machines can come out. None of it makes sense. If they're right, they keep claiming that they're right and ARA is in the wrong on the contract. Why have they not begun the litigation procedure then? civilization you don't have to go all the way through i mean i'm assuming dutch law isn't completely alien to me i mean it must be somewhat similar to the rest of the law of western civilization you don't have to go to trial when you start the your legal procedures but it's like they're not serious about it they just keep i mean i don't know they go to the meeting with our and say well you know we can litigate this and it's like well you haven't filed anything you haven't actually you know where's the threat where's the real threat i mean if you're right why aren't you pushing it unless you unless you are right and you don't have the money to even hire the attorney in which case we've got a funding issue anyway and if that's if that's true then how in the world am i supposed to believe that you can somehow find another contract manufacturer somehow pay them with what what would you pay them for they're going to have to tool up i mean if they're going to stick in the netherlands there's not another contract manufacturer that's ready to build pinball machines. No one else does it. Aura had to get all that stuff from the get-go. So none of it makes much sense to me. I really just can't understand it. And maybe I'm too simple to figure it out. But it's just nothing about this to me sounds like Dutch Pinball is in the right or that they have a means to execute some sort of vision to transition. But what concerns me the most is I don't think there really is a vision. there's some loose stuff about finding a new contract manufacturer they said that six months ago where is that where's an update regarding what's going on with these purported Brida pin bots did anyone actually buy one I mean I want to say I can't believe anyone would but in reality I assume they at least sell a few because there seem to be some people that have to buy all this stuff I can't believe people are still pre-ordering games from companies with how things have turned out the last several years but it's happening. So there's always going to be somebody that's going to. Yeah. I, I, I, the bottom line for me is I had a lot of trouble imagining Dutch pinball ever doing more than the big Lebowski, even if they took the Navoji offer, but by rejecting this deal and not having another deal in its place, I mean, I'm not saying that they couldn't get another arrangement and maybe it would be more advantageous to them. Maybe they can, But they sure don't sound like it's a priority to them. Their continued spin that everything's okay, I think, is what's so off-putting because it's really obvious that things are not okay. Everything is stalled. It's not like this project was on schedule in the first place, and it's so flippant. It seems so flippant. They may not mean it that way, but that's the way it comes across. And you pointed out the deception and the lies that they'd engaged in before. there's a real issue about credibility that i don't know if it's sunk in or they think that hey it's pinball as long as we make pinball we'll get as many chances as we want and with some people that may be true but i you know i don't know the damage they're doing to themselves in the hobby i i feel is probably more significant than they realize that it's sort of it's it's there's a risk of a loss of respect at this point because it's like with j-pop you know a lot of people think he's one of the greatest designers who ever lived, but there are some that will never forgive him for what he did with Zidware, ever. And it's just, he damaged his reputation more than I think he realizes. Now, some people might be able to still say, you know, he is a really brilliant designer, but there will always be that but there. And I fear that this is sort of the route they're going down. There are a number of people who post and defend them on Pinside. Most of the posts I have noticed tend to be from other people in the Netherlands. and so I'm guessing they, you know, that they're nice people and they have friends and their friends are worried about, you know, what's going on. But this is business and this does not look to me like the way you run a business. I agree with you. It feels like amateur hour just grasping at what's left, trying to pull something back together. But I think it's done. I think they're done. I think it's just a matter of watching the body die at this point. And I think Amateur Hour will be the name of this episode. We had to talk about it so much. So let's go ahead and move on to a non-amateur thing, our final pinball topic. And probably a happier one because I have no doubt that these will get built. There was a new Stern pinball machine that was announced. It was announced kind of in a strange way. It came out on a YouTube show regarding Star Wars. and surprisingly to no one the machine was star wars not not a lot of information yet uh we don't know anything about uh gameplay there's no there's no footage of video yet they've showed us the uh some there's some low-res images of the cabinet designs it's going to be the standard three tier there'll be a pro a premium and a limited edition model we've seen pictures of the playfields for both the Pro and the Premium slash LE because the Premium LEs share the same playfields for those that don't know. Game Design, it was handled by Steve Ritchie, who his last machine that came out was Game of Thrones or ACDC Encore, if you want to consider the reboot. And I believe Dwight Sullivan is on software, and he was most recently working on Ghostbusters. So, Tony, I'm not going to try and describe the art to people. go you know you could just go check stern i'm not gonna have a link to any particular thing i'm waiting for some high-res images and they're just not out yet so i guess there's not a whole lot to say other than this is the worst kept secret in pinball everyone says that so we have to say it as well so that everyone hears it forever and ever and ever uh a lot of people every game every game when it comes out from stern is the worst kept secret in pinball because everybody knows what the next game is going to be six months before stern says anything but then the lovely thing about stern is that once they do announce it we're normally within a month the game shipping unlike somebody going oh i've got look i've got i've got this license and it's so awesome and give me your money now and i'll ship you a game in three to six years yeah yes yes i assume the leaks are just a side effect of having so many employees but uh i will give them i mean credit to them this time the unlike with ghostbusters where months ahead of time the art leaked out They did keep a lid on this. Yeah, I agree. It was it's sort of odd that it seemed like they weren't really ready to announce Star Wars on their page when the YouTube show came out. Like maybe they didn't remember what date that show was going to come out, but they had they had stuff ready. But they're not doing their formal stuff with their full matrix and stuff yet. We have to wait a few more days. So I guess let's go ahead and talk a little bit about it there. in terms of the pro and le from what we can tell from the photos it looks like the differences are the death star there's a death star in the in the upper left of the play field that on the pro appears to be static and on the le it appears the ball can go inside it and it's a it's designed to explode apart so that's going to be a more interactive toy on the premium le edition and then the other visual thing i can tell the difference on is what i believe has been called the hyperspace ramp. There's a wire form ramp that kind of dips down and loops around in front of the flippers at the bottom, which I assume is going to be some magnet powered thing where the ball can fire around really, really fast. We've seen that mechanic used on some of the Williams designed Richie games that he did. It kind of reminds me of something like that. And actually, I've seen a few virtual games that do something sort of akin to this as well. So it's got, obviously, as you'd expect with the premium LE, it's got some fancy pants features going on that are that are missing from the pro uh lcd screen on the play field on both though not just in the back but also on the play field uh layout wise it seems to be most compared to acdc in terms it's not an identical layout but it is it is highly similar it seems in terms of where the shot placements are but uh that's all i wanted to say on that right now i guess overall tony do you want to talk about let me talk about what we think about the game's layout we could talk about the art, which is what most people online are talking about, or we talk about Star Wars. I'm like you. I'm not really going to get into gameplay, your thoughts on that too much until I actually see gameplay. I don't see any shots that look like I have any real concerns with them. The little loop thing sounds like it could be interesting once again until I actually see it in action, just like the magnet flippers are, or not flippers, but the magnet slings on Ghostbusters until I actually saw them in action. I just, I don't want to make a comment because what do I know? I'm not an engineer. I don't know how that stuff works. I know online, everybody online is talking about the art and it's like, oh, it's cookie cutter art. It's Photoshop art. It's just the basic stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not surprised. This is Disney protecting the way they protect. They're not going to let people go with something completely separate, completely on their own. I'm not saying I like that. I'm just not surprised by it. Stern has done a very good job lately of getting away from this type of art and going to stuff that is much more interesting. And they've got some good artists on hand now. So I've been real happy with their art lately. wish that somebody like Zombie Yeti had done something to this or if some of their other artists had been able to make something really cool yeah that would have been awesome but I'm not surprised by it being this style of art just because the gauntleted fist of Disney would have prevented it from being much of anything else yeah and I'm not entirely sure yet exactly on all the specifics of the art because I couldn't The thread that was on the announcement on Pinside got way too long. I was not going to read it all, especially once I saw what the content was. I've read segments from various pages of it. It sounds like that the – from what I've heard, and I'm not confirming this, but from what I've heard, the art is not straight movie asset Photoshop, that it may be hand-drawn but in a photorealistic fashion, and that it was not drawn by stern artists. These are Disney artists. They, you know, and that, as you mentioned, the iron fist of Disney or the gauntleted fist of Disney, that that's how they do it with their license because they want everything to kind of fit that same aesthetic. So that it's probably hand worked in some capacity, but that it was Disney's, that Disney did the work, that Disney, you know, here's what you'll use. And it's the style. But that – and we'll know more once you can zoom in with the high-res images once they're released. You know, I get it. I get the issue. I think it looks fine. I don't – but as I've mentioned many times, you know, I don't play the art. I don't get hung up on the art. I own a Star Trek, which is arguably one of the most unimpressive art packages that Stern had done in recent times. I think this looks better than Star Trek does. And, you know, it invokes the movies. and it's there's a lot of blues it's actually brighter than i kind of expected it to be but i you know i always just think the star wars logo against that black star backdrop so with you know in the yellow and this is said uh you know the cabinet art stuff has memorable fights on all of it for it's sort of a i see the battle of hoth on the premium one i see a millennium falcon flying around on the le and it looks like the battle of the death star on the on the pro the sides of the cabinets are you know they're not overly busy they're memorable shots yeah i think it looks i think it looks okay um uh the playfield layout yeah no idea how it were look uh works i did expect in this this confirms that they did go with a fan layout and i thought they would for star wars because i know some people complain about fan layouts but the thing is that fan layouts are some of the most approachable and i know while people can be very critical about seeing fan layouts what they feel like all the time uh you know some of the top games are fan layout games like attack from mars yeah so and if this is as similar as it i mean not everything like where where one ramp is and what it does isn't exactly identical but acdc plays really well so this plays a lot like ACDC. If I owned an ACDC, maybe I wouldn't be inclined to also have a Star Wars in my small collection. But kind of like how I wouldn't get a Spider-Man with me having Star Trek because I think they play pretty... The rules are quite different, but I think the layouts are so similar. Now I can only own so many machines. I wouldn't want both of them. You know, I could see that sort of argument being made. But, you know, this is different from what I have. And, you know, I have several Steve Ritchie games, and this doesn't look like it plays like any of the ones I have. So that's interesting. And, you know, it'll be interesting to see what Dwight does on code. I know a lot of people, I mean, Lyman, in a competitive world, Lyman Sheets is Stern's best coder in their view, I think. It's pretty universal. But Dwight has done some interesting rule sets. And, you know, I know some people aren't really big fans of how Ghostbusters plays, but I think the approach and the ladder system and stuff, I don't expect this to be the same, but I think he's had some interesting ideas. So, you know, I'm not disappointed with the programmer named or anything. So I'm curious. I'm really curious to see the footage on it. I'm, you know, probably priced out as I tend to be now on new machines. But I like, overall, I think I like what I see. I'd like to play it. I really want to see how that Death Star opens up, if it's going to be like the Lost World egg or what. but you know I think with the sound system and the video clips they could use this could be very very immersive when you're actually playing it far more than we're ever going to get a sense of with these stills but I mean now that they're on LCD and stuff there's so much you could pull from the films that could be really really good I think for making you feel like you're in that Star Wars universe I mean hitting those ramps and maybe hearing the speeders through the forest moon of Endor or hearing the lightsabers crackle in the pop bumpers or something I don't know yet, but I'm just making up stuff that I think would be cool. At this point, it doesn't matter. It's just whatever I want. Well, the whole thing is the sounds of Star Wars are awesome, from the John Williams score to the sound effects themselves. So just anything they do with it, if they're using the licensed sound assets, they have such a leg up over almost any other license that it's pretty exciting. And I'm not even the biggest Star Wars fan. You're a bigger Star Wars fan than I am. That's true. No, I really want to play it. I can't wait to get my chance to play it. And I'm sure I will. We'll just have to see. I mean, I understand the whole original trilogy. It makes sense for a machine. I would like to start seeing some more machines. If you're going to do Star Wars stuff, there's a lot of other stuff that you could do machines around and branch into, but I think this is a good start, and if it plays well, we might see more, because I know there are not enough machines along the way to see any of the new stuff yet, and we'll just have to see what happens. Yep, but congratulations to Stern for the announcement. I know a lot of people have been looking forward to this one. Yay! And speaking of yay... How could people be looking forward to it? Nobody knew about it. It was a complete secret. Oh, I was so presumptuous. I forget that I have the third eye and others lack this sort of premonition ability. Basically, I'm one with the Force and the Force is with me. I wonder, real quick, one last quick thing is once we get a better look at the play field and the room and stuff on the play field, with all of the Star Wars related things in existence out there right now, and I'm specifically thinking about Star Wars related, some of the Star Wars related tabletop games. This should be a game that's pretty easy to find toys to throw in and mod and add ships and stuff to between like the X-Wing miniatures game and the Armada miniatures game and the land fighting there. There's a, there's a land based combat miniatures game out there now also. So I have no doubts that this game will be easily see a ton of mods coming out for it. Oh, yeah. I think you'll see more than we saw for Tron, which is probably the most heavily modded game I can think of in recent memory. Yeah. Well, let's modify our approach and go into our second segment, which would be video games. I thought we'd start with one that came in from a listener question, messaged us on Facebook. Jake Danzig wrote in and asked for some suggestions on turn-based strategy games he could play on an iPhone or an iDevice. I think he was looking more at a tablet use. But it's sort of interesting, and I already responded to him privately. But in terms of the – Tony and I actually are on Android devices. But I did do some searches, and I saw a couple of games that I know – well, one I've played and one you've played. and they were the ones I recommended. I thought the first one that stood out to me is XCOM Enemy Unknown, which we talked about XCOM 2 last episode, but XCOM Enemy Unknown is on the iPhone. And I thought maybe you could, we never actually covered it on the show as a game itself. I think we played it before we had a podcast. So Tony, did you want to give some, just some information to the listeners on kind of what XCOM Enemy Unknown is? Because I know you played it on PC and I played it on the Xbox 360. Yeah, like we talked last time about XCOM 2, it is a isometric view, turn-based squad shooter where you command a small squad of troops fighting back against the alien threat. And I've not played the mobile version. I've heard good things about it. I've heard it's pretty solid, but I've never played it. I do play a lot of mobile games. That's a lie. I play two mobile, three mobile games, and that's about it. But XCOM is a game that I think should have absolutely no problems on mobile. The turn-based and the isometric view making everything pretty easy to put together and play. I've played other games that I don't know, I've never been comfortable playing more action-y type games on phones or tablets just because I feel like the controls feel real clunky and something turn-based and set up like XCOM should translate actually pretty well Yeah, I think it'll translate well also but I've never actually played any turn-based strategy that I can think of on a mobile device Other game that I recommended was Civilization Revolutions. I saw that Apple Store has both the first one and the second one. I've played the first one back on the Xbox 360. And I would say, unlike the numbered Civilization games, the Revolutions games, I'd feel more simplified. So it's not as a robust experience, but it was fun. And if you're a fan of that, it's, you know, you're overhead managing cities on landmasses. You can zoom in on those and customize your production and stuff. Whereas XCOM Enemy Unknown is a turn-based strategy, which is very much a tactical shooter. The Civilization games and Revolution games as well are very strategic in that overall managing a nation sense. There's still tactical choices that you make, but a lot of it's about selecting what units you produce and such for your combat. And you don't have to do everything combat-wise. You can do diplomatic approaches. You make alliances and stuff. So it's what it says on the tin. I mean, it's called Civilization for a reason. So it's a different experience. But I mean, when it comes to turn-based strategy games, Civilization and XCOM are my two go-to on PC or console or whatever. They're my two favorite. And so that I saw they were available on iDevices is like, okay, yes, that's what you want. Go for that stuff. So that would be my recommendation. If you want something less tactical and more strategic, I don't know which one would be harder. It depends on your difficulty setting. I think by default, normal versus normal, XCOM is a harder game than Civ. Oh, I agree. And like all the Civ games, when you get up to the really high levels, it's so blatantly cheated to the computer that, I mean, When their research times are less than a quarter of your research times and they generate more everything than you do and such, that makes it a lot harder to play against. Oh, yeah. You've reminded me of a major flashback. When I was a kid, we had the first Civilization game, the very first one on PC, and my dad played it. and he played it on the highest setting, which I think was Emperor or Deity or something. And he did... I know Deity's the current highest setting. I can't remember which one. Whatever it was, it was the highest. And he did that strategy, which you have so kindly informed me, is known as save scumming. He save scummed every combat move that... He would take a little catapult because he couldn't keep up with the research that the PCs, the AIs had, because they just got to be faster. So his units were worse. So he would go until he won with his little junk unit. and save and then go on. And it took him a long time, but he did win that game on the highest setting. I never bothered Yeah I have played on Deity but I never won on Deity but I don save scum typically Yeah I not a fan of playing on difficulties where the machine getting an advantage like that They're just fast. They're just innately faster. I mean, if you really want to just be – I mean, because that's what it is. You're handicapped. I don't mind them being hard, but I like it to be fair. I tried it, I think, once, and I probably never even got into the Bronze Age. It was so brutal. Okay, but I've not been playing Civilization lately. I'm going to briefly mention a game I did recently acquire. I had it on my Steam wish list for a while, and I saw it finally got pretty cheap, like under $4. So I bought a fighting game called Nidhogg. Nidhogg. We beat Nidhogg. That's a line from Final Fantasy XI. back in the link shells would always try and get claim the dragon nidhogg and fight him and i actually was not in the link show when they beat nidhogg so i never did beat him but that is another tale for another time uh nidhogg is a fighting game developed by a company called mess hoff it's a pixelated game where you kind of duel the swords you can punch and stuff it's got a very unique style look came out a few years ago uh it was on my list though because when they were taking votes for what games to uh what game to feature at evo this year the evolution fighting series which started the big tournament of fighting games big world tournament they had they they've been doing community votes like money for charity sort of things to pick one of the games to be on the main stage and this was in the list didn't win but it's in the list and i hadn't heard of it so i watched some footage of it and i was like oh this is interesting because the main thing about it is by and large you know once you do once you commit once you land that sword strike you've killed your opponent and that goes all the way back to one of the original playstation games i had called bushido blade and that type of fighting game is probably if i were to categorize that's my favorite i like the idea of that high stakes one hit might wipe you out sort of thing i like it more than the traditional life bar style so that's why one of the other fighting games i actually have on Steam is Divekick. It's all about landing that one hit. And it's just, that's a format I really like. I haven't played a lot of this yet. I was playing some of the single player. I have not done any of the online. I know my brother-in-law has it. I saw him playing it a few weeks ago. And anyway, I was just like, okay, I'm going to finally beat Nidhogg or at least play it from time to time. I don't plan to invest a lot of time in it, but it's one I was keeping my eye out on. So it's a two-player fighting game and it does have a single player mode so it's not on sale anymore but if that sounds of interest to you, if there are any long term Bushido Blade fans out there and remember what I'm talking about, this is the most recent thing I know of that kind of is in that vein I've seen it played I don't think I've actually played it I've watched it played it seems like a fun little game I know it was one of the games isn't it one of the games that's been up for the big fighting tournament this summer yeah yeah i don't know if it's going to be there at all or not it didn't win the vote to be on the main stage that one was i think what ended up winning oh yeah marvel versus capcom 3 because now that the new marvel was announced they dropped the old marvel which you know it was getting long in the tooth but i think people wanted on the main stage one last time but yeah nidhogg was up for consideration to be one of the featured ones just like i think the pokemon arena was up and they're like five or six games you could vote on if you donated to a charity i didn't vote in that but that's where i learned of it i was like i don't know if it's been at any past evos or anything i'm sure some other regional fighting game tournaments have probably had at least a side tournament with it yeah probably so yeah kind of like you know on those things trying to get on that main stage can be really rough i know skull girls has tried before and doesn't you know there's always something that's a little more popular and marvel has a huge fan base it's the players have really fallen off because the game wasn't getting patched anymore uh and it's just it's so it was like going back to the old uh smash which i know you hate watching yeah everyone plays fox and all that it's like that marvel got to that point where there are just certain teams that are better and no one's going to balance it again yeah no i mean smash isn't that fun to watch marvel i think has gotten to the point where I don't think it's that fun to watch. I'm sure this is the end for Marvel 3. When there's a new, generally fighting game people, they're totally cool with moving on to the new game for the main stage. They'll probably always be. They still do Marvel vs. Capcom 2 side tournament stuff out at Evo and other places because, you know, people learn them. They still want to go around and play with those crazy characters. But speaking of balance and keeping things balanced, there is a game that is continuing to try and keep things balanced, and that's Overwatch. and we have been really good. We have not talked about Overwatch in quite a while now. And that's actually what I've been playing most of these last two weeks because the anniversary stuff is going on right now and I'm trying to earn loot crates. I've been doing the same. I've been playing a lot lately. And I like the total mayhem arcade mode. Yeah, yeah, that is. Oh gosh, you know, I did one though and we fought over the payload for 15 minutes and lost. And I have not done it since that fight. Oh, I have. I keep playing it. I had one where we were right at the King's Row. It was King's Row, and we were right at the end. And the only reason that we kept things going is because we had a very good Mercy. She had, like, nine reses when we were after the last quarter at the end, and we finally managed to break them enough to get in and score. but oh it's it is insane and what's interesting is how it overpowers uh certain characters and others really aren't that much better than they are in the first place they just have more health i mean i've seen a lot of people playing rinds and it's like i i've none of the rinds have i ever seem to be that make it that big of a deal uh or like um roadhog is the same i there's always a roadhog and he doesn't seem to be boosted nearly as well as like diva or junk rat or some of the others from all the bonuses and stuff right right yeah so but you still see him all the time i had one run with D.Va where I was able to just boosting, I knocked three people into a hole. It was awesome. Well, I might have to do it when my arcade boxes reset here in this next week. Actually, I've been doing a lot of competitive over the last week after I got through the arcade mode stuff, because I'm trying to get my first golden gun still. We put in some decent time. Mike, who's guest hosted a couple times and I have played. Actually, we played it yesterday for a few hours. He was really worried about getting burned out on it. He's like, I don't want to play it very much this time. And I said, fine. And I just figured we'll go until we lose. It's the first time ever we didn't lose a single fight all night. Wow. Yep. And so I think we played for a couple hours. And it's like, okay, let's stop here because it's getting late enough that I don't think we need to play anymore. But, yeah, whereas one, he was sure we were going to lose. And I'm like, no, we're learning how to carry this stuff. Usually he's one of the tanks and I'm one of the healers. Or if they've got another healer, I'll do a tank as well. bit that's what it takes that's what it takes anyway there are some uh new uh new things being tested that i thought we should go ahead and run through but before we we start doing the the ptr stuff i want to note because we didn't mention it there was already a nerf to soldier 76 that happened a little while ago not a big one they took one damage away from each of his bullets so they decided he was being a little too powerful but just a little bit so that's not That's not terrible. No, it's already in effect, though, so just FYI. But there are three characters that are currently being tested for significant changes on the PTR. And I'll go ahead and I'll start. McCree is, I don't know if I would say he's the one getting the most changes, but I think he's the one who's going to get the biggest boost. Both changes are affecting his ultimate called Deadeye. The first is Deadeye currently, it doesn't start targeting opponents until after 0.8 seconds have passed. They're testing changing that so it starts targeting at 0.2 seconds. And the second change to Deadeye is the damage over time that happens during that first one second period. It starts charging up. So it's going to be changed from the current value of 20 to 80. And after the first second, the increase in damage is as it is currently. But they want it to ramp up so that if he has to fire it off faster, it'll do more damage than it currently does. So those are the McCree changes. I think that's some pretty major changes for McCree right there. I mean, Deadeye was already a very powerful ultimate. This, I think, will just make it even more so if he manages to survive. Because Deadeye is one of those ultimates that it's like, will you survive long enough to get it off? Because I think I probably see more McCrees go down after popping it before firing than I do that actually get it off or get it off targeting more than like one person. Yeah. And I, I'm sure that's, what's driving this. In fact, McCree's ultimate, uh, and his survival to actually accomplish anything with it is such a joke that virtually every animated Overwatch YouTuber who makes joke cartoons has mixed fun of him because he is, he's so vulnerable when it happens. He glows. I mean, the main thing is if McCree can get behind you or beside you and you don't see him in time, he can do damage. Otherwise, he's pretty trash. With his ult. It's the same way if you've got any hit scan and when Pharah pops, if she's up in the air instead of doing a low altitude thing, pretty much she dies after maybe a second of firing. Yep. Second character getting an adjustment is Reaper. Pretty straightforward change. They're getting rid of his health orbs. The way Reaper currently works is if he's involved with a kill, a little health orb pops up and he can pick it up and heal himself. Instead of having health orbs, what's going to happen is he's just going to get back 20% of all the damage he does automatically as health. I think that's going to go, that's going to be a powerful increase for Reaper actually, because I rarely play Reaper. When I do play Reaper, it's when I'm playing random hero typically. And even then it's not unusual for me to leave health orbs behind uh based upon movement and when you're in a big firefight so on the other hand as i recall you can get health orbs from people you didn't get the kill on too okay that i i after i said that i was thinking i was like is it really only if he's involved actually i may be wrong on that because sometimes i see health orbs when i play him and I'm like I don't remember if I hit them with a pellet or not so I yeah I mean I don't know I'd have to I'd have to look that up I think you can because I know I've gotten them health orbs and it's like if I got that guy I got him with like a single pellet I sure as heck didn't get the kill on him well I guess it's not really going to matter because I think this change is going to go in uh yeah Reaper is just he's not he's not chosen as much as I think he should be chosen uh he's actually fairly effective against some of those dive comp builds like winston he's very vulnerable i feel to reaper uh diva can be pretty vulnerable to reaper but and you're seeing a lot more winston's now but it's just yeah he's not like i most compare him to tracer in that he kind of needs to be close and he tries to do flanking sort of stuff like a sombra in a way as well but reaper survivability is worse than those characters yeah he can go i mean his biggest thing is going ghost and they're not making any tweaks to that but if he can't get to those health orbs he basically has to find a health pack he's usually behind enemy lines and can't be hit by a healer so i think this is a good change um i don't think reaver is going to get overplayed because his shot his shot range is so limited he's you know he only has situational value as it is yeah i think uh in i mean you still see him constantly in lower tier play but in higher high level and competitive play, I don't think this is going to make him appear any more often. Yeah, I agree. Last character that's getting changes examined right now, and some very significant ones, is Roadhog. One is regarding his head. His humongous head hitbox is going to be reduced by 20% so that he's harder to headshot. And the rest of the changes are involving his gun, the scrap gun. They're going, they're trying out a reduction in his bullet damage by 33%, an increase in his firing rate from the gun by 30%, and changing the clip size from a four to a five shot. Interesting on the clip size change, uh, the fire rate increase will be, I don't, I don't know if that'll be a big deal. I think the bullet damage reduction will be, because I mean that's a drop by a third that's pretty hefty drop we'll see if this can deal with the whole one shot headshotting thing that is Roadhog's reason to exist yeah and I had heard from someone I was talking to about these changes that they had read that higher end people had been doing tests with it and that the number of characters he can one shot just dramatically drop with this change in place, and there are some who are really questioning his high-end viability, given that he currently could, other than the tanks and a couple characters like Mei, for example, he could headshot everyone with the hook. But that changes now to all the weaker ones, like Tracer and stuff, still go down. But there are a number of other characters that actually can survive this that aren't tanks now. so uh blizzard's statement write-up if i'm remembering correctly was they basically wanted a net neutral change to roadhog obviously oriented towards uh impacting his need for the or the impact of the hook kill maneuver but making him more viable is their hope it appears for actual long-range combat i mean for my use and i don't play roadhog a ton and i'm not particularly great with the hook. I love the clip size increase. I really do. And I've seen some video of the firing rate in action and I think it looks a lot better for that distance stuff. But I completely understand. If you're going around doing the hook thing and all the good Roadhogs do, this probably sucks. This was definitely going to be a major hit to Roadhog. Battle Tech. Last video game topic. Tony, tell us about the Battle Techs. You've been playing them i have the battle tech backer beta came out uh due to issues with the multiplayer server code and stuff uh they released the beta with just the skirmish mode the multiplayer will be coming as soon as they fix the issues they were having um i've put like seven hours into the game so far so I figured out most of the general play stuff um it is everything I've wanted in a Battletech game it uh just as a uh example uh things that you normally don't see in Battletech games are the melee combat which was always big in the Battletech tabletop the melee combat was always a good viable option. This game has the melee combat. And there is nothing more satisfying than you getting, taking a bunch of big hits that strip almost all the weapons off your mech, but you're able to get close, but you're still able to get close enough and you can knock them down by just shoulder slamming them and then stomping on their head and destroying the mech. I've done that a couple of times with completely unarmed or unarmed weapon or mechs with no weapons still being able to get kills against mechs. just because you crushed their heads or knocked them down and fight in melee combat. It does a really good job of giving the feel of the tabletop game. It's a beta, so of course there's lots of little issues. The AI is not all the way there yet. It doesn't use everything to its advantage, and it occasionally makes decisions that make no sense. Um, but the, uh, it's, it's really good for a beta. Um, I plan on recording some video of it later this week. Uh, if I can get my recorder to function, right, I need to figure out what's going on. When I added my, uh, face cam to the game and recording, uh, I started running into some lag issues. Uh, but I will record some video hopefully this week and get it posted before the next episode. and it's been pretty enjoyable. I've put, like I said, seven hours so far into it, played with a lot of different setups. As always, I mean, they don't have the story mode in yet. They don't have the mech lab in yet, so you can't design your own mechs. You just use your own weapons loadouts. You just use what is put in, but even then, it's fun, and the abilities that they've given the pilots are nice. And it's definitely, it feels like the tactical decisions you make, unlike like an XCOM sometimes, it feels like your tactical decisions are while you make them, but a decision to flank doesn't always feel like it's super important, where in Battletech so far it's felt like you can have major different game plays just by a flank attack or moving the spotter off to one side compared to some of the other games. And like some of the old games like this, like Mech Commander, this feels a lot better than that. In regards to the issue with the multiplayer and the server code, Have they given a sense as to when they think they're going to be able to incorporate that? No, they haven't. Not as of the last thing I saw. They're hoping to have it by the end of the month was all they said, but they're not making any time promises. I know they've always been very cautious about making promises that end up not being able to be kept, unlike some other industries we've already talked about. Yes. All right. Well, it sounds really good. Interesting about the – that's a good point about the tactical stuff. with XCOM 2, I usually am just so focused on maintaining cover because it doesn't feel like, I don't take a bunch of the incentives for keeping stealth mode and all that because it just doesn't seem like it's around enough and such to really exploit. I've played some other games though that are very, very tactical where you get terrain bonuses and stuff and so it sounds much more in that vein where your positioning is so, so critical. It is and I don't know if it would have worked against a human opponent but I was able to I was playing a match against the computer obviously and it was I had a very slow mech and I managed to hide that slow mech behind a large like cliff build up so it wasn't visible and I just left him in place and had him so the best their sensors had was that oh there's a mech back there but they didn't know what it was and he had lrms which let you do if you have another mech another mech can spot if they spot something you've got lrms you can fire uh you can lob your missiles over stuff in the way and do an artillery style so i team overwatch exactly so i was sitting there and i had the had it was an atlas and an atlas is a man it's a hundred ton assault mech it's designed to get in your face and smash stuff. And I had him stashed behind something using his LRM and I was just spamming the LRM fire at people. So they knew, oh, he has a mech back there and they, but it would have just looked like it was a fire support mech. And that was my hope. And the computer ran a light mech around the corner and it ran face to face with my Atlas and my Atlas was able to punch it and kill it with a single punch. and then I waited out and just started destroying stuff. Some would say your atlas just shrugged. Well, this has been a wonderful episode and I'm glad that we've had... Come on, that was almost clever. I'm still proud of myself for that one. Oh, but we have actually reached the end of our episode. I do want to note that our next episode is the E3 episode. Yes, it is. We say it when all, but we're going to, we're planning to do it a little bit differently, a lot of it differently, kind of bit differently than we did last year. We were extremely comprehensive on every single thing last time. Instead, we're going to just focus more so we don't go on and on and on on the elements that we thought were really interesting, be they good or bad. We'll still probably orient it around presentation, around company. But one of the other changes with that, what we're freeing up there is we've approached several people about doing a roundtable style. I don't have everyone committed yet. We might have as many as five people participating, however. So I think that'll be really exciting. So we'll free up some time on how we handle the approach and we'll suck time back into it because of the additional grouping. But I just want to let people know that that episode will probably be longer than normal because there's so much to cover on E3. We won't totally forsake other topics if there's anything important. So if there is pinball news, we'll find a way to still work that in, of course, probably front load it like normal just because most of the episode is going to be video game. But for video game fans, you know, look forward to that. If you hate video games, you know, I don't know. We'll see if there's anything else for you, but otherwise you might want to skip an episode, just FYI, because I like talking about E3 and we're doing it. Well, with the amount of news that's been hitting pinball just this year, period, it feels like every episode there's at least one thing that comes out that is a must-talk about. So we'll just have to see what happens. Right. I mean, yeah, if there's anything, we're going to get it covered. But normally, the show is usually at least half pinball, and it's not going to be on the next one. So just be aware. If we have to go fast, we'll go fast. We're going to do in person. We're going to use the EGP major large studios. So sound quality will probably be a little lower than what you're used to because Tony and I have our very nice setups that we do when we're solo recording. But when we're in person, there's always more echo and such because we don't have massive soundproof room to go into. So it's just the way it is. but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And other than that, if you guys have anything you want us to focus on or want to write into us for any reason, you can email us, eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com or get a hold of us on a variety of social media platforms. On Facebook, it's facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. And we're available on Twitter and Instagram at eclectic underscore gamers. And I think we're actually probably going to record a day earlier do a Saturday instead of a Sunday for the E3 episode. Don't know if we'll actually release it that day or not. It depends on how quickly I can edit it because I have a feeling that we are probably going to be at least three hours long. So anyway, just stay tuned for that and until next time, I'm Dennis. And I'm Tony. See you guys. Bye.