What's up everybody? Back to you on a Saturday. Today I just got home from playing Spooky Pinball's new release, Scooby-Doo. Where are you? Down at IORK in Madison. And I've got the first impressions of gameplay. As long as the live stream that I did earlier today, up on the Facebook page. I've got a lot of reviews and views on this game. I was so happy to get to play it. And I'm going to discuss all of them with you in just 10 more seconds. Buckle up. Let's get to the big news. It's new pinball day, everybody. That's one of the best days there is, whether you're bringing a new machine into the home or you're playing a machine for the very first time. And that happened today, and I'm so excited. It couldn't have gone any better. So Scooby-Doo number two is on location. I believe this is the first public available game to play. It's in Madison, Wisconsin at IO Arcade Bar. It went live late yesterday, Friday night. And so there it is. Go play it. It's $1. And let me cut to the chase. This is going to be a first impressions. You know, I haven't had 40 games to play through here and seen all the modes and played all the multi balls. But I'm going to give you the first impressions and let the cat out of the bag. It's good, guys. It's really good. I'm so happy with how they made this game. Now, it's no surprise that based on just the art alone and what I saw that was revealed initially, I went ahead and put down a deposit. And I know that could be a gamble going in on a non-refundable deposit for a game that you haven't played. I've heard all of the valid reasons why maybe you should wait and see. But I didn't because this theme was doing it for me and I liked what I saw. I'm glad to say now that after I have played the game about four or five times with my wife and I, um it's really good the concerns that i have i'm not as concerned about them anymore so well done spooky i mean this was a great game that i played today so i'm just gonna have a whole list of uh of of uh let's see hits that i'm gonna go through or uh what is it what is it that i call them um my hot takes i'm gonna go through my list of hot takes from playing scooby today okay so we went to io we were there today they opened at 11 a.m uh it isn't it is a bar but uh saturday and sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. it's all ages so we were able to go and bring my kiddo now she hung over in the corner playing on her iPhone as the kids do but that's not here nor there this was about me and playing Scooby so first up I walked up the machine and yeah it's striking to see this wide body you know right in front of you you know and appreciate like the size of this game now I get what they were talking about or what other people have had with their takes that the play field is sort of oriented more in a standard size, but they used that wide-body space to add more features, to really expand the perspective of the player and what's available on there, especially with those extra ramps, so it doesn't take away from the core playfield. And because of that, it didn't play like a floaty, wide-body, like a Twilight Zone or a Hobbit or what have you. The first thing I did notice was the color of the armor. In person, this thing is the perfect shade. I was worried with some images that I'd seen online preliminarily. It looked like it was more of a fluorescent lime green, which seemed to detract just a little bit. But, you know, with the ambient lighting of the arcade bar, it looked good. It looks like more of a kind of a deeper green, not so much that neon lime green. Maybe that was just some of the lighting for the professional photos that was done that made it look a little more harsh, a little more saturated. So the armor looks good. It's got green powder coat on the collector's version, at least. and it felt good. It feels good in the hands too with the sculpted armor that they do with the creeper on the side. So I was happy with the color of the armor. That was one thing that was in the back of my mind. I was thinking, is this the right shade of green for this? And I think it works. The wide body is very striking seeing. It's going to look great in a lineup. It looked great to line up at IO. So one of the other things I was concerned with is there's these horseshoe shots, right? There's at least three. There may be even one more. Um, there's two down on the main play field. If you look at the array of shots, uh, because the main play field shots are kind of arranged fan layout ish to the extreme left and extreme right. There's these two little horseshoe orbits. And at first I was worried, okay, so there's not a traditional orbit shot that those shots do feel good on pinball machines. You know, when you hit the extreme left or extreme right, and they just whip right around the entire play field and come back at you. I was worried that these were more, um, like shorter, similar to like how Rick and Morty's, uh, horseshoe orbit is. But in fact, and this was alleviated a bit when I saw a picture of the bottom play field, those orbits on the left and right, they go back to the end of the actual play field underneath that upper play field. So when you fire a shot and rip one up that left or right or you know medium left or medium right orbit whichever way you enter it it does take the ball a bit of time to go around and come out even if you do hit a pretty strong shot in there So it felt like an orbit You know if you hit the extreme left I mean it would whip around. It's just instead of coming back all the way to the extreme right to feed the flippers, it comes back in the middle of the play field. And similarly, if you shoot one kind of straight up the middle to the left and right of that main ramp, they do come around in orbit and then shoot back and feed back to the flipper. So it's a satisfying orbit shot. There's two different ones, but what it does is different than a typical orbit because it can rip back and come back, you know, kind of down the middle to the flipper. Um, there weren't any cheap drains that I could see. Um, and actually the only, uh, like roll back that would cause a straight down the middle drain would be from that center wrap if it didn't quite make it up all the way to the top. But they did put that pop-up target down there, um, between the, uh, two flippers. So it will pop up momentarily if you do get a rollback just to help protect it. So that's a good gameplay element. It didn't feel cheap at all. And I like what they did with the orbits. It felt good. So thank you for doing that, Spooky. Now remember, on that left side orbit, there is a secret passage that's back there that gets activated and there's a magnet involved. It's out of the player's view. And that helps to lock a ball. So that caught me off guard too, because at different times I would shoot this orbit expecting the ball to come back and then it would hear it plop down to a subway somewhere back there and then you know, another ball would feed the in lane. So I was happy with how that came out, because it wasn't just, you know, some quick cheap shots. I mean, it seemed like there was actual some good gameplay built into that. What's the other big difference, this big innovative difference this game? Well, that's the bookcase flipper, right? So the left flipper on that upper play field on the left side is a bookcase angled about 60 degrees or so. It's hiding, you know, an actual flipper, but there's an appendage that comes off of it. If you look at the gameplay or play field photos, you can see that. So how this works is you rip a shot up the center ramp. Um, center ramp didn't feel cheap. I didn't get a lot of ball rejects. If it didn't go up all the way, it's legitimately because it was a softer shot that I sent every shot that went up there that should make it did make it. Um, it seems like it takes the ball a while too, to go up there. So I'm wondering what that ramp actually looks like. Um, but shooting that ramp, If you don't do anything, it's going to drain right off the upper play field into the blue Fred wire form and then feed back to the left flipper. So shooting up the middle, you want to hold the left flipper and it will activate that bookcase, slide it over, and that will grab the ball and kind of fling it over. It will bounce it really over to the right side of the upper play field. What I found I was able to do is by holding that bookcase shut, it would bounce over to the right flipper and then usually would have enough momentum to bounce back over where I could cradle and catch it on the bookcase. That was fun. What I wasn't expecting was a cradled shot off that bookcase. As soon as you let go of the button, it'll go ahead and lob the ball across the upper play field. It doesn't just fall down like a cradled shot would on a traditional flipper. So that caught me a little off guard. It took some getting used to because I wasn't used to a shot that's done that. I don't think another game has had that feature. What I was able to do was learn that as long as the ball didn't come to a rest, you can kind of let it keep rolling, drop the flipper and then hit it real quick. And that was a great way to set it up to either the left side of the horseshoe for Captain Cutler or bash him in the head itself. So it was fun to play around with that. And I can say that center ramp is repeatable all day long. Even I, a, you know, certified mediocre pinball player was able to reliably send it up that middle to keep trying to go for those Cutler shots. So it's fun kind of juggling the ball with this, you know, wacky new kind of flipper, plus having the traditional one on the right. So I liked how that gameplay was, and I'm looking forward to getting better and more finesse with it. I was able to let it kind of roll up the top part of the bookcase flipper and then let go and release and have it lob over to try to aim at those other passages underneath the Black Knight up there. So that was good. It had some neat feel. It's fun to play with. It's fun to experiment. It's going to take you off guard a little bit to figure out like how it feels. Speaking of feeling the flippers, they all felt strong. None of these felt like, you know, weak or sloppy flippers. They were nice and springy. They didn't feel clunky. I like the action that they had. They had a good, just with the stock bands that came with it, they had a good amount of bounce. So I did like that. Every shot I felt on the play field was hittable. And because this game does skew, maybe a little bit easier, a little more forgiving than maybe most traditional games and definitely a step above something like TNA or Rick and Morty, you know, that's helpful to know that you can reliably hit shots. So even somebody of, you know, mediocre means can still feel like they're performing well on this game. So I like that. I like the repeatable center ramp. And the shots did seem fair I mean when they would light up and I was trying to chase you know the robot shots during that mode or going back and forth with the witch mode and the witch and the zombie mode or whatever it was where you have to do alternating combos Like, I felt I could reliably hit the shots if I made an actual good shot. I mean, it didn't feel cheap. Nothing felt like it was rejecting. Like, I kept trying to hit and, you know, a shot should have been fair but was rejected. There wasn't any of that rattle that I've seen with other games. You know, some of the ramps on Rick and Morty come to mind where your window to hit that precisely is pretty tight. There's a little more latitude here. But it wasn't easy. You still had to focus. But I think once you get your game or get on location and kind of learn the shots, where they're at in relation to what part of the flipper you need to hit, I think it's solid. It's a fair game, so I like that. There wasn't a lot of that rattle, like, oh, that should have registered or that should have gone in. There wasn't that frustration. When it drained, it did seem fair. Speaking of fair, I did get that rut row drain on the left side a couple of times. So there is one in lane per side. The left side has a double out lane, and it's got a rut and a row, like Scooby-Doo's classic catch fresh rut row, right? So as you roll over those in lane targets, if you manage to hit both of them, and they're controllable by the flippers, you do get your ball save and get it back. So if you do drain to that left side, you do at least have a pretty good chance of nailing those inset lights and getting your ball returned. So that's nice. It's like a fun little mini game that's kind of built in there. What else do I have down? The mystery mine, spinner shot. I think it's fair. That's your mode starter. The courage meter was interesting. I'm still getting used to the idea. The basic gist of this is on the left side, the extreme left side of the play field, there's a set of kind of LED lights, kind of where those hot rail lights would be on Guns N' Roses. As you start a mode, there's kind of like a timer there, and it represents Scooby's courage, right? And once it runs out, the mode basically times out. But there are ways, as you're playing the mode, to grab Scooby Snacks to boost your own courage to keep that mode going. So it's not just a strict time limit like on, say, Godzilla, when you need to kill one of the monsters, one of the kaiju battles, where you've got a minute, and then when it times out, that's done. This does have a way to kind of replenish that if you're getting close. So that's nice. what I noticed was that as the courage meter was dwindling down I would start to feel a little bit of a rumble from the shaker motor so there was some good tactile feedback there so that was a fun gameplay integration another thing I got written down here is I was playing the collector's edition and bug wasn't lying when he said that these are the most sculpts that they've put in a game there's sculpts everywhere I mean there's a sculpted rock wall that aligns the upper play field there's sculpts for all the characters there's the scooby in the barrel that pops up There's, what's his name, Andy the Robot. He's on there. There's the sculpted hands that are down below on the apron for the apron locks. I mean, there's a sculpted Mystery Machine Man. There's things everywhere in this. Minor 49ers in there. So when I think about, you know, the mod community, which I'm getting to be a part of, I can't think of a whole lot of things that I would build to add in here that aren't already on there. I mean, I'm sure there's a couple spots where there's some plastics you could replace. But for the most part, I mean, it's pretty packed. There's a lot to look at in this game. there's a lot to play in this game there's a lot of innovative features that are in here you know there's it's just captain cutler up there at the uh the upper play field you can bash his physical head helmet um you can hit the stand-up targets and it engages a little magnet that you know whips the ball around a little bit um there's bookcase flippers there's the other three flippers which are full size which feel strong to me um and then just all the characters that are all over there there's five wire form ramps and then there's even stuff on the apron um so i didn't get to see a whole lot of functionality with these apron locks. I believe there's a way where you can lock a ball on each side and then trigger it for a multiball. I did not get to that mode. I did get to the Culpton-Cultler multiball mode a couple times. I'll get to that in a second. But the physical apron lock, for the most part, when I would get a ball up there, it would then just exit and be thrown right down between the flippers. That was a very smooth process for the most part. I did have, on the game I was playing, the ball did come down to the left apron lock. The bat wing went about halfway and then reset and then the ball was sitting up there and then during the ball searches it wasn't going and activating that. I did have to turn the machine off and then back on once it booted up but then went through a full ball search and activated all the mechanisms and then that ball came out. But they gave me my quarters back. It was okay. So that may be some early bugs. I mean this is the earliest public code that you're going to have for this game. That was the only issue that popped up during my gameplay and it's something that I'm sure with bug fixes, it's not going to be a problem. But it was fun to see the apron locks. One other thing that probably needs to be fixed, and this is kind of a minor thing, probably just an early code thing. But when you go to start players, now there's five characters that you can play, right? The five main characters Scooby Daphne Velma Fred and Shaggy Each one has their own little attribute you know What I saw is that if you play with Fred I think you get a little bit more forgiving ball locks with that pop target between the flippers With Velma, I think she gains clues easier or maybe needs less clues to successfully pass a mode or something. So when you start, you know, enter your coins and then make these great little sound effects from the cartoon, like a lot of boings and springs and boings when you put the coins in. So that was fun. But you load your money, you get a credit, you hit start, and you can play your one player. Once you hit start, you go to pick your character, you flip through them, and hit the center button to the action button on the lockdown bar to choose your character. If you wanted to play two-player, we had to put in the credits, hit start, player number one would have to pick their person, and then before they started playing, you'd have to hit the start button one more time. And then the second player wouldn't choose their character until the first player drained their first ball. Then it would come up to the character select screen for the second character, That seemed a little bit wonky. There was another couple that was playing, and they couldn't figure that out at first. It took them a time or two until they could figure out how to play a multiplayer game. So I'd like to see it where you enter the credits, you hit the start button however many times. That loads the players at least, and then the players can grab their character as they come up. I mean, simple bug fix, but this is more just if you happen to play this early code and you want to do a multiplayer, that's kind of what you have to do. Make sure after player one chooses their character, You have to hit that start button again before you start playing. Otherwise, you lose that ability to add a player. Apron locks I talked about. Overall impressions. So, fun game. I liked it. I played it about four times. Ball times were a bit longer than what I would experience on, you know, Deadpool or something. And that's not a problem for me. I think this is a great game for my home and my level of playing. if there were tournament players like professional tournament players i i think a four-player tournament on this game might go over an hour you know uh so we'll have to see how that shakes out maybe there could be tournament modes that are activated um there are some uh um uh exit lane or drain lanes what they call outside lane um uh those little uh bumpers you know uh and you can unscrew them you can move them around you can change the difficulty out lane pin blockers i'm sure there's a term for them anyway these were set on the most um you know the higher difficulty i mean there's only two settings for them um and i was still you know if you're a skilled nudger and you play you know relatively conservatively and don't take high risk shots i think you could keep that ball going for quite a while so i think that part of it is true um for me that's all the more reason to bring it into the home for the family uh so uh it also plays a bit faster than what i saw on the spooky live stream and i did live stream this game for a little bit i've got that video up on Don's Pinball Podcast Facebook page. And then Spooky actually reached out and commented and said that actually when they did the live stream in the factory, the game was actually set flat on the ground. They didn't have the back legs raised to the correct pitch. So it did play a little more floaty for their live stream than what this played on location. And in that live stream, I did go down because somebody asked a question. And I did video a bit of the back legs, you can see that they were up about an inch off the ground with the leveler. So those are my overall impressions for this. It's live and ready to play at IO Arcade Bar 924 Williamson Street in Madison, Wisconsin. Saturday and Sunday it's all ages, 11am to 2pm if you've got little ones. Otherwise, it looks like a great place to go hang out and have beer. I met the owner of the Pinball Machine with Madison Pinball. They have a Facebook page. Super chill guy. We got to talk a little bit. Glad to meet him, so shout out to you. Go out and play it if you're in the local Madison area. I know of a couple of other local arcades or playing areas that are going to be getting this game here in the next week or so. So I think from here on out, we're going to start seeing more of these on location, at least locally in the Chicago Midwest region. And then as we get into the next months or so, it's going to be more widely available. Of course, it's going to be at the conventions from basically here on out, I would imagine. Definitely a Texas Pinball Festival. I heard word that they may be down in Louisville now too. They've decided to go. So there may be some on location there to play as well. Stop by, play it, give the guys a shout out, give your impressions. go on to the Don's Pinball Podcast Facebook page and leave your impressions or what you thought of the video or just any comments in general or email me directly at donspinballpodcast at gmail.com. Guys, I played Scooby-Doo today and it was fun. I have one on order and I'm glad I do. So there's my hot take for my first impressions. Cue the music. Hit me up on the email. Drop some money at the support link down below on the Spotify description. I got a link in there. Throw a couple ducats in the tip jar if you like what I'm bringing. Everybody else, hit like, hit follow. Let me know what you're thinking. I love the interaction we've been having, and I'll have more content for you coming up soon, man. Have yourself a great rest of your weekend. Eat your vegetables.