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Forum Questions Part 1

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 49m·analyzed·Jul 21, 2015
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Blockade Podcast reviews Farsight Q&A on TPA seasons, sales data, and EM plans amid tournament meta discussion.

Summary

Blockade Podcast hosts Chris Frebus, Jared Morgan, and Bonzo discuss forum questions answered by Bobby from Farsight Studios about The Pinball Arcade's future seasons, table sales data, and EM machine plans. The conversation includes extensive debate about tournament grinding mechanics versus skill-based play, competitive standings for their custom tournament, and beta testing feedback on Safecracker.

Key Claims

  • Farsight plans to continue Pinball Arcade at least through Season 6, adding 20+ more classic tables over approximately two years

    high confidence · Bobby (Farsight) answered question about future seasons; Chris notes this is contingent on management/business factors

  • Addams Family has been outselling most Season 3 and 4 tables 2 to 1

    high confidence · Bobby's direct answer to sales comparison question

  • Big Shot EM table consistently ranks among top played tables, with its worst ranking being #11 by gameplay sessions in any month

    high confidence · Bobby citing internal Farsight analytics; surprising even to Farsight team

  • Farsight has plans to add more EM machines to Pinball Arcade while maintaining one solid-state release per month schedule

    high confidence · Bobby's direct statement; Chris notes this should be taken with grain of salt due to business contingencies

  • Season 1 tables still one of Farsight's best sellers despite being oldest content

    high confidence · Bobby's sales analysis comparing across seasons

  • Chris placed 41st in Farsight Pinball Arcade PC tournament, missing top 40 cutoff by one position

    high confidence · Chris's personal tournament participation and frustration narrative

  • Safecracker beta testing shows flipper strength tuning issue making table easier than real version; mini flippers lack power

    medium confidence · Bonzo describing beta testing experience and requesting adjustments to Farsight team

  • Ryan Schwanta (Farsight developer) achieved 38 million points on Safecracker beta, compared to Bonzo's 8 million

    high confidence · Bonzo's beta testing observation of leaderboard scores

Notable Quotes

  • “If you're getting stressed when you're playing pinball, you're doing it wrong.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~27:30 — Core philosophy about tournament grinding versus casual play enjoyment

  • “Well, thank God it's finally there because a lot of people do need to experience it and have fun doing it, but I just need to curb how I have fun with it.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~31:00 — Chris acknowledging PC tournament availability but recognizing his personal play style incompatibility

  • “It's supposed to rape the quarters from your pocket... It certainly did for me when it was on location when it was new. Boy, I pumped some money into that game.”

    Bonzo @ ~43:00 — Safecracker's intended quarter-eating design versus digital version's balance issues

  • “They're not a mythical creature with unicorns and rainbows that can magic pinball machines into reality. They're called a business and sometimes things in business don't work out as they plan.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~47:00 — Disclaimer about Farsight statements' reliability given business constraints

  • “I'm sitting there watching my score and I'm like, I was like right at the tail end of the silver of being able to advance... I placed 41st. I'm literally... I'm sorry I won... first loser, first loser, first loser.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~22:00 — Frustration over narrow tournament miss and rage-quit psychology

Entities

Blockade PodcastorganizationChris Frebus / Shut Your TrappersonJared Morgan / Jared MorgzpersonBonzopersonFarsight StudioscompanyBobbypersonPinball ArcadeproductThe Addams FamilygameSafecrackergame

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Farsight's revenue model requires upfront minimum guarantee payments to manufacturers for table rights, and profitability assessments factor into licensing renewal decisions

    high · Bobby: 'Mostly it comes down to keeping each table that we add profitable. Part of that is paying upfront minimum guarantees to the manufacturers for the table rights'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Significant frustration with Pinball Arcade tournament grinding mechanics (20-minute unlimited plays per table) versus time-limited skill-based tournaments; Chris's rage quit and near-miss (41st of 40 cut) exemplifies burnout

    high · Chris's extended narrative about Ripley's grind, Viking Eric's score overtaking, controller throw, and decision to change tournament approach

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Farsight maintains conservative approach to Season 1 remastering despite consumer requests, reasoning that high sales indicate 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' commercially

    medium · Chris's interpretation of Bobby's data: 'I could kind of see why Farsight might not be as keen to go through and perhaps give some extra love to those papers because they're selling so well'

  • $

    market_signal: Addams Family significantly outselling Season 3/4 tables (2:1 ratio); Season 1 remains top seller despite age, suggesting sustained demand for classic core lineup

    high · Bobby sales comparison data showing Addams Family 2:1 over newer seasons; Theater of Magic still #1 individual table sales

  • ?

    product_concern: Safecracker beta shows flipper strength tuning too aggressive for mini-flippers, making table easier than real machine and enabling marathon play rather than quarter-eating behavior

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.328

0:00
Candy, 2000 Security System Online. You're listening to the Blockade Podcast. Intruder Alert. You are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. With me, as usual, from down under in Aussie land, home of the buff kangaroo, is Jared Morgs. Hello, hello.
0:44
Also with us, who's taking a small sabbatical away, but we have things for him to do and he is very much needed, is the lovely Bonzo.
0:53
Guten Tag. Well, it's been a few months since we've actually had more than just myself and Jared in here. He has to get that shift right. Yeah.
1:08
Jeff was saying he was maybe going to be available, but then he said that he hadn't been playing much pinball lately, and so he didn't have anything to talk about, which makes me wonder, does he even listen to our podcast? I don't know. I wouldn't.
1:24
it's not like you have to talk pinball in here. I mean, come on. You know, I sampled a few different pinball podcasts, and I came away with this understanding. All they talk about is pinball.
1:42
Yeah, what's up with that? Well, you know, because we talk about pretty much exclusively, it seems, the pinball arcade, so virtual pinball, and we don't talk that much about actual pinball, we can only talk about what happens if Farsight is doing anything worth talking about. Whereas in the pinball world, there's expos and there's new tables coming out, or you can talk about restoring machines, whatever. We're just on the playing end, so we don't always have enough pinball material to fill up an entire show. Hey, mate, it could make for really short shows. maybe that's what people are trying to tell us.
Big Shot
game
Ripley's Believe It or Notgame
Viking Ericperson
Ryan Schwantaperson
Theater of Magicgame
Star Trek, Black Hole, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, Twilight Zone, Terminator 2game

high · Bonzo beta testing: 'flippers are dialed in too strong... don't really have a lot of power because of their length... really quite easy to get up there... it's going to be a marathon game, unfortunately'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Farsight plans to add more EM (electromechanical) tables to TPA while maintaining one solid-state release per month cadence; Big Shot's strong performance (#11 ranking) validates EM viability

    high · Bobby: 'we have a plan to add more EMs to Pinball Arcade while maintaining our scheduled lineup of releasing one solid-state machine a month'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Farsight confirms plan to continue TPA through Season 6 with 20+ additional classic tables over ~2 years; contingent on profitability and license renewals

    high · Bobby's direct statement: 'right now I'm optimistic that we will continue at least through season 6 that would add at least 20 more classic tables'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Farsight finally launching Pinball Arcade tournaments on PC platform after previous PS3-only availability; represents platform parity expansion

    high · Chris and Bonzo commentary: 'It's about bloody time for the PC crowd' and discussion of Bonzo's first PC tournament participation

    • 2:26
    Well, too bad, people, because you know what I'm going to talk about? I'm going to talk about what I think should basically be an official blockade holiday, which is Free Swarpy Day at 7-Eleven.
    2:38
    Oh, yeah. Now, I know for Jared, because his country abides by that silly notion that seems every other country but America does, where you actually put the day, then the month, then the year, so therefore your 7-Eleven isn't until November.
    2:55
    Us here in the good old United States of America, 7 stands for July, and that's July 11th, which just happened to pass by.
    3:02
    So I hope all those out there listening, you partook of your free Slurpee. I did my part and chugged a few.
    3:10
    Did you go and do your usual trick of going to, like, about eight different outlets and just going hard? I did not go to as many this time. We started off the day by just bringing our cups for refills because we were just going to be having some lunch, and it was like I don't feel like driving around just to get these at the moment. So we started off with a full Slurpee, and then later on in the day hit a couple to fill up with. But I did come across some interesting stats. Number one is that you Aussies drink a ton of Slurpees just like us in the U.S. Oh, we do? apparently you're like one of the largest consumers.
    3:52
    It's so bloody hot here, that's why. On the free giveaway day, in America they serve out something to the tune of 500,000 gallons of free Slurpee. And in Australia, they kick out 270,000 gallons. Jeez.
    4:14
    Say a letter to God, Jesus. And then in the course of a year worldwide, they sell 7.3 million gallons of Slurpee a year.
    4:25
    Jeez. For which my wife says I probably consumed half of it. That's a delicious, delicious frozen drink. But, hey, I can see why they do it because it's really great. I don't know if you guys have it over there, but we have a range of Slurpee here called Zilch. It's 0.1% sugar. Yeah. It's basically sugar-free Slurpee. Does it have the nasty aftertaste, though? It totally does. Yeah. It's part of the experience.
    4:56
    The Caribbean flavor has this most incredible, strange aftertaste to it that makes you almost reconsider your decision to go sugar-free. I think I'd almost go, give me the diabetes and let me have the full gob Slurpee, thanks. My kid just tried the Sour watermelon Sour Patch Kids Sour Watermelon And he didn't just He didn't just Yeah he didn't just try a little sample He filled up the entire cup with it And his logic was I'm going to get myself used to it And yeah he got through about half of it And was just like I'm done I can't do anymore It's pretty rough Yeah I wish they'd just make the normal flavors Like Coke or Cola flavor They do Oh, as zilch. Well, they don't have it here. Yeah, as zilch. Like, we would... If they just had essentially Diet Coke Slurpees, I don't think I'd drink anything else. I think I'd just go with that all day. Because it's great.
    5:57
    But yeah, that fake fruit flavor just kills me. It just makes me want to gag. Yeah, it's all kinds of nasty. Do you guys have the frozen Slurpees there in Germany? yeah but they aren't really that big of a thing because maybe we don't have a real summer here most of the time then the fact you have real desserts we have great food all together I'd say yep you do if not much else great beer and quite okay food yeah And then we have here where one of our local fast food joints, Carl's Jr., is doing the All-American Burger, which is a hamburger or a cheeseburger with a hot dog on top of it with potato chips.
    6:51
    And I can't remember if there's some other just insane topping on it, but it's just like an entire picnic in a bun.
    6:58
    Oh, boy. Yeah, that sounds nuts. We have this wonderful little Imbiss here. Bonzo that does a pork knuckle sandwich.
    7:10
    And it is like a slow-cooked pork knuckle with, they serve it with chips on the side, like fries on the side. And they usually have an accompaniment. You can have the kraut or this nice, what is it, coleslaw-style stuff. Man, it is just, and they also serve half-litre beers at this place as well, which is like, all right, well, you sold me on that. let's go and have a pork knuckle burger and a half liter of beer, please.
    7:42
    It's so good, man. There are a lot of great indices here in Germany, but what I do miss from the one time I've been to America is the amount of different chains. We've got McDonald's and Burger King. We've got Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I think that's it. and I've never been to In-N-Out and I've heard Chris talk about it so much and I've experienced it too when we were over there last year it's pretty incredible and when I was there we went to Wendy's and Jack in the Box and all that different kind of chains and some of them weren't that great okay but if the only alternatives you have is McDonald's or Burger King that gets boring really fast. Yeah. Hey, it would make you a healthier country because you wouldn't have all these opportunities to imbibe in terrible, terrible fast food. Well, we've got great beer, so... So that makes up for it.
    8:49
    Which would you rather have, the great beer or fast food joints? Great beer. Thank you very much. Yeah, maybe.
    8:57
    Hey, you know, we have a new thing that did pop up with the Pinball Arcade. And that is they finally instituted tournaments for the PC.
    9:12
    Hooray! I don't say that with any sort of sarcasm in mind. It's about bloody time for the PC crowd. It is about bloody time. The amazing part for me, I had not played in one of Farsight's tournaments in probably over a year. I had been playing them on the PS3, but then when there was the whole shenanigans of them not selling the seasons ahead of time, I never bought any of Season 3 on the PS3. So as soon as any of the tournaments started having Season 3 tables, I stopped playing any of the tournaments. I also, at the same time as I stopped playing those tournaments, was around the same time that I was kind of not playing much pinball arcade either. I was kind of burnt out.
    9:55
    And it's amazing the feelings that this tourney brought back in me. whiny, snivelling, baby feelings that I had.
    10:04
    The bitter loser feelings? Oh, God. I'm telling you, I've got to change how I play this. If I'm going to play the next tournament, I've got to change how I do it because it literally just sucked the life out of me.
    10:19
    But don't you, do you also play in the tournament of the month? You do, don't you, right? Well, yeah, of course I do. I kind of run the damn thing.
    10:30
    So how is it different playing that in comparison to the fast site 20-minute grind fest? Well, and Bonson can maybe pitch in, because you played in the PC tournament too, right? I did, a little. A little. So here's what happens with me. The tournament starts. I immediately jump in. I'll play all eight tables just before I post the score. This particular tournament, four of the eight tables were got leaves. So right off the bat. Yeah, right off the bat I was in bad mood.
    11:00
    And I only knew well three of the tables, which was Ripley's, Cactus Canyon, and there is a third one that I'm forgetting that I knew really well, and I kind of know Space Shuttle, but I suck horribly at Space Shuttle.
    11:20
    It's one of my favorites, that guy. so anyway I joined in the tournament and I posted my scores and then I was like well let's go knock out Ripley's real quick and see what we can do on that in 20 minutes so I go through and I posted pretty good score and I looked at the leaderboards and the top two spots are taken by what I consider to be hackers I don't know if one of them for sure is but the other one definitely was and no, I'm not going to say the names because they don't need the publicity.
    11:54
    But anyway, their scores, though, were such that I was like, oh, I can reach this. I can get that. Oh, wouldn't that feel good to knock off a hacker?
    12:02
    So I pretty much ignored all the other tables and just went nuts trying to knock out Ripley's. And I knew my strategy. I knew exactly what I needed to do. It was going to take three continent tours to get through to do it. I got to the point where I was literally just playing maybe three of the continents for score and everything else I was almost letting drain immediately just to run through as fast as I possibly could and I almost had it one time and it was it came down to the all I need to do is activate two times multiplier and then shoot the continent scoop and I'd be in heaven and I had all of a minute left to do this in and I shot the ball and I missed the two times and I hit the continent scoop instead and that just blew my score and I was so angry. Oh, man. So I'm sitting there just hammering away, hammering away on this, and I keep on checking my status because they have me start in bronze level.
    13:03
    And apparently they have people in silver and gold, which was interesting since nobody had been playing on the PC yet, but I think they took whoever had been in previous tournaments, you know, since they have the same account, and just kind of dumped them in that way. Okay.
    13:17
    So I was just trying to stay within, you know, advance to the silver level. That was what my whole point was. And I figured, hey, so long as I have a good Ripley score, all is well. So it's now probably about Wednesday or Thursday. So it's been four days of me just hammering on Ripleys and doing nothing but else.
    13:37
    And all of a sudden, Viking Eric gets aware of the tournament. It's all over. And so the score I needed to achieve was probably about $190 million. I had posted $170 million. He comes in and he knocks in, I want to say, $400 or $450 million.
    14:03
    Just completely pulls the rug out from under me. I was like, I don't even know how he did it. He posted how he did it, and I was just like, I don't even know that trick. and I pretty much threw the controller down and was like, okay, so I'm not playing Ripley's anymore. Rage quit. See you later. And here's where it got me back to the feelings of why I stopped playing Pinball Arcade was now I didn't even want to play Ripley's for fun.
    14:30
    It was just like I was just kind of like soured and angry and I'm sitting there watching my score and I'm like, I was like right at the tail end of the silver of being able to advance. so I kept on trying to improve my other scores but like I said with the other with the four Gottliebs I have no clue what I'm doing in those nor do I really want to know and so I wasn't really going to get much improvement on the score there and at the end of the day when the tournament ended they took the and I'll just throw this out I'm not sure if it's exactly true or not but they took the top 40 I placed 41st oh my dude I'm literally I'm sorry I won so I was just like I'm the first loser so I've determined that I have a new way that I'm going to approach the tournament and it'll be the only way to keep me happy because here's the thing even within the 20 minute time limit the majority of your scores tend to be the same score it's just It's like 9 out of 10, you're shooting the same score, and then it's that 10th time that you get the really good bump up, right? That's where I like our tournament better, because it's truer to what you would on average score, rather than just grinding for that one fluke moment, until people like Viking come in and show exactly what they can do on a regular basis.
    16:03
    But no, I think the next time that Farsight runs their tournament, I'm just going to pick, probably give myself two days,
    16:10
    and maybe say each table I'll give myself five tries. And whatever my score is, that's my score, and I'll just be happy with it and play with it that way. Because I don't need the stress.
    16:22
    If you're getting stressed when you're playing pinball, you're doing it wrong. Exactly. It's not what it's designed to do.
    16:31
    I'm kind of stressed during the tournament of the month, but that's the good kind of stress. It's fun, it's intense and it's well, it can be terribly crushing but in the end it's a lot of fun but grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding isn't fun. No, it's not. It's boring. As you just said, Chris, the tables even your favorite table you can't stand to play it anymore at least for a couple of weeks after the tournament and it's not really a test of skill you have to be skilled I'm not Viking Eric by no means but I guess he also invested some more time than I did and I think a lot of people who ended up in front of me in the rankings just invested more time it was quite a busy week for me and I just started with the tournament in the last three days, the last weekend it was on. And I had trouble. I think I didn't even play every table four or five times. I think I didn't even play Twilight Zone. I forgot to play Twilight Zone. Oh, yeah, Twilight Zone.
    17:47
    And, well, I felt bullied into playing the game, kind of. And that doesn't happen with our tournament because you have the set time. It's half a day or it's a day since the last round and you just play eight games. And even if it were three tables, you could basically play on and on even without extra balls. Even if it was Twilight Zone, Ripley's and, I don't know, Arabian Nights, I'd still have fun playing two games on these three tables. but it's not fun playing Ripley's for 20 minutes, 20 times. Well, and that's it. I think that when you have a limited amount of time, if you have a bad performance, you just have to laugh it off. Whereas when you have a week of being able to play a table as many times as you want, you stop laughing it off and it becomes this mission. And here's the interesting thing, though. I don't have a problem grinding for the wizard goals, but I think the whole point of that is because once I, there is a victory, you know, if you achieve the goal you can raise your hand and go, huh, I finally got it, whereas with this it would be grind, grind, grind, grind, grind and oh, congratulations, I placed 20th I think that's where it kind of killed the mojo so I mean, I know it's perfectly fun for a lot of people and again, I'm happy that we finally have tournament in the PC. I mean, it's like,
    19:24
    you know, thank God it's finally there because a lot of people do need to experience it and have fun doing it, but I just need to curb how I have fun with it.
    19:35
    You know, I kind of get what you guys are saying about, you know, looking at the leaderboards going, oh, I can totally get that. And then working out, like, when you actually have a look at the leaderboards, someone else is on there with, like, a phenomenal score above yours. So we're doing beta testing at the moment for Safecracker. Right. And it's going really well. Spoiler alert. Yeah, spoiler, like really.
    20:01
    Everyone knew it was going to be this table because of the incredible analytics that the Pimble IK forum has for trying to deduce the table from the clues.
    20:13
    So anyhow, we're doing a... I'm playing away and I'll say this, that I've never had ball times the same on the real estate crackers I have had in the Farsight version. I'm lucky to crack probably around 100,000 in the actual game because it's a point scored on dollar value rather than actual normal score.
    20:41
    And so I'm going around. I'm playing what is, I think, a marathon game. I got to 8 million, which is unheard of. in a real game. And I go, oh, right, okay. I'm going to have a look at the leaderboards now. And I expected not to be on the top. I expected to be pretty close. Turns out that at the time of recording, Pinball Whiz was up there with an 11 million score, which is pretty good. I'm sort of into the semi. But then Ryan Schwanta, who's one of the Farsight guys, posted the score of 38 million. and I just went I actually I posted the beta testing and said dude what the hell how the hell did you get that score man it was ridiculous I said how long did that take you because I reckon I would have been plugging away for about half an hour to get 8 million so I don't know how long it was I'm going to collect every single token that's in this machine on one quarter the problem is that this is something I've just never realized because I don't have game times like this on the real table, but when you start getting up into that sort of score level, you have entered the board game a number of times, and that scene, I tell you what, it screws down the access to the board game really tightly.
    22:05
    You've got, normally when you shoot the, it's not the very target, I think it's called the very target, yeah. Yeah, the very target. Yeah, that's right. So when you're shooting that very target, you can unlock things that will help you during the board game, like vault letters, for example. It's a really good thing to go for when you're playing the game. But normally the way that the stock settings go on the game is you'll get maybe a couple of vault letters per game if you're good enough to keep the ball live after the time it has expired. And I was shooting for that very target, which I'll admit is actually pretty easy to hit in this game. It's really, really... It doesn't have a very strong virtual spring in it. And the real table, you have to pound on that thing to get it to go all the way back. Like, you have to have such a targeted direct shot at it for it to actually go all the way back and let the ball drop in behind it. Like, you have to really be accurate with shooting it. But really, with this one, you just sort of get the ball anywhere near it and it goes halfway back. So it's really easy to get those awards that are quite crucial to the game. That's how you can get such long ball times on this particular table.
    23:26
    But, yeah, 38 million, dude. I trust you're going to hammer for it to be harder. Well, I've been trying.
    23:37
    I think the flippers, the way they're dialed in in the beta at the moment, they're typically just too strong, which is the same across most far side tables. They've just got ultra, ultra flippers.
    23:49
    And those, because on this table, they're little mini flippers. They're little twilight upper right. Yeah, little two inch twilight upper left flipper. And they're all the flippers in the game. So they don't really have a lot of power because of their length to start with. Because you don't have that extra bit of bat to give the extra bit of fulcrum strength that you normally do. so you know it takes a little bit of effort to get up the ramp but you can just fly this thing up the ramp it's like it's really quite easy to get up there so I'm really trying to get them to make it more difficult but I don't think I'm going to win because they've got a balance of that with people who've never played it before and some people haven't been lucky enough to play this game before so they won't know how it works but I think once they do learn the secrets of the table it's going to be a marathon game, unfortunately, and that's not how Safecracker is supposed to be played. It's supposed to rape the quarters from your pocket. That's how it's supposed to... It is supposed to send you to the pool house if you're actually putting quarters or dollars into it. It certainly did for me when it was on location when it was new. Boy, I pumped some money into that game. Timezone, which is the arcade it was in, they would have been very happy with me. I reckon I would have pumped in at least $800 into that game, at least. Very expensive token collection I have.
    25:12
    Hey, speaking of tournaments, we should maybe run through the June Tournaments of the Month standings, just because we like to give a shout-out to everybody that's been playing and how people are scoring.
    25:26
    So let's start with our, we'll just do the top ten, number ten. Ernie1977 came in with 34 points. Then we have Snorzel and CCL78 and Great Dane, all tied for seventh place with 35 points. Then tied for fourth place is Ksenia, Captain Bazaar, and myself, Shut Your Trap, with 36 points. Third place was Gus with 38 points. And then we had a tie at first with Switch3Flip and a brand new player, I'm going to say it's LazMama, at 39 points. So those were our top ten for June. And then that brings us to the season's date standings, because we will be having the next tournament starting on July 25th, and this will be our final of this first inaugural season. So this will make our sixth tournament, and we'll have our ultimate winner. So our top ten for that is in tenth place. Switch 3 Flip, followed by 9th place, Jared Morgz. Oh, just stuck it.
    26:39
    Followed by 8th place, Ksenia. Then 7th is Eldar of Suburbia. 6th is myself. 5th place, PinballWiz45B. 4th place, Invitro. 3rd place, Dylan H. 2nd is Captain Bizarre. And 1st is Gus. Point separation between 1st place and 10th place. First place is at 184 points. Tenth place is 155 points.
    27:07
    So basically between fourth and tenth place, it can all shift this next tournament. That how tight it is between those placements Yeah Yeah So make sure if you on that top ten list you don miss out Yeah. Practice. Nobody needs that. I'm going to fold. I'm going to fold it in like I always do.
    27:34
    Hey, we have the opportunity now and then to speak with Farsight, and we've got a pretty good relationship with them, even though we bash on them now and then, occasionally.
    27:49
    We provide them constructive criticism. There we go, constructive criticism. Anyway, way back when, Jeff used to send questions to Bobby, and then Bobby would answer five of them and send them back and then post them on the forum. And he decided that we should talk to Bobby again, and he suggested that we do that once more. So we opened the forums up to forum questions. People were able to ask anything they wanted of Farsight. I emailed those up to Bobby, and he has answered some. So with that, Jared, roll the theme music.
    28:28
    Blockade Theater presents Forum Questions with Bobby, Part 1. Fantastic theme music, if I do say so myself.
    28:49
    All right, so we're going to read these questions. I do want to just state, because people tend to then read the answers that Bobby has, and they kind of hold farsight to it and then mock them when things don't happen. So I'd just like to say this is, yes, it's coming from Bobby, but not everything he says is guaranteed truth because he does have a management team and does have bosses above him that can foo-foo things. So remember that Fastlight's actually a business is what we have to understand here. They're not a mythical creature with unicorns and rainbows that can magic pinball machines into reality. They're called a business and sometimes things in business don't work out as they plan. So take that as it comes. So playing the part of Bobby just like we had when we did our interview with Ask Homework.
    29:45
    Bonzo, did you practice your American accent? I did a little. That's awesome. All right. Let's get into the interview then. Here we go. Bobby, many are wondering how many more seasons of the Pinball Arcade are planned. and what that means for future table choices. Now, obviously, we know Season 5 is coming. Do you have a set number of tables you'd like at a minimum? Is it a question of license renewal or the parent companies, or does it purely come down to sales and customer demand?
    30:24
    Mostly it comes down to keeping each table that we add profitable. Part of that is paying upfront minimum guarantees to the manufacturers for the table rights. So, yes, renewing agreements is also a factor. right now I'm optimistic that we will continue at least through season 6 that would add at least 20 more classic tables in film blockade which is awesome because that means another solid two years of blockade podcast it's also too, it's interesting I know we want to make runs through the interview pretty quick but it's interesting they have to pay upfront costs and projected earnings so that's something I wasn't aware of interesting we'll glean whatever information we can out of this and apply it to our vast knowledge.
    31:09
    Speaking of sales, how were the Addams Family sales figures compared to other tables? Excluding Toten, since it's free, what are the top five best sellers?
    31:23
    The Addams Family has been solid. It's been outselling most Season 3 and 4 tables 2 to 1. It's difficult to compare sales since the Season 1 tables have a huge advantage in this ranking. Single table sales were much more popular Before season packs were introduced Plus they've been on the market longer Season pack 1 is still one of our best sellers Each month Theater of Magic sold individually is actually still Number 1 in terms of individual sales Star Trek, Black Hole, Ripley's Medieval Madness, Monster Bash Twilight Zone Terminator 2 Are all right up there So Adam's Family would be next Yeah that's pretty interesting that season one is still just like banging out, which I think that opens up the thing of, can I remaster season one?
    32:12
    Yeah, I know. Well, it says to me that I could kind of see why Farsight might not be as keen to go through and perhaps give some extra love to those papers because they're selling so well.
    32:28
    Commercially, if I was in business and if it ain't broke, don't fix it because they're still selling. And as a consumer, of course, I want to see the tables improve, but they're doing so well for them. So, yeah, it's a tough argument, isn't it, really? It's interesting also not being able to truthfully compare, like you said, with the Season 3 and 4 having been sold as packs right off the bat, whereas Season 1 and 2 weren't sold as season packs right off the bat. it is hard to tell which sells better in the case of Adam's family, which I thought would be just skunking everything. But it's like, yeah, everybody already has the season pack, so it's just kind of rolled into that, so it makes it more difficult to compare to those other ones.
    33:15
    Yeah, it's tricky. Moving along. Bobby, it's been said a few times by Farsight that there really isn't much interest in doing EMs in TPA, whether because of low sales, lack of interest, or the time and effort in scripting them. That being said, Big Shot and Central Park are also hardly shining examples of popular EMs among real-world pinball players. Yet, those are the few you have in the pinball arcade to base data off of.
    33:41
    Or do you consider Genie and Eldorado lumped in because they are essentially EMs with digital parts? Anyway, with that in mind, are true EMs, not solid-state machines from the 70s, ever going to make another appearance in the pinball arcade, or are the chances slim to none? we have a plan to add more EMs to Pinball Arcade while maintaining our scheduled lineup of releasing one solid-state machine a month. Big Shot is consistently one of the most played tables. We keep an eye on a lot of analytics. As I recall, the worst I ever saw Big Shot's ranking in the number of gameplay sessions listed was number 11 one month. So we know there's a market. Our fans definitely enjoyed playing Big Shot and we had noticed, to the surprise of most of us. yeah that's a big wow 11 that's incredible for an EM number 11 because the gameplays are so short that you just keep on piling them on I don't know that's on the one end and on the other hand it's a table you can just play in between whatever else you're doing yeah Yeah, try that. No, I can do it. Or Totem.
    34:53
    It's a quick fix. I'm sure all of our listeners that are EM fans just cream themselves because they're never going to shut up about this now.
    35:04
    As an aside, I've been listening to Nick Baldridge's Forum Use and Only podcast where he talks about EMs and bingos. And like this, it's got me fired up actually to want to actually play more of these pins because, you know, for various reasons, which I won't go into in this interview slot, they seem like a lot of fun, and I'd love to see more. So good on you, Faza, for doing that.
    35:30
    Which brings us to our next question. If there is no intention of making more EMs, which obviously they're saying they are, but anyway, I didn't know that when I answered the question. If there is no intention of making more EMs, and because you hold a license to do so, would you ever consider letting another developer build them on your behalf? or, if that is not possible, making a new app that features nothing but 1970s and earlier machines.
    35:52
    Both of these ideas are possible, but we'll probably add them to Pimblegate. And that would be one of those answers, folks, that you take with a grain of salt. Yes, that would be. Anytime now, real soon, we'll be adding those to the game.
    36:12
    Maybe we'll add them to Pimble after dark, huh? Yeah, it's not exactly fair. We all know exactly what that question was, and I should say right off the bat, thank you everybody that did post questions. I'm not reading off whose names read each question because I wound up compiling them because I had like ten pages worth of questions when I typed them out, and I knew that I would just make Bobby freak. So I pared them down, combined them, mushed them together, mashed them up, and threw them out there. But, you know, we all know what the hope was, was that, yes, we're going to contact ask and have them do all the EMs. Yeah, that's not going to happen. So, I mean, it's kind of a loaded question. So I'm not surprised that the answer is the proverbial, we'd like to.
    36:57
    Yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah. Okay. Let's flip that the other direction, though, and talk about modern stern tables. Apart from licensing issues, the emulation of SAM machines has been said that it can't happen due to older devices and platforms not being able to handle the processing power needed. Are there plans in place to move forward on this? Is there a risk of Farsight losing part of the Stern license to someone like Zen, Duke not putting out an entire subset of their product? And does the new spike system help or complicate matters?
    37:29
    Stern would like to see more of their tables represented in digital form. yes there are plans but I can't elaborate on the details quite yet the spike system is a new challenge but I don't think it will prove to be any harder than emulating SAM a bit of mystery to that one it sounds like from that perspective that perhaps SAM and spike apart from having a distributed computing model in the spike system are relatively the same as far as an emulation perspective goes yes that's what I'm saying It sounds like all they've done is they've just modulized the system and gave it a new name by the sound of things. So that's interesting. But I find it interesting that he can't elaborate on what their details, though, are. So I find that encouraging. Obviously, I think I was the one that started this thread, but pointed out that Zen had a meeting with Stern, and that got me all kinds of wondering. so obviously we know that Farsight owns the license to Stern tables so it'll be interesting to see how they go forward with that. I hope hope hope hope they find a solution I'd really like to see as an aside to that I think if Farsight were to do that they could probably actually go and make a bespoke app for that and when they march full steam ahead into Stern production and we're talking about latest digital tables being converted and stuff like that, that will be the time to separate Pinball Arcade into a Stern app, but also offer it within the core pack as well. Yes. Because people searching for Stern Pinball on Play Store, that will be good analytic for them to try and tap into.
    39:18
    Moving on. Similarly, Capcom Pinball was said to be processor heavy too. Is there anything new to report about that specifically? will we see any of the seven tables Capcom made in Pinball Arcade?
    39:30
    I'd be surprised if we don't add a Capcom table or two before the end of Season 6, but there are still a couple hurdles.
    39:41
    Interesting. Very intriguing. Because they have some good tables. They have such a solid sound system and they've got great music,
    39:51
    and I'd love to see some of those ones in. Absolutely It has been said and can be seen that Farsight wants TPA to run on as many devices as possible. When does Farsight finally say we are no longer able to support this device even Microsoft doesn't support Windows XP Apple is already on iOS 8 when an iPad 1 or 2 or iOS 5 and the user base of Android that uses anything older than Jell-O is like 2%. Are these not a boat anchor to making the game the best it can be this is a very good point yes it does require some attention to keep the game playable on older devices and older OSes we've tried hard to not let that least powerful devices hold us back in fact as recently as earlier this week we made a couple decisions that will limit one the Android devices that support the new UI we'll be releasing soon and two the OSes that will get updates excellent so that's the news that is something in the thread that Baron Rubik started Farsight were breaking up is one of the biggest things that all the Android users were picking up and saying look you've got to draw the line in the sand this is getting ridiculous and I think that ties back to the earlier question regarding Stern that maybe that's part of what's in the works you know so it's who knows I don't know puzzle pieces are falling into place I've actually got a feeling that that thread has probably given them a bit of a kick in the bum that they might have needed and made them think hard about the business model, which is exactly what we wanted it to do as a community. So it's good.
    41:35
    Just recently we have seen the implementation of dynamic lighting via DX11 on PC, the introduction of new flipper physics, improved elements such as transparent ramps on mobile devices, and soon increase difficulty on select tables. What is behind this surge of improvements to the game? Is the fall of Farsight back to concentrating exclusively on the pinball arcade? And is it finally having the monkey off your back known as the Xbox 360 debacle? Because we like it.
    42:07
    Thanks for your patience on these improvements. Some things just take time, especially when each member of the team has a full workload. and answer ok translation moving on what other things can we look forward to being added to TPA, ball spin maybe don't think we haven't tried to get spin fully implemented into our pinball physics it will be a huge change that affects a lot of tuning.
    42:48
    So it will be a lot of work for Bobby, huh? Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. And it might be, again, one of the things where once we get the difficulty put in, if people...
    43:01
    If the difficulty is right, we'll probably not think so much about ball spin. Possibly. Maybe. I don't know.
    43:10
    I think it's more of a disorienting, though. as well. Like, it's one of those extra things that creates a digital illusion of pinball. Like, having that ball spin and see it naturally spin, it's important, because that's what it does in real life. Yeah. And I think it depends very much on how they implement a little bit more of randomness, because if the randomness truly feels random, it might feel less realistic than it does now. But if it feels like, ah, that might have been because of ball spin, and it feels realistic, I don't care if it's really ballspin implemented in the engine or if it's just a fake ballspin, fake randomness. Elements of random, yeah. I like the idea of that.
    43:56
    Flipper Physics 3.0 is slowly being rolled out. Is there a time frame for adding to older tables? Is this the final version, or can we also expect to see something like flipper rise time so weak flips and tap passes can happen?
    44:09
    Over the next few months, we'll get the new Flipper Physics. implemented. I'm confused by part of this question. We've got Wii flippers and tab passes working to some degree, right? The thing holding us back from quicker flippers is simply optimization of our collision detection. Even running at 60 frames per second with 5 subframes, there are limitations. We still have improvements to make.
    44:31
    Damn you people for asking that question and making it let us look bad. You know what? After I got these responses back, I was like, Okay, I need to take a quicker look, and I happen to be playing Big Shot, so go figure I'm helping their analytics.
    44:49
    And I looked, and he is right. There is, you can do quick taps, and the flipper does not go all the way down to the bottom and back up. You can visually see it doing just a small dip.
    45:02
    I do, though, believe that, yes, the collision detection is where the problem is being with that, and specifically on Big Shot, I've had so many times where the ball has basically approached the tip of the flipper and instead of giving me a very gentle soft bounce off of it that would maybe send it to the other flipper, it just seems to go right through the flipper.
    45:29
    And I know that that's because they want the tip to be a little more mushy, you might say, spongy, because that helps with the softer flip. but I'm finding the ball just kind of goes through when it should give a nice little dink. Yeah, sound effects, right? Yeah.
    45:51
    I do like, though, the new flippers. I mean, it's made Big Shot much more playable for me. There's no denying it. Yeah, I agree. Okay.
    46:03
    That is all that we have for this portion of the interview. However, Bobby is saving the second page for next month. So something to tune into, guys. Yeah, there's a lot, lot, lot more to get into. But I think there's quite a few good nuggets in there for everybody to chomp on. Absolutely. Thanks, Bobby, for answering all of our questions and putting up with us. now I do want to touch on something that I think Jared you actually kind of brought it up in the midst of that which is with the Stern tables doing separate app and all I want to throw out a hypothetical and see what you guys think Stern has mentioned and I know we've talked about it before that they want to have digital pinball of their tables even before the physical table comes out, because that way they could bug test, they could also see what people actually like on the tables, they can work out some of their play code all beforehand, and use it as a tool of selling the actual tables. Here's your preview of the table, rather than just having to look at pictures and assume what's going on.
    47:19
    Love the idea. Now, how much, though, do you think that app would cost? Because I can't, if they sold it at $5, they would sell it to just a bazillion people, and now it's the question of, well, yeah, but are those people not going to seek it out in the arcade?
    47:41
    No way. They will seek it out. They will go and seek it out in the arcade. They will use it exactly the same as they do with Puma Arcade. They will use it as a training bed for rule learning. so that when they go into the arcade and go into tournament settings, they can smash that game. Okay, right.
    48:01
    Yeah. So here's my question. What would be too expensive? Like where's the sweet spot that they would need to hit so that it still maintains some kind of an exclusivity that is used as a tool for selling the actual pinball machine as opposed to just being a substitute for the pinball machine? they could take as much money as regular non very expensive triple A game for every table I'd say not like $80 a table but $50 maybe $40 yeah I think that would be okay $40 a table or $40 a DLC for that it would need to be incredibly high quality digital but it would need to be flawless for that. I think Stern realized that themselves and that's what they definitely are aiming for because if it isn't flawless, if it isn't very well presented, it's not really good advertising for them. No, it would need to be a really great way for them to test out new code. Imagine that. Rolling out new code into a digital pinball and then go, hey, look, we've got new code on here. Test it out. See what works, what it doesn't. And then being able to iterate on that based on feedback would save them so much money in ROM development and getting that customer feedback loop closed.
    49:30
    Now what if it was used solely as a pre-order tool? Like put down a deposit. Your deposit can be refundable on an actual machine, but we want you to first be able to try out the machine. So here's your digital version.
    49:47
    and if it was used fully as that kind of thing would that be too narrow I feel it would be very much a wasted opportunity because I think you just asked regarding the price what Stern would gain and I think they wouldn't lose a single pinball maniac who is hunting down machines in the wild and is looking forward to playing real physical pinball.
    50:21
    As Jared said, they just go and take it as something to practice on. But on the other hand, they could reach a new audience and could make pinball maniacs out of them. Like, for example, in your case, Bonzo, where there's not very much access to the sterns over in Germany, you know it could be an amazing way to open up the market over there and perhaps even get some import sales for actual tables over there indeed you know it's a huge opportunity and it could definitely maybe even make pinball more relevant again in Europe in general I think absolutely being on a drought here yep I agree okay so basically what we're saying is if you even at $40, the app would be worth it.
    51:18
    I'd like to add that it would be worth, if it's done well, it would definitely be worth $40, but I think at that point, it might be a wasted opportunity for Stern, because then only pinball maniacs would get it, and they'd not get the new folks then. And so I think they can't make it as cheap as Pinball Arcade or Zen DLC. What if they had a timed exclusivity on it? Let's say for the first, I mean, this is almost what happens with the main emulation stuff, where Stern kind of asks them, hey, try not to duplicate our pinball machines for, say, two years. And then after that, we won't come after you for copyright infringement or whatever. So let's say for the first two years they have the program at this really high price point, and then thereafter all of a sudden it drops in price to become here for the general public to mess with.
    52:23
    Well, I don't know about that approach. I think potentially having a lockout exclusivity on the app sort of made for the first more, let's call it an arbitrary time of two months after the initial table drop starts to roll out to arcades and to customers. So give people, because operators will be pissy about that if you don't actually let the arcade sites get maximum revenue from the game. So I would think as a hat tip to operators, they should probably hold the digital release for two or three months to let the game submit itself into the arcades. And then at that point, I think that's the time they could strike with the digital aspect of the platform because people will be playing the game in the arcades and will have got a feel for it. So then what they can do is, in their spare time, when they don't have access to the game, they can go and practice strategies in the digital app at home and then go back to the arcade where it's available and then try and replicate that in the arcade as well. See, I was thinking even longer because of the fact that, like, Wizard of Oz, it took me a full year before I ever even saw the thing. Well, that's, yeah, that's the other thing, too. Like, here in Australia, we do have, we're lucky enough to have a site down in Surface Paradise that commits to buying every Stern pinball that's released. But that is a two-hour drive, a one-hour drive, two-hour drive away from me, right? And I can't do that at all. And I miss out. We have a couple of other operators like at Death Valley Records and Tapes. Not Tapas. Tapes.
    54:11
    Thank you, Ed. But also have a couple of newer Sterns on the site as well. But this is the only way we can get access to them. And it's about a lifestyle thing too. What they have to realise, Stern, is that not everyone can physically get to play pinball. Guys like me with two kids and where I live which isn out in Whoop Whoop it actually just up in North Lakes which is still a very heavily urban area It distance in Australia and distance in other countries that prevents people from playing pinball This app, like Pinball Arcade, would bridge that distance and probably rekindle the fire in some people to actually go and seek out digital pinball again.
    54:55
    Physical pinball. Yeah, physical pinball. Physical pinball, yeah. Yeah, that's what I think. but if you keep the physical machine exclusive for a few months you would then have to maybe make the app exclusive for those who pre-order just like Chris hinted at then you could have best of both worlds you could have those who pre-order the machine or who are really interested in pre-ordering the machine having them do the beta testing or helping with getting the code to where it should be. And you could also then, after a time, start sending it to everyone.
    55:42
    Yep. See, I'd really, really like to hope that, you know, the brain trust at these companies have thought of these very things.
    55:51
    Well, I think so. But then again, I just saw the postings of the industrial videos that were sent out to distributors of the various Bally Williams pinball tables, and wow.
    56:06
    Yeah, that was back in the time when the Internet didn't exist. That was their only vehicle to sell tables, and you've got to remember that those were specifically aimed at operators. No, but those in and of themselves are representative of industrial videos in general, to which those are made. They're not run by a marketing department trying to sell to the general public. Like, it's, you know, it's basically the AV nerds at the company sending it out to the AV nerds of the distribution world, you know. Yep.
    56:38
    You know, it's, hey, it's Phil from Fontana. Oh, it's so good to see you. You know, it's. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, man. You know, they're kind of easily impressed maybe. I don't know. They're not looking for this giant flash quality, you know, presentation or whatever. that kind of tells you what internal marketing is like, where you just kind of go, so did anybody think of this or not? Don't know. Well, that was back in the 90s and the 80s. I think the paradigm shifted a little bit now. Like, you know, everyone is Internet aware. I mean, Stern themselves now has a Facebook manager and one of the guys that was originally a Pinsider is actually doing their Facebook marketing now, and it's so much better. You know, everyone is talking about how positive it is now. So they're understanding that now they need to pay more attention to that and actually market themselves in a different way because they're not targeting operators anymore. They're targeting the home market. Well, speaking of marketing in a different way, we just had San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, and Stern was there. And I don't know if this was their second or third year of going to Comic-Con, but I do know that they, I think, doubled their square footage of boot size. Wow. To have a very large presence for pinball.
    58:03
    You know, not even comic book. I mean, I'm sure they had one of their comic book tables there, but I also know that they had the Kiss table and Metallica table there.
    58:14
    And what they were saying, you know, the question was, why is Stern at a Comic-Con? and it was because we're geek culture and these are our people. Absolutely. It is pop culture. Pinball is now back in the ether again as a thing, and it's cyclical in its business model, pinball. You'll have ebbs and troughs and peaks, and we're in well and truly a peak at the moment, and it's part of the zeitgeist. It's part of pop culture. It needs to be at these shows. That's all there is to it. Hey Bonzo, how are you doing on time?
    58:51
    Huh? I said, how are you doing on time? He was actually asleep, but we woke him up. No, I should have said pardon. I really didn't understand the question.
    59:07
    It would be great if I dropped now, I think. Okay, with that, folks, we're going to... Bonzo has, you've got to understand, when we record these, it's like 1 a.m. for him. So he's got to get some sleep so he can go to work in the morning. Thank you so much for playing the part of Bobby. We'll hear from you playing that same wonderful role next month. Let's hear it for Bonzo.
    59:28
    Good night. Dankeschön. Yeah, go on, have fun, and I'll listen to the finished product soon, I hope. Yay. I've committed to try and turn this thing around in two days. so we'll see how that goes. Oh, fingers crossed, and have a good Monday, Sunday afternoon, whatever.
    59:53
    Have a good day that ends in Y. Bye-bye. See you, mate. Bye. All right, so now that he's gone, we can talk about him. So, Jared, I know that you guys have wonderful spiders there in Australia.
    60:13
    We do. Mostly the deadly variety. Now, I'm sure you're, well, I don't know. Is your wife anything like my wife where if she sees a spider, you are the spider killer?
    60:28
    Absolutely. I am the destroyer of arachnids, the slayer of eight-legged beings. And when I say slayer, I mean get the can of Mortine and drown them in Mortine. For the record, for any spiders who are listening to our podcast, I have nothing against you. I don't actually have a problem with you at all. It's my wife. She asked me to kill them. I have to kill them because it's manly to kill spiders for your wife. So, particularly the ones that have life bars hovering above them, they're the ones that you get extra points for. Because these ones, you know, the hand-shaped size spiders we have here called huntsmen, they're a predatory spider that like to eat humans, and they particularly like to eat babies. So because we have young kids in the house, we have to make sure that we get these ones with the life bars above their heads.
    61:26
    Yeah. So, we have spiders, too, but they're not nearly even a tenth as ferocious. And, yes, I must be spider hunter duty. So, the other night, I all of a sudden hear this yelp from the bathroom.
    61:41
    And I'm like, oh, spider, fine. So, I grab the paper towel and go in. And my wife is pointing up to the light in our ceiling in the bathroom. Now, it's recessed in. It's a, call it like a five by ten rectangle, right? and it's recessed into the ceiling. So in order to actually access the light bulb, you're supposed to pull down on the whole frame of this thing, and it drops down maybe six inches, and then you can access the light bulb. Oh, yeah, we have those. Right. So I walk into the bathroom, and I look up, and she's got the light on, and it's not a spider I see, but it is this distinct large shape that, although she was calling it a grasshopper, it looked very much like a cockroach to me. Oh, a cockroach. Now, I have no problem squishing a spider. I loathe with a passion squishing a roach. Now, this isn't even probably a true roach. It was probably we in Southern California have what are called Japanese water beetles. Oh. They're long. They're brown. They look like a roach to me. I don't care if they're not truly a roach. They're just disgusting looking. They just give me the heebies, right? They have an exoskeleton that makes them a roach, so die in a fire. Exactly. It's not going to, you know, when you squish it in a paper towel, it's not going to go silently. It's going to go in your, you know, you're right. So I see this thing up in there and it's bouncing around. I'm like, that's a roach. And she's like, no, it's a grasshopper. I'm like, fine, it's a grasshopper. It can wait until the morning.
    63:14
    So sure enough, it goes to be the morning. Time for me to go deal with this thing. So I get out the vacuum cleaner because I'm like, no way in hell am I going to, you know, palm this thing.
    63:24
    And I look under the light real quick. no movement, but I can still see the outline, so I'm like, okay, it's still there. Yep. So I get up on a chair, and I got the vacuum tube, and I'm getting ready to pull the little frame down, and I'm just like, knowing my luck, the frame's going to... It's going to crawl down your arm and eat your brains. Exactly. It's going to fall towards me. So while I'm doing this, in my mind, you know that scene in Aliens when they're in the room, they barricade themselves, and they've got the tracker out, and they're like, okay, three meters.
    63:57
    It's at two meters. That can't be, man. That's in the room. And then all of a sudden they look up and they're like, they're in the grating.
    64:06
    So the one dude stands up on a box and he pokes his gun up to lift up the thing and he peeks his eye up and then he sees the aliens all coming at him. This is what's going through my mind. a stinking little tiny critter, because I pulled down the covering, and I still can't see, so I'm smashing my head up against the ceiling, trying to get one eye to see what it is indeed there, picturing the thing jumping and hopping on my eyeball.
    64:41
    It's basically a scene from Starship Troopers. Kill the bugs! Exactly. So I peeked my eye, big enough that I could see two antennas sticking up, and I was like, good enough for me, I know it's there. And the antenna was slowly twitching, so I was like, and it's alive, got to use the vacuum. I vacuumed the crap out of it.
    65:06
    People are laughing at you while I'm laughing your head off in the background. Yes. Is she laughing at you? Yes, she's laughing at you. You're not such an entire population because – so after I get done vacuuming, we get in one of those – it's not a vacuum bag. It's a cyclone tunnel thing where you can pull out the cup and empty it. And she's like, did you get it? And I'm like, yeah, do you want to see? She's like, no. And she's like, it's a grasshopper. I'm like, I'll pull this thing out, and you can check and tell me if it's a grasshopper or not. She's like, no, it's a grasshopper. I'm like, whatever makes you sleep at night. Oh, yeah. So anyway, you know, you can deal with your man-eating spiders over there in Australia. I have to deal with them, you know, incisor go crunch.
    65:57
    For the record, my wife hates cockroaches as well, and she'll get me to kill those. We actually have a challenge in the house when we get a spider, when you spray it. I don't know if you do this over there, but to isolate it so it doesn't scuttle off somewhere and puke out young, as they often do.
    66:16
    Well, it depends on the spider. Sometimes they actually bear, they don't lay eggs, they actually bear live young, and they explode out of the abdomen if they're looking for a place to lay them. And as a defense mechanism, because, you know, because they're spiders. I swear to God, every single time we talk, you just further cement the fact that everything in Australia wants to kill you. Yeah, that's right. So as a side on this, there was one, we saw a very heavily pregnant huntsman spider.
    66:47
    And she was waddling around the poor thing, looking for somewhere to lay or to release her spiders. But I got to her first, sprayed her, she scuttled off around the corner. And then when I went to see where she got to, she was distinctly smaller than what she was to start with. and I saw all these things that looked like ants on the ground, and I went, holy shit, they're not ants, they're spiders, and they're coming out of her abdomen. She is giving life birth to spawn, and I must kill them all. And so the, you know, these things, there was like hundreds and hundreds of spiders coming out of this little thing's abdomen, and I'd never seen live birthing of spiders before, so achievement unlocked, I guess. so I got the catapult and said die and sprayed them all liberally with more team and they stopped moving pretty quickly I'm a terrible person for mass killing a whole family of spiders and I'm sure I'll go to hell wow, alright, well now that that is unsettled to everybody come to Australia, it's fun Yeah, let's move on to something a little more pleasant, like Jared Tech Talk. Jared Talk. That's funny. He would talk. Jared Tech Talk. All right. Now, that was a theme song, right? Because, indeed, Jared does talk tech like a techie would talk. Yeah, exactly right. Like a techie. It's a... So this segment of Tech Talk today is proudly brought to you by... the letter S for sound, and the number 69, because it's the number that was in my head at the moment.
    68:41
    So, we... Because it always is with guys. Yeah, 69. So, we're going to talk about mechanical sound effects, and in Android, at least, why they lag behind the action. Now, before I launch into this, is the PC affected by a sound delay at all? Like, do you notice it? Not that I don't notice anything, no.
    69:06
    I think this might just be an Android-specific thing. So for those people that are perhaps on iOS, I don't know whether it also is a... It might just be a mobile thing, I'm not sure. But if it is only limited to Android, I've got some good news because the TLDRs, they've kind of fixed half of the problem. Fastlight, after a couple of emails, I sent them with some ideas. I'm going to claim. I don't know whether it was just in the works for a while anyhow but I sent this one email to Norman who is a sound engineer and producer still I think, isn't he? Yes, so he's a guy who extracts all the sounds out of the pinball machines and digitises them and gets them ready for inclusion in the game. So I emailed him and said hey, what about this idea with Android now? Because what Scott Humble did was he implemented a new feature in Android for packaging that allows you to do what they call large packages. And what that allows you to do is get above the 55 megabyte limit for package sizes on Android. Oh, is that something that is limited on Android? I mean, like... Yeah. So, what they do, what they used to do is have a like a 55 megabyte package and then you downloaded additional content.
    70:28
    And it was like an extra little download that happened after the fact. Well, they've bumped the size of the packages now so you can fit more in. And what that has actually allowed is to include a lot of the mechanical effects in what they call the Android Sound Pool. So to give you a bit of background about what the Sound Pool is, in an Android app at the top directory inside the APK, and it should be noted that an APK is like a zip file, but it's called an APK. So it's a package that's installed onto the device. So you can actually, on Linux especially, you can actually open up these files and see what's inside them. And at the very top level of the directory, so at the root is what they call it,
    71:17
    there were a couple of files for flippers. There was two Flipper files, there was one Flipper file, Flipper.org, which is an open source sound format. So it got me thinking, I went, well, if there's one in there, why don't they just put all the mechanical sound effects in there and call them from the sample, which is zero latency.
    71:38
    The problem that the Android sound effects had in the past is that they all had to be included in what they call a big stream. and because of the processing problems with the Android operating system for sound, there was a little bit of latency, so a little bit of a time delay in how the sound was passed when Switch was triggered to when it was actually presented to you and your speakers. And we all know that if you have that sort of like desync between sound and vision, it's really jarring. It's like watching when somebody's speaking on the TV and they don't have the sound quite right and their mouth ends and my voice is still coming out? Yeah, it just looks totally wrong. It's really disconcerting. Well, in a digital simulation, people are like, hey, it's the same sort of thing, except you're not looking at people's mouths. You're looking at the ball touching and interacting things, but hearing the sound up to 10 to, I don't know, about 100 or 150 milliseconds after it actually happens. And you think, what's 120 milliseconds? That's not that long. It's an eternity, an eternity, when you're looking at things happening from a mechanical perspective. So, for example, a really great way of testing this up until they fixed this issue was, if you had a look on Terminator 2, when you go for the skill shot and the little targets are oscillating, like, beep, beep, beep, well, the sound effect for that was just a little bit behind. So, depending on the speed that those were oscillating at, you would actually miss a blip for the first time the target was going. So it was actually a blip behind. And I found that I was using the sound effects to time my shots in the real game. But when I went on to the digital version of it, I was completely screwed. I had to completely relearn how to shoot the skill shot.
    73:29
    So it's that sort of thing that was really hurting the game from a realism perspective. So with this new large package feature they've got with Android, they've been able to put in all of the mechanical sound effects into the sound pool. So instead of one sound, I think it's something like about 12 or 13 different .og files in there now. So what that means is everything from metal tinking noises when it hits like one of the metal guides to pop bumpers, slingshots, like saucer kickouts. Unfortunately, the farting source is still in there at the moment, but Norman is trying to do something about that. He's going through and doing a clean-up of audio on these things as time progresses, which is really great. But particularly in Safecracker, those of you who are familiar with the game, up in the pop bumpers area, there are drop targets and pop bumpers, and they're really, really close together. And what I've noticed while playing the game is that I haven't noticed it as far as mechanical sound effects. And if I haven't noticed it, that means it's working flawlessly. Ah, yes. Because you shouldn't notice these things. It should just be sampled. It's kind of like in movies where they say the best special effect is the one that you didn't know happened.
    74:47
    Exactly right. And this is exactly the same case with the sound problem. So I'm going to have to – it pleases me immensely that I'm going to have to go back into the Pimble Arcade User's Guide and write an addendum to Chapter 8 about why Android sound effects always lag behind the action, because I can now proudly say that this issue is now being fixed, at least from the mechanical sound effects perspective. I think there is still some latency in the actual in-game music and sound effects, but I don't think that's going to be something that can really be fixed on Android at all. I think there's always going to be a little bit of a lag there on Android, but the fact that the mechanical effects are now in sync with what's happening on screen, it makes a colossal, colossal difference to gameplay and realism. So it's been a long time coming, and I'm pretty sure that technical... I'm sure that Farsighted wanted to do this before, but they just couldn't because of limitations on Android. So they've now gone and tried to rectify it by using large packages. And I've got some, before I wrap up the segment, there were some answers provided by Ryan Routon, who was the former Android developer.
    76:08
    And there were a number of things that he tried to do to fix the problem initially. There was a thing called a block size in the sound mix that Farsight uses to mix the sounds in-game and then send them through as a big stream as you're playing the game. So there was a thing that you can do. You can decrease the audio block size to make the chunks, the audio chunks, smaller. And by making the audio chunks smaller, you would decrease the amount of latency because it doesn't have such a big gap between each block that's being passed through the audio streaming system. So he tried to do that, but he got to a point where it was so small that you actually hear blips between it and little blips between the audio and it became really apparent that you couldn't actually do it that way because you get to the point where it gets too small, it misses audio blobs and that's tied in with a fast like game engine.
    77:08
    So if you're missing audio calls, it gets out of sync and the whole game crashes. So sound is really important in the game and how it actually interacts with the Farsight engine. So, yeah, it looks like this issue is actually being addressed. And I know Norman's doing a sound pass on some of the effects too to make them more chunkier as time progresses as well. So there is work being done in the audio area, and I think that's actually really important as part of the digital illusion. I've said it time and time again, that it is part of digital illusion, and they're doing something to fix it. So that's really, really good.
    77:49
    Good, good, good. Yeah, because this brings back, I mean, I know the very first time I ever went and visited Farsight, where they were talking about how they only have a limited amount of size that they can send certain parts of the game over iOS and Android. So if those sizes have increased, then obviously, logically, they can increase the density, the resolution, whatever, of these packets, bringing back up to scale. It might be that they can actually, because of the extra size, they might even be able to increase the sample, the sound sample size. because at the moment it's 11 kilohertz, which is low-resolution mono, which, I mean, for most of these games, the Fireside Audio Mixer doesn't support stereo. Even for games that does feature stereo, like a lot of the Stern games. Like Phantom of the Opera has the stereo sound option on it, but the Audio Mixer just doesn't handle it because of blocks, well, not block sizes, but the fact that it's expensive to do that from a processing perspective because you've got to have two channels of audio rather than just one, and that starts to impact other areas of the game. So, yeah, there might even be some cleanup moving forward of that sort of stuff as well, which could be pretty... which will be good, again, to keep the digital illusion thing moving forward. As we like to say, yeah.
    79:21
    Any improvements that can be made on the game are good. yeah improvements are good I mean we've seen them we've seen quality in this season just boost dramatically we've got all these other little tweaks coming in so they're getting through them and it's great to see it makes you want to I was on the fence actually of buying season 5 but seeing all this extra effort that the guys are doing to reduce some of these low hanging fruit items that have been hanging around for a while it's made me go and get a Google Play gift card in readiness for season 5 to drop so bring it on you're going to get some more money out of me to see if that's all the only thing we should do is since with Safecracker that wraps up season 4 why don't we kind of discuss what we think of season 4, how does season 4 fare amongst the other seasons just to remind everybody what season 4 is compiled of we have Phantom of the Opera Party Zone, Earthshaker Starship Troopers, Adam's Family, Cyclone, Jackpot, Xenon, Roadshow, and Safecracker. Now, I'll go on record and just say, because there are no Gottliebs in this season at all, it's the best season ever.
    80:39
    I'll go on record to say that the fact that it's been finished with Safecracker, I can pretty much be done with Pimbalacade now if I wanted to. If I was poor and didn't want to throw any more money at them, I'm done. I've got my table of my dreams in the product. So season four, winner, winner, chicken dinner.
    80:57
    I do agree. I honestly don't think it started off that strong, just in terms of, well, I'm not a Data East fan too much. So Phantom of the Opera and Starship Troopers really, you know, I don't have any nostalgia for them. So for all intents and purposes, they're brand new to me. Yeah, the bit I have for me too.
    81:24
    And Party Zone, it just never has really caught on with me. I mean, yeah, it's better than Dr. Dude, but it's still kind of goofy. And I don't know, there's something about it that just doesn't really grab me. Earthshaker, on the other hand, that for me was the fact that we have, well, I'm a Waller fanatic, but Earthshaker Whirlwind Adam Family and Roadshow that completes it for me as far as I care with Lawler Oh and we have Funhaus It like that it Those are what I needed out of him
    82:05
    Everything else is just kind of gravy. So the fact that we got Earthshaker and Adam's Family and Roadshow and Safecracker, it's like I'm in Lawler heaven.
    82:16
    It's season four, the year of the Lawler. I don't think Xenon's that great of a table, but on the other hand, I don't think it's a terrible miss either.
    82:27
    No. And, you know, the fans wanted it. Exactly. And I think it looks beautiful. I think it plays really nicely. I think it encompasses everything that they've been doing since Season 3 in terms of quality of their tables. Yeah. Same thing can be said with the Cyclone.
    82:45
    It's not really my kind of a table. I don't really care for the theme, but it is a classic. and TPA would be sorely having a huge, giant gap in their lineup if they didn't have one of the circus tables in it. It would be right. And we've got to remember this is what TPA is about. Their mission statement still stands, that they're trying to keep these tables preserved in digital form forever. Right, for future generations. For future generations, et cetera. So this is something they need to do. Although I can't imagine a future... As somebody who recently downloaded the original Tomb Raider games, I don't really think future generations are going to be too impressed with graphics.
    83:35
    You know, 15, 20 years down the line, they're going to go, what the heck is that? Because when I booted up Tomb Raider and realized that it was 20 years old and looked at that game, it was like, oh, guy, that's ugly. Yeah, I think it's the ability to be able to play them digitally is what they're doing. I think, you know, as we all know, graphics technology will go over time. And who knows, it might be a chance to do a digital redux of them all down the track. But the fact that we can play them on our devices now, we've got a lot of tables. Imagine if we had an arcade in our town with the amount of tables we had in Pimple Arcade. Oh, I know. You'd be pretty happy with that. I'd be bloody amazed if we had one like that here in Australia. I'm stoked to go into one of my big houses that have 12 tables in their house. I mean. Yeah, that's right. So having nearly, what, 60 tables now, that is bonkers ridiculous to have access to. In fact, it spoiled me for, you know, going, oh, what table should I play today? Because it's like, oh, I don't even know. I need a random button so I can just go and walk up to a game randomly and go, yeah, I'll play this one. I need a random button. So maybe the new UI, hint, hint, might have a random button in it. I don't know. That would be kind of good, wouldn't it? That would be kind of good. That would be good indeed. Would you – where would you place season four, though, of the four seasons? How would you rank them? Well, it's – I'd probably place it – Well, I place it number one for me because it has Safecracker in it. It's number one. I then place season three behind that.
    85:26
    And season one is a bit of a vague memory for me as well. I can't really say what order I put season one and season two in.
    85:38
    But let's just... the thing I had, the problem I had with season one and season two is just the quality.
    85:46
    And this is what I base my ratings on. Like season three and season four is when we started to see a dramatic uptick in quality and how the tables were presented, the care and stuff like alpha panes and graphical effects on tables and stuff like that. And that, to me, is what makes these seasons more valuable than season one and season two, which were just release all the things and get through our backlog of Pimple Hall of Fame tables and let quality get sacrificed a bit. Now, if those seasons were to have a significant reboot and have them go back through and clean up the graphic assets and make things nice and sharp, put Alpha Pains in all the older tables, that might change my opinion because there's some classic tables in there, So, like, you know, brighter pin bot looks great when it has good-looking graphics and effects. And, yeah, so, yeah, three and four. So, season four, season three, and then a mixture of season one and season two somewhere around there.
    86:57
    See, I think I would still go, I think I'd still have to put season one at its tops just because it has so many classic tables in it. and especially now that I've been playing it in DX11, I go back to those tables all the time.
    87:15
    And you know the reason why? Because of DX11, because of advanced graphics. Exactly. And this is the thing we don't get on mobile. These tables are just flat on mobile. They're uninteresting or flat compared to Season 3 and Season 4. That being said, the ball physics on some of these tables are atrocious compared to 3 and 4. Yeah. I mean, it's a night and day difference. You play Adam's Family, and then you go play Theater of Magic, and it's just like, what the hell am I playing? You know, Theater of Magic is a mess with ball physics.
    87:55
    So, that's the only downside for me with Season 1, but I would go Season 1, then I'd go Season 4. then probably I think I would go with you in terms of quality go season 3 and then I'm not much of a fan of season 2 I mean there's good tables in it but there are also kind of the tables that just like I go oh yeah I like that table but I don't play it there's a lot of oh yeah I like that table but don't really do it it's not one I go back to And that's kind of the same thing with Season 3. It's got those kind of tables in it, but the quality is just, you know, it's really good. Yeah. Like I said, Season 4, though, I mean, yes, it's the year of Lawler. How can I complain?
    88:48
    It's pretty good. It was a little bit weak to start with, but boy, it's getting strong. Yeah. So I don't know what Season 5 is going to be like. Yeah, based off of the tables that I've heard, rumor, Is that safely squirting my NDA? Of what are going to be in season 5, I have no issue buying the season pass as soon as it comes out. I've tweeted exactly the same. I went, yeah, season 5, yeah, it's an insta-buy for me.
    89:19
    From what we're aware of. I know that there's three tables for sure that I'm like, yep, I would buy those no matter what. And all it really, I think, is buying two more tables and you've essentially paid for the season anyway. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's goodbye.
    89:37
    It's goodbye. It gets our approval. Make it rain. Shut up and take my money. Yeah. Oh. Well, for those people that are interested in pinball talk, that might have been the conclusion of pinball talk for this podcast. So if you feel like shutting us off, then fine. Screw you. Leave. for those that enjoy our random banter because we're actually at 1 hour 28 at the moment are we really? yeah we are because I'm keeping time because it's part of editing this podcast now I have to like look at time stamps and stuff like that oh man but yeah we're at about 1 hour thriller of fun are you? I know I know so what other things do you want to talk about? because we're on the clock here Absolutely. Well, you know, I keep on threatening this, and I have to talk about it sooner or later before it just completely escapes my mind. But we've got to fit some movie talk in here, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. So the other day, flipping channels, and I come across this movie called Career Opportunities. Now, this is a John Hughes-written film, probably one of the last ones that he wrote. It came out in like 91 or 92. It starred Frank Whaley Jr. and Jennifer Connelly. All I remembered about this thing was the poster.
    91:06
    And on the poster it says, the tagline was, Maximum Comedy, Minimum Wage, or something like that. Minimum Wage is that Maximum Comedy? Whatever.
    91:16
    But I never heard anything else about the movie. And so I started thinking, well, come on, it's John Hughes. You're going to like it. I mean, even if it's this ho-so, you're going to like it. It's John Hughes. Guy's a genius writer. So I go ahead and I record this movie. And then I proceeded to watch the movie. And within about five minutes of watching it, I was like, oh, this is a terrible, terrible mistake.
    91:36
    And it only got worse. All right. Okay. If somebody told me that they literally were digging through Hughes' file cabinet and went, hey, John, what's this? He goes, I don't know, some script I was trying to work on. I never hammered it out. They're like, can we make it? He goes, how much are you going to pay me? We're going to pay you this much. Sure, go ahead. Make whatever you want. Because it did not bear his finesse at all. It essentially is them trying to take the best moments of Ferris Bueller and mix it in with the best moments of other John Hughes movies and failing miserable at it. Oh, dear.
    92:23
    I mean, any movie that they not, they, quick and short, is that the guy gets locked into a Target overnight and can't leave.
    92:33
    And he's a really bad employee and decides to have fun in this time, which involves basically putting on roller skates, dressing up in a tutu, and then skating circles around the store. Okay. And we don't just get to witness this once. We get to witness it twice because it was so good the first time. There's another scene with it, but this time he's skating with Jennifer Connelly. So it's really spectacularly bad.
    93:02
    But I've heard people like, oh, I remember that movie. It was great. And so I looked up the reviews, and, like, the reviews were kind. And it got me thinking. I'm like, what are some movies that you have seen, if you've seen any, that are so far past their expiration date that they stink no matter even if your nostalgia tries to tell you that they didn't stink.
    93:27
    Oh, jeez. This is a hard question for me to answer because I'm not really a super hardcore movie buff. Right.
    93:36
    But you know how people will be like, oh, you've got to see this movie. You've got to see this movie. And then you see the movie and you're kind of like, really? that was what I had to see Spaceballs was that you know what I just recently watched it and it was horrible yeah Spaceballs was that for me I just went oh yeah it's like Night at the Roxborough as well was another one and I went oh really I had to see this why yeah I was going to say I kind of put that with almost any Will Ferrell movie because just I don't find him fun that was me watching Anchorman when I finally got around watching Anchorman, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. How are people thinking this is the best comedy of the 90s? It's crap. Yeah. I'm not laughing. Make me laugh, please. Yeah, please. No, it doesn't happen, eh? Yeah. It's funny how it works sometimes. People's memories of things, it all comes down to the situation they were in at the time and the time of their life that that movie was screening, right? So if you were in a really good time of your life and you watched that movie, you go, yeah, it was awesome. But it wasn't actually the movie that was awesome. It was your life that was awesome.
    94:49
    Wow. So think about that for a minute. Interestingly enough, I opened up my latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, and their film critic had the 2015's 10 best films so far. And so right off the bat, I'm like, oh, so Mad Max is on this list. no it's not listed here which immediately voids the entire list so I'm going to read you the titles of these movies tell me if you don't have the same reaction that I did so we have Inside Out then Amy which is a documentary then Cobain Montage of Heck a Kurt Cobain documentary Uh-uh. Haven't seen it. Then a film called Mommy.
    95:43
    Nope. Then a film called Danny Collins. Nope. Haven't seen it. Then a film called About Ellie. I haven't even heard of the last three. I don't even know what your movies are. And I follow movies. You're a movie guy. Right. You're a movie guy. Then we have a movie called It Follows, which I just watched the other day. It's a horror movie where this demon follows you after you have sex. and the only way to get the demon away from you is to have sex and make it follow that person. Unless it's getting the mug chucked you back. Yes, literally. But if it catches the person that you have sex with, then it comes back to you.
    96:23
    Oh, okay. Interesting premise, right? Yeah. Joker movie. Yeah. And the only reason why I can think that people are going nuts over it is because people that like horror movies are so used to watching really bad, crappy horror movies that as soon as a mediocre one comes along, they go, Oh, it was so good.
    96:42
    Yeah, you're probably right. Anyway, moving on. Then they have Clouds of Sils Maria. What the hell? Timbuk2.
    96:54
    And Red Army. So we've got three documentaries, two foreign films, and the rest is indie crap except for Inside Out. I bet I would win this argument, which is, of the nine movies not Inside Out, collectively, they probably didn't even earn as much money as Inside Out made on its very first showing.
    97:14
    Probably not. Yeah, because I've never heard of any of these movies. All I can think of is, this is typical hipster bullshit from a movie critic, who is the equivalent of when somebody goes, Hey, we're going to, I don't know if you guys have Nielsen ratings, but we have what are called the Nielsen ratings, and they monitor what TV shows people are watching. And a common occurrence that would happen with this, there was two types of things. One was they plug a box into your TV and it would actually monitor what you did. The other was you just kept a journal and then you mailed the journal in. It was amazing how many people said that they watched PBS, public television. Oh, really? Nobody watches PBS. The only reason why they were doing it and what they found people were doing that did the logging was... even if it was a show that they didn't necessarily like watching, they would say that they watched it to promote it, to try and raise it up into the ether. Now, that's fine if you want to have a platform to do that with, but don't call it the best film so far. No. Nobody wants to watch this crap. It's not the best films, it's my best films so far.
    98:26
    But like I said, I knew this would happen with Mad Max, but it's that typical yeah, it got universal praise and it's the best action movie that we've seen in a long time. Not to be witnessed at any award seasons though. Yep, exactly. And then somebody else brought up a movie that I just watched the other night also which was called Ex Machina.
    98:48
    Oh, I've heard things about that. What's that about again? It's a sci-fi movie where a guy creates an artificial intelligence in a female form of a body, but you can see the inner workings, her torso is clear so you can see the spine and the mechanics inside and the head is only her face. The rest of her, she's bald and you can see into her brain basically. Wow, that's pretty cool. The idea, what they call it is, there's something called the Turing effect, which is how they define true AI, and that's if you're interacting with an artificial intelligence and you forget that you're interacting with the artificial intelligence, that means that the AI has passed the Turing test. Right. Cool. So this guy gets brought to the guy that creates this woman and is presented in front of her, and he goes, well, but the problem is I can clearly see she's a robot. She's AI. and he goes, that's what's going to make this test even better is if you wind up not caring, if you wind up being fooled into thinking that you have real emotions and the intelligence, that's the ultimate AI and so it goes off into all sorts of cool sci-fi dilemma paradoxes that wind up kind of warping your mind in the end like any good sci-fi should that was really good And, again, not on this list, but, you know.
    100:27
    Yeah. That sounds like one I'd like to see. I think I'll put that one on the list. I actually did go and see Inside Out, and I thought it was – I actually went with my wife, and we did not take the kids. It's actually a strange film. It's more pitched at the tweens, I think, rather than the kids. I honestly think that it's a movie that is made for adults, just happened to pretend that it's made for kids, because my boy came out of it going, that was a really sad movie. And I came out of it. But I came out of it going, no, that's just called growing up.
    101:03
    Yeah, but it was. Like, boy, I tell you what, Disney, Pixar know how to... I was reading tweet reviews of this, like, know how to make a bitch cry.
    101:13
    I was a goddamn suffering mess in that movie. It was bloody great. I saw a post where somebody said, do you find yourself crying? because your glasses are suddenly bent, you have Pixar Depression Syndrome.
    101:29
    It's like, did you think of your grandpa and break down into tears? You're suffering from Pixar Depression. That's right. Man, they have some very good writers that tap into emotional stuff in those movies. Yeah, I really actually enjoyed the Pixar short before it as well, lava, which is bloody hell. Such an earworm.
    101:54
    Every time, I have such visual cues from inside out where they get the little thought workers are walking through the long-term memory storage, and they just push one of those little balls back up into the control room, and it starts playing. It's a bloody jingle. Well, that's lava every three hours. You don't understand. That is my wife to a T. All of a sudden, she will start singing some commercial from the 80s. Word for word perfect.
    102:26
    And I remember that commercial, How Do You? And she's like, I don't know. I mean, there are a bazillion jingles that just pop into her head. And so then I see the movie, and I went, that's the reason why. Because there's a little work in her brain going, have another jingle!
    102:43
    Yeah, a little work in her brain that's wearing an iPod. walking around the parade just popping random thoughts back up into the um the control room and yeah that's totally me as well so i love the the imagery that they used in inside out to convey the workings of the brain i thought it was brilliant brilliant stuff um yeah great movie would go and see it again probably um but yeah the the inner workings of a what a 12 year old's brain Wim Riley, the main character who you're seeing inside Brain Off, yeah, it kind of makes you go, yep, welcome to QB. And welcome to, you know, massive change in somebody's life. This is how it affects them. So it was, I know that a couple of my friends who work in child services will be using this movie as a way to help explain how you're feeling about things, and it will actually help them as a tool to convey those messages to the people that they help. So it's going to be great for that. Well, I would say the most interesting thing I ever found out about human brain development is that from, and I heard it from Dr. Drew on Love Lines at one point. I don't know. Do you guys know who Dr. Drew is? You may not know. Okay. I didn't think so. Dr. Drew is a board-certified specialist in addiction.
    104:17
    Anyway, he started off on a radio show here locally. He's gone on to national prominence. He's on CNN Headline News.
    104:27
    All right. Basically deals with addiction for the most part, but he also deals with, because he's dealing with how the mind deals with chemical interaction, He also understands hormone of growing teens. And so they did this show called Love Lines, and it would be people would call in either with their love problems or with their addiction problems. And it's amazing how many times both of them were completely intertwined with each other. Yeah, for sure. What he highlighted was that the human brain, when it enters puberty, it has to literally rewrite itself. And so there's a portion of your brain, and it's the logical, long-term consequence portion of your brain, that basically goes dormant. It shuts down because it has to be rewritten. And it shuts down from essentially the age of about 13 to, say, around 21. Wow.
    105:30
    That's in a male. It might be a little earlier in a female. Yes, it is. The part of your brain that then takes over all those functions that it was supposed to be dealing with is the part of your brain that likes instant gratification.
    105:46
    Right. That explains a lot. And the part of your brain that has no concern for long-term thinking. Yeah. So this is why all of a sudden a teen will do completely stupid things that you go and that the parent goes, what were you thinking? and the quick answer was, no, I wasn't. I wasn't because I don't have a brain. Because they are physically impossible of thinking of those things. Now, that's not to say that every person reacts the exact same way, but it is why a lot of your teens and stuff, they cannot see a future, why they think that they're going to be dead by, you know, 25. They don't see beyond that. And then by the time they hit 21, all of a sudden, that part of the brain starts functioning again because it's completely written. And all of a sudden they go, oh my god, I was an idiot, wasn't I?
    106:40
    And I've never forgotten that. And what Dr. Drew was saying was, he goes, to those of you that are about to have teenage kids, just remember this. You had it. Your parents dealt with it. No amount of logic is going to work. You just need to guide them appropriately and try and keep them Hope that they kill themselves. Exactly.
    107:04
    Basically, yeah, consider yourself a successful parent if your kid actually survives. Totally. The fact that they can be a productive human afterwards is even better. Yeah, that's right. It's an added bonus, but not critical to their survival.
    107:21
    Yeah, it's crazy. So, yeah, the whole idea behind Inside Out is very clever filming and very clever writing. I really do dig it. Oh, man. 145. That's how long we've been rabbiting on about stuff and things now. Oh, we should probably end then. Yeah, 145 seems like a good enough time to end it. All right. Well, we did have an extra person in Bonta, so I'm blaming it on him. Yeah.
    107:48
    Hey, we failed to mention this, but our good friend Mike over at Wizard Amusements, he is offering up for the tournament on July 25th the Randy Macho Man Savage custom shooter rod.
    108:02
    Please enter the tournament so you have a chance to win that. But more importantly, go visit his website, wizardamusement.com. Go check out all the awesome custom shooter rods that you can buy for pinball tables. And even if you don't have a pinball table, they still look pretty groovy sitting on your desk. So get to that. Sorry we said it for the end, Mike, but, you know. At least we got it out.
    108:26
    All right. Well, next time, we will have part two of the forum questions with Bobby. And beyond that, I'm not sure what we will talk about, but I guarantee you we will figure out something.
    108:42
    That's right. Thank you to Jared Mortgage for showing up. Thank you to Bonzo for showing up. Maybe we'll be able to calm some of the other guys If you pop in next time, we shall see.
    108:55
    I'm ShutYourTrap. You've been listening to the Blockade Podcast. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Remember to leave a review on iTunes or any podcasting channel Blockade is distributed through. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Until next time, remember... You have been terminated. Have a nice day.