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Two and Done

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 41m·analyzed·May 22, 2015
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

BlahCade episode 18: Tournament updates, spreadsheet tech, table selection debate, Android tech tips.

Summary

BlahCade Podcast episode 18 covers the hosts' monthly Pinball Arcade tournament (April results and May planning), discusses tournament spreadsheet improvements by community contributor Ksenia, debates the selection of a high-variance "put-up or shut-up" table for the final playoff round, and features a tech talk segment on Android's Google Play Games integration in Pinball Arcade.

Key Claims

  • Janos Kiss won the April tournament of the month with a score that marks his second top-three finish, placing him first in season two standings with 112 points.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus and Jared Morgan discussing April tournament results

  • Sam May tournament playoff will feature tables: Whirlwind, Centaur, Cue Ball Wizard, and Monster Bash, with signups opening Wednesday the 27th and the tournament running Saturday the 30th from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus announcing May tournament details

  • Community contributor Ksenia has created build 28 of the tournament spreadsheet that allows Chris to run a full tournament simulation and post results in 10 minutes.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus praising Ksenia's spreadsheet development work

  • In the April tournament, 42 people signed up but 8 did not post scores, requiring Chris to manually regroup participants in the tournament brackets.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus explaining grouping challenges from last month

  • Google Play Games integration in Pinball Arcade was implemented by Scott Umble and allows cloud save backup of achievements and hall of fame data.

    high confidence · Jared Morgan explaining Google Play Games implementation in tech talk segment

  • Centaur and Whirlwind are preferred for the 'put-up or shut-up' table because they have high variance and unpredictability compared to tables like Monster Bash which play consistently.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus and Jared Morgan debating table selection for playoff round

  • Pinball Arcade has approximately 50 tables, each with 10 achievements, totaling 500 achievements, which exceeds Google Play Games' 300-achievement cap per game.

    high confidence · Jared Morgan explaining achievement system constraints in tech talk

  • A Macho Man Randy Savage custom shooter rod head by Wizard Amusements will be the grand prize for the July tournament, requiring players to have participated in at least 4 tournaments.

Notable Quotes

  • “That's pinball, exactly.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:20:00 — Summarizes the hosts' philosophy on variance and unpredictability in pinball—embracing randomness as part of the game's appeal

  • “It really does matter because sometimes you had these scores that were rather low compared to everybody else's scores, but they happened to be all in the same grouping.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:30:00 — Highlights how tournament bracket grouping can create unexpected placements independent of actual skill

  • “If anybody has extra Steam keys or Humble Bundle keys... feel free to contact us. We'd love to give it away as a prize.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:45:00 — Shows community-driven prize sourcing model that keeps tournaments sustainable without corporate sponsors

  • “Without the community it just wouldn't be happening like the engagement we get from Pinball Arcade fans and the people who play in the tournaments, it really is like catching up with 40 of your mates at your local Pinball Arcade and having a tournament.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~00:50:00 — Articulates the social value and community cohesion that digital tournaments create

  • “Make worky. It's like the worst thing you can say to a developer.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~01:05:00 — Humorous acknowledgment of how non-technical requests underestimate implementation complexity in software development

  • “There's a cap on the amount of achievements you're going to have for each game of 300... even with 50 tables we're up to 500 achievements.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~01:10:00 — Technical constraint affecting Pinball Arcade's achievement system architecture

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonKseniapersonJanos KisspersonJay PelterpersonEldar of SuburbiapersonViking EricpersonScott UmblepersonBonzopersonJeff StrongpersonSean Don Carlosperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: BlahCade's monthly Pinball Arcade tournaments sustain consistent participation (42 signups in April) with community-driven prize contributions and spreadsheet automation enabling scalability.

    high · 42 tournament signups, 8 non-posts requiring manual regrouping; Ksenia's iterative spreadsheet development across 28 builds; community donating Steam/Humble Bundle keys as prizes

  • ?

    design_innovation: The 'put-up or shut-up' final playoff round introduces high-variance table selection as a strategic element to create unpredictable final standings despite consistent mid-season performance.

    high · Debate between hosts about selecting Centaur/Whirlwind (high variance) vs Monster Bash (consistent); simulations showed placement swings based on grouping; leaders tied at 106-112 points

  • ?

    technology_signal: Google Play Games cloud save integration in Pinball Arcade required significant developer effort (Scott Umble) to overcome system constraints and achievement cap limitations.

    high · Implementation more complex than anticipated; 500 achievements exceed 300-cap requiring grouping; system uses protected Android folders (data/data/comfars.androidpinball...)

  • ?

    community_signal: Community member Ksenia developed an automated tournament management spreadsheet (build 28) that reduces tournament administration from hours to 10 minutes, enabling rapid simulation and regrouping.

    high · Chris reports completing full tournament simulation and fake TPA posting in 10 minutes; spreadsheet includes idiot-button UI and drag-drop regrouping

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.303

0:00
You big sausage! Come on in! Look over there! You don't know what's in there! You are listening to The Blockade Podcast. I believe this is podcast number 18. Amazing. How about that? I don't know how. Because 18 is such a significant number to get to. Yeah. It is. I don't know why, but it is.
0:35
The voices you are listening to, myself, I am Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Frebus. The other voice you have just heard is Jared Morgz. Your favorite convict from the Down Under land.
0:48
Also joining us is Bonzo from Germany. Actually, Bonzo is down with the lurgy, the dreaded lurgy at the moment, so he's not going to be joining us today. Well, that's enough time for Jeff Strong.
1:05
Actually, Jeff's not feeling the greatest either, so he's had to bow out as well. Ooh, well, hey, you know who will love to take advantage of the extra time? That'd be Sean Don Carlos.
1:16
Ah, yeah, sorry, Chris. He's really flat out with work at the moment, so he's not joining us either.
1:23
Okay, so it's the Jordan Sugar Traps Morning Show. welcome to the jungle wait I don't have any clown horns or anything to squeeze Jeff can you add those in later? thanks note to the sound editor all that good stuff well that's ok we will make the best of the time possible And I'm sure, don't worry, kiddies, they'll be back soon enough. Don't worry, guys and girls. We'll phone it in today. You'll love it.

high confidence · Chris Friebus announcing final tournament season prize

  • Viking Eric placed 9th in current season standings despite skipping one table, which prompted discussion about changing scoring rules for season two to award 0 points instead of 4 for skipped tables.

    high confidence · Chris Friebus discussing Viking Eric's placement and rule changes

  • The tournament grouping system significantly affects individual standings—simulations showed players could place first in their group but 20th overall depending on which group they were assigned.

    medium confidence · Chris Friebus explaining how grouping impacts tournament placement variability

    • Montana Frank
    person
    Captain Bazaarperson
    BlahCade Podcastorganization
    Wizard Amusementscompany
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Google Play Gamesproduct
    Whirlwindgame
    Centaurgame
    Monster Bashgame
    Cue Ball Wizardgame
    Medieval Madnessgame
    The Addams Familygame
    Earthshakergame

    competitive_signal: Season two standings show extremely tight clustering (106-112 points across top 4) where May tournament placement has potential to dramatically reshuffle rankings based on table selection.

    high · Janos Kiss 112, Jay Pelter 108, Jared Morgz 107, Eldar 106 points; put-up-or-shut-up table determines 4-point minimum vs potential first-place bump

  • ?

    operational_signal: Rule change proposed for season two: skip tables would award 0 points instead of 4-point minimum, preventing players who skip tables from ranking above those who play all tables—prompted by Viking Eric's 9th place finish.

    high · Viking Eric skipped one table but ranked ahead of players with full participation in 5-way tie; Chris manually reordered; now plans rules change for season two

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Hosts articulate preference for high-variance tables (Centaur, Whirlwind) for final playoff round, citing unpredictable outlane saves, multiball chaos, and plunge anomalies as features rather than bugs.

    high · Chris: multiball on Whirlwind where all 3 balls lost via bounces without flipping; discussion of outlanes in Centaur being unsaveable despite skill; framing randomness as 'real pinball'

  • $

    market_signal: Community prize pool heavily skews toward digital game keys (Steam, Humble Bundle, Zen Pinball) due to logistics constraints around physical shipping internationally, limiting PS4 platform appeal.

    medium · Captain Bazaar offered Zen tables (PS4 only) but only 1 PS4 player participated; Chris prefers platform-agnostic prizes; pursuing logo redesign before merchandise T-shirt distribution

  • ?

    content_signal: BlahCade introducing 'Tech Talk with Jared' segment to provide Android and developer-focused education based on community feedback requesting more technical content.

    medium · Jared notes he received feedback requesting more tech discussion; introducing Android User's Guide topics; asks for feedback on segment pitch and audience appropriateness

  • ?

    product_strategy: BlahCade exploring branded T-shirt merchandise with logo redesign, considering crowdsourced logo design ($20 budget) to solve scale/professionalism issues before tackling international shipping logistics.

    medium · Chris discussing logo flaws with design-minded friend; exploring Photoshop communities for design services; acknowledging shipping complexity as blocker for merchandise launch

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Tournament simulation reveals that bracket grouping significantly impacts placement outcomes—players with identical table scores can rank differently based on group composition.

    high · Chris ran 12-20+ simulations using April scores; found players placing 1st in group but 20th overall; scores clustered in groups can yield unexpected first-place finishers

  • ?

    industry_signal: BlahCade's tournament format and community engagement (40+ players, zero corporate sponsorship except Wizard Amusements) creates social cohesion comparable to in-person arcade tournaments despite being fully digital.

    high · Jared: tournaments 'really is like catching up with 40 of your mates at your local Pinball Arcade'; Chris notes forum names now have scores attached, improving community connection

    • 2:08
    Well, why don't we jump right into it, Jared, and talk about last month, our little tourney. Oh, yeah. What, that to-and-done thing or whatever it's called? You know that one? I don't know what a to-and-done thing is. You're talking about the table of the month, or tournament of the month. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That thing. Presented by the Blockade, which would be us. Yeah, that's one. Blockade's tournament of the month. With occasional cool prizes. I don't know if this next month's prizes are falling out, but last month's prize, we gave away Peppers, please.
    2:49
    Peppers, please. And the month before that, we gave away, of course, a copy of The Addams Family. a digital download of that. So we'll see where we go from there.
    2:59
    Somebody made a suggestion that maybe we should have the winner, or again through random drawing or whatever, be able to join us on the blockade. That could be interesting for maybe 30 seconds. Well, it could be.
    3:15
    It's good to have guests on, special guests. So maybe we could have a chat to the winner and see if they'd want to come on or you know, give them the screen first. Can we do an email chat with them and have Bonzo read them again? Because I couldn't get enough of that. Yeah, that kind of worked well, didn't it? Yeah. Everyone's going to sound like a German, but that's okay as well.
    3:41
    International flavor, that's all. That's right. We like to cater for all the time. So yeah, the April tournament of the month, this featured the tables of Whitewater, Black Knight 2000, Bride of Pinbot, and Theater of Magic.
    4:00
    And as it fell out, our top three placers, number three was Rushdude 2112. Second place went to, of all people, Jared Morgz. Yeah, again. Didn't you swear you were going to be giving away your place? You know, like you were going to be plummeting down the ranks and here you come in in second? No, I think that was Bonzo said that last time. He was going to let it slide this year, but that wasn't me. I was going to forge full strength through. I don't know what happened, but, yeah, I managed to sneak in miraculously to second place, which, strangely enough, sort of foretold how I was going to do in my actual tournament as well. We'll talk about that later.
    4:52
    Yeah. Much congratulations need to go to our first place winner. Who was Gus? And this marks Gus's second time in the top three. Gus is a man of consistency. Isn't he, though? Yeah. It's good. And wouldn't you know it, those consistencies have helped him in the season two date standings, which let's run through those real quick, eh? Why don't we? Let's do that. So Gus is number one with 112 points for the season so far. Jay Pelter coming in at number two with 108 points and then we have Jared Morgz 107 points you're like right there in the running here I am folks representing on the leaderboards for the southern hemisphere number four is Eldar of Suburbia at 106 so look at that point spread 106 points, 107 points, 108 points and here's the fun part next month the tournament for May which will be coming up on May 30th. That puts all four of you guys into the put up or shut up round. Put up or shut up. Yeah. Wherein, whoever comes in last place only gets four points and loses six points on the leader. Which is a big gap with the sort of spacings that we've got at the moment.
    6:09
    So you guys could conceivably easily jump up to number one or conceivably jump all the way down to number four real fast. It's going to be interesting to see what we actually select as the put-up-or-shut-up table. There's a lot of conjecture about that at the moment, isn't there? There is indeed. Let me wind up this top ten, and then let's go into that. Oh, I don't know. Number five so far in season standings is Dylan H at 104. Tied with him is In Vitro at 104 points. Then we have PinballWiz45B at 102 points. Coming in at number eight, Captain Bazaar at 101 points, followed by Viking Eric with 100 points. This is Viking Eric who likes to skip tables. He's handicapping himself and still in the top 10.
    6:59
    We have some thoughts about that for next season also. Just beware of Viking Eric. He might have spoiled it for everybody. Then rounding out the top 10, shoving me out of the top 10, Bonzo. He didn't do horrible enough. I did worse than him this last month and he bumped me out of the top ten.
    7:19
    That is our top ten. Let's talk about the possibilities of the put-up or shut-up round for the May tournament. My thoughts were to be either between Whirlwind or Centaur, and then somebody made a pitch for having it be Monster Bash. Yeah, Monster Bash, which is, of all things, I kind of thought would be the last thing that you want to put up or shut up around in because it's kind of consistent. I mean, like, how you play it, you can play it fairly consistently. Hmm. I think that's where our feelings about put up or shut up differ. So for the blockade's feelings versus the foreign's feelings. And I think, you know, Centaur and... What was the other one again? Centaur and... Whirlwind. You see, yeah, these two tables, they're either going to kill you and you're going to die. You're going to die. Or they're going to yield a phenomenal game. And I've had some. I've had 99 that weren't, but then I had one that was great. And this is the case at the center. So I kind of like the pure sort of chance aspect of it. You walk up to a table in a tournament in real life, you don't know how the thing is going to play. Exactly. So you want to walk up to it, and the four best players walk up to this table, right? And they play it, and how it goes down is how it goes down, regardless of whether it's known to be a consistent table or not is immaterial, right? Well, because, I mean, and I have had it where I've had, you know, where I'm up against the top ten player, and it's, you know, some of these tables, you know, like, say, Harlem Globetrotters, or just last month I played Cleopatra and this happened, where it's a five-ball table, obviously a table from the 70s.
    9:20
    I watched this top-ten guy. He had three house balls in a row, where he literally did not get to flip.
    9:26
    Yeah, and it happens. It happens, and although it's mean, to me, that's the beauty of a real table, because sometimes, just off the plunge, wicked things happen, or an anomaly on the table.
    9:43
    makes the ball go wonky, and there it goes. And that's why I was leaning towards Centaur and Whirlwind, because in the pinball arcade, they do have a habit of doing that. They don't feel like they're so much on rails for where the ball is going to go. Particularly things like Centaur as well, because it's outlanes. You know you can save them from the outlanes, but sometimes, for whatever reason, you just can't save them. You cannot do it. it's like the ball has to travel down those out lanes in a particular sort of path, and then it will actually contact with the bumper. Then you can actually bump it back in. I've never found it to be consistent. So that's a bit of a variable element to that table as well. If you think that you're playing it safe on those two tables,
    10:26
    there's still not a safe way to play. I mean, even with Whirlwind, just with it being our previous table of the week, where I had the two balls locked, I had the ball in the launch, boom, I launched the ball, I get multi-ball started, and literally all three balls went in the out lanes without me so much as flipping because they bounced off of each other in a wacky way, and boom, two went out, and then another one hit the bumper wrong, out it went. You'll see it later. Yeah, and I was like, that's pinball. That's pinball, exactly. I'm sure that's not what you said when it happened to you, but yeah, that is pinball. Yeah, some mildly harsher words might have come out of my mouth.
    11:12
    We also have somebody talk about that we should have Cuball Wizard be the put-up or shut-up. And I don't quite understand what the logic behind that one was, whether it's because just nobody likes playing it much or... Well, yeah, I'm not sure either. I sort of had been thinking through that thread. Yeah, that one I kind of was like, and because it really is a one-shot table. Yeah, that ramp. Yeah, it's all about the ramp, and half the time when the mode starts, you're just kind of like, I'll just wait out the mode. It's not even worth going for because it'll result in instant death. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's one of those tables that I reckon Centaur, for me, would be the one to pick. It's also fun to play as well. Isn't it fun? Yeah, I think. Because you start the multiballs, and it's one of the very early tables with a pretty amazing multi-ball on it with a whole lot of stored balls. And that's pretty cool. When you get them all going, it's pretty crazy. You know, I am a ramp addict, but Centaur, I don't know, it's got just such a great layout that I don't even mind not having a ramp. Yeah, for me, it's a table that I go back to a fair bit in TPA because it is, it's, there's something about it. It's got drop targets everywhere. It's got, you know, and I love a good stacked bank. going for the Queen's Chamber, to me, is very similar to going for a ramp shot. Yeah, it is, because you've got to hit it multiple times to build it up. And the same thing on the right-hand side, on the upper, there's that lane to shoot in for doing a... It seems like it's a timed release of an extra ball.
    12:53
    Excuse me, for a multi-ball. Although I never hit it, because I can't get control of the ball before the light blinks out. But both of those... Yeah, both of those feel like ramp shots to me. And I think that's what it is. Even though it's a completely flat table, I wind up playing it like it is ramps and get a good time out of it. Yeah, it's good. It's got its merits, for sure. So, yeah, I don't know. I think I'd lean towards Centaur as the put-up or shut-up. But that's just me. Of course, by the time... Well, no, I shouldn't say by the time this podcast will be out before the tournament. So there's still time to weigh in, kid.
    13:26
    That's right. Yeah. Something in between those two. In other news with the tournament, I should say the tables that are going to be playing this next tournament.
    13:42
    If I can recall them. Oh no, we just did. I'm like, haven't we just been talking about these? Why am I suddenly blanking? Yeah, so the tables are going to be Whirlwind, Centaur, Cuball Wizard, and Monster Bash. Make sure you sign up. Sign-ups are going to be on Wednesday the 27th. through that Friday, except for people like Jared, which will be Thursday through Saturday, because he lives on the other side of the house.
    14:10
    Yes. And then the actual tournament starts on Saturday the 30th. It'll start probably around 8 a.m., maybe an hour earlier, depending on how early I get up, and push the little button that activates that you can enter scoring. Then it ends 12 hours later, 10 p.m. And the part that I'm thoroughly excited about is Ksenia has been diligently working on the tournament spreadsheet for me to use. And his latest version, I kid you not, I was able to run the entire tournament and do a fake posting on TPA in 10 minutes. 10 minutes? 10 minutes. I was able to just blister through it. and he's made it so simple because basically every, I think this is like build 28. I mean, this is how many builds he's gone through. You guys have no idea the amount of work because he has been doing on this. And, uh, it's pretty impressive. It's really impressive. And every single time he'd put a build, I'd be like, okay, but you know, this one part for me, I just keep on forgetting to push this button or keep on forgetting to do the order and be like, okay, no, no problem. I got that covered. And the next time I'd put a build, they're basically what I call idiot buttons.
    15:24
    And he idiot-buttoned this thing that I'm pretty convinced if we just pulled one of you guys randomly and said, here, run the tournament, that with no more than five minutes of instruction, you too would be able to run the tournament. That's how awesome he's made the spreadsheet. So I can't wait to actually really, really run it and see how it goes. Because last time we had some little, I don't know what you'd call it, banana peels thrown in the floor for us to slip and slide on. Because of the 42 that signed up, we had eight people then not post scores, which meant then I had to rearrange the brackets. The groupings. and that's the part that it hey the side bonus was this is what allowed now the spreadsheet to be worked on so well because we put in all these safeguards and ways of making it so I can easily regroup everybody at you know just dragging and dropping and boom done it realigns everything kicks out the new scoring stuff I probably ran using last month's scores for a fake May version of scoring I probably ran it maybe a dozen, if not 20 times. And what was interesting was seeing how everybody's placements changed based off of the groups that they were put in. Oh, really? So it really does matter which group you're in, how it's really helpful in the day. It really does matter because sometimes you had these scores that were rather low compared to everybody else's scores, but they happened to be all in the same grouping. And so that low score roundup getting, you know, first place. But then if you look at the overall scores for those tables, which, by the way, we will be posting the next time, we'll give you complete breakdowns of how everybody actually really scored on each table. One more thing that Cassandra put into the spreadsheet.
    17:27
    But no, it'd be interesting how a person, you know, placed first in their grouping, but then you look at their ultimate score and they placed, you know, 20th on the table itself. so yeah it's like I said it's anybody's game it's anybody can place high it's kind of what I like about this although your consistent players are consistently near the top so yeah that's right and you see that in real tournaments as well you know there's always somebody that's just great at playing pinball and they're always at the top so yeah digital pinball is just like real pinball you know except so the thing that I hinted about that we very well might do for this next season is, because I found out, I almost found out the hard way with the league tournament that I was in, that currently we have it if you don't own the table but you enter the tournament and you at least post one score, we'll give you the minimum points, four points, for the other tables. Where this played havoc happened to be because Viking Eric wound up placing based off of his points totals ahead of other individuals, but then I moved those individuals ahead of him because they actually played all four tables. I didn't think it was fair that somebody that played all the tables would wind up scoring less points than, or fall in, like they were tied. I think it was a five-way tie. And they, because the one table that Viking Eric happened to play was the put-up-or-shut-up table, and he won, that he would then, because he won that,
    19:04
    rank higher than the other people that played all four tables. Therefore, I manually bumped him down to the bottom of the list. That still puts him right now, he's number nine for the season. Well, I found out that in my league, that's not how they do it because my league scores the exact same way that we're scoring this. If you're not there, you get zero points. That does add a whole new wrinkle to things. so I'm thinking when we come around to the our second season and we everybody starts brand new with points that we are going to go to that method so you can blame Viking Eric for ruining it for everybody you scored too darn good you're making a mockery of us so So we don't have, as of yet, a prize. I know that, I believe, Captain Bazaar offered up some Zen tables, I think. But it was for PS4. Yeah, but it was for PS4 only. And based off the fact that we only last month had one PS4 player.
    20:19
    That would be a pretty easy competition, wouldn't it? Yeah, I would prefer that. I mean, as much as I appreciate the offer, I kind of want a prize that more people would be able to maybe benefit from.
    20:35
    That does remind me that for the final tournament of the season, which will be our July tournament, we are going to be having the Randy Macho Man Savage custom shooter rod head that was designed by Wizard Amusements.
    20:58
    They were giving that for us to give away to anybody and I have stipulated that you need to have played in at least four of the tournaments. I don't care if you don't have a pinball table. These things are pretty cool. I would love to have one sitting right next to my desk or next to my gaming station because it just looks awesome. Come on, he's the macho man. It's pretty cool. Yeah. It is. And it's like a $30 or $40 value price, so nothing to shake your head at. I mean, if you wanted to and you were good with woodworking, you could make yourself a trophy out of it and just stick it into a block of wood and engrave yourself a plaque and make you feel awesome.
    21:35
    Or if you're lame, you can just get a piece of foam and jab it into that. You could as well. Whatever floats your boat, you know. So I do encourage if anybody has extra Steam keys or Humble Bundle keys, especially with Humble Bundle where oftentimes you already own at least one of the games that's in the bundle, but because the bundle is so darn cheap, it's like, who cares? Now you have an extra key. Yeah, if anybody has that kind of thing lying around that they don't know what to do with and none of their friends want it or whatever, hey, feel free to contact us. We'd love to give it away as a prize. we'll even let you determine how the price is given what kind of random drawing because I think with Paper It's Pleased the stipulation was that it was whoever lost the tournament nice that's cool sorry Montana Frank that you won that but congratulations Montana Frank you won that free game is a free game there's nothing wrong with a wooden spoon I've got one plenty of times and this is what I love about our tournament we don't really have any sponsors apart from our good friends at Wizard Amusements and I love the fact that the community just gets behind it and puts up keys and makes it as fun as it is because without the community it just wouldn't be happening like the engagement we get from Pinball Arcade fans and the people who play in the tournaments, it really is like catching up with 40 of your mates at your local Pinball Arcade and having a tournament It really doesn't matter that we're doing it digitally. It's really cool. I love it. It certainly makes it when I read the forums in between tournaments that all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's that person's name. Yeah, they were playing in the tournament. And I kind of have a little better connection to the mass amounts of random names that you normally see floating around. Yeah. It kind of puts a – That's really good. It's not putting a face to it because obviously our faces aren't posted, but it puts a – let's say it puts a score next to their name. Kind of go, oh, yeah, hey, cool. That's right. That's cool. And hey, who knows? Maybe someday eventually, maybe, maybe, maybe, there'll be T-shirts to be given away too. We'll see. Yeah. We have to work on that, right? Yes, I had a discussion with my friend who has helped me clean up the logo somewhat, but then he just ripped into it the other day also. All right. See, I think it looks cool, but getting opinions is good. And then as he pointed out, it looks cool when it's nice and big, but when it's nice and small, like most people see it, there's a lot that gets lost on it. And so he was recommending, and I don't know, Jared, have you ever tried anything of this nature? He was saying that there is communities online. Oftentimes they do it with Photoshop where somebody will post a picture and say, hey, can somebody Photoshop me in the Andes? And then send all sorts of things and people do that. Well, apparently he said that there's also arenas where you can do that with logos. You can say, hey, I've got 20 bucks. Can somebody design me a logo?
    24:42
    Yeah, yeah. Some people will jump at that opportunity. It's like they just enjoy doing this kind of thing. Other people will be like, I don't do anything for that cheap. But, hey, that's fine. This is what you have to put up, and let's see what somebody can come up with. And it becomes one of those things where it's, hey, if you don't like it, you don't use it. You promise not to download it anyway.
    25:03
    but if you like the logo and you then feel like using it, then you kick over the money. And so he was kind of pointing out that, you know somebody with an actual design background not just me that happens to have Adobe Illustrator that they can actually design something that would maybe take some of the cues that are in our logo and make it look somewhat professional.
    25:28
    I do enjoy our logo, but I also recognize all the flaws that he pointed out in it. So anyway, someday we'll have something going on. Someday. Any time now, real soon. Yes. that we have to work out the logistics of actually shipping t-shirts around the world because that's really easy well let's listen enough blathering about this uh let's move on to time for jared tech talk sorry if i had an echo button i'd use it but uh you know we don't have echo buttons we don't one other thing we've been discussing about this podcast that's right we need some better tech you know if we're 18 episodes in you'd think we'd be more professional at it by now if we were actually willing to you know drop 20 bucks we could actually make this show sound like a real show but 20 bucks what do you think we are beta buddy that's it I'm going on GoFundMe kickstart it if these people can do it with you know getting donations for doing Twitch broadcasts.
    26:38
    Pinball game rooms. Like, what a scam. Like, yeah, I'd like pretty pinball machines so I can do broadcasting on Twitch. Well, dude, it'd be so funny.
    26:47
    Sorry. Tangent. So just this morning, my son loves watching, what do they call them, Play With Me videos or Let's Play. Excuse me, Let's Play videos. so it'll be a particular video game and so he watches Minecraft games and Plants vs. Zombies and now he's watching Terraria he just watches basically other people play video games and so I was commenting to him about how when do these people when do they have the time to play all these multiple games and everything and I was like oh yeah they treat it like a job and so my son goes you know I think I'd like to be a YouTuber someday. I'm like, oh no, this is actually a job category? This is something to aspire to?
    27:40
    It's a university degree you can get to become a YouTuber? I think I missed it. I'm like, okay, that's all fine and dandy, but in the six or seven years before he's able to actually have his own account and do this kind of thing, who knows? The whole world might have changed again. It will. you know it will yeah it's funny right yeah so tech talk with jared this is this is something that um some people have said they wanted to hear more of on the podcast like i've got some feedback that when i started talking about some tech uh technical aspects in the past that they really wanted to hear more so i'm going to test it out see what you guys think of it i'd love to hear some feedback on it um i'm going to try and pitch it at the the right audience here if i'm not getting that right, tell me also. It's just, I don't know. I've never done this before as far as talking tech. I'm a pretty big geek as far as Android goes, but yeah, just let me know what you think in the forum or on Twitter at Jared Morgs. So what I want to talk about today, this is riffing off some of the stuff I've documented in the Android User's Guide for Pinball Arcade. So this first one, which I think is probably one of the most important things if you're using Android is to understand how Google Play Games works on Android. Is Google Play Games, just so that, you know, here, I'll be the idiot.
    29:06
    Google Play Games, is that kind of like the Game Center on iOS? Yeah, absolutely like Game Center from what I've heard. It's Google's way of sharing scores and backing up data in Android apps. And it's pretty prolific on Google Play Store now. Lots of apps utilize the system. It's really, really good for learning about what your friends on Google Plus are playing. I actually discovered some really awesome games because some of the people I follow on Google Plus were playing them. It's all about discovery. I'd assume that's what Game Center does as well. Does it pop up when they start playing a game? Pop a little box saying, oh, so-and-so is playing this game? Oh, no. That sounds cool. That's what Steam does.
    29:49
    Whenever you log into Steam. I mean, as soon as my PC turns on, it logs me into Steam. And then whenever somebody that I have on my friends list is playing a game, I get a little tiny box saying they're playing something and such. It has made me go, oh, wow, there's like six people playing this game. Maybe I should check it out. Oh, that's cool. I'd like that as a feature, Google, if you're listening, because you would be listening to our podcast.
    30:11
    So, yeah, Google Play Games. So, back when Earthshaker was released for Pimple Arcade, a pretty long-standing request was implemented, which was Google Play Services is what it's called, but most people just call it Google Play Games.
    30:27
    And it was great because there's a number of things to do with the mobile platform, particularly in Android, that make it a very important feature to have. And shout out to Scott Umble, our legendary Android developer, for pushing this in because it wasn't... When I made the request, silly non-developer me, I was going, oh, yeah, you know, Google Play Games. Here's the docs, you know, make worky. Six to eight weeks, it'll be fine. Make worky.
    30:59
    It's like the worst thing you can say to a developer. I didn't really say it like that, but, you know, I made it sound a lot easier than it probably should have been. And, you know, after he actually got in there and implemented it, it was nowhere near as easy as he thought. Like, there's a lot of stuff that you have to set up to make Google Play Games work. you've got to have you've actually got to make icons for the achievements and you know you've got to uh and i mean we've got 10 different achievements for each table in pinball arcade so he had to make a decision there to actually group them in lots of five because you know there's a cap on the amount of achievements you're going to have for each game of 300 i think and you know even with 50 tables we're up to 500 um achievements so there was no way he could actually implement like a flat structure for achievements, which is another thing I've been wanting for a while, but I don't think it's going to ever happen.
    31:53
    So, yeah, the most important thing that Google Play Services offers is the ability to make save games in Pinball Arcade.
    32:03
    Now, in the past, you could do this if your Android device had the super user binary added in it. So that's called routing on Android. So you root your device, you get access to the whole system, you can kind of do what you want with it. When you root your device, you can use things like titanium backup and other apps to access protected parts of the system of your Android operating system. And the way Pinball Arcade had all the local achievements, all your standard wizard goals, all your hall of fame points, all that sort of stuff recorded was actually in the system folder of Android. Now, the system folder of Android is protected. it's um it's no android goes no user no normal user should be able to mess around with that part so we're not going to let you unless you kind of know what you're doing and by routing the device google say well you must know what you're doing so have at it you know so um what the google play services allows you to do is it allows you to hook into that um save games database which was in a very convoluted directory in the data directory. So it was data, data, comfars.androidpinball, javaproject, files, save data. So all the way... Easy! Yeah, easy to remember, right? So, yeah, that's where the local database resides. So what Scott was able to do is he was able to build upon that database, still use that as the way the game detects the achievements and everything in the game, because that particular part of the app is pretty heavily entrenched in the system. It would take Scott a long time, probably, to actually code that part of the database out and actually make it into exclusively Google Play games. That part of the game detects all the hooks that Fastlight coded in. like, you know, there might be a goal attributed to, say, a flashing shoot-again lamp, for example. If the game sees that lamp solid, it then detects that you've earned the extra ball for the game and awards you that achievement. And that achievement then gets set in that saved data database. So now what happens is Google Play Games watches for events in that saved data part of the database and then sets a flag at its end and saying, good, you've achieved that goal. So you've achieved, say, one of five of the standard goals. So once you've achieved all of the standard goals, you get a standard goal award on Google Play. Likewise, when you complete all the wizard goals, you get a wizard goal. Right. So that's pretty easy to understand how that works. Yeah, we get the same one on Steam, and I'm pretty sure that's the same. well, they're not doing trophies anymore on PS3. Because they've run out again. Yeah, they've run out. So that's a similar problem. Like, yeah, you tend to run out of achievements pretty fast. I mean, there's a lot of tables in TPA now. So it's starting to stretch the possibilities as far as a lot of these achievement-based systems work. Well, it's certainly a unique game in that respect because most games, even with downloadable content, they don't have monthly downloadable content that has its own group of trophies again. I mean, at most, a game might dump, say, maybe a large game-adding stuff. It would be maybe three, four. If you're doing maps or whatever, there would be achievements attached to a map. but it's not going to have, you know, accelerate into the hundreds. And then the only other, to me, the only other game that kind of is like TPA with the monthly add-ons and stuff would be your, your rock band kind of games where it was music, but they never had goals attached to each song. So yeah, TPA kind of is its own little, uh, unique animal, which is probably why none of the, uh, none of the systems are going, Oh, let's bend over backwards to fix that for you. yeah that's right um so yeah it's it's an interesting edge case i guess as to how those systems are utilized so so yeah so we've got access now to save games so for most apps on google play um the expectation is if you see the little cloud save logo on the game um you expect that actually if you see achievements and lead aboard and you also see like a cloud save or the possibility of cloud save, users generally expect that to be automatic. And it's great. As soon as I earn an achievement, that gets backed up to Google Play. And if I ever have a complete device meltdown and I have to buy a new device, I'm not going to lose any progress. Oh, okay. It's not how it works in TPA. It's a bit opposite to how that works. So in TPA, because of that local database still being used and it's not completely relying on Google Play Games, that local database is intrinsic to the way that achievements are awarded still. So if you lose that local database on your device, you lose all your local progress, unless you have a save game profile backed up to Google Play Games. Now, I've heard on the forum a number of different users getting caught out by this, and it's so frustrating because you think everything is being done magically, automagically in the background, and then you find out the hard way it's not. And this reason, this particular point that I'm making here is the reason why I made that Android users guide because it was catching out so many users. Because in the app, there's no real user assistance for that feature. It's sort of like, hey, save games. it's there, but there's no indication of just how important it is for you to actually do something with. So as your phone falls into the water, you're like, oh, darn, that's okay. All my pictures were already backed up to the Google Cloud. You go buy your new phone. You sign up your account name. Hey, look, there's all my pictures. You go and play TPA, and you're like, oh, it's the end of the world. Yeah, that Lyman's Lament achievement, see you later, sport. You're going to have to earn that one again.
    38:42
    Have fun doing that. So this is the advice to people who play on Android and who may not even be aware of the Save Games feature and how important it is. Make yourself a Save Games backup at your earliest opportunity so you don't lose any of your local progress. The great thing is that if you do use the Save Games feature, you can transfer your goals between devices. So say you've got, for example, a Nexus 5 or a Nexus 7, you can transfer your achievements between each device and sort of make running backups of them. So that's kind of cool that you can do that now. And so all you need to do is you just need to go into, there's on the main screen, most Android users would have seen this menu already, but there's a big Google Play button right on the main screen where you go into your tables and tournaments and stuff like that. So you just tap that button. You then tap save load, and then you tap save new game, and that's all you have to do. It'll make a save game entry, and you're done. So the problem is that that's not automatable. You can't automate that. So you can't say every week make a backup or every time I earn achievement, trigger that backup service. It's all manual. Again, that's another thing that I'm not particularly sure is a great way of implementing it, but it is what it is, so you just need to work around it.
    40:10
    So what I usually do is every time there's a new DLC released, I use that as a reminder to back up my local achievements. So it's sort of like a manual backup job. That's just an easy way of remembering it. There's a bit of a trick, too, to deleting the save game profile as well, because there's an upper limit of three save game profiles that you can save in Google Play Games. That's actually not a Google Play limitation. That's a Farsight limitation. They've made it three only. You can have a lot more if you want, but they haven't decided to do that.
    40:47
    So you will get to the point where you need to delete a save game at some point, And there's a bit of a trick to it because if you tap Google Play, then save load, and then just touch anywhere on one of the save game tiles, that'll actually load the data, not give you an option to delete it. It will load it immediately. So if you've got a two-month-old save game profile there and you're going, oh, I want to delete that one, and you tap on it, boom, all your progress you've done in two months is gone.
    41:21
    So yeah, not ideal. So the way you work around that, there's a little action overflow button, which is an Android. Android users will know what this is. It's like these little three vertical dots. You tap that and hidden in that menu, it's a very small little button on the tiles. They'll be very precise when you touch it.
    41:42
    There's a delete button in there and that's where you delete it. So just be a little bit careful when you want to go and delete your profiles.
    41:51
    I brought up that point in the forum, and it turns out that other games in Google Play, you can actually customize how those save game tiles are displayed in the app. So you can actually have clear load and delete buttons and things like that on there to make the user experience a lot easier for customers. So I think that, you know, as a continuous improvement activity, that's something that Farsight and Scott could actually take a look at and make that a little bit more intuitive for users. So, yeah, that's a bit of an overview of Google Play services and how you should be using it in-game. So, in short, back up your data. Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time.
    42:34
    You know, it kind of reminds me of, just with all those steps to do to make the game not necessarily function, but make your, you know, one less headache or whatever. But it kind of is the argument that I used to have with consoles versus PC in terms of playing games. Whereas my argument for always being on a console was it's so easy. You throw in the disk and it just works. You're not having to deal with graphic settings. You're not having to deal with what is my current CPU running at.
    43:13
    There's nothing. All you do is you push save. Boom, it's saved. You don't have to do anything. It's done for you. And of course, the sacrifice to that is you're locked into its environment. Yes, that's right. So I have, over the past year, been playing much, much more on the PC than I have been on my PS3.
    43:42
    Part of that is just because I haven't been interested in any games that were on the PS3. part of that is the TV that I have it hooked up to it can't display 720p you can only do 1080i and there's a lot of games that it's either 720p or welcome to 480p so the graphics weren't looking as sharp and awesome and stuff and then it was just the fact that I finally had a PC that actually had a good graphics card and could run things and so I've been playing more on the PC But the flip side, the evil side of that is I've been getting introduced to the settings menu and going, what in the hell am I supposed to do in here? I don't know what MSAA is. And I don't know what, you know, you know, shadow detail and all these other things. And, you know, and I'd like I'd be like, oh, no, I've got a I've got a good graphics card. Let's turn them all on high. And I go to play the game. It's like stuttering. I'm like, OK, so apparently I can't do that. Now, what do I back off? And to me, it's now a two-day ordeal of trial and error.
    44:50
    Welcome to the PC. Exactly. But the interesting thing is, like, I did – well, Steam had it on sale a few – probably a month or so ago. And then I just noticed Humble Bundle was doing it this weekend, which by the time this podcast goes out will no longer exist. But anyway, they were having a Rockstar sale. So they had GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, GTA 4, as well as two DLC packs for $10. Far out. What a bargain. Exactly. And I'm like, you know what? Even though I've played these all on the PS3, it's been years, and I thought, oh, what the heck. Just get it. Insta-buy, right? So I go to load up GTA 3, and holy crap, it looked hideous. It was like 680 graphics, you know, it was low res, and it wasn't meant for widescreen, so everything was oval and stretched. I'm like, no. So I guess it was a direct port from the PS3. Yeah. Well, here's where the beauty of the PC is. This is Welcome to Mods. All right. And wouldn't you know it, there was a mod out there to fix the entire thing, make it in high-def graphics. It fixed all the bugs that were in the PS3 version. It corrected a couple of other bugs that were in it. Then it winds up, I find out that in Vice City, that they had lost Steam, when it went to Steam, that they lost the license to a bunch of the music. And the music in that game, well, the 80s music, it makes the game. I was like, what? Totally. Well, the modders went and they got all the music from the original release and threw it back in the game. So basically, I've got the best versions of the game, and that's just me running it as the game should be. Then there's all the mods that rack on all the extra graphics and extra madness, which I haven't even dealt with there. But it is this weird reality of, man, you've got to jump through some hoops to get it going on. And it's great once you get it going. And thank God for Google searches telling me how to do everything because otherwise I'd be completely lost because I really don't tinker. Yeah. Unlike you, Jared. You just want it to work. Exactly. It's pretty much why I am on an iPhone because all the discussions you talk about Android and the things you can do to an Android and everything, I just kind of go, yeah, I wouldn't do any of it. Just not brave enough to dive into those waters. but it's interesting though, like you're saying you can actually improve upon the game because I don't know if on iOS, what happens if you lose your phone yeah, I'm not sure if that data is saved or not it's probably something you should check and don't experiment by going oh, so what happens if I drop my phone in the water don't do it that way okay, so another tangent because I like to do these so I am I love roller coasters yeah you and me both and I have a season pass to this year I have one to Six Flags Magic Mountain which here in California it is has 17 roller coasters second most roller coasters only to one other park in the country which is I think Cedar Point and that's all the way on the east coast so anyway it's a good time to go there well I've been working on a script because I work in the industry so I have to have one and I've been working on a script I finally finished my second draft and a partner of mine who has connections that we might be able to actually see about getting this thing made we decided we had to take a meeting and I was like how true romance of me well let's go meet at Six Flags because that's where they filmed the one meeting in for a romance. And so we discussed our script while riding roller coasters.
    48:59
    That sounds awesome. That's why I call it boardroom. Exactly, right? Well, on the second ride we went on, for those of you that are in California or roller coaster aficionados, the ride that we rode was X2. It's this extreme,
    49:14
    they call it a 4D roller coaster. It's bug nuts insane. It's great. Good time. Anyway, we go up the second apex. It's not really a drop because of the way you are writing this world of course, but anyway, call it the second apex. It's an area where you do catch air.
    49:32
    And me and him were riding in the front car, and all of a sudden I see this white object fly in front of me. And in my head I went, oh, somebody just lost their phone. And simultaneously he's sitting next to me and I hear him go, oh, my phone. Oh, no. So, to say the least, an iPhone that drops 150 feet down onto asphalt, I don't think it survived. No, I don't think that one's a goner. Yeah, even if you had a good case like an Otterbox, I think it would still be a goner. Yeah, I think it would. Now, I haven't talked to him since then because I can't talk to him. Because you probably can't because his iPhone's busted.
    50:11
    I know he submitted him to Lost and Found. We just wanted to see what the if they found the thing because they walk the track or underneath track every night We just want to see what it looked like because I was like, oh my gosh Can you imagine how shattered that thing must look?
    50:24
    But it did probably still boot and you could probably run a backup that has from iTunes on it right just a screen that completely toast Munted Yeah munted Yeah But it did go through my thought I was like, oh, that sucks that you have to now pay for a new phone. And then my immediate thought after that was, oh, the things that you would have to replace on that. You know, all the apps and all the data and all the, it's like, and then top it off, he was like, oh, I should probably let my wife know that, you know, she can't call me. and then he stops for a minute and he goes, I can't. I don't know her number. Well, no, because he could use my phone, but he was like, I don't know her number. He goes, I don't know anybody's number.
    51:05
    That really sucks. See, this is the cool thing about Android. I don't know if you can do it on iOS, but you can enable guest mode on your Android phone. So if I smash my Nexus 5 and you've got another Nexus device or any phone that runs Android 5, I can say, oh, dude, can you do me a solid? Can I just use your phone and I'll just make a guest profile on it? and set it up. It just basically sucks all your settings down and all your contacts and stuff are synced up to the cloud like it would be on iOS anyhow. And you can just make calls and it's just like your phone. Oh, that's weird.
    51:39
    Yeah, it's pretty cool. So yeah, that's a handy tip. I'm sure that Apple's done something similar though because they're all about the user experience. So I'd imagine that would be a thing.
    51:50
    It'd be a thing and if I actually cared about my phone and learning what it could do, I could probably find out. but so so you've got your um your gta all installed but i understand that you're on on the pinball side of things you've been using um your computer for um pinball related activities too in particular uh something that has a d and an x in it followed by the number 11 yes let's talk about let's talk about what farsight or more specifically what uh mike reitmeyer has been doing with our beloved pinball arcade on the pc with dx11 dynamic lighting specifically so if you've seen any of the uh clips of the ps4 running uh pinball arcade you've obviously noticed that it looks crazy amounts different than it does on any other platform mainly because the ones are all actually individually working, the table is significantly darker, and my god, it looks so much more like a pinball experience. Yeah. It looks so nice. Yes. So that was basically the baseline, call it. And when we heard about DX11 going into beta, it was basically promised as oh yeah, we we're going to basically test it for about a month and hopefully it'll come out with Cyclone. Well, as you can tell, Cyclone has already come and gone and been released, and Xenon will have been released, and still no DX11. Well, you can blame us beta testers for that. It's all your fault. Because like a pitbull locking his jaws on a harmless chihuahua, we have not let go. and poor Mike we've really just been throwing request after request after request and God bless him if he hasn't been trying to appease us yeah so what started off with just him having now it didn't start off quite at PS4 quality there were some basically when we got to start baiting it it was hey this is good enough to at least run but we were able to see quite a lot. And right off the bat, we had the light-medium-dark slider. That's good. Which is good, except for the fact that dark was nowhere near dark enough, and light was as if the sun was ten feet away.
    54:32
    It's very washed out. It's very washed out. I mean, even in full daylight, if you had your pinball table out at high noon in the middle of the street, it would not be this bright. Um, so, but that was where, that was where we basically started. And bit by bit, he started, you know, obviously making the lights look a little bit better and everything. Well, the first thing that we were harping about was, come on, you got to make it darker. You got to make it darker. You got to make it darker. So he made a little bit darker, but then among the beta people, some people were like, not dark enough for the people were like, Oh, there's plenty dark. And everybody just kept on saying, come on, it's the PC. Can't we slide these? Can't we slide this? Because I just want to touch darker.
    55:15
    Lo and behold, all of a sudden, we get the light slider that we've been requesting for two plus years. And it's a full zero to 100%. Now, zero percent still isn't absolute darkness in the room.
    55:29
    That being said, it's very dark. And only on a few tables is it an instance where you're like, If only it was a little bit darker because you just want the light show is what you're really after.
    55:42
    That's when you're talking about tables like Circus Voltaire where you're just like, I want it black.
    55:49
    And so we got that going on, but then it became a matter of, oh, but you know what? Now I can't see the ball.
    55:58
    Yeah, that's a problem. And because if you play a real pinball table, it doesn't matter how black the room is. You know, pinballs are highly reflective surfaces. And all it takes is just a pinpoint of light, and you can spot the pinball. And, hey, look, on a machine, how many pinpoints of light are there? There are pinpoints of light everywhere. But the way 6.11 is working is each individual light is casting a radius, basically. And they can't increase the radius too much. Otherwise, it starts interfering and causing all sorts of other havoc and weird, odd lighting circumstances.
    56:38
    So the ball isn't constantly getting that reflection. On top of that, we found out that the ball and its reflectivity is specifically tied to the engine, not to the lighting.
    56:51
    Oh, okay. So we were kind of like, oh, crap. Well, what are we going to do? Because we started referring to the ball as the light-sucking orb.
    57:03
    If you played Phantom of the Opera at 0% lighting, you couldn't see the ball. There's so much black on that table, and it's such a dark table. It was impossible to see. so Mike was good enough to come up with a temporary fix that he called bright ball and I'm assuming it's kind of a bit of post-processing but he put bright ball on and suddenly you could see the ball it's not 100 perfect but I also have not taken that setting off since he introduced it because right I like seeing the ball and it looks it looks good you can track the ball, that's all I really cared about. It's not 100% realistic, but it's also not something that just jumps out at you and is screaming, oh, look how fake I am! It works. It doesn't break the illusion, as we keep on saying, with digital pinball. And I will more than happily take that over than the light sucking orb.
    58:04
    Which does definitely break the illusion. Yes. And I'll take it until such time as the engine, the mechanic, as we like to call him, The man that works on the engine can actually work on a different ball setting. Yeah, right. So we got that. Well, we were all happy about that, and then Mike went one step further, and all of a sudden he put in a separate slider for bulb brightness.
    58:31
    So now not only do we have the room environment in terms of how dark you can make it, but you have the ability to adjust the bulbs. And why this is important is because on some tables, and this probably is how it was done in the artwork, on some of the tables, the lights were significantly brighter and therefore washed out.
    58:53
    So you drop the light slider down to 20%, and now you look like an actual incandescent bulb. Well, if you dropped it that low on another table, all of a sudden it was like, guy, this thing's barely lighting up. So you crank it back up to 50%, 60%, and it would look fine. So what he's done is allowed us the ability to customize it to our preferred look. Because there's been some settings that people have talked about in the beta forum about, oh, yeah, I have this setting at 80%. I go and drop it to 80%. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'd have to wear sunglasses. And it just looked horrible to me. Burns my retinas. Exactly. So it's basically allowing us to now have much more customization to it and to make it look the way we want it. of course we've now leapfrogged what the Xbox one and the PS four look like. And I'm sure they're all going to be severely jealous that, um, you know, we're getting to mess with all these things and probably, you know, the complaints will start as soon as DX 11 becomes absolute public and built into the game that they're gonna be like, what about us? Um, but this is the cool thing. It seems like Fireside is really, you know, since the last time we talked, he's really stepping up their game and trying to, you know, implement these things. It's long been talked. And it's no longer been a case of, oh, well, this is what we'd like to do. It's actually happening.
    60:16
    And that's why even though, well, the DX11 is now a public beta, so you can play it if you want to play it. It's just not, you know, it doesn't have all the kinks worked out yet, but it's so worth the wait. It's, I, the, not, yes, the last tournament I played with DX9 on because I was afraid of it ruining my scores if I played in DX11. Because obviously with the tables darker, it's a little different. Well, I have since gotten so used to playing with the DX11, and I went to test something on Whirlwind, because there was an issue with sound dropping out for some reason on Quick Multiball in DX11, so I tested it out in DX9. And sure enough, it wasn't an issue in DX9. but I couldn't follow the ball anymore because everything is so bright and the lights aren't now drawing my attention to where things are happening I was losing track of the ball and I was like, holy crap, I'm already sold I can't go back to this It's just flat I throw on a game like Genie which everybody is like, oh my god can it look any flatter in EX-11 it actually has some dimension Wow. Yeah, so it's adding new life to tables that you thought that you just hated the looks of, and instead you're kind of like, no, you know what? This is pretty darn cool.
    61:45
    On top of that, one of the first things that we begged for, we were like, can you please put strobe multiball back in? Oh, yes. We have strobe multiball in Attack from Mars. Man, that will look amazing. It looks great. It's not blinding, which, and I had this argument with somebody where I said, in a real game, when it would be blinding, that's because all the room lights are off, right? Yes. Well, if you're playing it at home, what are the odds that you have all your lights turned off and the only thing that's turned on is your computer screen?
    62:20
    Yeah, not really. Not really. And more to the point, that light that is blinking, it's so bright it's like having a flashbulb go off, and that's causing you to have the little blue dots in your eyes. Well, the computer can't really do that with that one isolated light unless it did a fake flash. Yes. And also fake temporary blindness as well. Exactly.
    62:44
    So it'd have to sort of like, you know, wander the screen a little bit. I don't think we want that because I've played some tables in visual pinball where somebody added an artificial flare and it annoyed the crap out of me. Yeah. But the point is that, hey, now the mode actually looks like it's doing something instead of it saying, throw a multiball, and you're like, what is any different than what we were previously playing? Exactly. It's no light multiball. Yeah, and the same thing with neon multiball works beautifully. Oh, that would look sweet as well on CD. It just adds so much. And I'm hoping that the added benefit of all of this is, since Mike's doing all the work on it on this side, that maybe it'll circle down into the other platforms.
    63:29
    Yeah, I think I was thinking this very same thing. When I saw DX11 was getting momentum, it made me think, hmm. And there's a long discussion on Android about improving the platform for mobile devices. Yes. And this is one of the things that I think FuzzSight should give consideration to if they're not already, like working out how to actually get a dynamic lighting, even if it's some type of dynamic lighting introduced in mobile, because we've seen it now with Ask Homework's offering. And yes, there are a number of caveats that you have to understand that Ask have done there as far as their game engine and what they're doing with the game. But the technology is out there now that you can do it. Well, what they're proving here is that you can have both the DX9 build, which will be the slower or the lesser build that will run on most machines that are out there, including anybody that's still running Windows XP. And you have the DX11 version, which will be for your higher... I mean, it's not even that much of a graphics hog.
    64:35
    I mean, there's been some debate about what level of graphics card you need, but it's not going to cost you hundreds and hundreds of dollars to step up and be able to use this. And any PC that's been bought within the last year that has more than the motherboard's graphics card on it is probably going to be able to run this just fine. But there you have the choice.
    64:55
    They're proving that they can deliver both on one platform, two options. And I think if they were able to do that with the mobile platform, that would be fantastic.
    65:06
    And hopefully this serving is fed to kind of show that. It really would blow mobile platforms open. I'm talking about iOS and Android here as well. iOS have good hardware as well as Android now. I'm running a tablet that's running a Shield tablet, which has essentially got a PC graphics card in it with the K1 processor. Right. This thing has got 182 cores of graphics capability on it. It should theoretically be able to run the PC build if the framework wasn't limited to Windows binaries like the X11. Right. So I think the biggest challenge for Farsight, and this is pure speculation on my part because I don't know how everything hangs together, But if the engine dev had to make changes to how the ball was reflecting, then I'd say that it would all come down to how the engine was coded on mobile because we don't have things like DX11 framework and stuff like that. So a lot of that stuff would have to be baked in to the engine itself or they'd have to switch to something like Unity and develop on that. And again, I don't know the support cross-platform between iOS and Android. So there's a lot of technical challenges that probably even I'm not fully appreciating with what they need to do to get lighting done. It doesn't mean they shouldn't investigate them. I'm not saying that at all. But I'd say that there would have to be a fair bit of refactoring to code to actually get dynamic lighting with the current engine that Farsight is using. Well, and here's the thing, too. We've heard from one or two of the developers at Farsight where they're saying they're really excited about the future. and it's not just the tables that are coming out but what they're planning on doing with the game and i think we're starting to see them commit to this um yeah because also just introduced last week on the xenon beta they're doing flipper physics yeah and boy are they good man um well the the first beta of it not so much let's just say there was a lot of balls going through the tips of the flippers or the flipper, the tip of the flipper felt like it was a sponge.
    67:20
    So the ball would kind of go mush and then you'd flip and it barely flip up. It was very odd, but they're rapidly working on it to the point that some people have the skill. I still don't understand how it exactly works, but doing live catches I've been trying to do juggling and it seems to at least work a little bit better than it used to. You know, the ball's not now flying a million miles an hour with a real quick press of the button.
    67:48
    So hopefully they're working on some of that stuff. But who knew that they were going to be working on flipper physics? You know, that was just kind of like thrown into the beta and, you know, it's being worked on. So I'm hoping there's been something. We've been clamoring for that for like years now. People are saying, give us the flipper physics. This is, you know, such an important part of the game. The flipper is basically the person's hand inside the pinball machine controlling the ball. So make it awesome. And it looks like they're starting to do it because I've played the Android beta. It's really exciting. Are they doing it on the Android beta also? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they've got it on the Android beta at the moment. And it's really good. I've been able to repeatedly, like within like 70% of the time, do drop catches and stuff like that. Like this is good stuff, guys. So thank you if our site is listening to this podcast, which I know sometimes they do in the QE area. So shout out to you guys for listening to us and for getting some time in the schedule to push this stuff in because it really does mean a lot that you're actually doing it and good on you guys for getting it in there. We look forward to all the awesome new things you have planned, whatever they are, for the platform because it's exciting to see stuff moving forward. I know that personally, the mobile platforms had a release of Scared Stiff that we were talking about last time in the podcast, and I was saying it was a missed opportunity because they didn't fix bugs. Well, it turns out that the longstanding crate bug, which for those of you who didn't catch the last podcast, there was a longstanding issue with Scared Stiff that if you shot two balls into the crate, they'd jiggle around and erroneously award you multiple jackpots all the time. until they got shot out. So you get like 10 or 15 jackpots in a row.
    69:35
    And after giving the guys feedback, I sort of left a review on the Android app and I think I brought it up in one of the, in that improving the mobile offering thread as well. And I don't know whether it was just a combined approach or that other people were doing it too, but they went and fixed that bug. They actually went and squashed that bug so you can't exploit that feature anymore. and this was essentially a low-hanging fruit item that had been identified at the time that that particular table was in beta and it just turned out that they didn't have time to fix it then and it probably just got bumped down the list with all the other DLC packs and stuff that were being released but they've got to the point now where for whatever reason they can actually address it and they did. So again great work guys on listening to the community and listening to feedback. So everybody that was complaining about us being a little too harsh on Firesight and some of our podcasts. Hey, squeaky wheel. Yeah, totally. And credit where credit's due. That's the thing. It comes down to actually executing on that feedback, and that's what they're doing now. We don't have any reason to hold a grudge. Grudge isn't the right word, but to actually hold back on giving praise where it's due. Not only that, but you and I, we actually know some of the tables that are coming up. We do. Okay, let's just cut this right now because otherwise I'm going to squeal. Yeah, the NDAs can be a curse sometimes, but they're also a delight when you get little tidbits of information that you are very happy to hear about. The suck part is that I feel I can no longer mention any table at all just in passing because the ability of our forum to dig in and try and extrapolate. Oh my gosh, they could be any of them. Also, they'll mention titles and stuff and you're like, oh my gosh, did I what did no, I didn't say anything.
    71:39
    No, they're just guessing. I don't know. Now I'm just like, I can't even say a word because I'm afraid that anything that I even inadvertently not dropping a hint at all and it's because I become hyper aware of any other table that's been mentioned. So, you know, in the past three weeks of the 50-some tables that people have thrown out ideas for, all of a sudden I'll be just kind of like going, I'm not going to say a word because I don't want to. Even if it's not a table that I know is getting made, I don't want to say anything in case it winds up being a table that is being made. And then all of a sudden it's, who told you that? And, yeah, so it kind of kills the fun of. But on the other hand, I'm like. We have to be really serious because, you know, NDAs are no laughing matter. Like, FOSI could really have us if we do the wrong thing and breach information. So we've got to be really careful. Like, all the moderators on the forum must find them because there's protected areas on the forum that we have to access to do our jobs. But in saying that, it does kind of take some of the fun out of being on the forum. Because you can't. You just can't. And, you know, it's it's even when I'm talking about tables that are at my league, all of a sudden it'll be just like.
    73:02
    OK, do I mention something? Because like I said, there was now this goes back to when the first times one of the first times I visited Farsight, I was talking about a table that I hadn't even seen at Farsight, nor did I know that Farsight was making.
    73:22
    But I was talking about the table having been at one of my tournaments and being like, oh, this is such an awesome table. Can't wait to see it or whatever. And all of a sudden, everybody was like, oh, that's the next table that's being made. I'm like, ha-ha, you guys are so funny.
    73:37
    And because I'm like going, I don't know. I don't even know what the next table is that's going to be made. And sure enough, it was like the next table that was being made. and I was like, oh my gosh, this looked bad. I'm going to get a message from them going, okay, who told you that you couldn't? I was like, no, I didn't even know.
    73:52
    It wouldn't be a message from them. It would be a message from their lawyers. But that being said, I can say I'm rather pleased with the few titles that have been mentioned to us. It goes to show that there is still a lot of life left in this game.
    74:12
    There's some stuff that I'm going to be very, very, very pleased. And I have no problems immediately as soon as Season 5 is available for pre-purchase for the entire season of Forking Over. I'll just say it like that. Oh, yeah, instant buy. Yep, instant buy. I will be instant buying, but I usually do anyhow because, you know, doing the beta testing. I know you kind of have to in order to play the betas. Well, yeah, we do. Because, you know, there's no way they can actually give us free access to the tables because, you know, you've got to pay for them. So, yeah. Oh, that.
    74:46
    Oh, yeah. Hey, speaking of playing tables. Yeah. Playing on older machines, and when I'm talking older, I'm talking your EMs, tables from the 60s and earlier, if not that.
    75:03
    I was, my last league night, there was a large amount of EMs. Let's put it, of the six tables I played in the tournament, five of them were EMs. Right. That's a lot. It is a lot.
    75:18
    And they are mean. They're mean and they smell as well. In a nice way, but they smell. The question that I realized, because all these tables, they weren't fixed up in the least. There's a lot of peeling paint on these and they functioned, but I wouldn't say they necessarily functioned well. so they were play as condition as you would say if you were selling something exactly yes you know they did have they had new rubber on them and it wasn like there was any dead flippers or dead slingshots but you could also tell that they weren't in pristine prime condition either. But it made me think, have I ever played on a pristine EM?
    76:06
    And my resounding answer is no, except for I have played on a Wonelli. Oh, yeah, which is not really an EM. No, but I mean it's designed and laid out like an EM. Yes, it's a shot game. Yeah, so I mean you can say, okay, this would be what it's like to play on a brand new EM in terms of having full strength and full power and a perfectly smooth play field.
    76:34
    Kind of is kind of, is it though? What I've heard from people that have been playing on EM, like Wernally, is that it's still got solid state flippers. So you've still got, you know, I mean, it's been driven by the Stern spike board underneath the play field there. So you've got these really strong solid state flippers and they're just, they behave nothing like an EM's, you know, directly powered, you know, arcing, sparking, stinking flippers. Which they are, they stink. you know you certainly miss that like and if you're holding the ball and you hear the hum they start getting worried that oh no I'm going to break the machine if I hold this too long yeah the poor little relay down the bottom inside the machine just going could you just let me go I'm tired I've been around for like 80 years you know 60 years I'm getting old I need to be retired but it did make me think that um i wonder what these would play like if they were you know completely reshopped i think they play pretty amazingly there when i went to pacific pinball museum last april i got treated to the whole em room there at that place and um and it's uh there were some machines that for me they they seem to be working pretty well like you could actually get the ball and hit targets well and everything. And they're nice to play when they're working well. They're a completely different game to even an early solid state machine. But it's, yeah, there's something about them. Like we keep saying, you know, there's a bit of charm lost with TPA and the way that they seem to be running with solid state flippers on EMs at the moment as far as strength goes. It would be wonderful if Norman or one of the other, Norman probably, could be able to capture that sound that the flippers make and decrease the strength by, I don't know, about half and make shooting targets on Central Park really tricky and decrease the strength of the pop bumpers and stuff so that you don't actually get balls careening over the table. like they've got massive Assault State slingshots and stuff. Yeah. It changes. I can tell you the games that I played, and for those that know them, and for those that don't, they can IMDB, or not IMDB, Internet Pinball Database hidden. So I played this game called Big Deal. And this is, you know, when people talk about, well, why don't we get more EMs and everything? This to me is a prime example of why EMs aren't popular. So this thing is called Big Deal. the black glass is all cards right so you're thinking oh cool gambling game on the playfield there wasn't a single card to be seen there was not a single gambling element to be seen it looked like every other em it was like wow way to use the theme woohoo this is the thing though like back in that day ems they were producing so many tables each each year that all they were doing was changing the back glass and just re-theming.
    79:50
    So I played Big Deal. I took third on that one. I played Sea Ray. I took first in that one and I took it by a large margin. Go figure.
    80:01
    And this is the other thing that comes out with playing EMs. Nobody has a clue what to do. Everyone's just as bewildered as everybody else. Pretty much the only thing that everybody agrees on it's get the ball back up the play field as high as you possibly can and hope to hit something because how bonuses work how uh score progression works it's just like huh no idea and you want to talk about hungry outlanes the outlanes are about twice as wide as the ball oh yeah there's no bouncing and hoping it comes back out it's if it's heading over there it's going in there there's no your fans or butts. And the thing is, you can't slide save an EM, because it'll just tilt your game. Because I think with EM... When it tilts, it kills your entire game. It's not killing the ball. It's not your ball, it's your game. So it's very, very gentle nudging, not tilting, otherwise you can have a bad time. Then I played Time Zone, which I know actually scored well in the EM poll.
    81:08
    Oh, right. And that was done. and I took second on that one and then I played a game called Cleopatra which is an EM but isn't it's kind of like Genie and it was a godless also so it was one of their very first sold states yeah and that's the game that I watched our top 10 player go three house balls in a row and we were just endlessly laughing at him and he's one of these very serious players.
    81:41
    The string of cuss words and beratement that he can issue at a pinball machine is astounding. Which just made us laugh even harder.
    81:53
    Watching him take fourth place on it was kind of rather amusing. Then I got dropped on to F-14 Tomcat. Which would have been a breath of fresh air. Well, a breath of fresh air except for the thing is you go from a very slow EM, and that's the other thing. The ball moves terribly slow on these things. 2.2 F14, which is pretty much known as one of the fastest pins out there.
    82:20
    Go figure, I rocked it. I killed that machine and took first handily. I was like, yes! I was very stoked about that. Do you think it was because you were focusing on shots in the EMs rather than actually the normal things you would normally take for granted in a solid state because EMs are all about shots.
    82:44
    Yes, but I honestly think I have an innate understanding of System 11 games. I know where to put the shot.
    82:55
    I just knew, shoot this a couple of times and good things are going to happen. You know what I mean? Whereas in EM, I never know where the good thing is going to happen, if it's going to ever happen at all. And on Tomcat, I wound up getting multi-ball on my, I think my, I might have gotten it on my first ball. I don't think I did. I think it was on the second ball that I got multi-ball going. And once it was going, I was able to keep it alive. And that was the key, keeping it alive.
    83:23
    But then for our, talk about put-up or shut-up games. So for our put-up or shut-up game, we played a game called Tucson.
    83:30
    Tucson is from, I believe, 1943. its flippers are the little tiny short ones the inch and a half, two inches or whatever and they flip out not in and there is no left or right in terms of they both flip at the same time no matter which side you push and they're not right next to each other they're spread out with basically a whole bunch of drops below it so once your ball stops bouncing around on the top section where there's pop bumpers, once it drops below the pop bumpers, it was basically impossible to get the ball back up there. And that's where all the scoring was. And then it just became a game of Plinko where you're hoping the ball drops in the proper spot. And the flipper was basically good enough to just kind of redirect it. If it came near, I, and I kid you not, it's one of those situations where it was count yourself lucky. if the ball even came close to your flipper because odds are it wasn't even going to. Yeah, right. This would be the amble game. You know, Roger said he would not have done good on this.
    84:43
    To me, it sounds like they were just coming out of the, you know, the pin game era into the pinball era. So from, you know, what they incorrectly call bagatelle into pinball. And this was sort of like their entry into it. Hey, look, we'll put these things called flippers on and we'll see what happens.
    85:03
    That wound up being my put up or shut up game. Which unfortunately I had to shut up because I took fourth. I can imagine.
    85:14
    It was like I knew I was doomed from the start. I was like, oh man. That being said, I did really well in the tournament. I jumped 10 points. I went from 36th place on the season to 26th place on the season. That's pretty good. For an EM tournament. A bit of a win in my real tournament as well, of which the next one is tonight as we record this podcast, not live.
    85:39
    And I somehow, through a pure miracle, managed to get sixth place out of 30 players in that tournament. I got a colossal score on the Dutter East Tommy pinball. Something like 600 million on that. which is incredibly high. Okay. And they just bought in a brighter pin bot that had been recently shopped. I gave the operators some tips about how to actually get the flipper strength up on it. Yeah. Because all the cabinet switches were heavily pitted and they weren't transferring the power. Of course, brighter pin bots are pre-fliptronics pinballs. All the power was routed through the cabinet switches.
    86:25
    So I managed to get sixth out of this tournament. I don't know how I'm going to go tonight, but I think it was a combination of just the right amount of beer and just the right amount of I don't give a crap.
    86:37
    And I think that actually helped me win. So I'm going to try and replicate that again tonight for great justice. I was going to say, if only that was measurable. Yeah, if only it was. Yeah. There's actually another place that's opened up recently, sort of in my area. I'd have to go over a little way to get there. It's over in a suburb called Morningside here in Brisbane. It's got a really cool name. It's Death Valley. Death Valley Records and Tapas. And my mate who runs All Pinball over at Morningside has got a couple of machines in there. He's got a brand new Avengers pin in there. It's an LE, I think, which I've never played in my life. I've got to get over there and give that a go. He's got a Walking Dead Pro, but he's got mirror blades on it and a couple of other mods as well that make it look pretty slick. and he's got, just for the vintage lovers, he's got an Addams Family in pretty good condition there too. So good excuses to go over there, have a couple of craft beers and play some pinball, I think. I think I should stop talking about it and go and do it.
    87:41
    Yeah, something of that nature. You know, I'm looking at the time here and I'm going, my God, the two of us filled up an entire podcast virtually. But we're not done yet. No, we're not. We're not done yet. There is one thing that we have to talk about.
    88:00
    Mad freaking Max. Oh, yeah. I thought this was going to come up. It has to come up because I cannot stop talking about it. My wife is sick and to death of me even mentioning it.
    88:14
    It is absolutely astounding. Let's put it that way. Um, I, I, in my anticipation of the movie as it was, uh, building up, I thought, oh yeah, this would be cool. I'll go, you know, sometime on Friday when it opens up. And then I got on Facebook, somebody had posted a fake commercial for, do you know what power wheels are? It's the little kids, um, uh, uh, vehicles, you know, battery operated vehicles. Okay. They go all of like two miles an hour typically made by Fisher Price. Okay. They can go over the grass and that's about the extent of the terrain that they can handle. But little kids absolutely love them. Well, somebody had made a fake commercial for what do they call them? Do they call them road warrior power wheels or whatever? And they basically turned the power wheels into what looked like road warrior vehicles and they had the kids dressed up in the shoulder pads and the war paint and everything and they're staying by their cars and all of a sudden this little girl goes get his fuel and they hop into the thing and they're doing this two mile an hour chase down the sidewalk and then one of them says it was awesome and that little clip was like on Wednesday and I was like I need to see this movie now I cannot wait so I look up and sure enough they're doing preview showings on Thursday night I'm like I am going I don't care. I'm there. And so I went and saw it on Thursday night. And then as soon as I got home, went straight to Facebook and Twitter, and I'm just like, I'm totally going to go and see it. And everybody that had previously been giving me likes and everything for whenever I'd post one of the trailers, they were just like, okay, so it's good you're saying it. And I'm like, ah. And then I had a buddy of mine who I hadn't talked to in a long time, and he started trolling me about the movie, saying that the trailer looks like crap, and I thought he was just having a go at me because I thought it was this brilliant trailer and everything. And so I was kind of playing along, and at that point on Rotten Tomatoes, I think of the 95 critics that had reviewed it, 94 had given it a fresh rating, and only one hadn't. And so I was saying, oh, yeah, those 94 critics, and he's like, oh, well, you know Rotten Tomatoes is owned by a studio now, so you can't trust it. And I'm like, what, they paid off every single critic? Now I think there's 205 reviews, and 201 of them are positive. so the movie well um yeah I've heard nothing but praise for it on Twitter for the people I follow they said yeah well you know what the impressive thing most about it is that I mean for me at least is a couple things the first thing is it is beautifully photographed it is just a gorgeous movie to look at um the color palette for being in the middle of the desert there actually is a color palette and it looks fantastic um there's not a sign of shaky cam anywhere.
    91:30
    This is how action movies used to be shot. There was true geography. You understood where your actors were, where the villain was, where the danger was coming from.
    91:43
    It wasn't all in these giant tight close-ups that you have no clue what's going on. You see everything. You know where it's coming from, what's happening, and it's just such a breath of fresh air to see an action sequence shot like that. I think I've got an indication of just the quality and the care that the director, who was the director for this? Go on, it's one of your meets. Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven't met him. You might be surprised we don't have seven degrees of separation from famous people in Australia here.
    92:14
    But the thing that struck me from the trailer is even as it opens, it was the old Warner Brothers logo. You know, the red in black Warner Brothers logo that would have featured in the movies back in the 70s. The logo that's in the trailer isn't the logo that's in the movie, and the logo that's in the movie kicks that logo's butt. It's just like, from the minute it started, I just went, I'm happy. Oh boy, I'm in for a good ride here. And all I can say is, go see it in the loudest theater you can find, and preferably on the biggest screen you can find. The one negative that I did, I went and saw it in 3D, Oh, not good in 3D. No, I'm not saying it's no good in 3D. Because, thank God, George Miller actually knows how to frame a shot for 3D and understands that you don't edit every three seconds in a 3D movie. You let the audience's eyes actually adjust and figure out. He understands spacing so that you get that sense of depth. That being said, the 3D didn't necessarily enhance the movie or add to the movie. It wasn't like watching Gravity where I saw that in 3D and it felt like a must. And then when I watched it on TV, I was like, wow, it lost a lot not being in 3D.
    93:32
    I don't think that's at all going to be an issue with this one. The problem that I have with the 3D is the very nature of it being 3D. They can't put it on a big screen because they don't have enough projection light.
    93:43
    Oh, okay. So any theater, unless you go see it in one of these IMAX theaters, which I call it LIMAX because they're not true. But unless you see it on an IMAX screen and you're seeing it in 3D, it's not going to be in that large of a screen. It's going to be one of your smaller theaters. So I need to go back and watch it in a ginormous screen. We have what you call Sense Stadium Cinemas over here, which are like massive, massive theaters. I would highly recommend that. Oh, yeah. I have to go and see if I can take along Kim to that one, my wife. And see, for all the people that would say that, oh, the wife isn't going to enjoy it or whatever, if your wife enjoys, say, you know, Girls Kicking Butt, if Run Lola Run was a movie that they liked, if Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a TV show that they liked, if, you know. Dig this movie. Exactly, because it's not chicks in peril. It's chicks that happen to be in danger but can take care of themselves, too. Yeah. I know that's what a lot of people have said on Twitter. It's so refreshing to see that actually being portrayed and women portrayed on screen like that. It's so rare these days to see that. And, you know, it's funny, too, because for as simple of a story that it is, it's got some themes in it that are rather complex. And I think that's why people are still talking about the movie. It's raising these themes that the movie basically hints at and kind of says exist, but it's the very thing that sticks with you after the fact. And so what I found interesting is on top of all the feminism issues that people have been bringing up and saying, oh, look at how it's celebrating this. I'm like, it's not even necessarily celebrating it. It's just showing that it's celebrating it as much as Ripley was celebrated in Aliens. Right. Right? You wouldn't call that a feminist movie, but it's a strong woman in the part, and she's not being treated like a manly version of a woman. This is a woman at the peak of her power. Yes. That makes really good cinema. It's refreshing, and it makes really good cinema. Right. The other thing that I found as an interesting issue that nobody's bringing up, and maybe I'm the only one that's thinking about it, But in today's climate with ISIL or ISIS, however you want to call it, and the radical nature of their belief on religion, which is, as far as a couple of the articles that I've read, where you've got this head of it called the caliphate, and he's calling everybody to the one true version of the religion. and it's wipe out everything else and all the soldiers that come into your men that come into this, their whole purpose is basically to die a glorious death. It's not to try and live as long as you can. It's, no, you want to die and go meet your maker, essentially. And it's really hard to, how do you battle something like that when everybody else is valuing their life and these people are worse? They make the Japanese kamikazes look like pussies.
    96:58
    And so in this movie, you've got Immortan Joe, who's basically the caliphate of this community, and you've got these – they call them the war boys. These are all the guys that are in the white skin driving and chasing, and their whole purpose is to die a glorious death. And I went, oh my god, it's like a total analogy to – I mean granted, when they started filming this movie, ISIL didn't even exist. Or not that we knew it. but I went wow it's kind of a weird parallel and then to have a character kind of awaken and go hey wait a second maybe there is something more to live for than this you know so I haven't seen anybody mention it but like I said there's a lot of there's a lot that you can draw out of the movie I can't wait to go see it again I think it's absolutely fantastic I think it's a kick in the nuts to any other action director out there that does practice the shaky cam moves and go, hey, stop the game. I also think, because I saw Avengers Age of Ultron, and my problem with a lot of the superhero movies, I enjoy them, and I think they're fun to watch, but they are pretty much just a cartoon. I mean, they're so heavily CG'd that you don't even know when it's a real actor. You pretty much assume that it's not a real actor throughout the thing. And this movie was so refreshing because instead it was, can you spot the CG? We know that it's in there. We know that it's doing wire removals or harness removals or things like that. But it's the real people making the movie. Yeah. It's not actually the movie. It's cleaning up. The vehicles that are flying through the air and everything, that's happening.
    98:46
    They're not faking it. So that was really, really not only refreshing, but to me it amps up the tension. It amps up. it makes you really go wow when you see something happen and there's a lot of wow moments in it so yeah it sounds pretty cool definitely sounds like something we should all go and see yes i i expect uh uh nothing but uh comments and reviews the next time that we come back for podcast number 19 sounds like it sounds like it's my mission i must go and see it before we next meet which speaking of which have we got anything else to talk about i you know i think beyond that we don't really. We've managed to fill up the time. I think we've talked bold enough.
    99:29
    I think our audience would agree. So with that I want to say thank you to Jared Morgz for being with us today.
    99:39
    I want to say get better soon to Jeff Strong and to Bonzo. To Sean Duncarlos, quit working so hard. You're going to kill yourself. Come enjoy the wonders of the podcast, won't you? Your spot for lits has not been taken off you. You're welcome back. Come and tell us about in-depth things about tables.
    100:04
    Because we need to know. And we miss mocking you. Please follow the Blockade podcast on Twitter, at Blockade. You may follow myself at ShutYourTraps, and Jared at JaredMorgz. Jared Morgz. We do post regularly.
    100:25
    And it's a good time to follow. We keep you updated on the tournaments and table of thought of the week.
    100:33
    So, by all means, check us out. Like us. Well, you can't like us. You can just follow us. We don't have a Facebook page. Not going there yet. We know where we are. We love you.
    100:48
    We're under the delusion that we might be. so who was from with that alrighty with that we shall wish you all a good time and see you next time on the blockade podcast