Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, November 23rd. This is episode 259. I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. Tony, what's been going on? Well, for funds, I'm on vacation until the first of the month. Oh, okay. So this is that time of year where with how holidays fall, you can do – we like to call it the three for nine because you burn three days of vacation and you end up with nine days off because of the Thanksgiving holidays. Oh, I see. So I did the three for nine because I'm about to max my vacation out, and I'm like, oh, I'll just take three days off, get nine days off. So me and the family, later this week, we're going to go down to Hutchison to visit the Cosmosphere. Oh, okay. Because I've not been to the Cosmosphere since 2014, I think. Yeah, summer of 2014, I think, was the last time. So it's been like 11 years since I've been down there. And one of my kids has never been because the last time we went to the Cosmosphere, she was three. Right. And then like last weekend, there was a convention here in Kansas City called Meeple-a-thon, which is a gaming convention just like Can't Con that I went to over the summer that I went to on Saturday and Sunday. But each day, on each day, I took one of my girls. So we had, like, father-daughter time, and we could play different games, and it wasn't the whole problem of having two people who wanted to do completely different things. That's very clever. So we went on separate days, and we went and played games. And when I said one of them learned how to play Magic the Gathering, and we played a Call of Cthulhu game. just in case anybody's wondering my character died um but uh it was call of cthulhu that i've never survived yeah i've only played it once but yeah i i have i've been in games where people have survived the game my character has never survived the game um and then on the second day when I went with my other daughter, uh, we played a bunch of different other different games and, she learned how to play war machine, which is the tabletop game that I used to play all the time. Uh, it's, it's the smaller model count, cheaper version, uh, steam punky instead of where, as opposed to like 40 K super future sci-fi. Uh, and then we played shadow run. Uh, My character did survive Shadowrun, so that was good. But Shadowrun, for people who don't know anything about Shadowrun, it is a future-y sci-fi cyberpunk type theme where things have happened and portals opened up. So there's elves and dwarves and dragons and orcs and all that stuff, but they're in like modern or slightly like five minutes in the future type modern world. I've played a video game version. It was almost like a hero shooter. Yeah. Way back on PC, I played it. Yeah. So that was also simultaneously a good time. So that was just a great busy, busy. Last weekend, I got nothing done because I spent two full days at the convention. Well, that's how it goes. Yeah, but it was a ton of fun. Okay, cool. What have you been up to? Not a whole lot. I did finally finish Alan Wake, too. Good. I was close on the last episode, so that's done now, and now I'm playing Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. Oh, that's a good game. I slide down a lot. He slides a lot. He does slide a lot. I don't know why so many planets have slides. It seems a little fake, quite frankly. I mean, it's a little too game mechanic-y. Yeah, it's a little too game-like. But you know what isn't too game-like? The new Pinball release that we're going to talk about. Oh, my God. Guys, I'm so excited. We've got a new release. Spooky Pinball has finally revealed Beetlejuice. Didn't we talk about this already? Oh, we talked about the teaser. We talked about the teaser where we knew that the game was going to be $9,999 and it was going to be limited to 999 units and it was going to have a $1,599 topper. We talked about that. But they finally showed, like, the play field. People finally got to see the game and the features, and it instantly sold out. Wow, I'm surprised. Back when we did it, I think we had said that everything except for the handful of sub-100 unit games that Spooky was going to directly sell were already spoken for. The Spooky ones sold out immediately as well, as soon as they made those available. In fact, I believe, if I remember correctly, their website crashed. They didn't sell a single one on the website. They sold them all on the phone. It's old school. It is. In my head, it's... But their website always crashes. Right. But in my head, it's like the old videos where they're picking up the old cruddy plastic rotary phones with the coil things, and they're... Like, you see them all the way, yeah, yeah, you want to buy three? Yeah, three. We got three going to New Jersey. Ah, yeah. Yeah. It was probably just like that, with the cords and everything. Yeah. So, just a quick little rundown on some of the aspects of it. So the game designers on this game are Corwin and Luke, so Spooky Luke and Bug. Lead programmer, Spooky DJ. Christopher Franchi did the art package. Sound, Brady Hearn kind of led the efforts. And, of course, they have the elements of the soundtrack. So you've got the Danny Danny Elfman score and then, of course, the Deo Harry Belafonte song is in it. This is a standard body. Evil Dead was a wide body. This is a standard. It's a three-flipper layout. Some of the features are probably the most noteworthy one is the ball-eating sandworm with a motorized target brank. So the bank drops, and then you can shoot the sandworm, shoot in the sandworm's mouth. But then there's also a lower area with subway targets that can also be shot if the sandworm's lifted up. That's cool. Physical ball lock, waiting room couch. Think modern version of the Simpsons pinball party couch. Beetlejuice grave rising sculpts. So he kind of rises up at one little spot. It's got a magnet grab feature grab. Uh, it's got a wire form launch. Uh, there's a drop target ball hold. Um, you know, spooky likes to do those ever since, uh, TNA, lots of drop target holds, uh, double stack ramp, uh, Dante Inferno sculpt ramp, uh, has a roulette skill wheel, a magnet ball save and death launch. Kind of like the Jedi save on the new star Wars cover bridge sculpt a lot more. Um, the, the pay for topper is the one that's in the images that I provided for our internal review, where it's the Beetlejuice as a snake. There is a more flat plastic topper that comes with all the games, but that's the add-on topper. This has the spooky speak, which does actually, yes, it's a, you talk to the game to have it activate certain things. It didn't sound like all of the, I was not clear from what I've heard yet, just what all is fleshed out, fully developed. The ability to start the game is in there. Being able to say Beetlejuice three times to start the game, kind of like they did in the teaser trailer. but I'm not sure what else exactly works on it. I did listen to the interview bug did with the loser kids pinball podcast where they discussed some of this stuff. So anyway, I've given you a few images for our discussion purposes, Tony, so you could easily refer to like the feature set and all of that. But really, I just wanted to open this up because again, the game sold out. So in some ways it's almost pointless to talk too much about it because no one's going to be able to easily buy it. Last I saw, you would have to pay almost 50% of the game to take someone else's deposit. So pretty high up. But what are your thoughts? I guess thoughts on the game, thoughts on the launch, thoughts on their decision to limit to just under 1,000 units? I think that's fine, the decision to limit. That's kind of what Spooky's old ballpark was, and I always thought it worked pretty well for them doing the whole limited release. In this case, it actually worked because they actually sold them out really fast. I think the game looks good. I don't know about play or how it'll shoot or anything like that, but, I mean, the physically, like, franchise artwork is amazing, like you would expect. And even the way the art on the play field and stuff is laid out doesn't bother me like they do sometimes. and there's some interesting features that I think I'd have to play it to really know if they work or not. Like the sandworm thing sounds kind of cool. Some of the other stuff sounds really cool. It's just all about how does it hit because that's always the question with spooky games is sometimes they just don't feel right. Yeah. Yeah, looking at the layout, you've kind of got an upper section. That's where the third flipper is, is in the upper left. That kind of goes on and does some stuff. Visually, yes, the game looks really, really nice. Very good job on the world under glass. Lots of movie clips are in this as well. A lot of the fun modes, I didn't really outline it, but there's a Deo mode. So when the song takes over, the stuff is moving to – like the worm is moving to the music and the flippers can start – so it's – that, for example, is a really good instance of immersion into the theme. So I thought that was a real highlight mode that they pointed out. Layout, I will say when I look at the layout, it in and of itself doesn't look super exciting to me. but as we know with Spooky, when they've gotten really creative with the layouts, it hasn't often resulted in a particularly fun shooting experience. So the word I use for this sort of layout is safe. I don't mean to say that's a long play, or I don't know that, if it's a long play or not. But I do feel like it's a safe layout that's probably more inoffensive than revolutionary, would be the way I would put it. But that, especially for them, may still need to be the angle they go with. I feel like they've really gone with a lot more straightforward layouts ever since Texas Chainsaw slash Looney Tunes. Like Scooby-Doo was a little more normal than, well, I mean, Halloween and Ultraman was just way out there. But again, like I look at this, most of it's configured with almost a fan approach of a lot of shots towards the back of the play field. You do have that upper section that does break things up. the toys and stuff sound interesting like you I don't know how fun they are going to be to interact with but from an immersion standpoint they leaned really heavily into sculpts and the community has been rewarding this very rewarding to games that go more sculpt versus flat plastic yeah and so I will my interpretation about the decision on the unit count is a little bit different than yours obviously it worked out for spooky in the sense that they sold out however given that the theme is beetlejuice i feel like this was such a safe theme to sell out i question why they didn't double the count i normally don't really judge too much i don't and i don't even in this instance i won't say i'm judging harshly i am judging obviously but like when winchester mystery came out limited to 525 i i believe on this show defended the idea of the 525 and there were people frustrated that it sold out and they couldn't get it but with a theme of questionable interest it i thought it made a lot of sense to keep the count low and guarantee that you could you could achieve you know something that you could build in a reasonable amount of time and push out in the case of beetlejuice i don't really know why they limited to this level when we know they've built so many more like when scooby came out it was near on 2 000 units so why not double this or at least increase it by 50 percent given the theme um i did as i noted earlier listen to the loser kid pinball podcast interview with bug on there he argued about the value retention like the idea of the value of the game and that's why they went with a number that they went with i had heard which was interesting because i thought maybe what he would argue is though this did come up in the interview later was what i've heard others say, which was, well, no, he didn't really argue this in this way. Let me, but I'm starting to ramble. I've heard others in the community who had speculated that the reason they left the number as low as they did was so that they could get it done in a year. However, Spooky kind of almost exponentially improves production speed as they go along. They can do more than a thousand in a year. We know they can. What Bug mentioned, which wasn't that angle, was he said that they limited it from a value perspective that to try and get people willing to buy i to comfort them that they weren't going to take a bath on the game most likely right okay makes sense to me but he did also note that their build quality has been better now that they are building as many as they did like with scooby-doo and we've heard a lot better response to how the game's evil dead are holding up versus the prior games. So a stronger argument, but I'm not quite sure why, were they just, I don't know if the building they build, do they have quotas and people are just screwing stuff up because they have quotas or is the build quality better because they've just made improvements to the manufacturing process and they really could build faster too and they just didn't want to for the aforementioned value proposition. To me though it Beetlejuice It was going to win no matter what so why limit it to this level That was my main takeaway I mean, I think it's a valid thought. They definitely could have sold more easily. It's a popular enough theme. It's a theme people have talked about over the years. I know that just people are really mad, Tony. There are a lot of people that didn't get to buy this game. And understandably, they get really frustrated when they see people trying to sell their spots, the spots for five thousand dollars. And they are the problem. The problem is that people are buying it. Yes, that's the problem. Fundamentally, this is not this is not really a spooky problem. This is a person problem. Right. Yeah. The problem is that people are actually spending that money to buy it. But Spooky could have done things differently that would have helped with that because I think this was pretty predictable. It's kind of where I'm going at. Yeah, it is predictable. Well, I think that as long as it gives – if this gives Spooky the return on investment that Spooky wanted, I think this was a nice, safe path to take that kind of drives them back towards their high-demand, can't guarantee that you can get one Roots when they start it. That's true. That's true. And I do wonder maybe that that's a portion of that motivation because, yeah, I'm sure they're they're quite happy with the ROI. Because lately on a lot of their releases, they've come out of their kind of boutiqueness with the numbers they've released for a lot of their new stuff. So they've kind of left the super tight FOMO boutique. And this feels like a return very much to utilizing that mindset, that FOMO mindset. Yeah, I could see that. I mean, they definitely have always relied on the limited count to, I feel, try and generate a FOMO response. But as the release counts got so big, the ability to get the games became easier. A lot of that loss of the FOMO was also probably driven by that a number of those games just weren't very good. And my go-to example is always Halloween. It was a case-in-point game where most people who played it didn't like it. They just don't. I don't. And I love that theme. Oh, yeah. So anyway, good job for Spooky, though. They did. This has gone quite well for them, I think. That's really it for the pinball section other than some emails. So I do want to go ahead and jump into one. This is a long one. Dr. John John C. wrote into us regarding our prior episode. And he opens with this. Hello, gentlemen. Of course, this must be read in the most annoying Aussie accent you can manage. Not New Zealand, not South African. Best of luck. I think he says this because he knows I can't do that, mate. Mate? Boy, mate. Boy, mate. Cranky. Oh, wait. No, that's the wrong one. Oh, no. That was New Zealand. Eh, mate. Maybe it's. What? What? What? Tangent. Okay. One of my kiddos, when we had gone to the convention, she bought a little fidget uh stingray uh thing that's like it's like like moves and stuff that was 3d printed and all that stuff and all of that and when we got home she was talking with her mom and her sister uh and they were trying to figure out a name for it and and i said they should name it steve and it took my wife about 15 seconds to figure it out and then i got caught bad stuff Oh, inappropriate. I'm going to leave this in so people know I'm not the only one who says bad things. No, no, no. I totally meant for this tangent to be left in. I figured. I figured. But I was like, oh, so mean. And so, yeah. So mean. Okay. Yeah. It's just, it fits the tangent. I know. I get it. I definitely get it. It totally fits. Yeah. So because this is as long as it is, I'm afraid I can't really attempt that accent because I can't ever do it. And honestly, I probably do what I thought was Australian and I would end up being New Zealand. And I would because I've listened to Lord of the Rings so many times. I think I end up skewing towards a New Zealand accent when I think of Australia. Which makes sense. Because my ear doesn't really I can't really detect the difference very well. Like my ability to detect like between the Japanese, Chinese and Korean is more when I start hearing the language. I start to notice certain things. I'm like, like I can hear the difference between Chinese and Japanese pretty easily. when I hear Korean, I'm always confused. And I go, I'm confused. It must be Korean. I don't know what any of it is. Right. It's just when I hear, you know, when you hear, it's like Portuguese versus Spanish. Now, I did study Spanish, but when I first hear Portuguese, I think I'm supposed to know it. And then when I hear more words, I'm like, it's not, it's there, but it's not quite right. So it must be Portuguese. Right. And then whereas with Italian, the accent gives it away. Like the accent on Italian is very different than Spanish or Portugal. Yes. Anyway, that was my tangent, which was much nicer and not mean than yours. Continuing Dr. John's email. Unfortunately, not with the accent he requested, but I'll give him a very nice, deep, doctor-y voice. I listened with great sadness to your JJP rating list and thought I would put my two cents in, although we don't have one or two cent coins over here anymore. Well, Dr. John, neither do we. Goodbye, Penny. It was nice. I mean, we still have them, but they're not making names. Yeah, they don't make any more. They don't make any more. Attached, he included an image. Attached is my JJP row at home. Toy Story 4 is also here, just cringing in the corner after being berated in your last episode. Where it deserves to be. It is great that pinball has such choices for those of differing tastes that we can all have such divergent views. That sounds like code for our views are wrong. JJP games are really not for casual or location play, just as much as they are not ideal for tournament play. They are created for the collector that must have the means to afford such extravagant toys. Once located in the home environment, where sounds allow a degree of understanding not found in public locations, they are a marvel to explore. The comment Tony made that if he had more time on Avatar, he may grow to like it, more is probably the most accurate thing said. To briefly go over some good points along with the bad, the rainbow lighting is often denigrated in games such as Woz, and later games to a lesser extent. I agree, reliance on lighting to understand shots is not the best way to play games such as Woz. Once the rules are understood and the game broken down into its four quadrants, apart from the rainbow and rescue targets, no further shot indication is needed. But I'm not here to go through the rules, just illustrate that JJP Games do not follow the standard formula of shoot the blinking lights. Pirates' character selection is a bit of fun, but again, of no real consequence for home play. The whole game revolves around trying to complete movie scenes. Character choices can help with this objective, but I've never put the game in a tournament because they can affect scoring, as you said. Not having character images in the scenes is really a moot point. You don't watch the screen while playing, and there's enough there that you recognize what part of the movie it's from. Avatar has a menu choice of what percentage you want callouts to be in pinball-speak versus navi, so you can experience immersion in the theme to a lesser or greater extent. Again, after playing the game at home for a few weeks, the shots become quite obvious as to their location, but being guided purely by lit shots initially is not intuitive. And that's the pattern with these games. Why can't JJP conform to lit shot norms and simple call-outs? Why should they, when theme immersion is their main goal? They seem to sell enough games to stay profitable, and they have the broadest theme selection of any manufacturer, in my opinion. Sure, they have repeated some previous Stern titles, and I've owned both variations of these, and each have their own charms. The Venn diagram between JJP and Stern Games is probably just overlap with theme base and presence of pinballs, though. So, that's my standing up for the little guy rant. Bring on more variations in games and tastes. It keeps the hobby interesting and gives us all something to talk about. I'll see you both again at TPF next year, and I'll bring the Vegemite to breakfast again. Dr. John. Well, thank you, Dr. John, for the most elaborate bourgeois argument I have ever heard in defense of pinball. Zach would have been proud had he been the host on the show, but he's not. Tony, what are your thoughts? Hi, Dr. John. Just so you know, before we see you in March, no, I still haven't gotten a sleep study. I have lost 70 pounds with more going off, so I feel much better. Thank you. I think you have a perfectly valid argument for something that is so personally opinion-based. And it could be completely true that if I had some of these games in my home could spend the kind of time and the hours on them to enjoy their depth and breath, that I would feel the same way. But that's not an option that I've had or been able to partake on. I think it's like just about anything else, that everybody has the ability to enjoy things in different ways. And I love that everybody does enjoy things, even the same things, in different ways. Yes. Yes, that part is very, very accurate. My favorite part of the entire email was how obvious the shots will become on Avatar. You just need a few weeks of playing it to understand that. I'm just like, okay. I mean, to be fair, everything becomes obvious on all games once you get some time, but some of them, yeah. I mean, I'm just saying like in the world of other games, it doesn't generally take weeks to understand like where things go. But I don't know. I mean, JJP games are definitely a different experience. That is true. Yeah. But, yeah. Poor Toy Story 4. I think maybe we were too cruel to it in the rankings. Let's be honest. What? It likes it. It's a masochist. You can tell. You can tell. You can just tell. You can feel it. Because if it didn't want to be that way, it wouldn't have been Toy Story 4. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But thanks for writing in, though. Yeah. No, sure. And yay. Vegemite. I might try it again. You got really sick that breakfast. It wasn't the Vegemite. I know it wasn't. Yeah, okay. I did figure out what it is. My body has decided that it no longer likes almond milk. Oh, it was the almond milk? It was the almond milk. I thought it was the hard-boiled eggs originally. That's the last thing you had told me. Right. But I had a bunch of almond milk that day. and I was real bad. And about a month later, I had some more almond milk, and I got the exact same way. And then I tried one more time just testing. Same thing. Okay. And the lead up to it is I used to drink almond milk all the time, but now my body rejects almond milk. Can you still eat almonds? I can't. I don't understand it. Okay. Interesting. Maybe Dr. John could write in and explain it. Maybe. Yeah, my body just rejects almond milk. So I've had to segue. My non-dairy milk now is of choice is oat milk. yummy all right well we have another email uh this one is from chris d uh he i made some light edits for brevity he had suggested this to be done okay i have done so hi guys i wanted to open up a discussion that might be controversial was the beetlejuice release actually really good for pinball keeping in mind that this is not a dying hobby but very much an aging hobby, the average age of owners typically being 40s and 50s, here are some hot takes. Very popular games that are severely limited only go into homeowner collections, thus not giving the public or a younger generation a chance to get further in on the hobby. Scalping is very much on the rise. Case in point, Evil Dead, Winchester going for $5,000 more than List, etc. Dealers requiring larger deposits for a product that are sight unseen. games being reserved for content creators and people who need to know someone to even have a chance to get or play them all together i really felt the innovation and presentation was awesome my take is that i think it was good for pinball but some of the hot takes will create larger issues in the near distant future time is a flat circle thank you chris I think time is a wibbly wobbly ball of timey wimey but I think it's one of those things that pinball is always going to be a niche hobby that is dominated by an older demographic and even as that demographic ages out and passes away the demographics that come up and continue to play will still be older just because of the cost of buying into the hobby it is such a high cost hobby to get into i mean and especially for what it is and the desires you have to have a certain level of interest in the physicality of the game uh to be part of it as well but just think about some of the other hobbies that have gotten popular and their price of entry You can get into like heavy drone use way cheaper than a single pinball machine You can get into FPV drone racing way cheaper than entering the pinball hobby Honestly, you can get into watches cheaper than the hobby. You can get into cars cheaper than entering the pinball hobby, to a point. You can definitely get into motorcycles for cheaper than entering the pinball hobby. There's all sorts of things out there that are much cheaper, thus having a much lower barrier of entry. But they're also very different animals than what pinball is. I think we're always going to have this. I think at this point, this is the kind of future of pinball is the themes are going to probably be mostly that trigger nostalgia or really big hits. Because even at this point, Beetlejuice is a nostalgia title. Toy Story was a nostalgia title. Willy Wonka is a nostalgia title. The non-nostalgia titles that are coming out that have come out recently have been John Wick, Stranger Things. have honestly you can almost argue avatar is a nostalgia title at this point yeah but the jjp one was the second movie it was it was uh pirates of the caribbean i think you could argue as a nostalgia title like harry potter like harry potter uh so but i think there's always going to be that barrier to entry level um so that like for homeowners but it's got high accessibility because there's arcade bars in every major city anymore. There's pinball bars all over the place. And there's places that have machines on site that are on small. With me being on vacation this week, case in point, my plan is on Tuesday, I'm going to go to Nub's Pub because they're closed on Mondays and play some pinball up at Nub's Pub because I've not been there in a while. They've got good food. It's a nice place. So I'm going to go up there and take care of that. I'm going to scratch that itch as it were. But I think it's always going to be just something that happens in this hobby. The price of the barrier of entry is just so high to be a home use owner. Just between the cost, the necessary space, the ability to move a machine, everything. It is just multiple things piled on top of each other. Sure. I think that is also part of the reason why the average age of the owners is so high, because generally it's once you get up into like those 40s in particular where people tend to have the more disposable income to be able to maybe pick up a game. It's just but again, that that varies by person for a variety of reasons. the uh and there's always been a tension i feel uh and i i don't think you hear it as much anymore but i i believe it is still there where um there was a side of the hobby that you could get into pinball and they got into pinball cheap and they learned how to fix them up and those people by and large i believe very much resent the new approach where pinball just got really expensive the frustration that has always existed with pinball ever since jjp came on the scene was competition is supposed to reduce prices and it feels like it just did the opposite in pinball just like all these other companies sprouted up they're all more expensive than stern yeah like what is going on uh it's but in a way neither here nor there now back to chris's question about was the beetlejuice release actually really good for pinball um i don't think he means like good as in really good but my was it really good for pinball i that's a hard one for me to answer i'm gonna say it it was good for pinball players that got one like if you wanted beetlejuice it's good right like i can't it's not there's nothing really i would pick apart regarding the game here's where i think it could be good uh there's a good and a bad to it so i i hate being on the fence but i'm going to be on the fence on this one so where i think beetlejuice has the potential to be good for pinball the hobby is it kind of like and it's not just beetles but it's another case in point like with winchester coming out sculpts i feel like we are on the precipice of a potential change like how jjp came out and had the lcd screen and it wasn't all that long where stern was finally even though they're like just like how dr john talked about you know you're not watching the screen when you play you're watching the play field stern had that george gomez was saying that with the whole well why are you guys still using dmd well the game isn't the dmd it's the play field in just a few years they were doing lcd yeah because maybe we're at the turning point and beelzers can get some of the credit for that turning point where the booty right flat plastic stuff just gives way to sculpts like even stern can't just like cheap out and just do flat top prints on things and say hey look theme immersion that we actually expect sculpts even on the cheap stuff like that might be something beetlejuice could achieve everything else that beetlejuice has done uh in terms of the game is stuff i feel like we've readily seen and we've seen sculpts before but i think with this and winchester and stuff we're seeing the other companies try and embrace the okay we're not going to be elwynn on rules and layout let's win on theme immersion and we're gonna and the easiest way to do that is to put in sculpts that didn't come from Hallmark just put in sculpts that we created into the game to help with that. So that's where I think it could be good for pinball. This whole FOMO thing is not good for pinball. FOMO is not healthy. I or anything I and I don't like FOMO for a whole host of reasons. But so for those that I'm sure most people know who are listening, but for those that don't know, FOMO is a short for fear of missing out. I don't believe decision-making based off of fear is ever a good thing, except for survival. That's the purpose of fear is for survival. So that companies are using fear-based tactics to get you to buy games, I find inherently unhealthy. Yeah. Like psychologically. So I don't like – so do I think FOMO is good for pinball? Absolutely not. I do not like the idea. It's not pro-consumer in my view. So but again, you can't even if like even if they weren't leaning into it, like it's not necessarily that they could help it in some ways, as you mentioned earlier in the episode, Tony, it's the buyer's own fault. They choose to worry about not getting the game. I'm not worried. There are plenty of games where I love the theme and I have my rules. I need to play it. I haven't played it. I didn't get it or I played it. And like Alien, I didn't like the game. And I'm like, I love the theme. Well, it's not for me. Let others who enjoy it own it. You know, so so it's kind of like it's a Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice release wasn't in my view. It's it's basically it's neither good nor bad for pinball. Maybe it's a sign of things to come. That could be an improvement because at the prices we're paying, I do feel like we should be getting more in the games now. and this is a hobby that jacked their prices during the pandemic and has thankfully refrained from major increases since then because i think they bit off more than they ever should have yeah but this was a very weird year for pinball a lot of really strong thing themes so there's been a lot of fomo that people have had even on stuff that there's no excuse for fomo like harry potter you'd be like well why doesn't harry potter have an excuse for fomo because jjp think smartly from their business perspective decided we're not capping the ce count yeah it's going to be a duration cap they still haven't even said when the duration ends so it's it's i mean has that hurt their sales i think it gave some people the opportunity not to have to buy day one but that game is selling really good from everything i've heard really really good uh that helps that the gameplay once people got their hands on it we're like this is actually really fun to play So now more people are buying CEs than would have had we operated on a more traditional FOMO model. And I think all that's done is benefit JJP. It does. You could argue it's hurt the value of the CE owners, but these aren't investment instruments. It's like there was a time when I got my Godzilla premium. I could have sold it used for more than I bought it new. Not anymore. Godzillas are everywhere. but I feel that's more healthy for the hobby like Godzilla is like our generation's Addams Family the young generation's Addams Family I guess I grew up with that I didn't play Addams Family going up guys so to me it's an old timer thing it wasn't mine so no I don't there's some potential that things like Beetlejuice are going to be healthy for the hobby but not the count, not the sales not the marketing strategy the actually there's a whole lot we already talked we didn't revisit it because we talked about in the last episode but there was a lot about how beetlejuice got unveiled with a distributor revealing it and taking pre-order like this was not a great launch in a lot of ways it's just from a sales standpoint for spooky it was a great it was a great successful launch from a like consumer-centric view this was a sloppy launch that um ended up i think undermining the ability for a lot of people that might have better wanted what better people who actually wanted to own the game getting it for a fair price versus scalpers getting the game i think the leak stuff actually enabled the scalpers wasn't spooky's plan it wasn't no fault per se it's just it is what it is well and i think this is a problem that's larger than pinball the scalpers problem the the buying things as an investment problem that should not be an investment vehicle oh it's widespread it's widespread it is a problem with the current culture of our civilization well it it all fundamentally comes down to easy money i want easy money and scalping is easy money because you do like look at look at you do no work oh well look i locked in a spot maybe i sent my deposit and now if someone pays me to take this deposit yeah i didn't even have to repackage it or anything right wow i'm so brilliant look at how hard i worked it's wasted money yeah but it is but hey if that's what people want if fomo is the motivator then what what can you do and some people make enough money that they don't care if they that they overpaid so jumping to video games tony we actually had a an email from richard a i'm only quoting a latter part of his email where he goes, in this Thanksgiving spirit, I want to say how thankful I am for your show. I don't know what accent this is, but just roll with it. Okay. It is my first listen Monday morning as I settle into work. I would like to also say how thankful and grateful I am for you two allowing me to push the virtual pinball topic. I really do believe that Zine and Zachariah originals can be a gateway to real pinball. Richard A. Well, thank you, Richard. that is man that's almost like uh uh uh it's like slightly redneck dracula romanian there that was what i was going for but southern romania southern romania y'all y'all look i just it's a new creation right into a quick gamers podcast at gmail.com and say how Terrible, that was. Thank you. So. What do you got? So video games, we're going to open up with some initial reports that I found surprising when I saw them. It looks like with an ongoing RAM shortage because of the demands for RAM in AI data centers. First it was crypto and now it's this. Right. Nvidia has canceled like a run of graphics cards because the RAM is just so expensive right now. But apparently Microsoft had no stockpiles of RAM set up, and rumors are coming out that they're going to be raising prices for the third time this year. They raised prices in May. They raised prices in September, and now they're talking about maybe doing it again before the end of the year. On what? On the Xbox. Okay, well, I guess I don't know if Target's footprint can get any smaller for it. Right. Because who's going to buy it? It's so old. Yeah, but those are the rumors that have been coming out of Microsoft. They're also coming out that Sony has stockpiled the RAM necessary to build the game. So they're saying that they might not have to see a price increase until probably the middle of next year. Okay. unless the shortages or issues with RAM production smooth out. Also, I wanted to follow up. Last episode, we discussed Rockstar's union busting, where they laid off the 31 employees who happened to also be the 31 employees who were working on setting up the union. Oops. Because those 31 employees were employed in Rockstar UK. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, they were employed at the Rockstar UK. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain attempted to get in contact with Rockstar, and Rockstar wouldn't talk to them. So they issued a legal claim against Rockstar for union busting. And this has gone up to the point where it has been discussed in the House of Commons as union busting. In addition over 200 employees at Rockstar have signed a letter to management protesting the termination and demanding the reinstatement of the terminated employees So does that mean Grand Theft Auto is going to be delayed again I think Grand Theft Auto is going to be delayed again We see But in any situation like this when it gets to the point where your primary legislative body is talking about it, that rarely leads to good things for the company involved. Oops. Oopsie. Krafton, publisher of PUBG and Subnautica, not the original Subnautica, they're the people who bought them out and are putting out Subnautica 2. And there's a whole lawsuit about that stuff going on that I've not really touched on because it's so convoluted and insane, made an announcement that they are going to be, they are transforming into an AI-first company and they are now offering employees voluntary resignations for those who don't want to get on board with the AI first company. They have frozen all hiring except for those positions directly related to AI programming and original IP developers. And they are wanting to increase the amount of work they get per person and reduce their overall footprint of people while utilizing AI to be their primary everything. Wow. AI first, person last. Yeah, AI first. What a great future. Wasn't this the timeline you looked forward to as a youth? Yeah. See, here's the thing. I think when we were all young, we hoped for Star Trek to be the eventual future. And it turns out that Shadowrun is closer to reality. Except for there's no elves, dwarves, ogres, and dragons, we don't think. I guess in our defense, we haven't had that third world war yet that Star Trek had. That is valid. Keep moving the timeline on that, though, as time goes on, because I think originally it was supposed to have happened 40 years ago. It was supposed to have happened in, like, the 90s originally. So Ubisoft, 15 minutes before their quarterly earnings report, canceled the report, held the report, had trading on their stock canceled. like frozen because they had to delay their quarterly earnings release. No surprise, this went really viral. Everyone was like doom and gloom. They'd been bought out by Tencent. They'd been bought out by the Saudi Arabia. They'd been bought out by this. The company was collapsing. They were all this doom and gloom. Literally Friday, that was on the 13th, literally on Friday, which would have been the 21st they finally did their thing they're doing great, everything's great they had to delay because they changed auditing groups in July and because of the auditing group change there were problems with how everything their math and stuff I've gone through an audit switch with smaller organizations because normally we use the same firm, the prior year financials are like your basis. And the new audit firm has to look at those for their comparison, but they have to go in and get acquainted with the entire accounting system. So it's not as easy. I should say it gets easier on subsequent goes because they know the processes and where to find everything. Yeah, the fun headline I saw was, turns out it's just a math problem. Okay. Because, yeah, no, they changed auditors, and they weren't quite ready to do the release. And they knew pausing the quarterly earnings report literally the day that they were supposed to do it would have dumped their stock. That's why they have their stock frozen, trading frozen on their stock. So they say Assassin's Creed Shadows is outperforming expectations by a decent margin, which is much better than can be said for Call of Duty 7, which there's no solid numbers from anywhere except for Europe. But overall, Call of Duty 7 sales are well below Battlefields. Europe has hard numbers, 63% below Battlefield sales. Yeah, I have not heard good things. Yeah, it is bad. Call of Duty, once again, due to having a whole bunch of AI used in their stuff, has started coming up in the U.S. legislature where there is now talk about putting rules and regulations on AI usage for a variety of things to protect jobs and economic realities and stuff. And Call of Duty 7 was specifically called out in one of the discussions. Okay. So, yeah, but they're definitely not having the greatest of release times for themselves. and we're at the fun time of year where the Game Awards are happening. Yep. The nominations came out. I'm only going to cover a few of the biggest categories because the Game Awards are like 197 categories now. They're worse than the Oscars. And the show is like 17 hours long. The show is really just commercials. Yeah, and it's just commercials. That's what I watch. I don't watch it. I watch the trailers later. I watch a lot of them at two times speed because it's the only way I can watch them in a decent amount of time it's an event but something has happened interesting Claire Obscura Expedition 33 has become the most nominated games in Game Awards history they have 12 nominations so they're nominated for almost everything thing. Quick highlights of the nominations. Game of the Year, Clare Obscura Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2, Donkey Kong Bonanza. Apparently there was a Donkey Kong released this year. We wouldn't know about that. We hadn't talked about it. But apparently it happened. Hades 2, Hollow Knight Silksong, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 are the Game of the Year nominations. for best game direction they're looking at Claire Obscura Death Stranding 2 Ghost of Yotai Hades 2 and Split Fiction and for best narrative they're looking at Claire Obscura Death Stranding Ghost of Yotai Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Silent Hill so but one of the interesting games we've not talked about it I've not really played it but it's been huge in the streaming world is Megabonk yeah I've heard of it which is kind of vampire survivor bro-tato type game. It was nominated for Best Debut Indie Game. The developer withdrew themselves from the nomination because the developer is what do you call it? Anonymous. They're using a stage name. It's not who they actually are. Everything's developed under a stage name. But they withdrew it from contention because they said they've made games in the past under different studio names. This isn't their debut game. And it wouldn't be right for them to be up against the other debut games because it's not a debut game. Because they're a veteran. Which I think makes sense. So they withdrew that. So we'll see. We'll have the full the awards are in it won't be next episode. I think it's the episode after. I think so. Because I think the, I think we're three weeks? I think we're three weeks out. Sounds right. From the game awards. I'd have to look again. But it will probably be two episodes from now when we talk about the winners. I'm going to go out on a limb and say Expedition 33 is probably going to win a bunch. They're up for 12, and I've not heard anything bad about that game. And the last thing I wanted to cover as kind of a happy, interesting little note is Valve. has announced a whole bunch of new hardware coming out next year. They're putting out, they're calling it the Steam Machine. It's a console. They're putting out a console. They did not put a price on it, but from the stuff going out and from interviews, at one point somebody said or asked them if it was going to be console price, and they said, well, what's console price? and the interviewer said $500. And apparently the room got real quiet and they just kind of looked at each other. Yeah, I read about that. Most of the estimates I'm seeing is they're talking $800 to $1,000 is what most people think based upon the specs, which is not surprising because it's like a decent mid-tier gaming PC. So it's going to be for those people. I don't know. It's a weird demographic target. I was reading someone commenting on it. They're like, well, they're not going to load it up and price it like a high-end PC because the people who want high-end PCs know how to hook their computer up to their TV and can run it like a console like that. So they're not the target demographic. This is going to be like an in-between demographic, somebody who wants a console experience but wants access to their Steam library or just they want their Steam Deck to be souped up we'll see I think it's a really weird weird hardware position at a higher price I don't see it personally I agree with you I think it's a weird position and I just think most PC players would just buy a PC just get an HDMI cable and run it to the TV I don't understand the big call they're also putting out a revised version of their steam controller uh the steam control i've heard decentish things about it but it's weird because it has these thumb touch pads uh so it's a pretty good size controller i mean it's still not like the original xbox duke controller uh but it's a good size controller and it's got a whole bunch of buttons on the back but it's got these weird capacitor touch pads, but they're using, uh, they're like magnetic sensors, uh, for like the thumb sticks to get rid of the, the joystick drift, like the problems that, uh, this original switch had with joy con drift and all that. And so it'll be interesting. The initial reviews from people who've gotten hands-on says it's real comfortable to hold and they really like it, but we'll see. I just don't know how much you need a high end expensive controller when you You can just buy a $30 Xbox controller that will connect Bluetooth to any modern computer. And the big one that they're releasing is they are once again entering the VR market with their Steam Frame VR headset, which is a completely computer-free standalone VR headset. It very much goes straight into that meta VR category. So we will see how well that continues to do. Again, no pricing on it. You know it's going to be $1,000 or more probably. VR's still kind of expensive, and I just think VR's still a pretty niche product. Yeah, I don't think it's taken off the way everyone thought it might. No. No, it is. I remember the first-generation VR stuff that was coming out. Part of the big problem was you had to put the lighthouses all around your room to do the tracking and all that stuff. And this one, it doesn't. The tracking is all done by the headset. The headset has cameras that, like, maps out the area around you and tracks, does your motion and everything based upon the cameras built into the headset. So you don't have to do that kind of stuff anymore. And it no longer requires you to be plugged into a computer, so there's cords for you to trip over and all of that. But I still, I just, I don't know that there is a deep enough bench in VR stuff for it to be that popular. Though the reports are that it is very, in addition to VR stuff, it is very, very good at playing non-VR games, so it just feels like you're in front of like a 100-inch monitor. Okay. Which I know some games where that could be pretty good. We'll see when the price points come out, but those are all slated for release next year. All right. We'll see if they get caught in this RAM shortage issue with all the bajillion data centers being built everywhere. Taking all of our water. Thieves. They stole it from us. That's what I got today. Okay. Well, people can reach out to us at eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com if they want to discuss anything about the show. Also, facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. please do not reach out there but we still plug it I don't know why if you want to support the show you can for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com slash eclectic underscore gamers it's part of the same reason that we still plug our twitch at eclectic underscore gamers and our instagram at eclectic underscore gamers at least on the instagram we post several times a year yes and I look at it maybe once a month so I'm I fail at social medias I'm not I'm not a social media maven. Well, but we will be back in two weeks, probably too early for the Game Awards, I believe. But we may have some other things to discuss. I'm sure we will. Until then, my name is Dennis. I am Tony. Goodbye, everybody. See ya.