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Groot Vomit Mech

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·51m 40s·analyzed·Nov 7, 2017
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Blockade hosts troubleshoot Ghostbusters TPA performance issues and debate virtual pinball platform competition.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss their recent activities, including Jared's hackathon participation and knee recovery, followed by an extensive technical breakdown of performance issues with Ghostbusters in Pinball Arcade (TPA). They analyze CPU usage across multiple pinball platforms (Zen Pinball FX3, Pinball Arcade, Stern Pinball Arcade) and speculate on why Ghostbusters causes system crashes on older hardware. The episode concludes with discussion of Zen's superior community features and Farsight's strategic challenges competing against Zen Studios, plus mention of Pinball Invaders moving forward despite failed Kickstarter.

Key Claims

  • Ghostbusters in Pinball Arcade spikes CPU usage to 99% and crashes display/system on older hardware

    high confidence · Jared provides detailed CPU usage metrics showing Ghostbusters cranking to 65% minimum and spiking to 99% CPU usage, contrasting with other TPA tables at 10-30% and Zen at 50% max

  • The performance issue is likely caused by emulation overhead rather than native code execution

    medium confidence · Chris speculates that Ghostbusters had to be emulated in TPA rather than run natively from bytecode, causing the high baseline CPU usage compared to Stern Pinball Arcade which runs bytecode directly

  • Zen Pinball FX3 has superior community/tournament features compared to Pinball Arcade's clumsy online play implementation

    high confidence · Both hosts emphasize Zen's ease of setup for tournaments with automatic player matching, versus TPA's difficult head-to-head beta that has been dormant for months

  • Pinball Arcade leaderboards are compromised and unreliable due to cheating and technical issues

    high confidence · Jared notes developer tools left in Ghostbusters (ball control joystick) enable score manipulation, leaderboards frequently down, and Farsight resistant to resetting corrupted scores

  • Zen Studios is 3-4x larger than Farsight Studios with significantly more funding

    medium confidence · Chris states this as context for why Farsight cannot compete on features/quality with Zen

  • Farsight is likely pivoting toward mobile gaming as primary revenue source rather than console/PC pinball

    medium confidence · Jared speculates Farsight sees mobile as 'cash cow of pay-as-you-play' and has been trying to develop in that space for years

  • Pinball Invaders will move forward with development despite failed Kickstarter campaign

    high confidence · Farsight/Trick Studios official Kickstarter update states 'we will be moving forward with plans to help Trick Studios complete Pinball Invaders and bring it to the market'

Notable Quotes

  • “Ghostbusters is a performance hog...it immediately cranks up to 65% and only goes up from there and usually it would spike all the way to 99% CPU usage just for Pinball Arcade.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~25:00 — Core technical issue explaining why Ghostbusters table is unplayable for many users

  • “This release seems like a giant poke in the eye...you're letting cats and dogs live together now because you've got Stern Pinball Arcade and Pinball Arcade. You're diluting the brands.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~40:00 — Criticism of Farsight's decision to include Ghostbusters in TPA, questioning brand strategy

  • “The only thing that means anything to me is what are my friend scores? Who am I playing against? And that's where Zen is winning.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~47:00 — Explanation of why community/social features matter more than leaderboards for engagement

  • “They just need to be a better Farsight. That's all they need to be...make some tough decisions to remain relevant in their area of the market, which is real-life tables.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~51:00 — Strategic advice for Farsight to focus on niche strength rather than compete with Zen's superior resources

  • “Zen is so flawless, so easy. They've made it now so that there is always people playing pinball online. And that right there is the trick.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~54:00 — Identifies Zen's key competitive advantage: reliable, accessible multiplayer/community features

  • “The leaderboards have just been borked to no end, and I'm done complaining about them...and then the leaderboards were just down last week.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~45:00 — Frustration with chronic TPA leaderboard reliability and maintenance issues

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonFarsight StudioscompanyZen StudioscompanyPinball Arcade (TPA)productZen Pinball FX3productGhostbustersgameStern Pinball ArcadeproductPinball InvadersproductTrick Studioscompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Farsight Studios faces existential competitive pressure from larger, better-funded Zen Studios with superior community/online features

    medium · Chris states Zen is '3-4x the size of Farsight' with more money; hosts note Zen's tournament/community features far exceed TPA's clumsy head-to-head implementation that has been dormant for months

  • ?

    business_signal: Farsight likely pivoting strategic focus toward mobile gaming as primary revenue driver rather than console/PC pinball platforms

    medium · Jared speculates Farsight sees mobile as 'cash cow of pay-as-you-play' and has been exploring this 'for a very long time'; questions whether company is 'hedging all their bets on pinball'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Pinball Arcade leaderboards have lost credibility due to cheating (developer tools left in code), frequent downtime, and Farsight's refusal to reset corrupted scores

    high · Jared notes ball control joystick in Ghostbusters enables manipulation, leaderboards frequently down, community frustrated with requests to reset ignored, 'leaderboards mean absolutely nothing'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Farsight's decision to include Ghostbusters in Pinball Arcade criticized as 'giant poke in the eye' for diluting brand and coexisting confusingly with Stern Pinball Arcade

    medium · Chris criticizes brand dilution: 'you're letting cats and dogs live together now...You're diluting the brands...doesn't seem logical at all'

  • $

    market_signal: Zen Pinball FX3 establishing community-driven engagement model as key differentiator; tournaments easily accessible and driving player participation vs TPA's friction-heavy approach

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.155

0:00
this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared today on the blockade pinball podcast wally finch and his talking parrot jane frazier of wacky weather and the musical stylings of scalded tongues here's your hosts chris freemus and jared Morgan.
0:29
Howdy, how. Decided to try something different. I don't think that one's going to stick, though. No. That changes as good as a holiday. We haven't had a good holiday, haven't we? We have. I really do want to, though, hear what the musical soundings of Scalded Tongue might be.
0:46
Yeah. That would be interesting. Scalpunk, I reckon, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah, we had a, well, A little bit of a holiday, although it was more you having your hackathon, right? Yeah, that's right. It went pretty well. It was more of an update of where we were rather than a new idea or a new concept that we were building out. but it was really interesting to see the other people who participated in the hackathon and the solutions they came up for for both epilepsy type 1 diabetes and the racq care flight helicopter service which is like an airlift an emergency airlift service for people who get stuck on mountains and need to be rescued okay so yeah there was lots of very interesting solutions about lots of very different problems that were related all to those three sort of causes. And it was really good, very interesting. And we were a classic hackathon. We were working on our slides during the presentations and we just finished the slides off one session before ours. So three minutes to go, we'd finished them off.
2:03
So classic. Yeah, good, good times. Right. You know, it's only fun if you can go right up to the last minute.
Stranger Things 2
product

high · Jared emphasizes Zen tournaments 'so easy' with automatic setup, no arm-twisting; 'That's what's drawing me in'; TPA required effort to recruit players and set theoretical end dates during 'Table of the Week' experiments

  • ?

    announcement: Pinball Invaders moving forward with development despite failed Kickstarter campaign; Farsight/Trick Studios providing continued funding

    high · Official Kickstarter update: 'despite the result of this campaign, we're happy to announce that we will be moving forward with plans to help Trick Studios complete Pinball Invaders'

  • ?

    product_concern: Ghostbusters table in Pinball Arcade unplayable on older hardware due to extreme CPU spike to 99% and system crashes

    high · Jared's detailed CPU monitoring showing Ghostbusters at 65-99% usage vs 50% max for Zen and 20-30% for other TPA tables; multiple users reporting crashes; Farsight initially unable to reproduce but later confirmed on older test hardware

  • ?

    product_strategy: Farsight's TPA head-to-head multiplayer feature appears abandoned after months of no updates or innovation

    high · Jared notes beta testing stopped 'a long time ago'; 'There hasn't been a single innovation or anything done to that in months...Months and months...It's been way put on the back burner'

  • ?

    technology_signal: TPA's emulation-based approach to Spike hardware causing performance degradation compared to Stern Pinball Arcade's native bytecode execution

    medium · Chris speculates emulation overhead as root cause; notes Stern Pinball Arcade runs bytecode directly and performs better; Jared agrees emulation is 'costly as anything'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Spike-based Stern pinball hardware (Ghostbusters) creating emulation challenges for TPA; implications for future Spike 2 tables with color screens and increased complexity

    medium · Jared notes 'They're only going to be Spike tables from now on...Spike 2, which is all of the ones with the color screen...going to be even harder to emulate...on the wide gamut of software currently being used'

    • 2:11
    That's exactly right. So we did that. But it was a really good, it was a great day. There was lots of innovative solutions. And one of my fellow product managers at LabBrokes actually got second place with her team solution, which is really cool. It was like an epilepsy profile sharing prototype for parents or carers and the patients of young patients with epilepsy. So it was a really good solution. Yeah, it was great. Good. So I, you know, as everybody knows, my knee is all jacked up and I've slowly been working on recovery. I can now actually fully bend it together. It's getting it straightened back out. That's the issue. Oh, okay. Because I don't have the muscle strength yet to do that. Okay.
    3:05
    But I'm still, so basically I'm still, you know, relegated to the couch for the most part. So I took that opportunity when Stranger Things 2 dropped last Friday to sit down and just nine-hour binge the thing.
    3:21
    Right. And how was that for you? How was that? that was good times to, uh, to just sit there and, you know, at some point you go like, okay, I got to take a break so I can eat. And then you go back and sit down and you, and you watch more and more and more and then it ends. And then you go, okay, so I waited an entire year for that and I just consumed it in less than a day. Yeah. Now I got to wait another year.
    3:47
    Yes. That is kind of the problem with binging, isn't it? Um, and it's weird, isn't it? that a lot of those shows that are Netflix or like cable TV exclusives, you have to wonder, I guess there's two schools of thought, but you have to wonder why they have previously in Stranger Things at the beginning of the show because a lot of people just binge it. Well, Stranger Things doesn't do that.
    4:11
    Oh, it doesn't? No, none of the Netflix shows do that, actually. That's weird because it's silly. You're right. I mean, it's a waste of time. Yeah. I know Dexter used to do it all the time, And when I decided to get Dexter on the internet, it was like, oh, well, that's fast forward two minutes at the beginning, plus the one minute 30 intro. So it's like five minutes and we actually get to the new content.
    4:35
    I've been watching a show called The Good Place and they'll do previously on and it'll literally be like the last 10 seconds of the previous episode.
    4:46
    So it's not a catch up at all. It's more or less, yeah, we're starting right up from where we last left off kind of thing. Just a refreshing memory about what happened. That's kind of good. That's a good approach. Again, I think they understand people are going to wind up binging it. I mean, I think that's what has freed up writers with these shows, that they can stretch out things, storylines, plot lines. they don't feel like they have to wrap it up every single episode and they're trusting that you the audience member will stick with it and if you're binging you're definitely going to stick with it so I think it's kind of had an interesting effect that way what else did I do see I binged all of Mindhunter which is also on Netflix and you know I didn't play much in the video game department other than dealing with the Zen tournament, which, hey, why don't we go ahead and talk about that because we've got two to talk about.
    5:55
    Oh, yeah. So since we didn't get to it last week, we did the Fear Itself tournament, and that one was pick-your-own add-ons.
    6:10
    Oh, okay. Yeah, so we wound up having in fifth place it's David5 at $141 million. Then NimbleLee at $151 million. Third place is MS505 at $204 million. And then it's myself at $205 million.
    6:27
    And then Johnny3w6 came in and sniped me in the last 10 minutes and dropped a score of $250 million.
    6:35
    And I was so distraught that I was going through the tournaments and found somebody else had their own Fear Itself tournament. And I was like, screw you guys, and I went and I blasted their scores out of the water.
    6:48
    By that point, I knew how to score really, really easily. But you didn't have enough time to actually become top placed again because it was nearly out of time.
    6:58
    Well, the interesting thing with the Zen tournaments is, let's say it says there's two minutes left. So long as you start your game, you can play it for as long as you need to play it until you drain your balls, basically. so it's entries close so basically final entries you've got to be playing a game right alright okay that's good so I saw Johnny's score and I hopped on to try and beat it immediately but I didn't have a good game that time so I wasn't able to excel yes but like I said I smoked the other tournament I was like you guys don't even know who I am but I'm coming in and dropping a bomb I mean, I'm talking like I smoked a buy of like 100 million. It wasn't even remotely close. That was a convincing victory. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flawless victory. And then this last week we had our, which I thought was appropriate for Halloween, the Walking Dead survival tournament. Ah, yes. I don't know that I'm necessarily a fan of this survival because basically you have one minute to get the next score goal.
    8:09
    And sometimes you'll all of a sudden lock yourself into a mode where there's only one way of scoring.
    8:16
    And that can become exceedingly frustrating when you've got a countdown timer also, you know, lobbing at you. Yeah, that is a pain.
    8:26
    So the grouping on it was much tighter, though. The fifth place goes to TheDoctor2008 at 50.7 million. Then it was myself at 61 million. Ksenia, a.k.a. Sven, he was at 66.1 million. And he got bumped by somebody named Vu at 66.3 million. So close. And then Nimblely came in at 73 million.
    8:54
    And it's interesting. When you look at the leaderboard scores, something I discovered, they'll have, call it your profile picture. Yes. So like my profile picture is of our Blockade logo. And if it is somebody that is playing not on the platform you're playing, then all you'll get is a silhouette of like a face, and that's it. So that's how you can actually know if somebody is playing on the platform you're playing or they're playing on something else. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's like a visual clue. Exactly. Oh, cool. Um, so I've already started up, uh, this next week's tournament. It's going to be a seven day here. And because it's in theaters this week, man, we got to play Thor, even though I don't like the table. Um, so we're going to, we're going to play Thor, but here's the deal. It's, uh, we're playing a pure, that means no add-ons, regular pinball, uh, high score wins. That's it. Three balls, no add-ons. Uh, so it's, uh, check, check your true pinball prowess. That's what we're, uh, we're going with here. Flop your skills right down the table. in it. Right, exactly. The big old flopper.
    10:06
    It's one of those things where it's like when I go to pick these tables, I'm... On the one hand, I want to pick tables that I know I'm good at.
    10:15
    Yeah. But on the other hand, I don't want to necessarily do that either because then what if I'm not good enough and I get my ego crushed?
    10:22
    That's a risk. That's the big risk. It is a risk. So I'm kind of looking for theming each week as we get there, although I don't think there's necessarily a turkey table for Thanksgiving, although maybe I'll just go literal on the meaning of turkey and just pick one of the truly terrible Zen tables.
    10:43
    Yeah. Well, which one would that be? There's a couple. Well, there's a couple of Star Wars ones that I would throw in that. V8. Oh, yeah, V8 for sure. There you go. There's your winner.
    10:58
    Why did nobody play this tournament? It's funny, too, because you can tell that Sorcerer's Lair is the free table because probably three-quarters of the tournaments that are up are Sorcerer's Lair. Man, that would be a... There's only so many different ways you could spin that game to actually make it unique enough to play. Yeah. So that's the deal with Zen. I'm still loving that product. It's been pretty much the pinball I've been playing. I really, really wished that I could be playing Ghostbusters,
    11:34
    but boy, is that thing just ticking me off right now. What's it doing? Well, it's crashing my computer. It would entirely be crashing your computer. Well, I shouldn't say it's not turning my computer off. It's not a complete, it's not an OS crash. What it's doing is the game completely crashes, which in turn is crashing my display.
    12:00
    And so then if I sit here long enough, the display will try and fight to come back. And so sometimes what I'll get is just the outlines of the various windows that were open. And what I'm waiting for is for TPA to completely be unrecoverable. and then once that's unrecoverable, then the rest of my desktop will all of a sudden pop back up on my monitor and then I have to push close program. So I was having this issue with the beta and I had reported it and the guys got back and said that they were not able to reproduce this issue. I talked to a couple of the other guys that were in the beta. They also were having, I mean, other than maybe having slowdown issues with the table, they were able to load the table. my issue was that as soon as I clicked on Ghostbusters and it would go into the what I call the flyover menu it would stutter like crazy Sometimes it would clear up and go back to being smooth Other times, that's when the crash would occur. If it got smooth, then I'd push start game, and then it would crash. I had one occasion where it actually got me into the game itself, and I started playing it, and I noticed it was minor, but I noticed slowdown at the flippers and slingshots when the ball would get there. It would be a little bit slow. So that got me thinking. I was like, well, this is so bizarre. You would think it would consistently crash, not all of a sudden one time let me in, and I couldn't figure it out, and I was like, it can't be in my graphics card.
    13:40
    I mean, my graphics card is a GFX 670, so it's not exactly the most powerful thing out there, but it's also powerful enough to run everything that I play. And in the case of Zen and TPA in DX11, I can run all the high settings and not have an issue. Right. So, I mean, exactly. Ghostbusters is a performance hog. I mean, it's a performance hog, but I didn't know exactly to what extent. So then people were starting to talk about CPU usage. And so I asked, how do I find that out? So they pointed me to bringing up my task manager. And I was running it. And I got some interesting numbers here for you.
    14:28
    So if I'm running Xen, Pinball FX 3, when I'm just in the regular menu, I'm running about 18% CPU usage on the game. once I go into an actual table and play the game the highest it'll spike is at about 50% CPU usage that's pretty normal now I should also note what I'm running I'm a dual core 2 Intel processor and I have 8 megabytes or 8 gigabytes of RAM so my processor is about 10 years old I get that I understand but like I said, pinball effects three brand new game, you know, we're running, you know, currently or whatever, like I said, it's spiked, uh, max at about 50% CPU usage during the game. Um, now that's on top of, we also have, uh, I'm running my DS for windows program, which is what allows me to use my controller, uh, my PS4 controller that takes up about five to 10% CPU usage. and then also you then you got to add in whatever windows decides to uh spike sometimes it'll all of a sudden decide to run a quick windows update check to see if you're up to date that'll sometimes spike it by 50 so now and then i'd also see the cpu jump up to 99 but it'd be brief quick and then drop right back down um and not be an issue so then i threw in pinball arcade and when you're in the opening menu, it would be anywhere from 12% to a spike of 50%. Which is really high for a menu, but I've got to believe it's just the loading of all the tables or something. I don't know, but it was kind of interesting. Does it float down after a while?
    16:29
    No. That's what I'm saying. It hovers between 12% and 50%. It basically enters in at 12, wait about two seconds, jacks up to 50%, stays there for a couple of seconds, and then drops back down to 12-ish and then kind of dances around there.
    16:46
    You go into a game, and I tried various games to see. CPU was at about 10% to 15%. Okay. And I tried Circus Voltaire. I tried Ripley's. Ripley's actually was one that ran at about 20%. Okay. I tried Indy 500. I tried Big Shots, which was only like at 6% to 8% CPU. I mean, there's not much to run there.
    17:17
    And then for the fun of it, I also ran Stern Pinball Arcade. And this one in the menus, if you got the loading screen, so sometimes when it's first loading the menu up, it would jack up to 85% CPU usage. And then once you got the actual menu of the tables you could play, it would drop down to about 18%. Then when you were in-game, and I tried Mustang and Star Trek, it was running at about 20% to 30% CPU usage, which I expect that to be higher for Stern Pimble Arcade than for TPA.
    17:54
    Those seem like acceptable numbers. Yeah, definitely. Then I tried Ghostbusters. and here's the problem is usually it crashes before I can get a true CPU usage but it immediately cranks up to 65% and only goes up from there and usually it would spike all the way to 99% CPU usage just for Pimble Arcade.
    18:20
    So 99% on that and then you add in all the other things that's why it's all of a sudden crashing. It's just going so So that's... The part that mystifies me is why does the game not just slow down? Why does it not drop frame rates and just go to a crawl? Why is it actually crashing my... just causing my CPU to just take a complete dump?
    18:49
    And I tried... I'm sure they're trying to lock the frame rate is what they're trying to do so the physics engine works. So they're trying to lock the frame rate at 60 so their physics engine doesn't break and you get balls through flippers.
    19:02
    Then why is it having slowdown for a lot of other people? I'm not sure. See, this is why I don't understand what's going on. Do they have more powerful video cards? Do they have just more powerful video cards and more powerful CPUs? They have a little bit more. Well, they have more powerful CPUs, but this is what I'm saying. My question is, why if it's trying to lock in at 60 frames per second, why is it not crashing their computers?
    19:32
    Is it just because their CPU can handle more input? Yep, I'd say so. It's probably because their CPU is like a quad core, and it's probably got 16 gig of RAM, and they could have a higher-end video card. You have to actually go and ask for the existing specs. I will say this. It's not the video card. And you want to know why? Because I also tried this out in DX9, and I literally turned everything off for video purposes, and it still immediately crashed.
    20:06
    So this is not a video card issue. This is a CPU issue. Right. So finally, the guys up at Farsight said that they were able to duplicate the issue on an older computer that they had. Right. So I'm hoping that they're going to come up with some kind of a fix. But the question that we're all kind of banding about on the forum is,
    20:28
    what is causing this game, unlike all the other Stern pinball arcade games, what is causing this one to just go absolutely bonkers nuts? And is it because this is the first, was it Spike? That's the thing it's running on? Is it because, and one of the theories is that, well, they're not having to worry about optimization, sternism, because they're not having to worry about real-world physics being duplicated and being processed also. That's right. So the only thing that it has to worry about is reacting to real-world inputs. Events, yeah. Events. And because of that, they can't put in any delays.
    21:13
    It's got to be constantly on, and it's that constant on status that is cranking up the CPU to max usage. Absolutely. So that makes me wonder, is there anything that Farsight's going to even be able to do to try and optimize this thing? To make it run?
    21:34
    Because otherwise they're going to need to really issue and I mean, not that they're going to, there's a lot of people that can't run this table.
    21:43
    And it's probably going to have to give a recommendation on system specifications once they learn more about what hardware people have that are successfully running it and those people who aren't they can sort of form a bit of a i guess a you may have troubles running this table on this hardware and what they should do is make it the table of the month for the first month so people can test it yeah i mean unfortunately it's already past that uh train but i just there's a lot of people that have bought the table and are pretty pissed because it doesn't work yeah you know and and and the thing is is it's you know if there had been any kind of a notice if there had been any kind of a warning prior uh that it may not work i mean now on uh android i believe and ios they did say hey you have to have a one gigabyte processor and you have to be running at least on iOS, you have to be running iOS 10. So they did at least... They got a 2 gig of RAM on Android for it to run. And really, you only want to run it on last year's flagship and upwards. Anything less than that, you're going to have probably a bad time, except with the exception of Shield tablet, because that's basically a PC, and it's still current. Like it's still a valid device to be running all this stuff on because it just eats graphic issues for breakfast.
    23:13
    So that's why it's one of those things that is really frustrating to me because it is so above and beyond the usage of anything else that's out there, pinball related, that – and this is going to be the only table that's that way. You know?
    23:32
    Potentially, but maybe not. Potentially. They're only going to be spike tables from now on. And now there's spike two, which is all of the ones with the color screen in them. So there's going to be some that are spike regular and then some that are the new fancier ones, which are going to be even harder to emulate, how to run on the wide gamut of software that's currently being used to run those games. So, yeah. And they have not released yet for Stern Pimble Arcade. So I've not been able to test it in Stern Pimble Arcade.
    24:17
    I've tried it on Android. It seems to run better. Well, and that's what some people are saying. So I'd be very curious to know if it does run on my computer in Stern Pimble Arcade as opposed to not running on TPA. It wouldn't surprise me if it does actually run better because you've got to remember they're not trying to emulate the code on Stern Pimble Arcade. They're actually running it directly from bytecode. so this is a thing that made me really skeptical about them including it in tpa because they as far as i'm aware unless they've been able to put some sort of extra like support layer in they would have had to somehow emulate the table not run it natively and you can guarantee from my perspective that would be the reason why you're clocking in at 60 as a baseline cpu because that is emulation framework is having to go okay here's all the original code now i'm going to have to plug that through the emulation layer and we all know that emulation is costly as anything rather than running it directly so i would i really did wonder very much about why they were doing that because i thought well you're instantly going to have problems with performance because yeah you're not you're not running it directly you're emulating so you're gonna automatically have a bad time i think blind freddy could have even seen that but anyhow. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I just I don't know. This release seems like a giant poke in the eye And it a it a I would say a poor decision yeah but there no real way of sugarcoating this one it like a no you letting cats and dogs live together now because you've got stern and pimple arcade and pimple arcade and stern and and like what are you doing like you're diluting the brands number one and it's just it doesn't seem logical at all to me no not at all it's uh what are we going to do about it nothing we can just make commentary about it and say hey it's dumb that's all we can do because we don't have any control over it truthfully it's one of those things where it's just like alright well I'll just go back to playing some Zen well they do seem to have their shit together so yeah may the best platform win honestly it's getting towards that point I mean I'd still don't really have an opinion on Xen because I don't have an ability to play the new version but I'd really be honest with you I haven't actually played much pinball at all this last month it's just been too busy in my free time slots for me to actually do it it's interesting that my decision of what to play whether to play TPA or to play of Zen is coming down to this community aspect. It's just drawing... I mean, like, I've played to death the TPA tables.
    27:18
    And so it's kind of... I'm looking for a reason to hop back in, you might say, to play them. And with the Zen... There's no compelling reason to hop back into TPA. No, because I'm just like, do I really want to go after any more Wizard goals? I've already gone after most of them, and the ones that are left are kind of annoying and take forever.
    27:40
    And the leaderboards have just been borked to no end, and I'm done complaining about them. It's like, how many years have we said, please just reset them, and why there is this resistance to that is beyond bizarre. And then, again, the leaderboards were just down last week. I don't know if they're back up. They're currently on Ghostbusters on the Android and iOS devices. They left in a developer's tool on top, which looks like a joystick for whichever. What the heck is that? And it turns out that it does ball control. Well, tell me that people aren't going to be jacking up some scores using that and then posting leaderboards. And then you think Farsight is going to clear the leaderboards? Hell no. No, they don't want to do that. So again, that's why the leaderboarders are so infuriated. A waste of time. They are. They mean absolutely nothing. So the only thing that means anything to me is what are my friend scores?
    28:46
    Who am I playing against? And that's where Zen is winning because I can post, hey, guys, I got a tournament this week. Here's my name. Come and play. and I've got people that I know coming and playing and I'm not having to twist their arm. I'm not having to remind them. I'm not having to set up a time for them to come in. I'm not having to set up an end date that's theoretical and out there like when we were doing the... The Zen book club. No, not the Zen book club. No, when we were doing table of the week and table of the month. Yeah.
    29:18
    You know... That was... It was terrible. Yeah, it's so easy. And like I said, I'm not playing Zen just in regular table mode. I've only been playing the tournaments. It's just that's what's fun. Community mode. Yeah. And that's what's drawing me in. Look, it's one of those things that you've got to keep on staying relevant in the market. And I'm just wondering if maybe this could be a bit of a time for people like K to actually reflect and actually do a little bit of competitor analysis.
    29:54
    They never, let's be serious, and they're going to catch up to Zen from a, like, quality features because they're just such a huge team. They're like three or four times the size of, like, Farsight. And they've got just a lot of money behind them. So let's put that out there quite frankly now. Like, they just need to be a better Farsight. That's all they need to be. And the only way they're going to be a better Farsight is to make some tough decisions, to remain relevant in their area of the market, which is real-life tables, and actually doing that. Although maybe they don't need to, because let's be honest, who else is doing that? No one. So they are the leader. So do they actually have to innovate? Probably not, because there isn't any other option in the market. The only other one is, you know, of the likes of Zacharia, but that's a very different subset of games. that they really got the NBA game chance. I like it or lump it really. It's probably the answer. I just look at Farsight's attempt at doing online play. Doing head-to-head play.
    31:04
    It's beyond clumsy. Especially when you see what Zen is doing. Zen is so flawless, so easy. They've made it now so that there is always people playing pinball online.
    31:19
    And that right there is the trick. Because with TPA, when we would be trying in the beta, and I know the beta is a small sampling of people, but just trying to get people to be there so that you could have somebody to play against was a giant task. And then on top of that, it was having the thing actually work to pair you with somebody.
    31:43
    And I think that's where Farsight needs to outsource. they need to get somebody that actually knows what the heck they're doing to make that kind of flawless experience. And then they can learn from it, and then they can apply that towards their own games in the future. Yeah.
    32:03
    Because right now, we've stopped beta testing the head-to-head, it seemed, a long time ago. There hasn't been a single innovation or anything done to that in months. Months and months. It's kind of dead. It's been put on the back burner. Yeah, been way put on the bag burner. And I would rather them just completely pull it from the game than having it sit there every month and me going, oh, let's see if anything changed, and me clicking on it going, nope.
    32:29
    Yeah, it might be one of those things that it could have just been an experiment for them. It might have just been something they were testing and going, ah, let's entertain the idea of this sort of multiplayer experience. Yeah.
    32:43
    Business picture for them. they may not think that it's a thing. I mean, there's a lot of evidence out there just to suggest that it's probably something they should be thinking about, but there might be other things. Like, I don't know, maybe they've got to be doing something else there at the moment. Like, they've got pinball, pinball. There's got to be something else that they're working on as the next. They've got to be thinking about the next. So you'd have to think that something else is going on there as well. Like, they couldn't just be, like, hedging all their bets on pinball because that's going to end. Yeah, I don't think they are hedging all their bets on pinball, but I think that if I had to guess what Farsight's up to, it's a mobile game.
    33:26
    Yeah. They have been wanting to get into the mobile gaming aspect of things where there is a cash cow of pay-as-you-play.
    33:38
    They've been trying to figure that out for a very long time, and honestly, that's what I believe that they would be developing for. I don't think that they're trying to develop a console game or a Steam game. I just don't see it.
    33:53
    Yeah, think about... Actually, this flows quite interestingly into Pinball Evader's update that I saw on Kickstarter the other day. So the shorter it was, it didn't make the goal. Okay. But in the update that I got on Kickstarter, for those people who did actually back it, You'll know this, but for those who don't, let me read it out.
    34:14
    We at Farsight believe even more strongly in the game than ever before. During the campaign, we were honoured and thrilled that Apple featured Pinball Cadet the week after it launched as a new game we love and then featured the game again as a best new game update. We also love Pinball Cadet and we'll continue to make it even better. Plus, while Pinball Cadet is a lot of fun, we believe it is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we think can be done with this concept by the talented people at trick studios so despite the result of this campaign we're happy to announce that we will be moving forward with plans to help trick studios complete pimple invaders and bring it to the market so even though the kickstarter wasn't successful it sounds like they're going ahead anyhow and this is exactly kind of what Kickstarter's about. So Kickstarter is a prototyping platform, basically. It's testing the market and it's a very easy way of doing that. Guiding people's interest. And it seems that they're onto a winner here, so it's a very easy way to validate an assumption about whether something is viable or not. And it seems in this case that yes, there is an appetite for it. So that removes what they call one of the riskiest assumption test. Will people buy it? It turns out they will. So, well done. Nice little bit of iteration there, Farsight. And you're right. Here you've got a different studio coming up with a mobile game and all the pay aspects in it. And Farsight might be able to... They can throw their weight behind it and what Farsight does well, they can help implement into this game. And then vice versa, Farsight can learn from somebody like this in terms of here's how you develop for mobile.
    36:07
    Yep, exactly. I think it could actually be quite a nice symbiotic relationship that they've got going on here.
    36:13
    Because you've got to remember, Farsight has been at this since… 17 years or something? I think it's 20 plus. They were putting out games for the Wii. I think they were putting out games for Sega, for Dreamcast even. Really? Wow, okay.
    36:34
    When I went to their studio, up on their wall, basically they had the cartridges of every game that they've made. Oh, really? And they started off being sports games, and they were doing a lot of peripheral-based games.
    36:50
    Oh. You know, so... Like gun games and stuff like that. Well, but against sports. So like baseball, it would be, you know, you had a plate. A baseball bat. A baseball bat kind of thing or, you know, something of that nature. They did football games and stuff.
    37:07
    So they were doing a lot of one-off kind of things like that. And then when it came to the Wii, they hit upon some party game, which most people recognize it as shovelware, but it was a bestseller, enough that they put out, I think, three different versions. Oh, right, okay. Or sequels. There was a trilogy of them, kind of thing like that. So it was one of those games, party games, where it was just like, oh, yeah, we can keep on producing this and put it out.
    37:42
    That's why it's always with TPA, I think it caught Farsight by surprise. I don't think they ever expected it to garner the attention that it did and the fan base that it did that would be so completely loyal that they were able to just keep on producing and producing and producing. And the next thing they know, they're like, oh, crap, we're a pinball company.
    38:04
    They were kind of like just accidentally gone down this particular hole a little bit too deep, and we're in it. Yeah. The ropes, we run out of rope, and we're falling. Right. You know, they've certainly made the best of it as they've kept on falling down the hole.
    38:18
    Absolutely. You know, absolutely. Maybe they need someone like Pinball, like the Trick Gaming Studios, to actually throw a longer rope down and help them pull them back out into a different market. Yeah, figure out how to branch. Yeah. I think it can only be a good thing. So I wish them luck with Pinball Kivett, and I think I'll probably get into it. It be something different enough that it actually might be a little bit entertaining I mean certainly the physics are good in it So you know I looking forward to sort of like a level take on pinball It can only be a good thing I think
    38:53
    Stern has announced that they are, and actually they have pictures and everything. I didn't even know about it. But Guardians of the Galaxy is their next table coming out. Yeah. Wow. Now, one of the things, I'm not going to talk about the table itself, other than it is kind of funny seeing Groot spit out six balls just like Yeah.
    39:13
    I reckon it's using the same mechanism as like under Groot's head to be using the same mechanism as the what was it? The terrible Harley Davidson motorcycle mechanism. Vomit neck. Because it's not like it's shooting the balls out. It's more just like it's just throwing them up. There's just this splurge of balls that's dropping down.
    39:41
    But one of the things that people were kind of like, oh, wait a second, because apparently it's not going to have any of the music. Yeah. It's like, what?
    39:52
    It's crazy. Which, on the one hand, with Guardians of the Galaxy, certainly that's a major plot point.
    39:59
    The tape that he's listening to. But I kind of get why Music is insanely expensive to license. Yes. Especially hits like that. That's ridiculous. Yeah.
    40:16
    But then as I was playing Guardians of the Galaxy on Zen, and they have their pseudo soundtrack, right? Mm-hmm. And I was like, okay, obviously there's no music songs, lyric-based songs in that game, and they're just kind of doing a generic soundtrack.
    40:37
    And around the same time as I'm thinking about this, I find this article about how all of Marvel's orchestral scores for their movies are just this completely generic eh. Yeah. And to prove their point, they went out on the street and they asked people, okay, can you sing me something from Star Wars? everybody immediately did the Imperial March or whatever. Then they said, okay, how about Harry Potter? People were able to do Harry Potter. They're like, alright, how about they threw out one or two other ones. Everybody was doing that. They said, okay, now do any song from any Marvel movie.
    41:21
    And then went, nobody could do it because there's not a single theme that stands out in any of the Marvel movies.
    41:29
    Yeah. It's true. And I just kind of went, huh, that's rather interesting. It is, I think. It's very interesting.
    41:41
    They further went, though, that they said it's not just Marvel that's suffering from this. It's a lot of movies today.
    41:51
    And what it is is that because all the editing is digital and nonlinear, The directors, a lot of times, they'll put what's called a temp score in as they're editing. And so they'll find some piece of music that they really like a lot from some other movie, and they'll put it in there, but then they'll have their editor cut the movie to that music. But obviously they can't use that music. They have to have an original score. So they'll remove that music, but then they'll go to their composer and they'll be like, yeah, I want to sound a lot like that. So this video showed a couple of different pieces from movies, and they played it with, here's the music that was used in the temp track, and here's the music that adds in the movie, and they're so minutely different, it's ridiculous. Oh, really? So they also say me, because I can't go back and recut the movie because of the music. They don't actually start with the music first. Or like, this is, oh man, this is like my product manager hat is going, This is bad. So the Hollywood Reporter had a whole group of composers sitting together, and they were just having a general talk about this. Yeah. And they specifically asked Danny Elfman, who's totally a musical hero of mine, from Oingo Boingo days.
    43:11
    But they asked him, they go, we hear you particularly have this taste for temp tracks. And he's like, oh, it's the absolute bane of my existence. he said I'll go in and find out that they have a temp track and he goes I will listen to it once if at all and then I will never listen to it again because I don't want to be influenced by it I want to do my music and have my own resonance with it and a bunch of the composers were saying that and then they also kind of commented about how there's this new trend in the movies where they And I know this from camera work that this thought has been out there, but where they said, well, we don't want people noticing the music. Like, they don't want the music to be standing out and become its own character because they feel that's taking away from the movie. They want to just, you know, support it. And so it's one of those things you hear it all the time where, like, with camera work, you'll hear people. one of the theories out there is that they're like, well, if you notice the camera move as particularly interesting or that's drawing attention to itself, then that's bad. That's taking away. Same thing with special effects where people will be like, oh, well, if you notice the special effect, then it wasn't a good special effect. It should be seamless and you not notice it there. But there's an opposite theory, which is my love of practical effects over CG effects, or what I like to call man in suit versus a CG monster, where even though it draws attention to itself, I love the artistry of it. And it makes me love it even more, as opposed to just being some generic, yeah, you created a monster. or whoo, you know. Yeah. So I did not know that that was a trend these days. And sure enough, they played a clip of Captain America where the music is really down low and there is some person narrating over the top of it. And then they went, okay, now watch this. And they took out all the sound other than the music and played the scene again. and you got every last piece of information that needed to be given without the narration over the top of it and you had more of an emotional reaction to the piece. Really?
    45:37
    But they said it's the safe way is to do it this other way. It's not taking a risk and yet the pieces that take a risk are the pieces that you remember. Exactly. So yeah, pedestrian movies, everything. Why bother? Why put music in there at all? Why can I actually? Let it shine. And there are. You think about Quentin Tarantino. He doesn't use music. He uses songs, but he does not use an orchestral score. No, he doesn't. The first time he's ever used one was with his most recent movie, Hateful Eight. That's the only time he's ever used an orchestral score.
    46:12
    But what I'm really hoping for is with this Justice League movie, which I'll see eventually. I'm excited for it. But Danny Elfman is doing the music for it. What does Justice League have in it? It has Batman. What's Danny Elfman known for? really well, his Batman theme. Damn it, it better have that Batman theme kick in, or I'm going to call major failure.
    46:34
    Even as a leitmotif, it'll have to have the Batman theme in there. It's gotta. In this newest Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man Homecoming, Michael Gianchino did the score for it, and he worked in, in one spot, the Spider-Man. Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider... He worked that into an orchestral version. It was like, thank you. It needs to have it. Just one little moment, enough that we go, thank you, you recognized. Yeah. Props to you. Thank you. You can go about your business. Right, exactly. We're happy. We got our smell of it.
    47:16
    Yep. That's why when they said that with Guardians of the Galaxy, they didn't have any music, I kind of went, well yeah that's it really important then i realized oh yeah it's the 70s soundtrack that people are wanting not the orchestral soundtrack because nobody knows what the orchestral soundtrack sounds like no they they actually don't so yeah it's it's a shame that they can't get um one of these companies to go there's a i forget the name of them there's a company that goes out and reworks music to get around copyright and they use it all the time when you hear artists sampling other music. One of the most famous ones was this one that was a dance music track and it had this sort of piano and violin sort of a sample in it and they couldn't get the rights to it. So what they did is they handed over the original track, which was like a 70s funk track with this particular sting in it. They handed it over to this agency that then broke down that part of the song and re-engineered it in such a way that they couldn't get copyright on it. So I just wonder if they could actually go down that path and actually break it down like that and get around it. Well, one of my favorite I've been showing it to my son, my favorite anime is Cowboy Bebop and I absolutely adore the music in it. I literally, when I watched it for the first time, I was two episodes in before I was on eBay trying to buy the soundtrack. The OST, yep. You know. So but there's a lot of songs and when I say songs, I'm talking about the songs that actually have lyrics to them, where sometimes I'll be hearing it and I'll be like, boy, that sounds vaguely familiar. Or the artist singing, like there's one guy that sings songs where I'm like, he almost sounds like Bowie. Almost.
    49:04
    Well, what I found out was that they put actual artist songs in their temp track and it was, okay, obviously we can't pay for that, so they had Yoko Kanno, the composer, rewrite them, put in new lyrics, and re-engineer them so they sound close. They're not, but they're going to evoke the same feeling. Emotion. That's what they need to do. They need to think smart about it and go, look, there's a number of ways to skin a cat here. Let's just be a little bit smart about it. And then it'll be fine. You can sort of get around it. It'll be good. Kind of like what Zen did with Back to the Future, where the theme song was sort of kind of in there. There was enough to evoke, but then when it went into, like we said the other time, when it went into where it sounded like the Huey Lewis song, but it wasn't, it was painful.
    49:58
    Yeah. Sometimes it can work, sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't quite work, no. That's right. Well, speaking of working, we're going to stop working on this.
    50:10
    We're going to let this podcast go. We will obviously be back next week to talk some more. In the meantime, why don't you hit up our website, blockadepinball.com. There you can find past shows as well as show notes and links to websites that we mentioned during the show. You can also check out Twitter. The show is at Blockade. Or you can follow Jared and myself. I am at ShutYourTraps. He is at JaredMorgz. Last but not least, drop us an email. blahblahblockade at gmail.com If you have any show suggestions, questions for us, insider information that we can't blab about, who knows what.
    50:51
    Yeah. Stuff. All of that stuff, like we like to say. Stuff. Alrighty. Well, until then, we will talk to you then, and thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
    51:07
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    51:22
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some pinball.
    51:38
    you