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Pinpals Ep 12 - Avengers Infinity Quest Deep Dive

Electric Bat Cast·podcast_episode·3h 20m·analyzed·Feb 7, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Deep analysis of Avengers: Infinity Quest (Premium/LE) underperformance and mechanics, plus Pokemon reveal discussion.

Summary

Electric Bat Cast hosts a deep dive into Avengers: Infinity Quest (Premium/LE), discussing why this Keith Elwin-designed game ranks as the sixth-worst earner despite strong design and art. The episode features guest Nick Zachary analyzing the game's complex rule set, portal locks, multiball mechanics, and layout differences between Pro and Premium versions. The hosts also briefly discuss the newly announced Pokémon pinball game by Stern, speculating on its mechanics and licensing structure.

Key Claims

  • Avengers Infinity Quest is the sixth worst-earning modern pinball game (excluding classics)

    high confidence · Cale Hernandez, Electric Bat Cast host, citing Rachel's research on arcade earnings tracking

  • The game's main barrier to popularity is rule complexity and lack of code clarity

    high confidence · Nick Zachary and Cale discussing early impressions and rule accessibility

  • Avengers Infinity Quest is the most complicated modern Stern code in the last few years (excluding Lord of the Rings)

    medium confidence · Cale Hernandez assertion, agreed with by Nick Zachary

  • Pokemon secures licenses from all three IP holders: Nintendo, Creatures, and Game Freak

    high confidence · Cale Hernandez explaining the significance of Game Freak's involvement for gaming mechanics

  • Pokemon generated unprecedented excitement compared to Star Wars and Harry Potter announcements

    medium confidence · Cale Hernandez describing community response: 'my phone started blowing up'

  • Ray Day (coder) implemented Keith Elwin rules and was perplexed by some of them

    high confidence · Ray Day's direct statement in chat during the podcast recording

  • Portal locks are critical for tournament scoring on Avengers but confusing to explain and understand

    high confidence · Cale and Nick's extended discussion of portal lock mechanics and difficulty

  • Captain Marvel ramp on Premium reaches 5x multiplier maximum

    high confidence · Cale and Nick's detailed discussion of premium-exclusive multiplier mechanics

Notable Quotes

  • “it's the sixth worst earning game in the arcade...and I think that's an absolute crime.”

    Cale Hernandez @ early in episode — Frames the core thesis: a great game with poor earnings performance

  • “the rules are pretty complicated, and in order to really enjoy it, you kind of have to get a better understanding of the rules...that's probably the number one thing holding it back”

    Nick Zachary @ early discussion — Identifies root cause of underperformance as accessibility issue

  • “Pokemon was the worst-kept secret in all of pinball, Stern just did a teaser trailer for Pokemon”

    Cale Hernandez @ mid-episode — Official confirmation of Pokemon announcement

  • “my phone started blowing up. This did not happen with Star Wars. This did not happen with Harry Potter.”

    Cale Hernandez @ Pokemon discussion — Demonstrates unprecedented community excitement for Pokemon vs. other major licenses

  • “I believe that I was once one of the world's best original Nintendo 64 Super Smash Brothers players”

    Nick Zachary @ Pokemon discussion — Personal anecdote establishing Nick's gaming credibility; lighthearted moment

  • “he implemented Keith's rules and was just as perplexed by some of them...the trophies were all him, which made me feel real good when the first reaction was, can you disable the trophies, lol”

    Cale Hernandez @ mid-episode — Insider perspective from actual coder on rule confusion; humorous community feedback

  • “I still have the game...because it is so deep and there's so many different ways to play it, and I kind of find new ways to do something that I've never done before”

    Nick Zachary @ early in deep dive — Defends game's quality and depth despite poor earnings

  • “Jack Danger, it's Gomez with the finishing touches. I think it's going to shoot incredibly well.”

    Cale Hernandez — Confidence in designer pedigree for Pokemon game

Entities

Cale HernandezpersonNick ZacharypersonSergepersonRay DaypersonKeith ElwinpersonRick NaegelepersonJack DangerpersonGeorge Gomezperson

Signals

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Portal locks identified as critical to tournament scoring but confusing to understand and execute. Multiple pathways (combos, skill shots, Computer Grid Award, Hawkeye Challenge, Mystery Award) create accessibility barrier.

    high · Cale: 'Portal locks are really important, but the way to get them is darn confusing.' Extended discussion showing difficulty explaining mechanics.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Three distinct multiball types: Thor multiball (easiest to start), Iron Man multiball (requires more effort), and portal-lock-enabled mode multiballs (provide 2x playfield multiplier). Asymmetric difficulty creates strategic depth.

    high · Thor requires 3 captive ball hits vs. Iron Man requires spelling IRON on inlanes plus 3 tower shots. Portal locks add multiplier layer.

  • ?

    product_concern: Premium layout's Captain Marvel ramp frequently fails on location machines due to setup issues, rejecting balls instead of looping. Requires ongoing maintenance and modification to function reliably.

    high · Nick: 'It just takes a little tweaking and setup...It prevents it from rattling, which will take energy away...If it gets very dirty, it won't quite have enough energy to make it up that ramp.'

  • $

    market_signal: Avengers Infinity Quest ranks 6th worst-earning among tracked modern pinball games, despite recognition as well-designed with strong art and layout. Suggests disconnect between design quality and commercial appeal.

    high · Cale: 'it's the sixth worst earning game in the arcade...I think that's an absolute crime.' Rachel noted that engagement increases when Serge provides gameplay analysis.

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.600

0:00
All right, making sure we're live. I'm going. Oh, my God. We are. It's actually working. I think we're live.
0:22
Hooray. Yes, I see us there. All right. Do you want to start us up, Cal? Yeah, here we are. Everything's looking good. I like this. Let me get back to where we are. Where's Serge? Do you not see Serge, Daniel? No, no. No, it's there. He's here, I tell you. I was just looking at the chat. What's happening? Cale Hernandez here from the Electric Batcast Studios. I have two fellas joining me remotely. We, of course, have Serge. And then we brought in a special guest, Nick Zachary. He's a local shooter. Tearing up the AV scene has been for a long, long time. Today we're going to talk Avengers Pinball. And this is a Stern Pinball machine, not the 2012 The Avengers Pinball machine. This is the 2020 Avengers Infinity Quest. One interesting thing about this meeting, Rachel, our leader, assembled this. because she was saying, what's going on with Avengers? She thinks it's a great game. Come on, it's an Elwynn game. And it is the sixth worst earning game in the arcade. Now, that's not including all the classics because we don't track earnings from that. But all of the games that we do track earnings for, it's the sixth worst earner. And I think that's an absolute crime. Rachel thought it was a crime. We think this game has stunning art, a cool IP, and what I think is a great layout. Why is it such a low earner? And Rachel noticed every time Surge did a deep dive on the machine, whether it's during a tournament stream or a live or a special podcast, people play the game more.
2:14
And that's what we're hoping to deal with here. One thing I want to ask you guys is This game, what's the deal with it? Why does it seem to be the least popular Elwynn game? Are the rules too complicated?
2:34
@ Pokemon discussion

  • “Portal locks are really important, but the way to get them is darn confusing. It's not an obvious thing.”

    Cale Hernandez @ deep dive section — Identifies core UX problem with game's design

  • “A portal lock. Oh, I'm going to find it. Okay.”

    Cale Hernandez @ mid-deep dive — Self-aware moment about difficulty explaining mechanics, underscores complexity issue

    • [name withheld pending review]
    person
    Rachelperson
    Avengers Infinity Questgame
    Pokemongame
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Electric Bat Castorganization
    Lord of the Ringsgame
    Stern Pro Circuit Championshipevent
    Jared Augustperson
    King Konggame
    Nintendocompany
    Game Freakcompany
    Creatures Inc.company
    Wesleyperson
    [name withheld pending review]person
    Zombie Yetigame

    community_signal: Detailed podcast/streaming coverage of Avengers rules and strategy demonstrably increases player engagement and location revenue. The Electric Bat Cast episode series directly addresses underperformance by reducing rule opacity.

    high · Cale: 'Rachel noticed every time Surge did a deep dive on the machine...people play the game more. And that's what we're hoping to deal with here.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Portal locks represent a novel three-layer multiball concept: secondary multiball type distinct from mode-based multiballs, providing 2x playfield multiplier when starting modes. Later refined as 'island locks' in King Kong.

    high · Detailed explanation of portal lock mechanics converting single-ball modes into 2x-scoring multiballs; comparison to King Kong's island lock evolution.

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Premium layout prioritizes thematic spectacle (vertical Captain Marvel ramp) over playability fluidity, while Pro layout (spinner replacement) balances accessibility with strategic depth. Different code creates distinct strategy categories per version.

    high · Cale: Premium ramp 'looks awesome...but practically, it's really hard to make that shot.' Pro 'opens up the shot...you get to access that shot from left and right flipper.' Premium has 5x multiplier advantage.

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Pre-release speculation on Pokemon mechanical design: Pokéball lock-ball mechanic, catch/train/evolve/battle rule flow structure. Serge predicts layout will reflect franchise game mechanics based on licensing structure insights.

    medium · Serge's detailed design prediction based on Game Freak licensing: 'Catch is like you need to do it. Train and evolve, that's sort of like an ally system...And then the battle is when you battle it.'

  • ?

    announcement: Stern Pinball officially announced Pokemon pinball game via teaser trailer. Described as 'worst-kept secret in all of pinball' before official reveal. Game generates unprecedented community excitement.

    high · Cale: 'Stern just did a teaser trailer for Pokemon...my phone started blowing up. This did not happen with Star Wars. This did not happen with Harry Potter.'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Pokemon pinball required securing licenses from three distinct IP holders (Nintendo, Creatures Inc., Game Freak). Game Freak controls gaming mechanics IP, enabling pinball game to incorporate core franchise gameplay systems.

    high · Cale: 'they were able to secure the license from all three IP holders...Game Freak holds the gaming aspect of Pokemon...That sort of thing.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Pokemon game assigned to high-pedigree design team: Jack Danger (layout/toys), George Gomez (architecture/finishing), Tanya Kleiss (code). Establishes design excellence credentials upfront.

    high · Cale: 'It's Jack Danger, it's Gomez with the finishing touches...I've actually heard it...I think it's going to shoot incredibly well.'

  • ?

    content_signal: Electric Bat Cast commits to live code breakdown episode on Pokemon launch day, analyzing layout and rules in real-time. Positions podcast as primary content source for new game education.

    high · Cale: 'as soon as, whenever launch day is, whenever they show me a trailer or whatever, we will do a code breakdown of the game that day...That's what we deliver here on this show.'

    • How was it accepted on launch? Can you guys tell me a little history about this game? Nick, do you want to go first with that? Yeah, I can pipe in a little bit But, you know, Cale, you mentioned that it's the sixth worst earner, and I'm kind of not shocked by that because I think people played the game early on and maybe came out kind of during the COVID era, and maybe that first impression didn't stick with people especially. And I think the biggest thing about Avengers Infinity Quest is that the rules are pretty complicated, and in order to really enjoy it, you kind of have to get a better understanding of the rules. I think that's probably the number one thing holding it back is just understanding those rules and the clarity, one of Serge's main points of good code, is not always there. So maybe we can clear some things up today. Cool. Who coded this? Is this Ray Day?
    3:35
    Yep, we lost Serge, Mike. We lost Serge's audio. What happened here? That's on me. It's a mixture of Ray Day and Keith Elwin, a Ray Day fan of the show. We welcome him. We're going to say nice things. But we're also going to offer some feedback, I'd say. I believe Rick Nagel also was on the point code. Nice. Okay, can you tell me, is this the most complicated modern Stern code?
    4:01
    What a good question. If you're not counting Lord of the Rings, let's say, if you're really talking the last few years, I might say yes. What do you say to that, Nick? I agree. I think it has a lot of breadth and a lot of depth and a good combination of those two together, which makes it, I think, extremely deep and extremely complex. But I don't think it's impossible to understand either. I think once you get some core concepts, you can really explore all kinds of different ways to play the game.
    4:34
    Cool. Now, I have a question, Kel. Before we get to this very deep dive of Lord of the Rings, and we will, there was a new game released. Do you want to talk about it, and should we talk about it? Oh, 100%. Ladies and gentlemen, the worst-kept secret in all of pinball,
    4:51
    Stern just did a teaser trailer for Pokemon. don't you don't usually do the the mic like cut off right there okay pokemon we know it's pokemon now uh are we are we excited tell me what's going to happen serge all right well i'll tell you my feelings all right we're not we could talk about it as a theme is it a good choice i don't think it'll bring any younger crowd um you know our older crowds are probably bigger when it comes pinball, but it'll be a younger crowd. I'll tell you what I do know about Pokemon. I am a consumer of all media in preparation for these podcasts. So I'll tell you what I would do with it if you allow me as a code structure and see if I can predict what's going to come out there. I think that the basic flow chart of the code will be you have to catch a Pokemon, you have to train the Pokemon, you have to evolve the Pokemon, and then you get to battle it against other Pokemon there. And so let's say that four things. Catch is like you need to do it. Train and evolve, that's sort of like an ally system to make the Pokemon more powerful, optional. And then the battle is when you battle it. And if I were telling you what I think the layout should do to match that sort of co-design, when we talk about catching the Pokemon, of course the main mech on both the pro and the premium, hopefully, should be an open and closed Pokeball that's a physical ball lock. I think everyone expects that, and we all expect it to eat the ball, right, a Pokeball, right? But I'm going to go a little bit further and then get your reaction here. to tell you how I might code such a thing to be in the spirit of the theme immersion and the moments that you want from Pokemon, let's say. All right, so what I would do is you have a ball. You have to bash the ball. The ball opens. You could shoot the ball, and it traps it inside. Then another ball comes out, and then you have a bunch of shots lit up for your Bulbasaur or your Pikachu or your Blastoise or whatever you're trying to catch, you know. And maybe you're playing their harder Pokemon and easier Pokemon. Maybe you could pick which one you want to battle. you make shots around the playfield to weaken the Pokemon so that you could capture it in your Pokeball, right? And if you make enough shots to weaken it, a Pokeball opens, and then you can shoot your ball inside, and then a multiball comes out. Or maybe the other ball that was inside comes out, and now you're in a multiball, now that you've captured the Pokemon, right? If you don't capture the Pokemon, because you don't hit enough shots in a set period of time, maybe the flippers die, the ball drains, and then it pops your original ball in the Pokeball out for you to try to retry and recapture the Pokemon. So that's my basic core mechanic, what I would do with this game, basic mech and basic code to match it. What say you, gentlemen?
    7:28
    Yeah, I'm down with that. That sounds like a lot of fun. The one thing I noticed that caught my attention on the trailer, because, I mean, there's not much going on there, right? It's a Pokemon load. It's a Pokemon logo, and it's a Stern logo. But they have the music. We could say that. They have the music. But one clue, I think most people aren't talking about, is they captured, they were able to secure the license from all three IP holders. Oh, tell us about that, the whole thing with the Nintendo and the Niantic and everything. Nintendo, Creatures, and Game Freak. And why this is important Is Game Freak holds the gaming aspect of Pokemon The game flow I mentioned The thing like capture, battle, train, evolve, battle That sort of thing Yeah, so that's the only interesting thing I pulled from that trailer What do you say, Nick? Yeah, so does that relate to video games, Cale? or like the original video games? From what I understand, yeah, that's that aspect of it.
    8:48
    Very cool. Nick, you're a diehard Pokemon fan, right? I'd say I'm more of a low medium. I think I was just the age where it was coming out and I was a little too old to maybe engage with it originally. But as time went on by playing games like Super Smash Brothers, things like that, that were Pokemon adjacent became more familiar with it. I have a radical claim for you guys, if you're ready for it. I'm not here to talk myself up in general, but I believe that I was once one of the world's best original Nintendo 64 Super Smash Brothers players. Whoa. We had tournaments, and we had a big tournament in New York in the movie theater, which I won, by the way. I was Captain Falcon. But Pikachu was in that game, and so I do know a little bit. And you could throw Pokeballs in that game and so forth. Mm-hmm.
    9:37
    So anyway, but you don't want to hear about that. Do we want to get into Avengers, or do you want to talk a little bit more about Pokemon, anything else? No, let's do it. I'm excited to see your Pokemon. Well, I will tell you one thing I've noticed about Pokemon.
    9:52
    Since it's been actually announced and it's verified, signed, sealed, and delivered, I have been getting a lot of messages about it, about the excitement. Now, Stern has to deliver and deliver a cool game. And I'm not even worried about that because they – I mean, it's Jack Danger, it's Gomez with the finishing touches. I think it's going to shoot incredibly well. I've actually heard it. Both designers. Yeah. So I think it's going to be a cool game. And the art's going to look like Pokemon. You know, it's going to be a lot of yellow You're going to get some reds and some other colors You know, it's not going to be like your Zombie Yeti fare I don't think You know Well, you know, so many people complain about Zombie Yeti's art being too colorful But I don't think this is going to be like that Because Pokemon is colorful I don't think you're going to get complaints I think this is going to, you know, look like every other Pokemon item You know, they're all very consistent across all the licensed items.
    11:07
    But there is so much excitement. I mean, my phone started blowing up. This did not happen with Star Wars. This did not happen with Harry Potter. Like, people are messaging me going, holy shit, when is this coming out? I want to see this thing. So there is a lot of excitement about Pokemon. Should I play your traditional theme song, Kel? Sure Okay, you know I enjoy it Can we all hear it? One second What's up, tsunami? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Oh, yeah It's Cal's Color Corner Where Cal dives deep into color theory Until you're green with envy Red with passion or blue in the face In Casca da Gana All the Ganas have a place Welcome to Kale's Color Corner.
    12:13
    I think Pokemon's gonna look cool. You know, all your primary colors, you know. Come on. Everything looks good on top of yellow. Let's go. Wait, Cale, a few more questions, though. What is your favorite Pokemon putting you on the stunt? Tell us about your favorite Pokemon.
    12:35
    I think it's the, what was it? The Razzle Dazzle. Yeah, you kind of love the Razzle Dazzle, right? That was really, really great. And, yes, you know, Nick, you mentioned it earlier. We will, presumably, as soon as, whenever launch day is, whenever they show me a trailer or whatever, we will do a code breakdown of the game that day. Are you signing up for that, Cale? Yeah. Oh, 100%. So I don't know when it is, but we will do a live show breaking down the layout and the rules of that game, as crazy as that sounds. That's what we deliver here on this show.
    13:08
    Yeah, I'm excited for your prescient breakdown, if you will, of just seeing the game from a play field and being able to decipher what it's going to be like. So that's always fun. Every insert matters. And we're going to see in today's game. Should we get into it? Sure, let's do it. All right. So, as Cale already introduced you, Nick, but we are fortunate to have you here on this very special episode of Pin Pals, where we dive into perhaps the deepest, most complex, ever, as Cale said, most ever complex modern string game, Avengers Infinity Quest. Not that other Avengers, like from 2012, the Gomez one. No, this is the Keith Elwin Avengers Infinity Quest. I want to give you a few reasons why Nick is here. One, he's an outstanding player, as Cale said earlier. He's usually in the top four of every league finals at the electorate bat. Number two, many years ago, I sold him my own Avengers Premium. So we met, actually, because of this game many years ago. That's number two. And he still has the game, right, Nick? Still got it. So he must like it. And then number three, he has great insights into pinball, including deep rules knowledge. And I have no idea whether he's going to agree with my take or not on the game. But he still owns the game, right? So I believe that he might stand up for the game. And I do, too. I like the game, too. but I'm going to give some criticism of it as well. I have some mixed feelings, in other words. And if he does stand up for it, I welcome that perspective and that spirited conversation around that. Nick, what say you to that? Yeah, yeah. That's kind of – this has come full circle, really, because Serge and I met via this game. Like, that's how we kind of first met each other in person. And I still have the game, what, years later now, I think it is, several years later. And I hold on to it because it is so deep and there's so many different ways to play it. and I kind of find new ways to do something that I've never done before in the game, which I think is one of its best qualities. Hear, hear.
    15:02
    And one question to answer in chat, asking back about the Pokemon, do we think it's going to be the original 151 Pokemon? I do think so, actually. I don't think you're going to get those crazy Pokemon in there. I think it's going to be the original one. So on this episode, the way I thought to break it down is we're going to do the deep dive on the layout and the code like we usually do, and boy, we will. But let's talk strategy up front. What does that sound like to you, Nick? Yeah, we can go into strategy. I think maybe there's two different – actually, I'll say three different types of strategies to approach this game. And I mean three categories of strategies, not three strategies total. Right, right. But do you agree, Nick? Do you agree? You're going to say different categories. So you're going to say this is one type of category that I'm showing on the screen now. For those who are not looking, and you should, this is a video podcast after all, you people. But I would contend, and Nick will disagree with me, that there is really a single strategy to start this game. You, number one, get portalized. You, number two, start a mode. And you, number three, start Thor Multiball. In terms of which mode, we could differ about which mode there is. We'll get into that. But that's my claim on it before we get into further. Nick, assuming that you agree this is one of your three strategies, right? Yeah, that's one of them. I'm sorry. I'm laughing at Ray Day's comments. Oh, this is important. Oh, Ray Day. Let's say what Ray Day's comments are because we haven't figured out a way to get the chat on the video. I'm so glad he's here. I'm so glad you're here, Ray Day. I hope you have three and a half hours available because we're really going into it, all right? I promise. In a way that nobody has seen before, I promise. You're going to see something you've never seen before. I've really come up with something special here, if I say so myself. But Ray Day in the chat, I just want to tell everyone what he says, who was a coder on this game. says he goes on the record as saying he implemented Keith's rules and was just as perplexed by some of them. He says, although the trophies were all him, which made me feel real good when the first reaction was, can you disable the trophies, lol.
    17:04
    Yes. So that is that. I love the trophies. Thanks, Ray Day. Now, RetroGamer says you might replace the Thor multiball with Iron Man multiball, and I don't disagree with that, But the reason I just definitively put in Thor is, on standard factory settings, it only takes three hits to get into Thor multiball. And the same cannot be said of Iron Man, which requires you to go through all four lanes to light them, including one lane on the plunge, and then three shots into the tower. So I'm not against it, I'm just saying it's harder. That's my opinion. Agreed.
    17:37
    Another interesting thing about the add-a-ball in Thor vs. Iron Man is both games have an add-a-ball, both multiballs, rather, have an add-a-ball, but one is easier to achieve than the other. In Thor, all you have to do is spin the disc enough, which you probably are going to do anyway accidentally while you're in Thor multiball, and then hit the target behind the spinning disc. Whereas in Iron Man multiball, you have to spell the iron lanes at the bottom, which we'll get into, is quite hard to do. On any other game where you could easily lane change, it's easy. But on Avengers, which has restricted lane changes, it's really, really hard to do. So in Iron Man, you're going to have to multiball. You have to hit the spinning disc to move the lights on the inlanes and then go through the inlanes and then make three shots into the tower. Sorry, the add-a-ball is the sanctum target after you get the iron. So it's similar but requires more effort. So everything requires more effort for Iron Man multi-ball to get it, to get the add-a-ball. I like it. It's just harder to do. So that's why I said Thor. Nick, is that fair, everything I said? Yeah, that's fair. Serge, on the Thor multiball, I thought you just nailed that captive ball to get it. Yep. So no spinner? No, I'm saying for an add-a-ball in Thor. For the add-a-ball in Thor, I was going deeper to say, yes, to get Thor, three shots of captive ball. So you get the add-a-ball in Thor, spin the disc, once you're in multiball, spin the disc, and then shoot the target behind the disc, and that's add-a-ball. And you will likely do that accidentally while you're in poor multiball. So even if you didn't know what I just said, it's both easier to get and easier to continue. And before we get into the deep dive real quick, can we talk about the differences between the pro layout and the premium layout? And which ones you like better? Very key. The answer is pro, which I like better. And I sold Nick my premium. but when I saw the premium, I was like, wow, look at that Captain Marvel ramp. Man, that's the most vertical ramp I've ever seen. That's going to be awesome, you know, and it looks awesome, and when it works, it's awesome, but practically, it's really hard to make that shot, and the Pro actually opens up the shot because it replaces it with a spinner, which means you can actually backhand it. Even if you're accurate on the premium and you can make that really cool shot, you could only do it from the left flipper. On the Pro, you get to access that shot from the left and right flipper, so it just makes the game more fluid and flows better, like Pros in general do for certain. So I'm a Pro guy in the end. That's what I say. Nick, what say you? Ooh, I agree with you that it opens it up more, but I think the premium is more rewarding with the Captain Marvel ramp. Now, sometimes, yeah, you'll run into ramps that aren't set up well on location maybe or need a little tweaking, but once you have that kind of dialed in, It's a repeatable shot. You have to be accurate. It's a tighter shot than the Pro, but I think it is more fun and rewarding, and there are things you can do with the marble ramp, such as the multipliers. I thought you were going to say that. So hold on here a second before we get into it. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Nick, but I have to do it. No, go ahead. All right. A lot of our chat will not know necessarily that the Premium not just has a different layout than the Pro in that sense, but has a different code. and the code is different enough that it can create other opportunities for strategy that might give you a new category of strategy on the premium that does not exist on the pro. And that would be the fact that the Captain Marvel ramp allows you, and the premium allows you to, with repeated shots, get it up to 5x the value maximum, as I recall. And so you can make the Captain Marvel shots worth five times as much as they normally are. And so if you get into certain binary hurry-ups, which you can get into, that becomes a viable strat. Whereas on the Pro, it doesn't even exist. Not even like, oh, is that a good strata or not? It doesn't even exist. I'll stop there. Nick, did I say that right? That's absolutely correct. 5x max multiplier on the marble ramp, which you can then leverage to all kinds of fun stuff, which we'll talk about. Yeah, we could do that. Although, don't hate me, Nick, because I don't know if we should get into it. It's only on the premium. I mean, you know, we can't go for that. And the Bat has a Pro for what it's worth, right? Right. So, Nick, since you own a premium and you've probably mastered it, and you pay attention to game setup, every time I've played a premium on location, that is not actually a loop ramp, the Captain Marvel ramp, it's a reject ramp. Have you found the best way to set up the game to get that thing to work? Is there a pitch? Is there, yeah, what have you found? It just takes a little tweaking and setup. Sometimes you have to readjust the wire form on the ramp and maybe the depth of where it sits in the mount. And also there's a modification you can do on the left side of it to help guide the ball straighter up the ramp, and that will help you. It prevents it from rattling, which will take energy away and not make the loop. But it can be done, and it's repeatable. Another thing, too, is if it gets very dirty, it won't quite have enough energy to make it up that ramp. So it is a holding the premium back, I will say. There you have it. Watch the ramps, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, watch your ramps. And also fresh flippers, as Wesley mentioned, yeah, making sure your flipper mix are strong and well-maintained. Do you think we could go try diving into this first initial strategy next together? Yeah, let's do it. I think you'd agree at least that this is the go-to strategy, though there might be a few others that are more complex. We'll call it the status quo strategy, perhaps. If you were going to tell people what to do in a tournament and to get high scoring, I think this is the reliable one to go to as the most explainable, perhaps. And it's not that explainable, but the most. Well, and excuse me for stepping on your toes, but I think the first thing you want to know if you have this game in a tournament is the game on competition mode. Oh, I'm going to get to it, Cale. Okay, good. Toes stepped on. Yes. Achievement unlocked. Oh, believe me, we're getting to it. All right, so to break down this strategy, we have to talk about the three parts of it. Portal locks, number one, to get, then mode, and then Thor multiball. So let's talk about portal locks first. Deep breath for that. Portal locks are really important, but the way to get them is darn confusing. It's not an obvious thing. If I said, how do you get the Thor multiball? Oh, you just hit the captive ball a few times. Even the Iron Man is a little bit tougher to explain. You have to spell iron on the in lanes, and then three shots to the tower. Not that bad to explain. Portal locks, harder to explain, and yet they are critical to scoring well in a tournament on this game. So let's try it. With portal locks, step one, what you want to do is any one of the following five things I have on the screen. Specifically, you can get four combos. You can get any one of two secret skill shots we'll get into. You can get the Computer Grid Award later on, a Hawkeye Challenge. Those are some ways. There's probably a Mystery Award that does it as well. You have to do that, any one of those things. And we're going to talk about those things in depth in a moment. After you do any one of those things, then you have to spin the disc on a pro, or if it's a premium, the disc raises up, and then you have to go into, it's a much easier shot, you just have to go into the subway underneath the disc. So I wanted to break down the individual ways you get the Port-A-Lux. Now, if you're watching this, I still want to give you a strategy that you could remember. And it's going to be unlikely that you remember every single way to get a portalock. But the simplest way to explain it is four combos. So in this game, when you hit any major shot, you're going to see some white arrows light. The white arrows on other shots, you have to hit them. And every time you do, you get a combo. And as soon as you get four combos, you don't have to get four combos in a row. You don't have to make four shots, you know, one shot and then another four in a combo to get it. You just have to collect over the course of your ball, or even the game, four combos. So I want to give you an example here of a video to explain that, and then we'll take discussion and see what questions come out of that. All right. So here's your combo system first. Way to get a portal lock. Easiest to explain. And for this, I'm going to call out thank you for Stern for hosting this Stern Pro Circuit Championship. I think this is going to be Jared August facing Ray Day, actually, to show you what this looks like. So I want you to see if he can make a shot. As soon as he makes a shot, there's flashing arrows right here. Two flashing white arrows. I'm excited to see what their strategies are for this game. I am too. I mean, I'm expecting combos. Do you agree with that? Two combos right there. So the screen says combos two. Light portal lock in two combos. So what that's saying is he's made two. He just needs another two combos. And he's going to miss this shot. That's my strategy. Yeah.
    26:28
    That's a start combo. I love this game. I think this is a soul shard. It's four combos. It says light portal lock awarded. And once that happens, your disc will flash. There's a circle insert here that says portal lock. And your disc is going to flash green and yellow. That hard mode.
    26:48
    I might note this is a premium on portals. Pro settings for portal locks. You're right, because you can see the subway here. You can see the marble vertical ramp there. But it's still turned off the subway, so you have to spin the disk. Portal kind of pro settings, like you said. So that's how you get a portal lock through the combo method. Nick, did I say it right? Do you have any questions about that? That's correct. Combos is the easiest way to remember to get portal locks. The more combos you get, the more portal locks you'll earn. Pretty simple way to think of it. A portal lock. Oh, I'm going to find it. Okay. All right. Let's go with that. All right. So now what is this portal lock? Why do I care about this portal lock? So what a portal lock does is it doesn't do anything after you get it initially. It's like nothing ever happened once you get it. So you might not notice it. And that's a problem potentially with the game is what I'm saying. When you start a mode later on, and to start a mode, you have to then spin the disc just enough so that it spells the word strange because it's Dr. Strange. spin the disc, and then hit this banana ramp or gauntlet ramp or whatever you might call it. If you do that, you will then be in a mode. And as soon as you start your mode, instead of starting with having that mode with one ball, you now have two balls in the mode. So it becomes a multiball. It turns the mode itself into a multiball. But much more important than that is it gives you a playfield multiplier. So if I got one portal lock, I will now, when I start a mode, at some point, the next mode I start, it could be the next ball, it could be two balls from that point. But the next mode I start, I will have two balls in that mode, and I will be a 2x play field instead of 1x play field. Does that make sense, Cale? And I try not to say that too much. I apologize. Yeah. So let's say you start out the game, and on the skill shot, you get that portal lock, right? Oh, we're going to talk about the skill shot method. Okay, let's say that happened. So now that means me as a player, I have one portal lock. Yeah. You still have to spin the disc annoyingly, but yes, to get the portal lock. All that means is you've lit the portal lock. You still have to spin the disc to get it. Okay, so then I spin the disc, and then I have a portal lock. I have one portal lock. Correct. You get the skill shot, and then you spin the disc. Now you have one portal lock. So you're telling me then if I start a multiball or if I start a mode, which is also known as a quest. Is that correct? A quest. Time gem, reality gem, mind gem, power gem, et cetera. So that means now I have two balls in that quest? That is correct. Correct. And you're at 2x for as long as you keep your two balls in that quest. So as soon as I start that quest, when I have one portal lock, it's going to shoot out another ball. With a ball save. I'm in a two-ball multi-ball. And 2x play through. 2x scoring. Okay. And that's important because the quests are where you can score big in this game.
    29:41
    There's other ways to score, but that's a big way to score in the game. and so if you can start a quest aka a mode with multiple balls you'll probably do better in the mode and moreover you will be a 2x for all of your shots in that mode as long as you keep two balls going so so those are the so there are basically three multi balls in this game right you have the thor iron man and then portal locks right they eventually honed this concept in king kong where they called it the island lock and it's quite similar in the sense of king kong in that you have your two regular multiballs, the King Kong multiball, the Pit multiball with a magnet, and then there's the third type, which is multiballs in modes, which you get through island locks, which I think you get by climbing, but let's not get into that. There's a difference in that it doesn't give you any playfield multiplier, but whatever. Come on, that's for another video, man. You're right, I went too far. I went too far already. But yes, portal locks are like island locks in King Kong. If you know one, you might know the other, in other words. But they are especially really important in Avengers because they give you a play-doh multiplier.
    30:43
    Now, if we've understood that, I can now tell you that you can actually get two portal locks before you start a multi-ball if you want. And if you... Mode, I'm sorry. I want to be precise with my words. And if you get two portal locks before you start your next quest, then when you start your quest, you will have three balls, and you will be in 3x playfield for that. So get at least one portal lock through combos. And if you can, let's talk about these other ways to get more portal locks. but the most reliable, friendliest way to get portal loss is four combos, four white arrows.
    31:18
    Hey, thanks so much for people at the pinball at the beach letting us know you're there and having a good time. I heard Keith Elwin just arrived. My gosh, he's probably not watching this. I got a message, yeah.
    31:29
    This is old news to him. All right, Cale, so far any questions on the portal loss? I know Nick gets them.
    31:36
    Yep, for sure. And then someone asked if there are more multiballs. There are. They're much cheaper in the game, but we'll talk about those later. And then Retro Gamer. All right. And Cale looks frozen, so we'll ignore him, and hopefully he figures it out one day. No, I'm here. Oh, good. Oh, sorry. You're just perfect. I was just paying attention. Like a bonsai tree.
    31:54
    All right. Now, one of the things, we'll get into the clarity of the game that I wish existed, is if you notice on the Avengers layout, which we'll show right there, is where is the 2X insert? And where is the 3X insert? it's not there. Where is it on the display that tells you 2x playfield 3x playfield? It's not there as far as I know. So some of the clarity that's missing in the game, respectfully is that it just doesn't tell you these things That's my claim on it. Nick, would you fight me on that? I agree, that's my one if I had one major criticism, it's clarity on this game and... We're going to go into clarity Yep, so I agree with that All right, but let's go back into the strategy. We talked about getting the combos. We showed the video of how to get the combos. Now we have to take a deep breath and talk about the other ways to get portal locks. This is where you might fall asleep, people watching here, but we're going to do our best to do it. So there is a secret skill shot where, and there are two secret skill shots for what it's worth, but there's a secret skill shot. You full plunge, and then you shoot the middle drop target at a very specific time, and it gets even deeper than I just said, which is it matters at this point, Kale, I could bring into your earlier comment, is this competition settings or not? So on competition settings, it always is you're going to time the skill shot so that you hit the middle drop when the flashing insert is on bingo card number six. And that sounds random. Let me show it to you, and then I'll explain it.
    33:31
    So when the game first starts, it looks like this on competition settings. On competition settings, there's a bingo card over here with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 inserts. And I'm numbering them like you would a phone, let's say, numbers 1 through 9. And there are three that are already lit for you. And those represent these three on the screen right here, these lighted, lit red three. There's going to be a flashing square that goes from here to here to here to here to here to here. And what I'm telling you is that you wait for the flashing insert to be here, then you full plunge,
    34:09
    then by the time the ball reaches the right flipper, the insert should be over here, number 6, and then you perfectly hit the middle drop target. And if you do that, on competition settings, hit the middle drop target, exactly the middle one, when the flashing insert is number 6, it will award you this number 6 award, which is bonus X. But more importantly, you form a bingo line, one, two, three things, which happens to be portal lock right here. And on competition settings, portal lock is always right there. Whereas on non-competition settings, standard settings, it is random where the portal lock is. And it may well be the case that you can't even get a portal lock with a skill shot on standard settings because that's totally random. Like let's say, for example, portal lock was right here. and let's say I waited for the flashing insert to be right there. I could get that, but I don't have this insert, and I don't have that insert, and so I won't even get the portal lock in that scenario. So that's my claim is a very complicated way to get a portal lock from a skill shot. Full plunge, wait for the flashing insert to be on number six, hit the middle drop, and it has to be in competition settings, and then you get a portal lock lit on a spinning disc that you then have to spin. Nick, agree that I said that right. Yep, that's absolutely right. So MNRetroGamer also said you can hit the other drop targets to lock in the bingo card. So you missed a skill shot. You can still collect it later. But this is just for the skill shot, yes. Correct. So far, that's right. And I wanted to show Nick also. Now, you posted a video, Nick. I'm showing – there's a little bit of Inception here. Hey, it's me. Hey, that's you. And you were wearing a different shirt. But you posted this on your YouTube account, and you did not have competition settings on. And so what you have to do if you're walking up to this game and you want to care this deeply about getting a portal lock, as I do, and you do, Nick, and maybe you do, Cale, which is you have to hold up your flipper so that you can see the info screen, and then you go to the info screen and you look at where your portal lock is listed. In this case, Nick's portal lock is right here, which means if he wanted to get a portal lock, he would have to get this award and this award and this award. In other words, three sets of drops, perfectly timed three sets of drops, to get that award, that award, that award, and then get a line for his bingo that gives him the portal lock.
    36:35
    But that means that no matter what he does, he cannot get it on his skill shot right here. Nick, do you agree with that? That's true. Yeah, that's tough. And also, one interesting point is if you're playing this in a tournament and it's on standard settings, so it's like the way you're seeing Nick playing right now, So it's actually, it is randomized, but it's the same for every player. That's correct. So if you could see one player look what they have, it's the same for you when you're a player too. We also had a comment from chat that there are other multiballs in the game, but I would say that my traditional approach is to differentiate standard base game multiballs from mini wizard modes. Because all games have mini wizard modes with, you know, like Black End and Metallica or something as a multiball. But on the other hand, like I'm not going to tell people that it's one of the multiballs, or not in the main game at least. That's my personal way I describe it. So, for example, in Avengers, yeah, there's Black Order multiball and Battle Royale and then Thanos attacks and other things, but I just not consider, or, yeah, Battle Thanos. But I'm just not going to consider them for the sake of argument. Do you guys find that fair? Yep, I understand. Yep. Okay.
    37:44
    All right, so hopefully I've explained. I haven't really fully explained the drop targets yet, and we will, I promise. We will get into it. But all I meant to do is explain this way to get a portal lock. And I think one thing you made a missearch is the reason you get the award for hitting that center drop target is because it rewards you all three drop targets for hitting the center one on the skill shot. Yeah, I have a whole section later diving into drop targets and explaining all things. I didn't get into it now, but, yeah, it's fair to say. The only thing hitting the middle drop target does get you is it acts as if you hit all three drop targets to next point on whatever flashing insert it's on. So if a flashing insert is here and you hit the middle drop target, it would get you all three drop targets down, rather. Only in the skill shot. Yeah, and it points to the skill shot. Right. In the skill shot. Sorry. Yeah, only in the skill shot. And it just happens to be that portal lock on the competition settings is always here so that if you hit the middle drop when the flashing insert was right here on this bonus X, number six, It would give you all three drops down, give you that bonus X award, which would give you the bingo line, which would give you the portal lock. Pretty complicated stuff.
    38:58
    Okay. There are other ways to get the – well, let's show it, actually. Hold on. How about this? One second. Let's go into a video to show you somebody getting the skill shot this way. Bought a few strange letters, so that's nice. It's not a difficult setting. Right. That furthers your point. It's getting into the sole a lot easier. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what Jason's doing. He was holding up the left flipper. Can you turn that down just a little? Now that's horizontal on the grid. That's the portal lock that everyone loves to shoot on the SuperSkills. All right, you can wait. Look at the insert. Now he's about to point. Looks like he's going for it. Now wait for the insert to be here. Middle drop. And you called it. Yep.
    39:38
    That is a standard opening. See how it says point and arrow to portal lock? and it gave you this bonus X. And then it wipes away that line, by the way. It wipes away those inserts clean. So that's how you get the skill shot on competition settings, just like what he did there.
    39:55
    Video evidence. Cool? Cool. I bet this looks like a cool match. Zoller versus Bowens? I know what happened, but I won't tell you. It happened four years ago. I think we all know what happened. Yeah, I think we do.
    40:08
    But this is actually Jason Zoller, one of his favorite games, he said before. And so there are people who really deeply love this game, especially a lot of high-level tournament players, that's for sure, who could take advantage of the complexity of the code.
    40:23
    Other things you can do. There is a separate skill shot, but this is really hard to plan for. It's mostly accidental, so that's why I don't really talk about it. I haven't really talked about it. So you plunge the ball so that the ball goes here. You know, let me use a, I'll go red or something. Sorry, so you plunge the ball, and it perfectly lands right here, and then comes down. If you were to do that, it would instantly award you also a portal lock. I don't tend to talk about it much because it's not really so easily done, is what I mean. It's very dependent on the copy of the game, and even then, it's difficult to pull off. Right, so it's just a cool thing when it happens, and if you're wondering why it happened, that's why it happened. There's an alternate way to get that skill shot, which is careening off the top drop target, let's say, or post on the full plunge, and it goes back up reverse through that lane will award you that skill shot. Love that point, and very true. And it happens more than you think.
    41:25
    All right, let's see a computer grid. I could also tell you, I was going to put a video of it, but we're going to get into the computer grids, but that's just basically what we talked about. But imagine you do the same thing I said, but not on a skill shot. You wait for it to go to number six. You hit any drop target to lock it in, and then you hit the rest of the drop targets to collect it on competition settings. It would give you a portal lock.
    41:45
    There's also this thing called Hawkeye Challenge, which we can get into it later, and we will. But those are the ways to get portal locks. And that sums up portal lock step one strategy of this process, one out of three things. If you get two of these portal locks, you get three X. If you get one of them, you get 2x on your quest.
    42:05
    Any questions, Kale? And I assume not from you, Nick, on portal loss. No, this has cleared up so much for me. I really appreciate it, Serge. But if you take one thing away from this, the real thing away, is just make four combos. Four flashing white arrows, and you're probably going to be okay now and do well in the game.
    42:23
    All right, now the second thing, the mode. Easier to explain here. You have to spin the strange disc to prep the mode, and then you shoot the gauntlet ramp, and then you get to choose with your flippers and your action button which mode you pick. If you don't want to listen to this whole thing, the answer is Reality Gem. That's the answer. And that's it. Do Reality Gem. Don't listen to anything else. But there are technically three strategies of which mode you pick. Standard strat is Reality Gem. That's the right answer for 99% of people. Big brain strat is Mind Gem. And we're not going to explain it yet. I will later, why Mind Gem works for this. But it requires deep knowledge of the perk system of the game, which has, I kid you not, 108 different permutations of potential possibilities of perks, and we will get into all 108.
    43:08
    But it really requires you to understand that, and so I'm not going to tell you. Unless you deeply understand that, you don't do that. And then there's the third strategy, which is more just whispers, whispers of something that I claim is for no one, sorry, Nick, which is time gem strat. Tell me why I'm wrong on the time gem strat. Well, you're not wrong because that strategy is more for, I'll say, a fun game or like a progress game and like a home setting, not a tournament strategy. Good. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I agree. It's actually good. It's a very good mode to start with. I'm assuming score is what people are going for. But if you're going for like defeating the game, perhaps, and getting all this stuff and computer grid frenzy and all sorts of things, time gem is probably actually the right strat for like a journey player. I didn't even think about considering that. Yeah, that's why I had three categories of strategies earlier. Do you want to say your strategies? I cut you off like a monster. Well, the categories are tournament strategies, which we're essentially covering. And then you have fun strategies, like, let's say, just to see if I can do this. Let's see what I can pull off. Let's see what I can stack. And then you have progress strategies, which will progress you through the game faster.
    44:17
    Damn it, you're right. I wish I had said that so well that I regret ever saying anything to stop you from saying it. It's all good, sir. All right. All right, so that's your mode. And once you start this mode, immediately when you start your mode, now if you've got portal locks, you're in a multiball, in other words. So that's step two. Now step three. Thor multiball, pretty easy to explain. Hit cat to ball three times.
    44:40
    Now I want you to put together all three things for you, all right, and tell you the order that I recommend doing this in. So hopefully we understand the three things. Let's say the order I recommend doing this thing in is, okay, step one. get one or ideally two portal lock awards. You can get them with the combos. You can get them with a skill shot. At least do one to get into 2x play field in your request. Then, step two is you're going to spin the strange disc to prep the mode to be started on the gauntlet ramp. But don't start the mode yet. Try to hit the Thor captive ball two times to prep it. I'm willing to drain on ball one to set this perfect stack up because the stack matters so much to execute that it's okay. You might drain ball one and have 3 million points and somebody else has 12 million points and you're like, oh, they're winning. But if you execute the prep for it, then you will get 100 million points. So don't think you have to do this on one ball. And I often don't. I'll try to, I focus on all these things. But here's where the party starts. So the party starts as soon, after you prep the ball, the cap the ball by hitting it only two times, then you hit the gauntlet ramp. You choose your mode. Answer is reality, Jim. then as soon as the ball comes out of the lock because it locks right on the upper flipper you could immediately hit the disc which is the first shot of Reality Gem so you need to hit the disc and that lights all other shots of Reality Gem and then suddenly you're in multiball because you have your portal locks and then you have to hit the capital only one time to start the multiball and now that's the party and then you go crazy so that's the full strat I'll show a video of it and then we'll talk about it and see if you agree or disagree oh I have one question before you start is there anything on the play field that indicates how many hits you have on the Thor ball? Yes. It says in letters Thor T-H-O-R and what you have to do is fully spell Thor and then hit the capital ball one more time it'll be a flashing insert and I will show it in fact let me show it now so over here is T-H-O-R and over here is a flashing insert for Thor multiball when you start the game it spots you the letter T, and it spots you the letter H, which is why to start the game on default settings, you only have to hit it three times. One for O, another for R, and then the third one for this.
    47:00
    Cool. And we will show that with the video. Let's go to the tape. Tell me if it's too loud. Chungus is in chat. I'm sure there's always Chungus is in chat. Make a picture and that video is all you'm doing. Right now is 5.06. You want it on mute, in other words. All right, he gets a skill shot. Look at that. Secret skill shot. That's his portal lock. Now he needs to spin that disc. You see how it's flashing green?
    47:26
    Portal lock open. Shoot disc for 2x quest scores. But he didn't fully hit the disc yet. He has to spin it more. See how it's, like, not spelled strange yet? It's still flashing green? It won't work until he spins it. He still didn't spin it enough. It's not fully spelled strange. He has to hit this disc one more time. It still didn't spell it yet. He has to hit that disc, right? Now he's going to hit it.
    47:49
    There it is. Now it says Portalonk 1. Quest scoring doubled. All right. Now he can either prep Thor or he could start the mode right away. He chooses to probably start the mode right away.
    48:04
    I think he's hit the Thor once already. I could tell that for what it's worth because there's these lights here, and three of them are lit. I think he just randomly hit the Captable once already. So now he's ready to start his mode, and he's going to consider reality versus mind gem, as all top players do, and then, as most top players do, pick reality gem, is what I would say. So he's like, meh, meh, reality. And then as soon as the ball drops from here, the very first shot is the spinning disc. So you want to wail on the spinning disc immediately.
    48:38
    And notice he's in two-ball multiball right now. First thing he's going to do with his two ball, because he has a portal lock, is he's going to hit the captive ball. Thor multiball is lit. And notice it's flashing right here. And he hit it while I was talking. And so that is it. That is the full stack. That's your 100 million points pretty quickly. Fantastic. Okay, thank you all for joining us. We really enjoyed your company. That's got to be it, right, Serge? With the strategy talk, it is. We're not done with the episode But that's it for the strategy talk Nick, what do you say to that strategy? Reasonable? Yep, pretty standard strategy The only thing It may be a little too deep But the more that disc is spun in that reality gem mode It increases the shot multiplier Up to 7x So that is displayed on those strange letters there So you always want to be swinging that ring While you're hitting those shots Keep that multiplier up Strongest is in check strange. I'm sure there's always junglers in chat. There's seven letters. I almost blew that. There's seven letters in the word strange. And so, yeah, the more letters you have, the more X you get, up to seven X, as you said. Yep. Cool. Look, portal lock. Okay.
    49:50
    I'm ready to move on from strategy and go for a further deep dive into the game. Nick and Kayla, are you ready? Well one question about that strat I like that and I completely understand it and this is very cool and I can wait to try it Just doing that what kind of points can I expect if I can pull that off in one ball 100 million. Okay. I'm doing really good in the tournament. Right. You're going to win, most likely. I mean, it depends who you're playing, of course, but in standard league night at electric bat, I would say you're going to win if you pull that off in strategy. You don't need to do it in ball one. You just need to prep everything. People are like, maybe I won't go for the portal lock or something. No, you have to do that, is what I'm saying, for the win. Gotcha. These are the steps.
    50:37
    You could do them in a little different order. I prefer to hit the captive ball on Thor by hitting it at least two times, or at most two times, I should say. You don't want to start it accidentally, of course. But the portal locks have a very short ball save on them, whereas the Thor does not for interesting reasons. And so if you get into Portalock, but you don't start your Thor and you co-drain back down to one ball and then you start your Thor, then you'll lose the 2x. So you have to maintain multiple balls for you to maintain your playfield multiplier, in other words.
    51:10
    Okay. So that's why I put it in that order, in other words. All right. We are now ready to go on to the next phase of our podcast where I'm going to make an argument here. Here's the argument I'm putting forth. All right. Avengers has an A-plus layout. Players love Avengers, but they're not in love with Avengers. Why is that? And now, when you break that statement down, there are several premises to discuss. Let's review all three premises of my argument, and then we'll take them each one by one, discuss them, see if you agree, Nick and Cale. So the three premises of that argument are, number one, that it does have an A-plus layout. This is like an all-time great, you know, top-tier layout, I would say.
    51:51
    Premise number two is players do really like Avengers, but they're not, like, in love with Avengers, I'd say. And then premise number three is part of the reason players don't necessarily love it is there's some clarity with the code and they find it unclear. Those are my three premises. Are you ready to argue?
    52:10
    Cale and Nick will start one by one on those premises. Yeah, well, let's just go with I 100% agree that Avengers has an A-plus layout. It has what I think is the only dead-end shot that makes sense in pinball. You mean here on the pro?
    52:30
    Well, it's both. Or even this one. Sorry, you meant this one. Yes. That's the greatest dead-end shot. It's very good, actually. Yeah, and also, I think it's a really friendly layout. Like, if you don't know what to do, just hit that big, fat ramp. You know, have fun with it, you know. But it's like I think it's a very playable layout, and it's very interesting, especially when you throw the premium in there. Yeah, here's the premium, by the way, right there. Maybe I'll share that, you know, at the same time. And I like what you're saying about this ramp is unique. It was the first of its kind that can be hit with three flippers. You could hit it with this flipper, you could hit it with this flipper, and you could hit it with that flipper. That is an innovative layout design that's never been done before, as I know it. It also has the best dead-end shot, you're right, in pinball. It goes up, it comes back down, but it feels cool.
    53:26
    Nick, what do you think about the design first? Do you think it's as great as I think it is? Yeah, as for layout, I mean, yeah, I agree with the A-plus grade there, and I feel I think we're justified also because I believe Keith Ellin on a podcast interview of some sorts, I can't recall which one, but he also claimed that it was his favorite layout to shoot. So I think, I mean, what more evidence do you need, right? Nick, maybe a follow-up question there. Of all the L-Win games, they all have great layouts, so it's hard to rank them, but do you have a favorite layout to shoot?
    54:05
    Yeah, this would be it. Yeah, I think so, too. Maybe King Kong, to me. I'm not sure. I still love Jurassic Park overall. It's always been my favorite. But for, like, pure layout, I'm like Avengers versus King Kong. And I think it's because you can combo so much stuff on this game, like, from any vector, any direction. Like, you can just really keep comboing this for quite a while. Cale, do you have an opinion there on your favorite Elwynn layout from a shooting perspective? Oh, mine's by far Kong. Yeah. I would have said Avengers until Kong, actually. That's true. It's a lot of fun to play, right? Mm-hmm. And you know what? I might throw a Bond 60th there, surprisingly. Man, that's a fun play. That's a fun layout.
    54:50
    Like, best street-level layout to me. Yeah, it's really a shout. You know, we've beat a dead horse about this.
    54:58
    Yeah, but it's a shame that more people are not able to experience that game. Come to the electric bat, Cal. We're going to put it out in route. Mm-hmm. And it does well. the weather's perfect that's so true let's talk about some other things I think that are great on this layout on the premium it has a subway at a time when Stern really didn't have many subways at the time of its release it was not putting things like that in its games it has a shot through the pops and people love shots through pop bumpers you know there's a feeling that you get by going through them you know Elwyn did it already on Iron Maiden with like a ramp shot through the pop bumpers I don't know what do you What do you say to that? Jurassic Park? Jurassic Park. Shot through the pumpers, through the smart missile. It doesn't do it on every game. Yeah, it's really interesting you bring up the Subway because I think the last game, Stern game, modern Stern game that had a Subway was Ghostbusters Premium.
    55:54
    Oh, interesting point. Well, Avengers came out after that. So take that. What do you mean? Avengers Premium has a Subway also. Well, yeah, but I'm saying the last game they put. before. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We're talking semantics. I apologize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, we're on the same page. All right, and it's got a spinning disc. Now, right after this game came out, there was like a whole spate of spinning disc games. There was like J.J.P. Guns N' Roses, Bond 60 if itself had it or whatever. But like Guns N' Roses, it was an independent design that happened to come out like right around the same time-ish.
    56:31
    And so like you started seeing a lot more spinning discs, but it wasn't in a lot of games when this came out. Now we're just like, oh, another spinning disc.
    56:38
    Now Jaws has two of them. Right now Jaws has them or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And I think even in Jurassic Park it's not a spinning disc, but they have a horizontal helicopter spinner when you plunge the ball. And I feel like Keith has always wanted to put in more horizontal spinning things. And the Jeep is somewhat of a spinning disc. You know what? In a sense, we're all spinning discs, Kale. Floating in the madness of the universe.
    57:05
    Yeah, on your point about the shot that pops there, Serge, it is satisfying in this game, but I think it's underutilized. It does have like a shield bonus shot you can capitalize for it, but compared to Jurassic Park, for example, it's not quite as satisfying as that smart missile shot. Although it's similar, it's in layout. It goes like that, yeah. It's not quite as satisfying. They don't make it into something. I know that in the code, shout out to Ray Day here, in the code, if he's still there, If you go through that shot and you don't hit the pop bumpers and it just goes through like that, it will count as if you had 10 pop bumpers towards your leveling up of Captain America, which we're going to get into leveling up later. So they do program some stuff into it that has some depth, but you don't feel the reward from it. There is a super jackpot in Black Order multiball that's tied with that, and that's probably the most satisfying one. That's a deep cut right there. it's got I love this left orbit spinner where that spinner rips and it just feels great I don't know to me that's like a great spinner rip shot on the left orbit and then the right orbit it turns into a ramp and I think people love orbits that turn into ramps that's my opinion on it like Stranger Things has it on the left you know orbits that turn into ramps what do you say to that Nick what do you think about the orbits on this game yeah the orbits are satisfying and like I said that Right, orbit to ramp is kind of like Jaws, which came later. But, yeah, they're satisfying, and they're a big part of the game, especially in some of the modes. So it's important to be able to hit those consistently.
    58:36
    Yeah, and then, of course, there's the thing we didn't really talk about so much, which is this Captain Marvel ramp on the Premium. And as I mentioned on the Pro, it's just a backhandable spinner shot. I still like the Pro better, but I could see the argument for this shot, and you could dial it in to your point, Nick. But I think there are not many games with this level of vertical shot like this. Actually, a recent homebrew came out that I thought would be fun to show, which is the Tony Hawk pinball game. And you could see kind of a similar thing there. Sorry, I can't draw on this. But a similar kind of vertical thing there. And I think there's one against the wall, actually, of the game, of the backboard of the game with a flipper there. That's pretty cool, too. So that game really is a good idea for some verticality. I wonder if they're going to do that in Sonic, you know, with J.J.P. because these are games that seem like they could really use them. You know, for example, Tony Hawk, Sonic, stuff like that. I didn't really need it in Avengers thematically, but it's still pretty cool.
    59:32
    Agreed. Anyway, I think that covers the layout. I mean, there's really just no other layout like this game.
    59:39
    And I think one of the things that you see in games with, like, how does a layout affect design that's perhaps worth talking about is, so here, the dead end shot like you said, Kale, has an opportunity for you to trap a ball with a magnet there and then have another situation where you could hit a ball there during Iron Man multiball and get like a double jackpot by hitting the ball that's in there I wish they used that mechanism more in the game, like I think you could have made a moment out of it, it happens in Iron Man multiball but you don't even notice it because it's like chaos I wish there was somehow a way for you to even start a multiball that way like you trap a ball up there in the magnet It holds it. Maybe they couldn't power the magnet for that long if possible. It probably magnetized the balls over time, too. It probably can't work, but I wish it could is what I'm saying. That would be a cool moment. That would be cool.
    60:31
    All right. I guess other things I could say about the code. We talked about how the shot through the pops is hard, so you should reward the player in some way. In this case, it adds ten pop-upers to Captain America, which is okay. It has three drops here, similar to Walking Dead, but it uses them very differently. Like, Walking Dead makes it a centerpiece of the game to start modes and to get bloodbath. And here it's sort of like the parallel thing that's going on in the game, this, like, bingo situation that we'll get into. So just interesting decisions that are, like, I don't know, some are good, some I wish were different, but it's all subjective. Anything else you would say about kind of layout and maybe how that should influence code?
    61:10
    No, I think you kind of covered most of the main points. Is the art too busy? Kale, should we put up another Kale's Color Corner?
    61:20
    No, I don't think. I think it looks beautiful. I love the art. I love it. Yeah. I love Zombie Eddie stuff. I do, too.
    61:30
    When was the last time we've seen him do a game? Pokemon? I don't know. I'm kidding. I have no idea. He's probably not. He's too big now. Yeah, what was his last game? X-Men. Oh, X-Men, yeah. Oh, that is. That was his last play video. Which is also an awesome art. Which is kind of similar art, color palette and everything. He's the Marvel guy. He does great. Yeah, he's the Marvel guy. Does a great job. I hope they do like Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse, the animated one, and then they get him on that too.
    61:58
    I'd buy that. Okay. All right. So we were covering an argument here. We're up to our second premise. Second premise is players love Avengers, but they don't love it that much. They're not in love with it. Do you buy that premise, Nick?
    62:13
    Totally. I mean, yeah, I feel like most people, yeah, they just don't. I mean, they may play the game, they may enjoy it, but they don't really feel it calling them back frequently maybe. Or it's too punishing maybe, I think, and I have some notes about that, about how the game can seem maybe a little extra punishing compared to other similar era games. And, Cale, I assume you're going to back this up too, based on the data at the back. yeah but I it's weird no no but I agree but I can't put my finger on like why oh we will try Kel that's why we're gonna get into this that's why we're not even there yet Kel yeah oh we're going to well because right now I'm thinking about games like Star Wars people are loving that game I don't care what you hear other podcasters say like you know you're right about that this game People speak with their tokens and quarters, and this game is getting played a lot. You know, I love that you're saying that, and I always love that you're here with the operator perspective, which I often feel is missing on podcasts. I feel it is missing on podcasts, you know. People think a lot of things, but, you know, what are you putting your quarters into? And I'm sure that's different. Now, there's a different point about is it selling to homebuyers, so that matters too, obviously. But in the arcade, you know where people are putting their money. Right. And my point being is I don't think everybody that's playing Star Wars is very clear on rules or, you know, what path they're going on. They just like playing it.
    63:49
    Yeah, although I will give Star Wars, and we did on our last Pen Pals show, got the award for most rules clear lighting, that it actually uses lighting to tell you things. Sometimes I'm like this game, which doesn't have inserts for 2X or 3X and stuff like that. and so I think that, yeah, I think it does, it is clearer. Star Wars, nobody understands all code, right? But I think, would you agree that Star Wars is a clearer, the new one, Fall of the Empire, is a clearer code rules than Avengers? For sure. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's not complicated. I'm sure it's quite complicated in Star Wars, but there's some stuff there.
    64:28
    We got somebody in the chat says that another reason people don't love it is There's nothing that eats the ball, and that is the thing in pinball. You've got to be eating the ball to be B.
    64:39
    I think the game layout is great. I have no problem with the mechs and the towers, magnetron and all that. Portal sort of eats the ball on the premium. Yeah, Portal eats the ball. Yeah. There you go.
    64:50
    All right. I'm going to give more than opinions here. I'm going to hit you with some data, guys, as I tend to do on this podcast. You know, pin side is not the be-all, end-all, but it does collect a lot of readings on games. So I've set up here all the games, except for Bond 60 if I took that out, all the games of the standard modern cornerstone games Elwynn has made for Stern, and what their ranking is on Pinside. Godzilla number one, no surprise there, has been for a long time. Sometimes battles with other games that come out that are new, but generally Godzilla stays up on the list. We've got Jaws number two, amazing game. We can do a deep dive of that one day. Jurassic Park, Iron Maiden. Those already four games are like near top four, and top ten rather, of all time, of all pinball games. You've got King Kong at 23, dropping down a bit, and we've talked about that. But at the bottom, not bad. It's not like it's a bad game. Nobody's saying it's a bad game. To me, it's like, I'll tell you what it's like to me and my own opinion of the game, because otherwise I might come off as offensive and I don't mean to be. It's like my least favorite Tarantino movie. I'd still rather watch it than a Michael Bay movie, is what I'm saying. And I like Michael Bay movies, too, if you're a movie person. That's my opinion of it.
    66:01
    So to all the people that think the Pennside rankings is bullshit, I can tell you for earnings, which are people's exact order, right? It's this exact order, man. I love that you're saying that. That's what I thought, too. This is the order for earnings. Right. It's just what people gravitate towards, too. It's just another way to get at the information. And I'll even show you another one. We could talk about the price of games and whether it's held up. Now, this is trickier to do. I'm only looking at LEs, and LEs have themselves changed in price. They've gone up in price. They've also changed the allotment of how many LEs were made, so that makes it hard to compare. So with that caveat in mind, I just point out, like, Godzilla, you know, still holds its value in LEs after many, many years now. Look at the green line, if you're curious, for thousands of dollars for the LE, for example, holding well above 10K. And this hold, I think we need to note, this is holding way better than Bitcoin.
    67:04
    This is a good point, Kel. To the moon, right, HODL? Yes. Okay, good. Diamond hands. Let's do it. We're going to keep going here. I thought it would be interesting to share this financial data with us here. We've got Jurassic Park holding above 10K. Now, this was tricky because they had an LE, but then they had the 30th anniversary edition. But you can see the COVID spike. By the way, yeah, exactly. I'm not going to get into it. But, yeah, it was a good time to sell games, you know, around then. So there's the COVID spike. You can really learn a lot through these graphs, right? So there's Jurassic Park. Let's show a few more. We got Jaws. It's held steady. It hasn't been out as long, in fairness, too. But it's also 12K. There's the Jaws 50th, which might change things. So that's a problem. but it's doing really well, in other words, on the value, also well above 10K. We've got Iron Maiden. What's that about these days? 12K, here's the COVID spike again, but we're at like 11, 12K for it right now for Iron Maiden. This is a huge game selling the LE. We've got Ting Kong. That's on its way down. It's a slow way down, but it hasn't dropped to 10K yet. I don't know what it is these days on Pinside, but this is back in October, so I didn't get the most recent data for it. And then we have Avengers, which is like the only one that's dropped below 10K, where you can get an LE below 10K. And so people speak with their wallets, and this is just another way to show it. All that tells me is getting Avengers now, you're going to get a screening deal on a great game. Right, on a top 34 game, according to Pinside. Great game, by the way. Still like it. Great game. Right. It's a Tarantino movie. it's just you know it's not like it's more like boy i'm gonna say one and then people are gonna be like that's a terrible choice uh what's what's the what's the one this is foxy brown or something what is that okay i feel like you know this uh something man it was too long it's like three hours i wanted to forget about it when i was halfway through it's a good movie what's it called jackie brown jackie brown thank you jackie brown thank you that's right jackie brown jackie brown is not kill bill you know what i mean or the cult fiction but it's a good movie All right, back to it. Sorry, you don't want to hear my nonsense. We also have this text from Rachel here that you already addressed earlier, Kel, so I won't spend too much time on it, which is just how the game earns at the bat. And as you said, it's the sixth worst of your games at the bat, right, and the worst of the L wins generally, right?
    69:36
    All right, so that's that. Thank you, Chad, for the Jackie Brown poll. Sometimes I forget. It's a good movie, by the way. Check it out. It's actually a good movie. All right. What's up, JoJo? All right. All right, so that's that second premise. And now we get into the third premise. So the final premise is, well, why don't players, why aren't they in love with it? I intend to make the argument that the rules are good and above average, but they don't quite reach the highs of the layout, and it doesn't reach Jurassic Park or Godzilla or Jaws levels of greatness in the code. It's good but not amazing. People see that beast of a layout. They expect amazing. And I want to be careful with my words here. the game is and the code is incredibly thoughtful. There's real passion behind it and very careful planning. This isn't like cookie-cutter code that I could mention other games and I won't that have more like basic depth to them. You know, I'm not going into the deep dives of those games because those games frankly don't need deep dives. I respect the work that went into this game is what I'm saying. So I wanted to get that out. And we'll clearly show this. There's a ton of font put into theme immersion and all sorts of things in this game. But that's not the issue. I think the issue ultimately falls a lot on clarity as we get into the criteria. What do you say before we do dive into it, Nick? I think we've sort of touched on it, but what do you say? I agree. I think that's, like I said, the number one thing that kind of prevents people from getting more into the game and just enjoying it more is, you know, some other minor things like call-outs, animations, things like that, which I don't think are deal-breakers, but the clarity of the code, I think, is number one. Awesome. Well, with that, we're going to dive into our biggest segment of our podcast. So we've gone through strategy. We've gone through layout. And now it's time to break down the code. After an hour and a half, let's do it. Into the top ten criteria, good criteria that we care about for pinball. Here they are on the screen. We've mentioned them before. Moments, theme immersion, breadth, depth, clarity, which we'll spend a lot of time on. Risk and reward, fair and balanced, innovation, pacing, or I was so close, and bugs. So with that, I'll start with moments. and maybe I'll start with you, Nick. Before I get to what I think are moments, as I understand it, you've watched the show before, right, Nick? Our show. Oh, yeah, big fan. That's what I mean. And you're doing great, by the way. I love what you guys do. Thank you. Do you share our view of moments in general and, you know, of what they mean and, you know, and what moments, and then I'm going to ask you as a follow-up, what moments are there in Avengers for you? Yeah, so, yeah, moments are important, I think. I don't think you need a lot of moments early in a game to make them impactful or meaningful. And there are a couple moments in Avengers that stick out to me, but the problem is I don't think most players get to experience them or see them because it's hard to get to that point if you don't understand the code or it's not clear to you. So one of those is the hurry up on the left orbit, which is the gamma ray. Gamma ray, good. Yep. If you roll over the right in lane when it's lit, you can build the left spinner up, hit it. It can build up a huge value on it. It has a bunch of cool sound effects. It really takes over the game, kind of really draws you in.
    72:47
    Now, there's a way to really utilize it and maximize it, but I don't think most people get to experience that, sadly.
    72:55
    Another moment, I think, is Thanos attacks. This one's going to be very controversial because I think a lot of people hate this mode because Thanos can take your gems away in this mode. You earn at least two gems, and the soul gem being one of them, you can play Thanos attacks, and he will try to take your gems away. But if you beat him, it's a huge moment. It's a big, like, yeah, you know, screw you, Thanos. I just took your gems. You know, I defended my gems from you. So that moment, I think, is, yeah. I think that moment's awesome.
    73:24
    But it's just, it's hard to find in the game. Those are your two, I'd say. Those are my two that I can think of right now. And then maybe Iron Man, like, super jackpots are pretty cool, I think, as far as moments.
    73:40
    But the real moments are, like, using your gems to build things. So they're kind of delayed gratification moments. You have to know the strategy to get that moment payoff. Right. Like, do the mind gem and soul gem to get the shot and hit the action button, and you timed it perfectly, then you pulled it off and you executed it. That kind of thing. Exactly. I get that point, too. Kale, what do you say about moments for this game? Do you have them in mind? You may not know the coach, but you've been up to no. But the thing as a player, the things that like, oh, this is cool, something's going on. Of course, the moments of starting a multi-ball, whether it's Iron Man or Thor. You know, they announce it. You get some lights flashing. That's cool. But my favorite moment, and you'll have to tell me what it is, where you get the ball locked into that. Challenge. Yes. and you can choose, you can risk it, you know, and go for another shot, you know, where you hold down the action button. That's one of my favorite moments.
    74:39
    Well, you guys have collectively figured out the moments that I would pick as well, so let's go to it. We're going to tell you my three moments, and I'm going to show videos of all of them, starting with the first one from you, Cale, and then later from you, Nick, about the gamma ray, for example. But let's start with the Hawkeye Challenge. All right.
    74:56
    So I'm going to show the Hawkeye Challenge first, And for this one, shout out to Ray Day, who has done intros to this game and deep dives into this game himself, talking about strategy and so forth. So in this, in Hawkeye Challenge, you're going to get the ball held with a magnet. So it can hold the ball, but maybe it just can't hold the ball too long for the thing I really want, which is like hit a ball into it, you know, and start a multiball or whatever. But it holds the ball and then it gives you a three, two, one, and it drops the ball and you have to hit it. But let me, let me show it first.
    75:25
    I'm going to try to walk some balls in Iron Man. Turn that down a little bit. Avengers is, you want to make sure your stores and Iron Man's are kind of ready to go before your quest. Oh, we got a Hawkeye challenge going.
    75:38
    Oh, oh, second chance. Oh, third chance. All right. That's it for, by the way, when I turned it down, can you still hear the audio of the video at all? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty loud. But it's good now, the way I set it? Yeah. Okay, I'll keep it there. Okay. Okay, so Hawkeye Challenge, this is a classic type of moment where you hold a ball, you give a countdown, and you make a shot. Other games that have this sort of thing, right, we know them, we've talked about them before, too. Jurassic Park has the smart missile shot, you know, for example, 3-2-1 left in lane, and you have to hit that shot all the way in the back. Fastball Special in X-Men traps it above the right flipper off of that in lane, and you have to hit the left ramp and then hit the sentinel after that. And not as powerful as moment, but it exists there. Jaws even has quince challenge where you have to make a set of combos after it traps the ball. It doesn't give you a countdown as much though. And then the granddaddy of them all, the inventor really of the hold the ball for a moment and then you have to hit a single shot, for me is Cactus Canyon where it has that drop target that moves around and pops up like a duel with a bad guy. And you have to 3-2-1. I think that's one of the best of these versions of types of moments there.
    76:55
    And But that said, I think there's a few things holding it back. I think it's a good moment. I think it's a few things holding it back from being amazing. And I thought we could break down why. What do you say to that?
    77:06
    Go for it. All right. Probably the best comparison of this moment is Jurassic Park. But we're going to break down the moment. When we break down something, sometimes we use some science to figure it out. And so that seems like a time. It's Pinball Science Corner where the pin pal. Sorry, is that too loud, by the way? It's really too loud. Come on up here. The impals break down the pinball rule. Using sharp, graphic science and fun. It's the Pinball Science Corner.
    77:45
    All right, how's that audio, by the way? Better? Perfect. Okay, I'm going to figure this out, I promise. Sorry, there's a few more of these, so keep that in mind.
    77:53
    All right. So let's talk about Jurassic Park when dissecting this moment, and let's show the moment from there. Shout-out to Carl here.
    78:03
    It's lit right there on this left-hand lane with this blue circle. Count the rest. Three, two, one. Ditch on the way.
    78:16
    All right. There we go. X-Ball there, X-Ball on the ramp. Let's do X-Ball right away. Now, we've seen that. Hopefully that was normal volume, right?
    78:30
    Now having seen that. It was a little loud. Okay, I should fix that. I see what you're saying. All right, I got it. It's still a little loud, I tell you. Tell me. All right, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go like that, maybe. I don't know. Is that like your master volume? Yeah, that's the master. I think it is. Oh, my God.
    78:48
    We just lost ten viewers. All right, sorry. Sorry. One more time, it's going to be loud. Then I'll stop, and I'm going to stop my nonsense. Okay, back to this. One day we'll figure it out. Cale, I ask you, do you feel that those moments are equal? Honest answer, I accept whatever your answer is, in power, or is one moment better than the other?
    79:07
    Or are they equal? I'm having trouble. Did you ask me something I can't really hear right now? Sorry, one more time.
    79:16
    Are you all right? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But you can hear me now, right? Yeah. All right, I don't know if you were kidding or not, but I am actually asking you about the moments. Are they equal in power or not? All of these? Everything you've listed here? No, not here listed. Forget about this video. I'm talking about, forget about this video. I'm talking about the drop from the tower versus the smart missile shot in Jurassic Park.
    79:48
    Oh, man, I think they feel similar. Nick, what do you say? I think it's a little more similar to maybe like Godzilla destruction jackpot.
    79:59
    Oh, that's another one I forgot to mention. Yeah, more so than the smart missile. Because you have to hit like a side loop shot. Because it's from an upper flipper. It's from a magnet grab.
    80:11
    That's a good point. Good comparison. I should have used that. Yeah, I think they're different, but more similar, I think, in setup.
    80:19
    That is fair. I'll tell you my personal opinion here as I tend to do on the show I think it's a great moment but I think it's not as good as it could be and I'll give you my reasons for it I think it compares pretty well the reason I compare it to Jurassic Park is in both games it's a 3-2-1 call out but Godzilla is too the ball is staged, it's dropped to a flipper you have a very brief window where you have to make a singular shot, same as Godzilla and if you make that shot you get a big prize in Hawkeye Challenge and also in Jurassic Park it offers you choices when the ball is staged. In Jurassic Park you can pick your prize. A lot of people may not know that, but you can move your flippers and pick Raptor versus extra ball, and you can instantly get in a multi-ball if you pick Raptor, for example. In Avengers you often get a choice, too. You can actually make the challenge harder for yourself. In Hawkeye you have a choice of hitting a stand-up or a loop shot, and if you hold down the action button you can make it harder, and you can make it so you have to hit the loop shot, for example. So they both give you options. I would say that one works a little bit better than the other. One is, well, how do you get Hawkeye? So to get Hawkeye, you have to randomly hit this stand-up and this stand-up and this stand-up and get those stand-up completions, which then lights the tower for you to get your Hawkeye shot. So it's like stand-ups, whereas Jurassic Park is like rescuing humans. It feels like more deliberate and more theme immersive. Well, I mean, there's immersion here. You're hitting the Hawkeye drop, those stand-ups that are like bullseyes, right? But I just feel like saving humans matters more somehow. I don't think truth, though. Most people don't know how you get either one, so that's probably, you know, an argument too far. They both have a similar frequency of occurrence where they happen often. Most players get to them one, maybe every two games for most players, where you get that opportunity. And at the same time, most players don't successfully follow through with the opportunity. Like, you typically, you do get to the smart missile, but you typically miss it. And you do get to the Hawkeye, but you typically miss it for most people. So I love that kind of setup for a moment where you get the opportunity, but you often fail at it. It makes getting the moment that much more. The last thing I'll say, though, about why I think one matters more than the other is the prize. The value is quite different. So in Jurassic Park, it's player choice, and you can get an instant Raptor multiball. As soon as you make that shot, you're in multiball because you made that shot. or you can get an extra ball, you know, for example, or you can get an outland ball stage. In Avengers, you get a portalock if you get the Hawkeye challenge. But you don't even quite get the portalock. You light it. You still have to spin the disc. And even then, and this is the key that I'm going to say, is you don't instantly use that portalock. The portalock has no inherent value until you're in a quest later on. So the prize of making this perfect shot isn't felt. It's delayed gratification from getting the shot. Whereas on Jurassic Park, you get it and something happens, and that matters as soon as you get it. Delayed gratification doesn't quite give the dopamine hit in pinball, you know? You need delayed gratification for strategy and stacking and all of that. But if for a moment, I don't think there should ever be delayed gratification in a moment. So that is my claim, because once you're eventually, later on, you're in a quest, and you're in multiple balls in that quest because you got the portal lock. but you won't remember that the reason you got that portal lock is, well, a ball ago you made that Hawkeye shot, so I guess it mattered. So that's my claim. It doesn't matter as much in the moment. What do you say to that nuanced point?
    83:46
    I agree with, I think, all of your points. It does feel more satisfying in the moment. There is something unique to the Hawkeye Challenge, though, that's a little different, in that there's progression levels of it. So the first time you get the Hawkeye Challenge, it's an amateur difficulty, and the award is a portal lock. The second time you qualify a Hawkeye Challenge, you can get an extra ball from hitting the loop shot. And then the third time you qualify the Hawkeye Challenge, you can actually get an award of either a gem you previously lost or a random uncollected gem, which is huge. You essentially get a free mode for collecting that third Hawkeye Challenge, which you can then place your gem and do all kinds of stuff with it. So it is different, but I think there's some uniqueness in it that makes it kind of cool, too. Really good point, although not one that players will likely ever see. Agreed. That's the only problem there.
    84:40
    I'll give you one last nuance, though, like if we're diving really this deep into it, and why not? Because what else are we here for? But the other nuance I would say is that it's always good after a moment when you get a chance to stop and appreciate it. You know, in Jurassic Park, if we just watched what Carl did, and maybe I won't because it's going to be really loud, but if we watch what he did as he gets in it stays up in the pop bumpers after you hit it so you have a moment to celebrate there when it goes in there you see what you did you could look at the screen for example but in Hawkeye Challenge it happens right away usually you win the Hawkeye Challenge when it drops and you hit the stand up that is much more common than hitting that loop perfectly And so, like, you hit the stand-up, you're immediately out of control, and you're not looking at the screen. You barely notice you've got it.
    85:33
    That's the claim. You buy that? Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's a moment, but it's, yeah, not superior to others. For sure. That's my deep-dive argument. All right, next moment, I want to give you your moment, Nick, which is the gamma ray, and I'm going to desperately try to get the sound right on this. It's going to be loud. It is, isn't it? It's a loud sound effect. Hold on, hold on. No, I know. I just meant that.
    86:00
    Okay. Taller players can absolutely see the ball inside there. Shorter players cannot. From the vantage point of the camera, you can totally see it, though.
    86:11
    I'll need to get that Hulk. Nice. Five, six, seven, eight million from one shot. Oh, there's a little bit of a... All right. By the way, decent audio, I think, hopefully. Yeah, that was better. Yeah, that was much better. So, I'm sorry I had to run out for a second. So, what happened? Did he place a gem on the Hulk shot and he was just ripping it? None of that. All right. Okay. So, here's what happens. To get this gamma ray, to get the gamma ray, you have to collect your Hulk Avenger. To get the Hulk Avenger, you need to rip this spinner a whole bunch of times, 80 spins or so, to start with when you start the game. So, you rip that spinner multiple shots to get 80 spins. that collects this, which then lights this in lane right here.
    86:58
    And as soon as you trigger that in lane when lit, it relights the spinner for a timed spinner hit to be worth some amount of points, a few million usually. Some things that are great about it is it makes you really notice it. The game turns green. The lights and sounds are now really noisy to make you notice it. The things that hold back from it for me are, one, there's, again, no insert there. It's just an O that's flashing. You don't notice that. You know, it's not like it says Hulk, you know, Gamma Ray, ready to go or something. Number two is that it's not worth that much. It can be worth more. Later on, you're going to say, Nick, well, if you put, and this is your execution point earlier, but Serge, what if you put the reality gem, but then you do, or something, and you get 4X or whatever, and you can say, and then you really make it valuable, and then I have to shut up, to be honest. That's a good point. So, Nick, what do you say to that and the moment overall? No, you're spot on. You've summed it up pretty well. But I think, yeah, the true value in that moment comes from building it, getting your Hulk up to level 2. If you hit Hulk enough, you'll progress him from uncollected to collected to level 1 to level 2, which increases the value of it. It puts a shot multiplier on that permanently, and then you can place the Reality Gem on top of that, which could potentially place another 2x multiplier on it, and then you can really start building some fun stuff with it. Alright, we lost Kale, but that's okay. Not physically but Kale's still there. I'm here.
    88:26
    Yeah, that's all true, and it's an interesting argument, too, that moments can be made from execution of high strategy. That itself can feel like a moment. Not a moment to a player that walks up in an arcade, by the way. Like there, you just hit Sparky, and something cool happens in Metallica, and it traps the ball, and the game goes crazy. But if you're a high-level player thinking about it, and you could execute, like, a 40 million point Hulk spinner shot or whatever. I see that.
    88:54
    You know, fair. All right. The final thing is, Nick, you talked about other moments like Thanos attacks, and that's totally true. The thing on this show, I tend to say, to not pick mini wizard modes as moments because most players don't see them. It doesn't mean they're not. I think they're really cool. Like, this game, for example, Soul Gem, is really, really cool.
    89:13
    You know, it was, like, the first flip count mode, you know, as far as I know, for example. and as Ray Day is saying here too the Hulk can become one of the most important very valuable shot because it gets progressively more valuable, the value carries over if you play Hulk Rage you know for example so if you invest heavily in the first one the next is better and all of that and then you can be really massive so it goes back to what Nick was saying is like it's more on the if you execute a strategy it feels great and that's true of this game It's all about executing strategy. Like when I get that perfect stack of the portal locks and the mode and then the Thor and everything, I'm like, I'm going to win now, you know, and I feel great in a tournament. And that's a valid thing to say for a moment. It's not a walk up to the arcade and feel it kind of thing necessarily, but it is there for players to understand.
    90:06
    So, I don't know. Did I say anything wrong or offensive, Nick? No. Totally agree. Is that a friendly way to say it? Yeah, I don't think you're wrong at all. I concur. All right. And Soul Gem, by the way, shout out to Soul Gem. We're going to talk about it in innovations again. Like, it's a flip count. I think this is, like, the first one that did a flip count in pinball. There have been games where if you held up the flipper, it would decrease the value of shots. But that, like, Wizard of Oz has something like that. But that's not what we're saying here. Here it's, like, a flip count. And now you see a flip count in a lot of things. Godzilla, I mean, sorry, either King Kong has it as well. And also Godzilla has it, actually, now that I mention it, in Terror of Mechagodzilla. So it's a great idea. That's what I'm saying, and it's been used a lot, and I don't mind it being used a lot. I think it's a great idea, and I think this is one of the first, if not the first, to do it as far as I know. Yeah, Soul Gem's a pretty cool moment in itself for a mode, if you will. Yes, yes, indeed. So that's it for my moments talk. Anything else you guys want to add to moments?
    91:05
    No, you nailed it. Shout out to Alpha Bravo Pinball, by the way. I always want to give the creators a shout out as I go through them. I'm not going to go through that again. Sorry, I won't go through this video again. We're going to get some more things.
    91:18
    This is the Soul Gem, by the way, but I won't talk about it here. Let's go on to theme immersion. Nick, what do you say about theme immersion? First of all, are you into Avengers as a theme, and then do you feel like this gives you the Avengers that you need? You know, it's funny. When the game first came out, I don't think I had seen any Avengers movies. I hadn't read any of the comics. You know, it's comic-based. But I really actually didn't really care about the theme, honestly. it came to like when I started playing the game and really getting into it. So the theme and theme immersion didn't really do anything for me when it first came out. But then I came to appreciate like the comic aspect of it and kind of how it all ties together. And I think that's done well.
    92:03
    Yeah, fair enough. And then, Cale, you have a Captain Marvel tattoo on your back. Is that right? Yes, a huge, huge fan. A Tramps fan, actually. Time to go binary now. I'm going to need some evidence of this. Cale, do you feel the theme immersion from it, or is that a fair question to you? I know you're not that probably into the theme. Yeah, no, and I used to read the Avengers comics, and I think this, man, I mean, this has everything. Everything Avengers is right here, and I think it all works, and it fits, besides the tic-tac-toe thing. Yeah, it's funny you should say that. I'm going to get into that. But let me say, you know what's so funny? anybody can go to our social media posts and if you see this, you know, I did this, well it's not going to be in focus, but if you look at right below the little tic-tac-toe board, there's this guy on the computer he's in a chair and he's got his hands in the air, he's like I don't know what's going on. So the whole, this was kind of built into, like obviously Zombie Eddie felt that, because the guy staring at the tic-tac-toe thing, what the hell's going on? It kind of, it dictates that you're getting ready to get into a complicated game. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I was going to say, like, overall it's pretty impressive, the theme immersion that they went to here. I'm going to have two exceptions, but I'm going to give you all the great things that I, I mean, not all of them, but just so many that I can think of. There's six gems on the affinity gauntlet that Thanos wields to terrorize the universe in the comics, you know? And so in this game you have six gems, and if you collect those gems, they give you powers. And the powers are really deeply thought about.
    93:46
    There's like a metric ton of thought put into these gems, like how can we make the time gem control time and the power gem be powerful and the space gem control space and all of that. And it actually does do those things in the game. There's the gamma ray mode we talked about earlier where the game turns green. It's a good Hulk tie-in. There's the Hawkeye sharpshooting mode. That's a good tie-in. Every Avenger has been shoved into this game. You've got vision on the drop targets, and even poor forgotten Ant-Man is on the lower right mystery scoop, you know, for example. You have Thanos attacks you mentioned before, too, Nick, where, like, Thanos comes and he steals your gems midway in the game unless you protect him. And that was a bold risk, you know, to make players play a mode where you could lose stuff. But I actually love all the thought that went into that. I'm with you, Nick, that it's, like, a really good idea and a cool mode. So those are, like, just some of the many, like, deeply theme-immersive things in this game if you're into the comics. Anything I missed there, Nick, that you would add? No, you definitely, I think you caught some things I hadn't even thought of. But, yeah, that theme immersion does make sense with the gems and some of the shots and things like that. Now, all of that's the good stuff, but I'm going to give the two things that are not that theme immersive, as we say. And one of them is the bingo awards, right? Oh, the bingo awards. We're going to get there, I promise. I'm going to talk about them in the next section as we go through breath. And I'm going to have to take a deep breath myself to explain those because those are intense if you really want to understand them. The second thing to mention about that, because what does bingo have to do that much with Avengers? But the second thing to mention is the trophy system. Now, a lot of massive amount of thought went into the trophies and the bingo awards, so I do appreciate that. I don't quite see what they have to do with the Avengers. Like if you take the trophies, for example, which you get by accomplishing certain features in the game, and I will show you those features right now. Yes, there are 32 different trophies you can get in the game that look like this. and trophies are actually important because that's actually the ultra-secret mega-wizard mode of the game called Trophy Mania, which you get by getting 24 out of the 32 games' trophies. Top quiz, Nick, have you ever gotten to Trophy Mania? I have gotten to Trophy Mania, super fun mode. I've never gotten to Trophy Mania in hard mode, which you have to get all 32 trophies, so that's a level I cannot achieve. And then about these trophies, I'm like, wait, what do the trophies have to do with the Avengers? And why are there 32 of them that interrupt me while I'm trying to battle supervillains? And why is collecting trophies the ultimate goal? I get, though, before I was going to say, I get that the thought of it is to tie into video games in general and where you get achievements unlocked. And I like that. I mean, that's badges and Insider Connect. But I just don't feel it in this game. What do you say to that, Nick? See, I see it more as, like, those trophies are mine, the players. Like, I'm earning those, and, like, that's kind of, it's almost, like, separate. It's a little, like, segregated, if you will, from the main. Yeah, it's, you know, like, you're kind of. So you support the immersion, that's what you're saying. Well, of, you know, the immersion versus, like, what the player is doing and accomplishing, you know, there's a little difference there. There's, you know, what's going on with the Avengers and things like that, and there's, you're kind of the one controlling the whole game, and you're getting awarded for that behind the scenes. I suppose I think of Jaws and Shark Teeth, for example. I'm okay with that.
    97:03
    Maybe I'm just saying it's a semantic thing. Maybe I'm just saying I would have called it something different. Yeah, if it was called something else. I'm not saying I'm against achievements that you unlock, even player-based achievements that are separate from the game, but just maybe name them something and draw them. Like if it's Avenger badges?
    97:23
    Everyone is a villain defeated. I'm just thinking about this now. There's six main villains in the quest, right? But there's a lot of villains in Avengers, Mandarin and all sorts of things I could get into, right? Whiplash and, you know, put them as each of them, like you defeated that villain.
    97:39
    That's just spitballing here. Okay. I can see that. Does Avengers have an ending like Jurassic Park?
    97:46
    There is a – well, this is the Mega Super Wizard mode. Would you say – you mean where the flippers lie? Sorry, you go ahead. Well, I mean, when you complete Jurassic Park, it just says the end and your game's over, like a video game. No, this does not. There is, like, Battle Thanos, which is, like, the final portion of the main story of the game.
    98:06
    And you beat Thanos, and, like, that's kind of it. But you keep on playing. It doesn't end the game like Jurassic Park or Godzilla. We write only a handful of games that truly end when you beat it. Name another one, guys, here either in the chat or Nick or Cale. Can you name another game that ends when you beat it? I said Godzilla. Yeah, that's a good example. All right, I'll let the chat do the rest of it while I go on to talk about the trophies already. Should we get into breadth of the game? Let's do it. Best part. All right, so on this podcast, we often talk about the five Ms in pinball rules. You've got modes, multiballs, multipliers, missions, the side quests of the game, things like cyborg multiball in Iron Maiden. And then there's the fifth M, which is miscellaneous for background things like mystery and hurry-ups and super modes. Avengers has a lot of that last one, so we have to talk about that one too today. And I can and will make many arguments about Avengers code today. But the one thing I can't say is that they skimped on code. There is a lot here, and this game has a lot of breath. That's my opinion of it.
    99:12
    What do you say to that, Nick, on breath? Yeah, no, I think there's plenty to explore here in this game.
    99:20
    Yeah, and we talked about modes for a little bit already. There's one mode tree. Always nice to have more, but there's one mode tree with six modes. What I really love about it is that they're all six uniquely designed with unique rule sets. Those are the quests we were talking about earlier. You know how I like unique rule sets on modes. These are super thoughtful with kind of theme immersion in mind. If you take the Mind Gem, for example, you know, if you're playing that, you've got this super giant villain who has mind control powers, and he's controlling the Avengers, the Hulk and Marvel and Black Panther and Black Widow, and so their shots are lit. But one of them really needs to break free, and that's flashing more, and if you hit that one, that's even worth more, and then you could spin the disc to break them free of the mind control and you have to break all the Avengers free There more depth and nuance to it that I saying Like if you get only the flashing ones then you don have to hit the same target at the end But if you miss the super flashing ones, then you do have to hit the same target. But the point is, it's a unique mode with unique rule sets that's theme immersive and gives you something to do that's different. It's not like you're playing the same mode rules every time.
    100:24
    So that's what I say about modes. I'll just give you some other M's and then get your thoughts if you want to add anything to the breadth of it. Multiballs. We said there's the Thor already. Captive Ball three times to start with. Iron Man. You have to spell Iron and then hit Iron Man and then three shots at the tower. There's Portal Lock sort of multiball, so there's that. There's multipliers in the game. There's the Portal Locks themselves are multipliers. Play Field X, 2X, 3X for how many Portal Locks you have in a quest. I wish it said so when you got it somewhere on the play field, but that's okay, or the display. But there's also Reality Gem gives you shot multipliers. We'll get into that later. So that's my first modes, multiples, multipliers. Anything you'd say that I missed there, Nick, before talking about the other M's?
    101:11
    Yeah, the super modes, I guess, is kind of – Oh, that's my miscellaneous. Oh, so you're miscellaneous. Okay. Part of it is I've found that there's not a universal agreement on what even is a mode. you know, like that. And I know this, because as we said before, Cale, I've asked Ray Day and Dwight and other programmers, like, their own opinions, Spooky DJ of their opinions of modes, and I get a different answer from all three. I'm going to tell you my version of modes is just, like, the quests that you play. Or in Godzilla, it's like Ebera or Titanosaurus. Like, I don't care about other things. There's a lot of other features in the game, but for me, it's like I don't know what, you know, I'm not ready to define it yet before being yelled at, but those are my definitions of modes. Primary modes. Yeah, it was called primary modes. That's right. Not features, but modes. All right, next is missions. So the main mission in Avengers is collecting the Avengers. And so if you notice here, there are six Avengers at the center. You're going to think of this like Cyborg Multiball, where in Cyborg Multiball and Iron Maiden you have to hit so many pops and so many loops and so many orbits and so many spinners, et cetera. and here you also have to hit so many things to collect these Avengers. This is the Cyborg multiball of Avengers, but where you have to hit various things. But they take it up, Ray Day and company, takes it up three notches past Iron Maiden because they give you three different mini wizard modes for collecting all the Avengers. And I'll show you what I mean by going to this. So the first time to collect all the Avengers and to get to SG, which is Soul Gem, you have to get 80 spins of Hulk. You have to spell Iron Man one time. You have to hit 50 pop bumpers in Captain America and three black widow ramps and one Thor captive ball completion and three black panther right orbits, for example. And then you get to Soul Gem. And that's a cool mini wizard mode. But if you do it again in Iron Maiden, you would just get the cyborg. Whereas if you do it again in Avengers, you get to black order multiball, and this is what you need to do to get to that black order multiball. And if you did it again a third time, you would get to Battle Royale, and this is what you need to do to get to Battle Royale. So it's like Cyborg, same situation in the background, but it gives you three different variants of Cyborg, if you will, and for doing a bunch of things. I'll pause there. What do you say to that, Nick, and how do you like that structure?
    103:34
    No, I think it's great. That's kind of the – I think it's almost the – it's the primary focus of the game is to get through those collecting the Avengers, but I think it gets a little lost because people get focused on the gem quest and things like that, where really this is your main goal to get to Battle Thanos, because after you complete all three of these, that's when you get presented with Battle Thanos as your next disc award. Well, it's funny you should say that. So here's my thought about it, too. I was having some argument in my head about this, which is that, as you say, it becomes really the main point of the game. And so when does a side quest become the main quest? I often say mission, a.k.a. side quest. But is this a side quest or is it a main quest? I don't know. I think it's the main quest. It might be the main quest. And the thing I would just say there is, like, when we get to pacing, there's something about the pacing that pulls me back from this game, which is that in order to get to the final wizard mode, you have to play all the modes, and you have to do all three of these things, right? And it's very common, tell me if you agree, Nick, if you've gone into Battle of Thanos, that you can get to the modes. You don't even have to beat them, you just have to play them or whatever. But you can get to the modes, but the thing you have left over is collecting the Avengers three times. You've probably done it the first time, maybe you've done it one and a half, two times, but boy, that's always the last thing, the last time. Do you agree with that, or do you not find that to be the case? Yeah, and I actually think you don't need to play all the GemQuest modes to qualify Battle Thanos. You think you can collect them three times? Yep, I think you can get to it without playing them all. Ray Day and Chat can tell us. I can't confirm, but I'm pretty sure you can. I'm going to go with my opinion. you also need to play all six gem quests. I don't think. But I'm willing to say when I'm wrong, as soon as Rayday tells us in chat if he's still around.
    105:25
    Okay. You certainly don't need to collect all the gems. I agree with that. We're on the same page. Don't need to collect it. My claim is play it, but you don't need to collect it.
    105:34
    Okay. So that's the missions of the game. Final thing is to say is the miscellaneous, where that stuff like the binary hurry up on Captain Marvel, where you have to hit the three ramps, as you said, and that starts a binary hurry-up, and that's the 1x on 2x. It adds a plus one. You can get up to the 5x on the Captain Marvel, only on the premium. There's different Hawkeye awards. There's an arc reactor bonus if you make the hit-to-drop targets and then get it up the tower. There's a shield bonus if you hit a side loop and then go through the pop bumpers. And then the thing I really want to spend time on, which we have to, is the Computer Grid Awards. Here's where we get into the Computer Grid Awards. Is that okay with you guys if we get into it now? Yeah, let's do it.
    106:15
    Okay, let's do it. So to do this... Before we go, have both of you guys been to this Battle Royale? Yeah. Yep.
    106:25
    Hmm. You can actually... It's a... Oh, it's just me. Did you expect it? You can play it from the very beginning of the game, Kale, if you do the challenge mode. You can actually play that Battle Royale before, you know, bypassing everything and just play that mode. Okay. So it's pretty fun to... Escape from Nublar. Yep, exactly. Yep. Okay.
    106:48
    Abe Flips. Hey. Hey, Abe Flips here. Thanks for watching. What's happening, Abe? Always nice to see you. And I feel like you've done an Avengers video, Abe Flips. You can tell me if I'm wrong about that.
    106:58
    But, okay. So to get into the drop targets, we have to go into a very common, popular segment on the show, Kale and Nick, which is our deepest dive segment. Okay. Everybody mute your audio. Now, I have to figure out the audio, and I'm going to lower it right away. but it's going to be loud the very first second I do it. You could say, Serge, just skip the segment song. Do we really need it? You know what? I think we do, Cale. I'm sorry. I feel like we do. So what I'm going to do is I wonder if I can mute it. What if I muted my system? We might not need the audio on it, do you think?
    107:32
    How about this? I'm going to go like. It's time for our deep, deep dive. Where the pin pop. It's time for our deep, deep dive. There you go.
    107:50
    Okay, sorry, now I'm back. It's time for our deep dive. Much better. The pen palpits fall so deeply. It may cause some of our viewers to leave their bodies and get sleepy.
    108:05
    Warning. Don't listen and drive. Bye. Thank you. All right. So that's our Deepest Dive segment, where we go even deeper than we... Thank you so much, Michael. It should be louder. You're right.
    108:37
    You can hear it, right, guys? Oh, 100%. Oh, that's great. Okay. I figured out I'll just mute before I play it. Thanks so much, Cale.
    108:46
    So more needs, more cowbell. All right, now, to do this, to really do this, to go deep into the drop targets and the bingo awards, I have to tell a story, gentlemen. Is it okay if I tell a story and give some background music? Absolutely. All right, this might get a trade. Cale, we'll get demonetized, but that's okay, right, Cale? Yeah, we don't care. Okay. All right.
    109:07
    Okay. There's some background music as I go. Okay. In the beginning, there were drop targets. All right. And life was good. And the designer was pleased. These drop targets gave points. This is Williams' 1962 Vagabond. It was designed by Steve Kordek. It was the first pinball machine to have drop target of the type we're familiar with today, where the entire target dropped into the play field when struck by the ball. So that was the drop target. And then, as time went on, there were three drop target banks. And life was good, and the designer was pleased.
    109:45
    The rules designer added value to each drop target. This was a big deal. It was the first use of a bank of drop targets on a Williams game, and this was 1977. It was also designed by the legendary Steve Kordek. So you'd have three drop targets connected in a bank. And then, as time went on, rules designers started realizing you can get a larger value or a special award for getting the whole bank of drop targets. So here on the left, we have Charlie's Angels, for example.
    110:14
    1978, where you got a bonus X if you got all those drop target banks down right there. Or Black Knight, of course, where you got a magnet save, magnet save if you got the drop target bank down. So it started giving special awards. And people were happy, I think, at that point. but then the bold rules of designers got greedy, as all of us humans do. Could you squeeze even more from a three-bank of drop targets? It's not enough that it gives you an award. And like Icarus, they flew too close to the sun, and their wings melted, and they began to fall back to the earth, and they saw it glinting in the sunlight. And do you know what they saw, Cale and Nick?
    110:49
    They saw the bingo car. Angel's Infinity Quest. They saw the bingo car. That's right. The story continues. The 80s were upon us, and the rules designers found ways to add the bingo card to many games. For example, you had big game, and within each generation a champion emerged who could explain the rules to bingo in pinball. But it was not enough, and the players were largely still confused until the bingo card went away by the 90s and was lost in the sands of time.
    111:20
    But rules designers were not satisfied with this, and they wondered what else could they squeeze from the three bank. and here's your ring, but let's keep going, okay? Next, we get to the Walking Dead and later Rush, for example,
    111:34
    where you'd have a strobing light between three drop targets, so it can actually give you three different awards. If you hit the drops when it was on food, it would give you food. If you got all the banks down, all the drops down. If you got the weapons, then it would get all the weapons. If you got the weapons drops, it would give you a weapon. If you got first aid, it would give you first aid. similar on Rush. You can get a guitar or bass guitar or drums or all of that sort of thing. So it's another kind of squeezing more out of the drops targets. And the rules designers were happy. But then, here's where our story ends. New champions emerged who believed they could bring back the bingo card and safely wield its power, but the bingo card gave them too much power.
    112:16
    That's right. And they decided they could do more with it. Could they put nine different awards on it based on a roving insert, not just it would give you an award, but nine different awards, and even more? Could it give you another eight awards for getting a line of awards together? Like one here, one here, one here, another one there, another one there, another one there, but also the diagonals? Could you get eight plus nine, 17 awards out of a drop target bank? They thought they could.
    112:46
    But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, Cale and Nick, They didn't stop to think if they should.
    112:54
    And that's where we get to explaining them. That is my story. Okay. That was beautiful. That was amazing. But can we have an honorable mention for Scott Denisey for using the drop targets as locks? Yes. And by the way, I had a trivia question earlier of what games end when you complete them, and that's actually one of them in TNA. Oh. Defeat the final nine reactors and you get to destroy it. Good luck. What about the time? What about the timing of that song, too, finishing the story? Amazing. I am blown away.
    113:30
    We've dilly-dallied enough, gentlemen, now to explain them. That was not on my bingo card, if you will. Oh, boom.
    113:38
    You know I do, Travis. I do tell this story. Now that we've done that, we've explained the history of draw targets. What makes this draw target so crazy is that it gives you that many awards. It gives you nine plus eight awards for getting them. So nine awards is explained sort of like Walking Dead. You're going to see an insert flash. When that insert flashes, let's say it flashes on Spot Avenger. If it flashes on Spot Avenger, and at that point you hit any of the three drop targets, it locks in Spot Avenger. Then you have to hit the rest of the drop targets to collect the award of Spot Avenger. You could similarly get a bonus X that way, another bonus X. You can get whatever this 2x arc reactor or spot bullseye, et cetera. So those are your nine awards that you get from that kind of roving insert. Cale, does that make sense to you? And I know, Nick, you get it. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Now, where it gets complicated is, okay, so you get that insert. You get the bonus X. But if you get this bonus X and also this lock and also this 2x shield, then you get the super disc award if that's the one that's lit there. And if you get the 2x Arc Reactor and this Bot Avenger and this 2x Shield, so that's three sets of drop targets, in other words, to get that timed perfectly well, then you will get the Super Gauntlet Award, for example. So that's the extra eight awards that you get, not just for the individual drops. When you hit them down once, they get you one thing out of the nine. But when you hit down a perfect set of three of them, such that they make a line, that's when you get the Bingo Award. Therefore, you get nine plus eight or 17 different awards there. and here's where we go back to what we started with, which is if you hold down the flipper, you could look at the info screen, which is the only way to know what the total of awards are, four by four, 16 plus one, 17 awards of these grid awards are, and so I'll pause there. Cale, did I explain it well enough that you get it? Yeah, you did, but it's different on the skill shot, correct? No, it's not actually. It's not different on the skill shot. Skill Shot remains the same. So when you first start the game, all games, whether it's competition mode or not, it gives you these three lights already.
    115:51
    It happens to be these three lights. It's always going to be on every game you play, these three lights. And these three lights are shown here in red on this screen.
    116:01
    What's different every time, if it's a competition mode, it always looks like this. But if it's a, let's say, I'm going to scroll ahead to, let's say here, yours, Nick. If you're playing a standard game, like set up at the bat, I don't think that's on competition mode, for example, at the bat, because it's an arcade people play for fun in, too, in addition to tournaments. But just to clarify, during tournaments, we do set it on competition mode. That's good to know, actually. And I check whenever I'm on that game, like what it's set to, you know. And the reason we started doing that is because of the topper. Topper Mania. Gem Mania. Gem Mania, rather.
    116:40
    Okay. Can I tell you why I'm confused? Because I always thought, you know, when you go for the skill shot, could you go back to the grid on competition mode? Here, one second. Let me scroll up. Look at that.
    116:58
    The only difference from the modes is the arrangement of the awards, the green awards. He's green. This is only the same. Right, okay. These nine are the same, and they're actually inserts on the play field, so they have to be the same. Okay, so ball one, I plunge the ball once I go all the way around, and I want to hit the center drop target, which gives me bonus sex, and that line, which gives me a portal lock, correct? Correct, but only when the flashing insert is here.
    117:27
    Right, but it awards me that portal lock. Like, I don't have to knock down all three targets. No, you don't. But it's worth explaining why that is. That's the power of the skill shot is that you hit that middle one and it awards you all three on the skill shot only.
    117:44
    Not every time you hit that middle, it doesn't award all three. How about this? I think I have a video example. Hold on.
    117:51
    No, I don't. Never mind. Sorry. I thought I had a video example of showing the computer grid award. But, yeah, what I'm saying is, if you hit a middle drop, all it does is give you, it counts as three drops, like Nick said, for whatever's flashing. So if I hit a middle drop target when it's flashing on this, I would actually get the 2x shield award, too. But the trick with the portalunk is you wait until it's flashing here, and if you do that and hit the middle drop target, it awards you the bonus X. It happens to be that on competition mode, bonus X is lined up in a horizontal way with these other two lights. and this horizontal line happens to give you a portal lock. So it's not that the skill shot itself gives you the portal lock. It gives you a bonus X when you time it right. And that bonus X is in a line that gives you the portal lock. In essence, yes, it gives you the portal lock. It's completing the bingo.
    118:42
    Bingo is hard. Don't get me wrong, Cale. I mean, I get it. Okay, but I think when you first started talking about this, you said you had to complete the drops, all three of them. That is correct. Skill shot is a unique time where you don't. Okay. That's all. And that's when I said what's different for a skill shot. You're right. I'm sorry I didn't answer it more definitively there. Yeah. You said it wasn't different at first, but now you're going back to it is different. Correct. Okay, I got you. Yes.
    119:09
    Call him out, Cale. Call him out. It's time for a seppuku. Nothing else to do at this point. All right. What's up, Tattered? Yep, we're two hours in. You'll have a lot to go watch after we're done. Yes. But we're moving. If you can believe it. If you can believe it, we're moving. No, this is great. Are you ready? That's it. That's what I want to cover in breadth. We talked about the five M's of pinball in breadth and what Avengers does for it, which is plenty. There's a lot of breadth here. No complaint there. Good on breadth?
    119:39
    Yeah. You know, I really like this throwback where this is a very, very modern machine. Hey, let's throw a tic-tac-toe board in it. Sure.
    119:50
    Sure. Well, I'm glad I would say I don't enjoy that, but I'm glad that people could feel differently about things. Somebody had to do it. Right. What about you? What about you, Nick? What do you think? How do you feel? I didn't ask you. We talked about how it works, but what do you feel about it? So, yeah, I think, yeah, understanding it is difficult. Agreed. Like, it doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense right away. But once you realize that just getting these three in a row bingos gives you something, gives you an award, then you can have something to go for. and you can use that to start these super modes. You can collect a portal lock. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So once you kind of grasp it, you know you can gain things from it. Is it perfect? No. Is it flawed? Yes. I wish there were a way to. You can accidentally lock in a square that you're not trying to get, for example. Like you said, you may lock in that 2F shield by accident from a ball careening into it and then you're kind of stuck with that award when you don't really want it. So I wish there was a way to maybe with the action button cancel the current lit grid square, sacrificing your current drop progress and moving it on. Are you listening, Ray Day?
    120:59
    Go back 1.1 code. I think Ray Day and other maybe top players would say play better. For sure. So, I think we all agree this is Elwynn's most complex code, rules. Agreed there. What is the easiest to understand? Bond 60th? Bond 60th. Yeah. Still not that simple, but Bond 60th.
    121:26
    Do you have a different opinion, Nick? I think that's a little surprisingly complicated to me. It is, yeah. I don't know. Maybe. Jeez.
    121:37
    A lot of his games are complicated. That's the truth. I always say the complicated is different from unclear. It tends to make things unclear, but you can be complicated, and I want complicated, just paired with clarity. That's all. Jaws seems like the most straightforward and clear to me. I don't know. Yeah.
    121:58
    That'll be our next deep dive. That's right. Hey, I can do Jaws. Let's do it. It won't be quite as long as this one. It'll be long, but it won't be quite as long. because we are at the next category of criteria. We did moments, we did theme immersion, we did breadth, and now we do depth. So breadth is a reminder to those listening. Breadth is how many choices do you have of things you can do right up front. Should you go for the drop targets? Should you go for the modes? Should you prep your multi-ball? All those things are there in Avengers. Depth is the rewards you get deep down in the game from doing something repeatedly. So, for example, we mentioned you could collect the Avengers, And there's really, really huge depth in Avengers, by the way. So you can collect the Avengers, but not just one time, like you might get in Iron Maiden to get a cyborg.
    122:45
    Here, you collect them once you get Soul Gem, and that's a dedicated mini wizard mode. You do it again, you get Black Order Multiball. You do it a third time, you get Black Order Battle Royale. Then there's modes, and there's six modes. And if you play three modes and collect the gems, you face Thanos Attacks, which is another mini wizard mode, where as long as you've got two gems plus a soul gem, to be technically correct there, then you get to play Thanos attacks and he can steal your gems. And so basically there's death for doing the Avengers. There's death for doing the modes. There's a separate death for doing the bingo thing that we mentioned. So some of the awards for getting the bingo awards here are super awards. Notice it says super gauntlet and super disc, for example, and super targets and super combos and super arc reactor And Hulk Rampage was another kind of super in the game, too. And these are super modes in pinball in general, not just this game, are modes, time modes usually, where you have to hit a certain shot in that time. There's, like, super spinner mode, and that's true even in King Kong. And you have to get the spinner in a dedicated 30-second block usually. And so this is true, too. Like, super disc, hit the disc as much as you can. And super targets, hit the targets, et cetera. So those are your super modes. The reason I mention here in depth is that if you were to get all six super modes, you would get to its own mini wizard mode called Super Computer Frenzy. Nick, have you gotten to Super Computer Frenzy? Yes, I've been there. It's a very cool mode. It has some really unique sound effects, which I like.
    124:17
    But, yeah, it's another fun mini wizard mode in the game. Yeah, and maybe this is a time to show – who knows what I'm going to show? So, well, no, I'm not going to show anything. Sorry, I got confused myself.
    124:29
    Then, so there's a mini wizard mode for the modes. There's a mini wizard mode for the Avengers, three of them. There's a mini wizard mode for the bingo thing. And then there's the secret ultra wizard mode, Trophy Mania, which is all those trophies I mentioned earlier, too, where if you get a bunch of trophies at 24 out of 32, that's the secret ultra wizard mode. And Keith is one of the people who, like, really has pushed these ultra wizard modes. a little time for definitions here. Wizard mode is the traditional end of the game. And you see that in a lot of games. It's in Adam's family. It doesn't mean game ends, but it's the final thing you can do in the game. You know, explore the house and tour the house and all of that. But in a lot of Keith Elwin games, I don't know that he's quite the first to do this, but he does it in almost all of his games. He has a secret wizard mode behind the other wizard modes. So for example, that's why this slide is up there. When dinosaurs ruled the earth. To get there, you have to do Secure Control Room, which is all the Control Room modes, Museum Mayhem, which is all the T-Rex modes, Visitor Center, which is all the paddocks. After you do those three, you get to Escape Nublar, which is the wizard mode of the game. But if you, like, totally beat that, you can do When Dinosaurs Rule the Earth kind of thing. And so he puts in these super-ultra wizard modes for very few players on the planet. What do you say to that, Nick? You're one of those players. You got to, Trophy Mania.
    125:46
    Yeah, I've actually never gotten to When Dinosaurs Rule the Earth, though. That one's, I find, even more difficult to get to than Trophy Mania, I would say. Yeah, that is really, really hard. What do you think about, Nick, about Ultra Wizard modes in general? Oh, I love them because it always gives you something. Even if you've played a game or had it for a while or you're just kind of over it, there's always something to shoot for. That's my opinion, too. It's like it doesn't mean I'm going to get there. I'm not. But I've never been to Trophy Mania, for example. But it gives you something to aspire to, you know. And those people are like, well, you know, when they program this big wizard mode and it takes a long time to do it, and people are like, you know, why do you really need to do that? Like, it's not like a lot of players are going to see it. It's true. Not a lot of players are going to see it. But aspiration matters, you know, in pinball. Like, it gives you something to always look forward to. I agree. Does, like, Monster Zero count as one of those? No. For me, Monster Zero is a mini wizard mode. Okay. For lighting. I agree. Because I've been to that. I've gotten to that part. That's a mini-Wizard mode. That's a fun mode.
    126:50
    Yeah, and Godzilla also has Wizard. I forget the precise name. You've got to do stuff to get there. That's an accomplishment. Yeah, you do have to do stuff to get there. I like mini-Wizard modes, Wizard modes, and Ultra Wizard modes. I think they all belong in pinball, in modern pinball, especially going to the home, something that gives death something to look forward to.
    127:06
    So that's it for me on death. You know, A-plus there. I mean, I don't have A-plus, but it's really good on death. There's a lot to do there. I think the benchmark for me is Evil Dead still, just because I covered it in the award show that we had. There's just a lot there that you can get in Evil Dead. But this is great, is what I'm trying to say. Not Jurassic Park, I mean to say. Avengers has a lot to do with it. Nick, is that one of the things that keeps you on in the game? Yeah, for sure. Because, like I said, there's always something to shoot for. You start a game, maybe it's going well, or maybe you're having a really great game. there's still something that you're not getting. You know, it's like, oh, I could do this. I could have got that. I could have, you know, done this a little better and pulled that off.
    127:51
    Okay. And now we go to clarity. And I take a deep breath because this is where we really get into it, gentlemen. All right. This will be the biggest section of the podcast here. Because clarity is the thing that people might take issue with the game. So the first thing to say is some issues with clarity. One, we went through the bingo. I'm not going to go through it again. but it's not the most obvious thing. Is that fair, Cale? Yes. There are 17 awards. I feel bad about complaining about it because they're giving me so much. They're like, look at all this that they're giving me, 17 awards from this. So I appreciate that, but it comes at the cost in this case of clarity. If I was leaving a definitive opinion, I would say get rid of bingo out of pinball. That's what I'm trying to say, my opinion. And maybe they have. All right, next thing. We also talked about portal locks.
    128:41
    I explained it. You have to get four combos for the first one, or you have to get the middle drop target when it's on number six, you know, position on the flashing insert, and then there's the other flashing insert, and there's computer grid awards we can get into. All of that, we're not going to go into it again. But the point is, that took a while to explain. It's not the most obvious way to get a multiball, in other words. Like, captive ball, Thor, hit it three times, you're in multiball. I'm not saying every game needs to have it easy to explain multiball, but it should be on the easier side of things to explain. And most games are, if you think about the rest of the games. Like, in Jurassic Park, like, there is hit the rafter repeatedly. Fine. Chaos. Spell these letters to spell the word chaos and then hit that target, you know? All the multiballs, like T-Rex multiball, hit the captive ball, shoot the left ramp. That's a great game. It has complex code. But the multiballs are pretty easy to explain how to get there, you know? Nick, is that a fair point? Yeah, I totally agree on that, for sure.
    129:38
    plus I mentioned my issue before that it doesn't tell you 2x or anything on there. If I looked at Jurassic Park, it tells you 2x right there when you're in 2x. If I looked at Walking Dead, here's the new Walking Dead, 2x right over there, you know, on that sword right over there. Even Andromeda over at the bat, 2x right over there. And I previously said, like, I don't want inserts everywhere on the play field, so you might say that's like I'm speaking on both sides of my mouth. I think there's inserts for really important things on the play field, like 2x and 3x multiplier, in my opinion, or at least on the display. That's my claim on Portalox. Nothing more I'm going to say about Portalox. I'm going to give another issue on clarity. It is now the power-ups. As we said, there are six major Avengers here. And to get the Hulk collected, you need to get 80 spins. And to get Iron Man, you need to go through the Iron Lanes, and we'll get into that later too, to spell Iron Man and so forth. So you need to collect the Avengers. But it doesn't stop there, folks. As you well know, Nick, it doesn't stop there. you can further power up the Avenger. And so here we get into this chart, the first chart I'm going to show you related on this point here. There are six different Avengers, and they each have four different power-up levels. Level number one, let's call it, I'm calling it level number one, let's call it level maybe negative one, perhaps. Level negative one is you don't have the Avenger yet. They are uncollected. You don't have a lit insert on Hulk, for example, because you haven't yet hit 80 spins. But once you hit 80 spins, then you've collected him. But it's still not even called level one. This is not my term. This is the code's term.
    131:18
    Level one comes later on. So it's just collected at that point. It's still level zero at that point. If you get another 110 spins on Hulk, it's level one. If you get another 110 spins on Hulk, it's level two. And so forth for the other characters. so you could have four different levels for six different characters. There is your 24 permutations, let's say, of these power-ups, and we're going to have to get into it because it goes into the very next subject I'm going to talk about. Nick, did I miss anything talking about leveling up the Avengers? Nope, that breaks it down as simple as it can get. Okay. Cale, so far so good?
    131:55
    I agree with Abe Flips. This is crazy AF, but I'm enjoying it. Oh, good. That's why we're here. All right. So hopefully I've explained this very first step of a complicated concept, powering up Avengers, because now we get into Gem Awards. Boy, we do. Finally. Yes. We're now here on Gem Awards. And I know, Nick, you've been waiting for this. I know it. All right. Kale, to you. After you beat a mode in Avengers, otherwise known as a quest, you get a gem as your prize.
    132:27
    And this gem, think about it as a unique mode completion perk. So defeat something and you get a perk. You see perks in other games. We talked about it in John Wick, where you get a perk for defeating all the different seven modes, for example. There's the multi-ball extender and so forth. Uncanny X-Men has perks for their eight modes in the game. You defeat the rogue mode and you get a multi-ball extender, and you defeat the snore mode and you get a, or, yeah, add a ball on Sentinel or whatever it is, right? Those are the kind of perks in games. We're good with the concept of perks so far, right? So as we talk about perks and as we talk about jam awards, we now have to take yet another deep dive here. And that means we need another segment. So I'm going to, for one second, mute.
    133:16
    Okay. That was too loud, wasn't it? Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. I thought I did it right, and then I didn't. Isn't that sad?
    133:36
    All right, let's try that again. It's time for our deep hit. Oh, that's great. Where the pen piles explore pen balls so deeply, it may cost some of our viewers to leave their bodies and get creepy. Warning.
    133:54
    Don't listen and drive. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. All right. So, here we go. Pin, pals, and drive, people. That's right.
    134:21
    And this isn't just going to be a deep dive. This might be the biggest deep dive we've ever done. The deepest dive. The deepest of all dives, not just on the show, on this episode, but of all time, Cale and Nick, that we might have ever gone through.
    134:34
    So, as you know, regular listeners on Pin Pals, each episode we have this deep dive where, you know, we give this warning to our listeners, and this is that time. This is the opportunity for me to explain a particularly dense segment of the rules. And it's not quite because I want you to learn it, but perhaps because of the opposite. I want to prove that it's nearly impossible to learn it. I will say it, and I will say it precisely correctly, but it will still be impossible to learn. And that is the actual issue, the meta issue of why I'm going into it is what I'm trying to say. And so are you ready? Let's do it. First, I want to define unique mode perks. So mode perks are these awards. They're given for finishing a mode that's unique to that mode. So we talked about them. I mentioned earlier Uncanny X-Men, John Wick. You know, we said X-Men Storm. Storm mode is the Sentinel one, is the Sentinel perk. That's right. And then John Wick, you can beat the red mode, and that gives you a multiple extender there, for example. And I want to clarify that definition, because I don't just mean getting an award after completing a mode. Let's say you play Stern's Kiss, for example, good game. In that game, when you beat a song, you get a 2x playfield multiplier for the rest of the ball. That's a perk, but it's not a unique perk. You get it after completing any mode. This concept of mode perks isn't new. Mode perks have existed before Avengers. You think about Aerosmith, for example. In Aerosmith, when you complete each mode, there it gives you a unique award, a unique super event for finishing that mode. If you beat Dude Looks Like a Lady, you get super lanes. If you beat super targets, you get same old song and dance. And so I see that as a mode perk. Differentiating it from KISS, which is not unique, it's just an award, basically.
    136:13
    Nick, can you stand that definition so far? Yep, I'm on board. Okay, now back to the Avengers. Oh, Avengers has mode perks. And you get something unique for each particular mode you beat. And mode perks are and can be a fun idea, and I want to be clear that I support the concept because they give a lot to strategy to it, but they increase game complexity and strategies significantly. So it really becomes important and critical to convey the message clearly to the player. And I think a lot of games that have tried mode perks have failed at that communication. We could probably do a whole episode on mode perks and whether they've been effectively communicated to the player. KISS doesn't have that problem. It's just 2X play field, so you don't have to really dive deep into clarity there. But even within the list of games that have mode perks, like Uncanny X-Men and John Wick, Avengers is truly in a class of its own. It took the concept, it added the Fibonacci sequence, the Nash equilibrium, some math that hasn't even been invented yet, and now we're going to try to explain that math here. Captain's Chair is a good example of unique perks in Star Trek, as Archadisang, Super Spinner, Super Ramps, for example. So, let's do it. In this mode, you beat a mode. In this game, Avengers, you beat a quest, you get a perk called a gem. Beat the reality gem, you get the reality gem. Easy enough. But you have to place the gem on a single shot, and the actual action of the gem is not one simple thing. It depends on multiple variables, three variables. One, which gem we're talking about. Two, the shot that you put it on. Three, the power level of that shot. Is it negative one level, you didn't collect it yet? Is it zero? You've collected it. Is it one or is it level two? So there's four different levels. And when I say I'll start with the Reality Gem because I think it's probably the simplest to explain. And when I say simplest, I mean it's incredibly complicated. It's just simpler to explain than the other five perks. The Reality Gem is a shot multiplier. That's the perk. It's a shot multiplier. So that's where most games would end the discussion. For example, in X-Men, there's a gambit perk. and it makes the Gambit Pop Bumper light a 3x shot multiplier instead of a 2x shot multiplier. That's all you have to understand for X-Men if you want to know what that perk does. Back to Avengers. As I said, you need to know three things to understand what the perk does in the Avengers. The perk itself, in this case the reality gem being a shot multiplier, what shot you place it on and the power level of that shot. And that means a lot of permutations. Technically, 18x6 permutations or 108 possibilities to be precise. And you know what that means. then within the deepest dive we're going to do a pinball science corner that's right what the fuck is that too much gail have we gotten too far wow that was that was ear-splitting loud it was oh You heard it? It's somehow getting louder. Everybody heard that. I'm going to drive. No more segments. Segments are over. Okay? That's it. I promise. I swear. It's the science quarter within the deep dive. That's what I want to convey to you. All right. And that's because I'm bringing in the largest chart I've made so far. Holy cow. That's right. This chart didn't exist yet. And I decided to make it, to really get it across here. And I'm going to have to go full screen to really show as much as I can. This is a chart of all 108 permutations, okay?
    139:40
    Cale, you can fall asleep now if you'd like, but we're going to do it. All right. Here's what we're going to do. I just told Jamie to join us. Okay, good. Perfect time. It's going to be super-rific, right? It's going to put him right to sleep. All right. We have a reality gem and everything the reality gem does, a power gem and everything that one does, a mind gem, a time gem, a space gem, and a soul gem. Those are the six gems in the game. And they all have perks, but those perks are different depending on what shot you place it on. So after you collect the award, what's the very next shot you hit after you collect? After you beat the quest, you beat Reality Gem, for example, and you collect the gem. The very final shot to collect the gem is the Gauntlet Ramp. Then a bunch of shots light, the Halt Shot lights, the Captain America shot lights, the Black Widow lights, the Black Panther does, the Captain Marvel, the Vision Drop Targets light. That's right, all of those light. What is the very next shot you hit is where it gets placed. So let's pretend for a second that we've beaten the reality gem mode using the strategy we talked about. We then collect the gem at the gauntlet ramp. We then, as our very first shot we hit, hit the Hulk shot.
    140:43
    That's going to dictate our awards, but it doesn't stop there. Wait a minute. Did you have the Hulk collected yet? Did you collect the Hulk? Or did you power him up to level one? Or did you power him up to level two? So if you did not collect the Hulk, you beat reality gem, but you haven't yet got 80 spinners on Hulk because you haven't powered him up by the method I talked about earlier, then all shots for the rest of however long Reality Gem is there on that orbit, that left spinner, will be 2x. So it's going to be 2x that Hulk shot. So if you want to build up the gamma ray, for example, which goes down the right end lane, and then you shoot that left spinner, that's how you do it. But if you've collected Hulk, if you've gotten at least 80 spins, it's still a 2X. But if you powered him up to level 1, then it's 3X. And if you powered him up to level 2, like another 110 and another 110 spins after that, then you've got him to 4X. So that is my this one segment here. Cale, what do you say to that?
    141:43
    So I'm just trying to – Yeah, so now I'm figuring, like, in a tournament, I want to, you know, get my Hulk up to level two before I even do a quest. That would be pretty cool. You could do it afterwards for what it's worth. It's not a problem to do it afterwards. Oh, okay. So do the quest, put the reality gem on Hulk, then work on leveling up Hulk. Yeah. Any order is fine, but that order is a good one.
    142:13
    Generally. Nice. That's right. Similarly, a little bit easier, now go to Captain America, which is the pop bumper shot. So again, you beat the reality gem. You collect the gem on the gauntlet ramp, and then your very next shot is to the pop bumpers. If you do that, then Captain America gets the reality gem. Wait, do you have Captain America collected? If you don't, it's 2x. If you do, it's also 2x. But if you powered him up, it's 3x. And if you powered him up to level 2, it's 4x. Makes sense there so far, right? Pretty simple to go for Black Widow. Same exact thing. That's the center ramp. If that's the first shot you hit, then reality gem is on Black Widow, and all center ramps will now be worth 2x unless you powered up to level 1, 3x, or powered up to level 2, 4x. Similar thing for Black Panther, 2x, 3x, 4x. So those are your four shots so far. Any questions on that, Cale? And I know, Nick, you get this. That's why I'm not asking you. No. I'm starting to see a pattern, Serge. Good. But I'm going to break you out of that pattern because there's two other shots you could put the gem on. You could put the gem on that wild Captain Marvel shot, for example, or you could put it on the vision drops, which are the drop targets, but those cannot be powered up. So in a sense, they're less complex than the other ones. There is no powering up. You can't hit the drops a bunch to get it to level two. You can't hit the Captain Marvel shot a bunch to get it to level one or level two. It just is what it is. So that's why Captain Marvel and vision have no power-ups to them. And they just do one thing. If the very first shot after I finish reality gem and get the gem and have to place it, My very first shot is the Captain Marvel shot. From then on, Captain Marvel will just be at 2X. It can't be any more. It can't be any less. It's just 2X. KLD, buy that.
    143:59
    I'm going to have to take your word for it. On that note, there's a separate category between the Avengers shots. Those first four Serge mentioned are like active Avengers shots, and these last two, Marvel and Vision, are passive, meaning they don't get leveled up. So it's one way to think about it. only those four primary Avengers can be leveled up. That's correct.
    144:22
    Vision drop targets is a completely random thing that doesn't really have to do with the thing I just said, more or less. It does actually give you 2x scoring on those drop targets, but it does this completely other thing where all you have to do is hit down two out of the three drops, and it will give you the award. So you don't have to hit all three drops instead of the two. When we talked about that grid award and complex bingo, here you just have to hit two out of three drops. And if you do, you get the award. It only works three times, but that's how that works. So these are a little different, Captain Marvel and Vision, when you put the gem shot on there. But that's Reality Gem, the simplest of all the gems to explain, more or less. And putting that Reality Gem on the drops is a good way to collect all those drop awards that we showed earlier in the computer grid. It'll help you progress through that faster, collect more awards. Right. So if you're, like, trying to do progress and that's your goal, get through as many computer grid bingo situation as you can, Reality Gem on the drops. If you want score, then you want to put in a shot that you think is going to be pretty valuable in the rest of that game. Nick, what do you care about? What do you say putting in the reality gem? Where would you put it for score-based play? Score-based, like Kale said, you could do the left orbit for your Gamma Ray hurry-ups. You could also put it on the Captain Marvel ramp on the premium at some point. It would get you, if it's boosted, it will give you some pretty good scoring there, too. Yeah, and I like it also on the left orbit on Hulk. So that's reality gem. Any questions on Reality Gem before we talk about these other gems?
    145:50
    No, let's go. I did say we're doing 108. Let's do it. This is a bit easier to explain also. Power Gem isn't so bad. Power Gem is powerful, and what that means is, remember when I said leveling up? And I'm going to go back to, and I don't have to show the song, but I'm going to go, which I know is way too loud.
    146:10
    It. Okay, so. It. Man, I'm sorry. That's way too. Everything is too loud. But anyway, when I powered it up, oh, you know what? What was it? Where was that damn slide? I'm not going to, you know what? I'm just going to show it here. And I'm going to find it easier. There it is. Okay. And not, avoid the songs.
    146:29
    So this is how you power up your Avengers. If you want your Hulk to be powered up, you need 80 spins. But if you put a power gem on Hulk, you only need 40 spins.
    146:41
    If you put, let's say Captain America requires 50 pop bumpers. But if you put the power gem on Captain America and you want it to level up Captain America, it only requires 25 pop-up burst. So it makes it easier to level up Avengers. That's the power.
    146:56
    Cale, did you buy that? Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's go. Okay. This sheet right here. Oh, yeah. We're not done with the sheet. You've always said in tournament play, you go straight to reality, Jim. I do say that, and I stand by that. Okay. Good. So all this other stuff you're about to talk about, the other gems, you would only go for those after you've done this reality gem. Correct. I am not doing this so that you could learn how to strategize in this game. I am doing this because this is crazy.
    147:31
    I am doing it for the thing itself, Kale. It is like the Joker with madness. It is about the action. It's not about, it's about sending a message, you know what I mean? Okay.
    147:43
    Maybe you would disagree with me, Nick. Maybe you find value in this. I don't know. No, I think Ray Day's already verified that. He even was like. That's a lot. You know, if you rewind the chat, he's like, what's going on here? Right. I am doing this because we make a promise on our show, Cale, to get this crazy. Yeah. And why not deliver it if we're going to do that? For sure. But, Jamie, you can go to sleep. That's what I'm trying to say from the JVS show. I'm still trying to get Jamie in here. All right. All right, so Power Gem. If you put it on Hulk, it means you can more easily power up Hulk. Also, if you were to drain, normally when you drain, you lose your power up on the Avenger, but if you have the gem on there, you won't lose that power up, so you can maintain it. A good one to put it on, tell me if you agree, Nick, is Captain America. And the reason you put it on, I would put it on Captain America. So Reality Gem, Hulk is a reasonable choice. Let's say I'm going to go bold it here. But Power Gem, I'm going to bold this one. Traditionally, because you want to power up your Avengers and collect them so that you go on to your Soul Gem and your Battle Royale and your Black Order Multiball and so forth.
    148:55
    So you want to collect them. But one of them is harder to collect than all the others, and that's Captain America. Because it requires a whole bunch of pop bumpers, and you're not easily in there. You can cleanly hit the Captain America shot for 10 pop-pumper progresses, but it's hard to do. And so you put it there so it carries. So not only does it make it easier to progress, but it saves you ball-to-ball and keeps the power level. That's my argument. Nick, what do you say? I agree it's a good choice. Another good choice, two other good choices, is the Black Panther shot, the right orbit, because it can be difficult to make that shot on certain copies. I'll hold that for you. and it has some good Black Panther has some good perks once he's leveled up. So that is one of my choices. The other one is the drops. If you put the power gem on the drops Wait, let me finish these characters just so I can show the drops. So it's pretty simple to explain for Hulk 2x progress there. Captain America 2x progress there. That's a hard Avenger to level up so that's why I like to put it there. Black Widow, a very easy Avenger to level up so I don put it on there Don put it on Widow Don put it on Widow And then Black Panther as we just said also fairly hard to do to consistently make that right orbit You have to really make the right orbit It can't fall down into the pop-up. It's got to make the right orbit to count. And so that's Black Panther. But now let's go to these other two that don't get power-ups. Sorry, you go, Nick, and talk to us about why you might put it on the vision drop target. On the drops, if you are going for, like, super modes or, you know, getting your portal lock that's kind of buried in that computer grid, the next drop target completion, you get two squares instead of just one square. So you're essentially completing that grid twice as fast, and you get to use that three times with the power gem. So it's a good option for it. Okay, so placing gems. For the people out there who don't understand it, like me, after you're done with a quest, you get a gem to place. Oh, I'm showing you a video, Caleb. Not a loud room, by the way. Sorry, I'm going to actually answer that by showing you the video of it. Yeah, I promise I will. Yeah, this is Ray D putting the gem, showing you how to place the time gem, for example. And let me – yeah, I think that's not going to be as loud as I think.
    151:16
    Wow. It is still? What is wrong with you? What is happening? I just say mute it. I muted it. I'm sorry. Okay, so I want to start this again. What he's doing is he has collected the time gem because he hit this shot. In fact, I'm going to just start it again completely.
    151:34
    So just so I understand, so that's the last shot of the mode, a.k.a. quest. Ish. Technically, they say that you defeated the mode, and then there's still this one shot left to collect the gem. So it's sort of like a secret last shot. And the thematic immersion is the gem is up in the gauntlet in the upper right corner. So you're capturing that gem from the gauntlet, essentially.
    152:03
    So there's this flashing, there's a circle right here. Sound blast. Yeah, I sure do. I'm going to fix that. I'm sorry, team.
    152:12
    It's made for a bad podcast. What can you do? We'll figure it out. We'll do it in post, right, Cale? This isn't live. All right. So when this is lit solid, that means you can collect the gem there. And you hit that shot, which will collect the gem, and he's going to do that right now.
    152:30
    So he just collected the gem. Look, collected time gem. Okay, so that is always your collect shot? Correct. Always. After you beat the mode, whether it's reality or mind or time, that's your collect shot. It tells you what it does very briefly. Adds time to modes and increases ball save time. Fine. and then as this ball is going to be trapped up here and then all those eight shots I mentioned, no, sorry, six shots I mentioned rather are going to be flashing and the very next shot he hits will place the time jump. Do you see that diamond and that diamond and that one and that one and this one and this one? So he's going to hit the center ramp most likely, which is a good one for time after he's done talking about it. And as soon as he hits the center ramp, you're going to see this diamond become solid, indicating that now placed time gem.
    153:22
    Shooting gem adds time, which we'll get into. So that is collecting and placing a gem. Cale, did that answer your question? Yes. That's what we're here to do. No more videos. Cutting out. I'm skipping ahead to make sure of it. Back to the chart. One of the shots you could hit as your very next shot is the drop target. And as Nick was saying, you might put the power there if you want to go through awards, because when you get the next drop target completion, it awards two awards at once. So hit three targets down, but get two awards.
    153:59
    And you have three uses of it as soon as you place it on the vision drop target. Nick, is that fair, and that's why you like it? Yep. Okay. Are we ready for the Mind Gem?
    154:12
    It's my favorite. Okay. Mind Gem. This is the advanced strategy. Because Mind Gem lights an action button for essentially a boom button. So it turns your action button into a boom button like on Deadpool where you hit the action button and it spots you a shot. And if that were all it is, then I would stop there. But it's more complicated than that. In just the 20,000-foot view, that's what Mind Gem is. Action button, boom button. That's it. To get it really silly, let's say the next shot you hit is Hulk. and you place the gem on Hulk after you beat Mind Gem, take that super giant, then if your Hulk has not yet been collected, it lights your action button for a single shot on Hulk. So let's say you're trapped up on the right flipper and Hulk is lit. You're in a mode later on. After your Mind Gem, you're in some other mode later on and your Hulk is lit. You're in power mode or power gem or whatever it is. Then you press the action button and it will spot you the shot on Hulk, but only on Hulk. That's what differentiates it from a boom button. Because a boom button is, it just spots you the most valuable shot. Whereas, you don't have to think about it. You know, for example, the Bishop award in X-Men, same thing. It's a boom button. You press it, it just spots you a shot, for example. That's that. But this gets a little bit more complicated. This only spots you the shot on Hulk. If you've collected Hulk, so you've made 80 spins on Hulk, then your action button is lit for two shots on Hulk, still on Hulk. You have two times where you could press the action button, and it awards you the Hulk shot. But this is the true boom button. If you have leveled up Hulk to level one, suddenly your action button no longer has anything to do with Hulk. As soon as you level up the Avenger to level one, you get three boom buttons of the traditional type, where you don't have to think about it, and it just gives you whatever shot is the most valuable on the play field. So does that, before I talk to crazy level two one, Kel, when I say boom button, I really mean only when it's placed on a level one Avenger.
    156:20
    Why? I said it right, correct, Nick? You're spot on. Okay. So this is the, level one is the traditional boom button. Now let's talk about level two. Level 2 takes away your three uses, and it only becomes one use. But that one use is a super boom button. Think about it like the heat. Why can't I think of it? Heat ray in Godzilla, right, where it just spots, like, all the shots that are lit. Did I say that right? Heat ray, I think, is just the most viable shot.
    156:53
    What's going on? Why did this happen? Is this Keith? Okay, so we know that. So this is Keith's idea. Was this him, like, trying to fuck with Carl? I don't know. I think Keith is, like, low-key, a pretty high-IQ guy, I would say. I don't mean that in a nice way. I just meant that, like, he's a high-IQ guy that's full stop, but he purposely doesn't give off the air of that because that's just not his style or whatever. But he's a smart dude, and clearly he gets all this sort of thing, and sometimes he pulls himself back because he, you know, or goes too far, recognizes that he's gone too far. Yeah, heat ray is all lit shots. Oh, sorry. My bad. Yeah, so this is like the heat ray. This is the boom button. This is the heat ray is what I would say if you have to consider it like something. And he just went too far here is what I would say.
    157:45
    Okay. Well, mind gem, where should you place it? The answer is the easiest shot. So whatever you consider the easiest shot in the game, Kale, is where you place it because the easiest shot, you're likely to get to level one or level two.
    158:00
    And that means you get the better boom button out of it, as opposed to this nonsense. So the answer is, and you're going to say it, Nick, what's the answer? Black Widow. Black Widow, that's the right answer. So the reason is you put on Black Widow, which is the center ramp. That's the easiest shot in the game. Would you buy that, Cale?
    158:18
    The perfectly center ramp, not the gauntlet ramp, the center ramp in the game, straight up the middle towards the back. I thought that fat ramp's like the easiest shot. You know what? Fair enough, but there is no gem to be placed on there. Yeah. Okay. Not lit for a gem. Not an option. Of the lit options, you're not going to put it on Captain Marvel. That's really hard, you know, for example. And so you're going to put it on the easiest shot in the game because you can get up to level one or level two really quickly. And if you're in some mode that has a really valuable shot that you have trouble hitting, suddenly you have action buttons that could do it for you. and that's where, if we go back in time to talk about different strategies of the game, where the high-level 1% of players pick the Mind Gem as their first mode. For everyone listening, pick the Reality Gem. But for 1% of players, pick the Mind Gem, and the reason you pick the Mind Gem is beat the Mind Gem, put the Mind Gem on Black Widow, make sure Black Widow is powered up to at least level 1, and then play the Soul Gem mini-wizard mode after you get to the Avengers,
    159:18
    after you collect all the Avengers, And Soul Gem is worth a lot, especially because you could hold down the action button for 10x scoring. 10x the multiplier on Soul Gem if you do that. And Soul Gem has some hard shots. You have to make like a Captain Marvel shot if you're on the premium. You have to hit all three drops at some point. But you could spot those for yourself. So that's why people do the Mind Gem slash Soul Gem route, 1% of players. Nick, what do you say to that? Yep, that's exactly right. That's a pretty good strategy. In fact, you can get the Mind Gem ahead of time before you play the Soul Gem, and you can enable the hard mode in Soul Gem, which will give you 10x scoring. You can then use the Mind Gem to collect some of those 10x shops and get a really high-value Soul Gem mode, which normally is very low scoring. Yeah, so, Cale, if you're doing Reality Gem, you're going to win with 100 million points. But if you're successfully doing the Mind Gem slash Soul Gem, you're going to get a few hundred million points.
    160:16
    Yep. And it's just hard to do. It takes a lot of understanding of the game to do that, which is why I do not recommend it.
    160:23
    Any questions there on Mind Gem, Cale? Nope. All right. But we're going to keep going to the Mind Gem all works the same way for the four Avengers. Again, you put it on a shot, but you have to power that up to get, you know, Boom Button versus Heat Ray, for example. But then, of course, we have these other two, Captain Marvel and Vision, which don't get power-ups at all, so that means they're complicated. So, action button on Captain Marvel does give you a Captain Marvel shot, which matters if you're trying to go binary, basically.
    160:57
    But it's not that great to do it on. Bad choice. Don't do that. You can also put it on the drop targets, and it's actually a little bit more complicated than I'm saying here. But it collects a lit award, and you could use it three times. You can actually sort of choose your award doing it, as I recall. But I wouldn't mess with that. I'm not going to go near that. Okay. Any questions before we go on to Time Gem? And yes, we're on our way, halfway through this deepest of all deep dives. I will say that Mind Gem, with the Soul Gem, if you want to get real crazy, there's a way to complete the Soul Gem using the Mind Gem and only two flips in the mode. In the hard mode. In the hard mode, yes. Carl D'Angelo did it, I think, on a stream one time. Nuts. That was pretty cool. You get those extra points with the number of flips remaining. It's just crazy. Max scoring. Okay. All right. Time gem. Let's do it. Time gem adds time. And time matters if you're in modes, for example, like the super modes, super spinner and super gauntlet ramp. And it's just going to add time to all of that stuff. It actually adds time to all ball savers. So it's really powerful. It's a good strategy for like long term playing, especially if you're trying to get through the game, because it makes your multi balls, the ball save of your multi balls last longer, for example. How much longer? Pretty simple to explain. Well, not that simple.
    162:17
    So you collect the time gem. You beat the time gem mode. You collect the time gem. Then you place the time gem. Let's say you place it on the left orbit, for example. If you place it on the left orbit, then every time you shoot the left orbit, and this is right, yeah, every time you shoot the left orbit, you will add time. But how much time depends on how much power-up you've given to that Avenger again. If it's uncollected or collected, level zero, let's say, then you get five seconds. If you collect it at level one and then power up to level one, then it's eight seconds. If you power it up to level two, it's 15 seconds. So imagine having a ball save that's 15 seconds extra on all your multiballs, for example. That's the power of it.
    163:02
    And it actually adds time to all ball saves, plus any shots that you have to that Avenger keep on adding more time to things, too, like any time modes you have. Nick, did I say that right? Yep. I'm not sure about adding 15 seconds to the ball save timer. I know it extends the ball saves, but I'm not sure if that's – I don't want to fact-check you or anything, but I can't remember if that's – I'm fact-checking, but I believe in it, what I'm saying. Okay. I trust you. I trust your research. Now, you're going to agree with me that this is probably one where you want to put it on the easiest shot again. Also, yeah. Because you're going to tend to – the easiest shot that's lit. You're going to tend to want to add time to modes. you're going to tend to add time to your features, your super spinner and all the super gauntlets, so you could get all these points going. And so, Nick, where do you put it? Black Widow. That's a Black Widow shot, center ram. And that's really the only answer, I would say, for me, of time jam, because it's very easy to power up that Avenger, number one, and so you're going to get more time. And it's very easy to make that shot. So at any time, you're like, I need more time on my super feature. Just shoot the center ram. That's all. But let's talk about the nonsense here. the other two.
    164:14
    So, these cannot be powered up, so it's just a 10-second flat rule. Captain Marvel adds 10 seconds to all ball savers, and any time you shoot Captain Marvel, it adds 10 seconds to the timer. Same deal on the drops. Adds 10 seconds to all ball savers, and any time you shoot the drops, it adds 10 seconds to your timer of your super modes, stuff like that. That's my time gem summary. Kale, you still alive? Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, good. I appreciate that you're still alive. But let's do, yeah, this is the one. This is the chart to end all charts. Let's do Space Gem. God, I hate Space Gem. Oh, it's the worst gem, and it's the worst to explain. But I guess we're going to try. So, shots to Hulk, like the action button, for three seconds, and that moves. This is so hard. I'm sorry. So you get the gem. You beat Space Mode, right? Space Quest. You collect the gem, and then you place it on Hulk. And again, it matters how well powered up your Hulk is. If you were to shoot Hulk after you place the gem, it will light the action button for exactly three seconds. If you press the action button when it's lit, it will move all gems one space to the right. Why would you want that? Well, maybe you don't like the placement. It also kind of helps recharge them when you do it. And so that's so you could, like, have synergy with other gems that have, like, limited uses.
    165:39
    If you did it with a collected Hulk, it's also still one use. But if it was level one, you get to do that two times. If you do it level two, it's three times. I think I said that right. I'll pause there. Nick, what do you say? Yep, that sounds right. God, this is the worst. This one's the worst. By far the worst. Great theme version. You're moving things in space, you know. I'll say this perk is probably the least important. Right.
    166:07
    Correct. Now, same thing for Captain America. One use, one use, two use, three use for your leveling up. Same thing for Black Widow. One use, one use, two use, three use. Same thing for Black Panther. One use, one use, two use, three uses. But those other ones are pretty ridiculous again, right, because they don't get powered up at all. So here it's just shoot the Captain Marvel, lights the action button for three seconds. You can move all gems one space to the right, and you only get one use, but you get to recharge it every time you get a Captain Marvel award, which you get for a repeated Captain Marvel shot. Similar to the drop target, it lights the action button for three seconds after you hit the drop target. It moves them right one time, but you can recharge it after your next grid award. So it allows you to repeat it very frequently use these space gems. If you really like using the space gem, you're probably going to put it on drops, I suppose. I'll say it. I'll bold it, even though I hate it. that's where I would put the space gems for that reason, because you're going to be able to use it, and then if you want to use it again, oh, just get a grid award, and you can get to use it again. Nick, what do you say to that? Yep, that sounds right. I will say that the space gem's biggest utility is actually during the mode when you're playing it. It has potentially one of the highest scoring gem quests, and other than that, don't worry about it too much.
    167:28
    Love that, and I agree there. and now we get to our last gem. Kale, are you ready? You specifically, Kale. Yeah. Okay. Soul gem. This is what I've been waiting for. This is the one. You knew we were going to do this at some point in this episode. Yeah. People asked for it. The soul gem. How is that not my favorite gem? Yeah. You're full of soul.
    167:48
    Soul food, soul gem. Yeah. So tell me why I don't need to worry about this. Okay. No, you can worry about it. I mean, it's a, well, first of all, it's a mid-game strategy. You can't play the Soul Gem when you start a mode. That's not one of the options. The only way to even play a Soul Gem is to have collected all sticks Avengers, 80 spins on Hulk, one Iron Man completion, and so forth. So you can't even play it if you wanted to. So you don't even have to worry about it. And if you get to the Soul Gem, you probably won the game at that point in a tournament, let's say. So in actuality, you don't have to worry about it. But this is in actuality. This is us talking about all the rules, so we're going to do it anyway. So I say you don't have to worry about it, Cale, but let's worry about it for the sake of our madness.
    168:32
    So let's say you get into that soul gem mode, and you beat it. It's a flip count, and you don't go down to zero flips, and so you survive. You beat the soul gem, and you collect the soul gem. It does three things for you, three things. The first thing it does doesn't matter where you place it, and that is that when you get to Black Order multiball, which is the second time you collect the Avengers. So you collect the Avengers at once, you get to Soul Gem. You beat Soul Gem, now you have Soul Gem. The second time you get to collect the Avengers, then you get to Black Order multiball, and it gives you an extender on that multiball. Fair, Nick? Two? Yep. That's correct. It doesn't matter where you place it. So it's just a free multiball extender. Second thing you get is it allows you to replay any quest. Let's say you played a quest, but darn it, you didn't win. You didn't get that reality gem, let's say. You could replay it again and get that reality gem. Let's say you really want that reality gem, so you could replay it. And that also doesn't matter where you place it. The third one matters where you place it. So you place it on a shot, let's say. The first shot you put it on is to Hulk. And then after the soul gem, you play a new gem, like reality gem, after that. You replay reality gem if you want, or you play power, or you play mind, or you play time or you play space, and then you beat that gem quest. So you've done a good job. You've scored 100 million in that mode. You did all the things with portal locks, and you score a whole bunch of points in it. The next time you hit Hulk, you get part of that value. You get what's called the soul gem jackpot value, and it's a percentage of how you did on the quest that you just beat. So you do soul gem. You win on soul gem. You put it on Hulk. Then you play reality gem. you get 100 million points on reality gem. The next time you shoot Hulk, the very next time, and only one time that you shoot Hulk, you're going to get 50% of that 100 million or 50 million points. If you powered up Hulk by collecting him, still 50%. But if you power him to level one, 75%. But if it's level two, 150%. So you would get, for one singular shot in this scenario, 150 million points for soul gem. So quite valuable, in other words.
    170:44
    Nick, what do you say to that? yep that's a really fun way to play the game actually is to kind of build up these big soul gem jackpots and collect them so i'm really satisfying yep and that's execution and feeling like you did like i could agree that if i hit that 150 million point shot let's say um i feel like i did something special you know but it's a moment but it's a moment born of complexity and deep rules knowledge you know i'd say so it's like not that accessible to a lot of people but it does feel good, I'd say. Okay. And fortunately, the other soul gems are pretty similar. 50, 75, 150, and so forth. So you're going to put, it also favors putting in enough shot that you feel can be powered up to level two. Would you agree with that too, Nick?
    171:29
    Yes, except for the premium and the Captain Marvel shot is the only exception. So let's go down to Captain Marvel, because as we said before, these ones can't be powered up. So it just gives you a plain old 50% on it can't be changed on Captain Marvel. Same for drops. Gives you a plain old 50%. Can't be changed. You can never get it up to that 150 million points. It's always going to be 50 million points on 100 million reality gem modes, stuff like that. And so you might want to put it on something that is level-uppable to you. That's what I would say. Any questions on that, Nick or Kale?
    172:09
    Nope. Nope, not here. And you'd think that after we did genuinely go through all 108 permutations, I'd be done, right? What kind of madness would I have to add to this 108 permutations? I knew you weren't done. No, because there's a little chart hiding behind this chart. That's right. It turns out you can move these gems in the middle of the game. No, it's not enough to give you 108. What if you wanted to switch up the 108? What if you're like, I'm going to move it around because I know the game so deeply that number 57 should go and spot 106, let's say. You know, like, that's the kind of depth that we're talking about. And so we talk about changing gems now.
    172:45
    Let's zoom in. By the way, I should have zoomed in this whole time, I realize now. Sorry, chat. But you could change the gems to move them all around if you understand the depth of the game so well. First, how do you qualify changing the gems? Every time you collect all the Avengers, lights change gems. And by the way, it's lit at the bottom right scoop on a premium, for example. there's a bingo award for changing gems and then there's a mystery award that you can get for it so that's how you qualify it and then you shoot the scoop to use it and when you shoot the scoop you have 13 seconds to move your gems move your flippers so it starts off with let's say one gem and you have to move your flippers and press the action button to move it and then it asks you the next gem and move it it's like a series of decisions in 13 seconds so you have to really understand the depth of this game very well Choose the bolded things that I did in this graph here, for example. And you have to know it well enough to do it in 13 seconds. For what it's worth, it's actually 20 seconds if you happen to own the space gem. That's another perk of the space gem, give you a little bit more time in that decision. And if you run out of time, they just randomly place the gems. So this is for these super users out there, like the 1% of the 1%, who know this game so cold that they know where they want their gems to go.
    174:05
    I had a question in the chat there from Travis. First question from Travis, who asked, if you put a gem on the drops, is it one activation per drop target hit for a possible two to three if the ball sweeps them? Well, the answer to that actually depends on, well, which award are we talking about here? So the vision, the reality, if you put it on the drop targets, all you have to hit is two out of three drops to get an award. And the power gem, you still need to get all three drop targets, but it gives you two grid squares. at two awards at the time, and you do have three times to use it, and you could recharge it via the space gem or the change gems that I just mentioned below. So I don't know if that's – hopefully that answers your question, Travis. Do you think that answers the question, Nick? I think the space gem is the only one that this would kind of pertain to. Yeah, because if you place a space gem on the drop targets, you'd have to shoot – I think that's the question. Do you want to hit one drop target or do you have to hit three to use that activation? You have to hit three, yeah, because you have to get the next grid award. Right. So it's all three, in other words. Yep. Okay. And that is it for this deepest dive. That's it.
    175:19
    We are now coming up for air on this super deep dive there. And I am going to say, as a reminder where we even were here, We were talking about clarity, and we were saying when it came to clarity that Avengers has this problem with power-up of the level. We said that. But then we also were talking about it in terms of the gem placement. And I have one last thing to say for clarity, one last extra moment to say that clarity could be better. And that is the inlanes. So I didn't talk about this this whole time, which is that the inlanes cannot be manually moved. On almost all pinball games, let's say this is lit right here, and you want to move it so that it's unlit because you see the ball coming down the ramp, and you're like, oh, I want to light the letter R. So you press the right flipper, which moves it to here. That's almost all other pinball games, even from the days of Firepower. It's in 1980. That's what the answer has been. But not this game. This came, there is no way to manually move the inlanes yourself. The only way, if you want to move that R, for example, is to go to, that's right, this disk, spin it around, and that will, in a random fashion, I mean, it's not every switch that moves the letter, but you can't predict where it's going to go, will move the letter to somewhere else. and that makes it really hard to purposefully get all the in lanes. You have to hit the spinner quite often and then hit a ramp, and you have to hope that the spinner spun just enough to move the lanes in the way that you want it to move, and I'll pause there. I mean, it's, Avengers said no. It's time to change this nonsense of moving lights yourself. Here, let's make it hard for you to do. You have to spin the disc. Nick, what do you say to that? Yeah, it's definitely different, I don't think most people realize that right away because it's just not super obvious. You've got to do a lane change. It doesn't happen. And I think the reason they did it is because it would make getting your Iron Man locks a little too easy because the ramps are easy to hit and combo to a flipper.
    177:39
    Because of the nature of the layout and its flow that will feed the flippers, it would be too easy to light your locks for the Iron Man tower. Yeah, and I agree with you. I think we get why Keith and Ray Day did this. And I think the way to think about it is if you have an important rule tied to in-lane lights, like in this game, lights, locks, that's a big deal, right? Other games are like bonus X. They don't care, you know, if you get the in-lanes or whatever. Not a big deal. You know, get some in-lanes or whatever. Make it easy. Make it not easy. Doesn't matter so much to those games, let's say. But in this game, it's a very important task to light the in-lanes because it gives you your locks, your lighter locks for Iron Man. You take that and you've combined important in-lanes combined with easy, repeatable-ish ramp. And in this case, that's the center ramp of the game. I guess, you know, like Gauntlet ramp doesn't go to the in-lanes, but the center ramp in the game, fairly easy to hit that ramp and maybe ski pass and do it again, you know, quite often. And so they had to nerf that, which is a way to say they had to lessen the value of that in some way. And that actually, this battle happens throughout the game of Avengers. in the rule set if you're really deep diving into it. I won't do the segment here. But what I will say is, for example, combos. We talked about the combo system. You cannot repeatedly hit the center ramp. You know, you have to switch it up. Or leveling up Avengers. Black Widow would be pretty trivial to just hit the center ramp, ski pass, and do it again. But they make you hit another shot alternating so that you can't level up Black Widow just by... I said it's like three ramps to light Black Widow, but it's actually six shots to light Black Widow because it's one to the center ramp, but then something else, and then one to the second and then something else. You can hit another switch, too, like a slingshot or something like that. That's right. We'll reset it. Six switches, in other words, to level. And then the in-lanes, because there's this big award. And so it forces you to spin the disc instead of the lane change because they didn't want overpowered in-lanes, in other words, and to make it easy. And I get that, Nick, but I'm just saying this is the wrong way to do it. That's my claim. Yeah, it's not clear, right? Still not clear. Right. Like, we could do it other ways. First of all, you could make the light lock something different besides the in-lanes, you know, for example. Maybe make this bonus X instead. And you can get one from the drop board, so you can light a lock from there. So that gives you another path to light locks. I think there was a question from chat. Did I go through the left in lane Thor helper? You did not. That's where you go through the left in lane, and then you hit Thor right away, and it's more progress.
    180:04
    That's on a level two Black Widow, I believe. It gives you that passive perk. Right. That's right. It's a good reminder. I have to add that to the chart, don't I? Yeah. There's actually more to that chart. I know. No, honestly, I couldn't fit it in. There's more in. Damn it, you're right. And there's level two Avengers and the scoring you get from being at level two Avengers. You're right. There's actually more, and I hate it that there's more, but there is more. It's okay. It's it. Serge, it's not your fault.
    180:27
    My fault. You're right. I will say one more thing on clarity. Yeah, please do. And I think, you know, we talk about how things aren't clear, but how could it be better, right? How could that clarity be improved? And I think a good example is Godzilla. because Godzilla's complicated. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of different things, but what does Godzilla have that Avengers doesn't really in, like, a main theme of the game?
    180:55
    It's a narrator. Oh, that's a good point. Godzilla has a narrator, like, talking to you, telling you what's going on, like, saying, hey, Ebra's getting ready to fight you, like, Godzilla's heat rays building, you know, things like that, where Avengers doesn't, yeah, it has call-outs from the Avengers and things like that, but it doesn't really narrate the story as well, right? You know what? It's a solid, that's an A-plus point, Nick, right there. I agree. Nailed it. You could even do it in Japanese on Godzilla if you wanted to. Exactly, yeah. You can understand that. All right, this is going to cover for me clarity, and I think we've finished clarity, and we only have a few criteria left, and they won't take as long. Are you guys ready? I'm ready. I think we've made the point, right, Nick? on clarity? I think so. Cale, do you feel we made the point on clarity? Oh, absolutely. Okay. The rest of this is going to be pretty good though, and only positive things to say. So we talk about risk and reward in pinball a lot too, and this game has a ton of risk and reward. There's so much I could point to, but I'll focus on a few things. There's a hundred examples of risk and reward, like in all Keith Owen games, there's a lot of risk and reward and also Rade Games, which is, we talk about Soul Gem. You can hold down the action button for the hard difficulty and make Soul Gem worth ten times as much, but you have fewer flips, in other words, and you add fewer flips in the mode, so you run out of flips sooner, but it makes it worth ten times as much. By the way, even if you're not a great pinball player, you should do, in my opinion, the 10x Soul Gem each time. Nick, I'll see what you think. But because the shots are worth so much that even when you don't finish the Soul Gem, fine, you don't finish it. I'm talking about in a tournament strategy. Yeah, a tournament. Not like journey progress, because then you won't win the Soul Gem. But you just make a few shots in Soul Gem, and you'll get a lot more points than if you finished the Soul Gem on regular easy mode. What do you say to that, Nick? I agree. You kind of have to be very cognizant of your flips, though, if you're going to try that, because it's really easy to burn through your flips, yeah. Right. The question from the chat is, did we talk about how to hit the Captain Marvel ramp on the premium? Nick did have a whole section on that at the beginning, at around the 27-minute mark or so of this podcast. That's what I believe. So we'll leave that for that one. Other things in risk and reward, which I would give an A-plus to this game on, there's the Hawkeye, and that gives you a choice. You could do a harder Hawkeye for more points. You know, for example, there's the Mind Gem. You know, we talked about the Mind Gem earlier. There's a rapidly firing shot to hit. There's a slower hit shot. You could go for the rapidly firing ones, which means you don't have to hit a sanctum target at the end. I'm not going to explain that fully again now, but what I mean to say is just those are some examples. What do you say to that, Nick, as an argument, risk and reward, and do you have anything to add? Yeah, and I think actually most of the modes do have a risk-reward factor, such as Power Gem. You can hit the left orbit once per shot round to increase the value. Reality Gem, you can spin the sling ring in order to increase the value of the shots. SpaceGem is the biggest one where you can use a combo system to boost the multipliers for the shots and really cash in big mode shots on that. You don't need to do it to complete it, but there's the option, so you have that risk-reward. Well said there.
    184:13
    And, you know, I'm not going to say all the other things in it, but it's got 2x, 3x portal locks and shot multipliers and reality gem. There's a lot there in the risk and reward. So A+, no surprise from a typical Elwynn and Raid A game.
    184:27
    Next criteria we talk about is fair and balanced. And just to explain what fair and balanced is, because that can be a vague concept sometimes, and I like to put up this slide so people know what I mean when I say fair and balanced.
    184:38
    Does one player do something that ruins another one? A la Godfather, for example. There's no lock stealing or anything in this game, so good on that one. And it's great on fair and balanced, in other words. Is the scoring so lopsided that it makes you ignore timeout modes? You're never ignoring or timing out a mode in this game, right, Nick? You're just playing them all, right? No, almost never. It's not like Guardians of the Galaxy situation. I only have like 15 seconds left, so let me wait until it ends so that I can start the mode and then start the multiball or whatever. You're not doing things like shenanigans like that in this game that I tend to not enjoy. There's one case I can think of, but it's pretty small. Can you say the case while I do one thing to lock the door here so my kids don't hear? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so one scenario is the Thanos attacks modes where Thanos is threatening your gem. So let's say you play the reality gem, Kale, right? You get that big scoring right from it. In Thanos attacks, you may want to sacrifice your reality gem so you can then play it again. If you have the soul gem, you can get to replay that mode and earn big points from it again. That's the only time I would consider, like, timing out it. time out that mode, essentially, and lose that gem on purpose to then replay it again. So, I don't know if you caught that, Serge, or not. In my heart, I did, Nick. And that's good enough. Yeah. One case. That's all I could think of. All right. So, yeah, this game is very fair and balanced. You don't always do the same thing. Like, obviously, there's so many things we set up how to do in this game and different strategies, and it's just not at all the same thing. although I think in the end it's still I personally think tournament strat is portal lock plus mode plus Thor but it's not the only thing you can do the game very much makes you use the whole play field that's true of every Keith Elwin game, every shot matters in different times and it never rewards you for doing nothing not like gimme multiballs the first Thor is sort of a gimme multiball with three hits but it still has to be purposeful and then this last point of harder shots worth more yes So in this game, for example, they make Captain America worth ten pop bumpers if you go through there. The Captain Marvel has this binary. It's a really hard shot on the premium, so they get you to be able to juice it to 5x, Nick, like the strategy you mentioned earlier. So they're very aware of which shots are easiest to hit and which shots are harder to hit, and then they're very aware of where they put the value on those shots. Would you agree with that, Nick? Yeah, totally. Agreed. That's it for Fair and Balanced. three more categories here. Let's talk about innovation in Avengers. Assuming you didn't want to add anything there, TKL, I'm sorry. Oh, no, no. You go ahead. I'm on Pinside looking for Avenger deals. I love it.
    187:22
    Innovation. Yeah, this game is innovative. This was, I believe, the first flip count thing we mentioned earlier in Soul Gem, and then it became a popular concept on all these games that came out afterwards, Elwynn Games and others, to add the flip counts, and I think it's a pretty cool idea, and it makes for a good moment. It's in King Kong, for example, only that hasn't innovated further with an independent flip count on each flipper. But it's a good concept. It works. There's other innovations here that I might like less, like the most complex bingo system that's ever been conceived of, and the 108 perks, for example. And I can't deny that's innovative, though. I can't talk of another game that has that. What do you say to that, Nick? Yeah, I mean, the entire concept of movable perks that are different every time you move them somewhere else and can result in a totally different game setup, gameplay experience. That's pretty crazy. It's crazy in an impressive way.
    188:18
    Rick and Morty came out before Avengers. Did it have limited flip count? Yeah, doesn't it when you get to the Jeter Dome or whatever? Yeah, the mode where you're in the dome, yeah. I think it's like one because one flipper confirm that, Kale?
    188:36
    Yeah, Rick and Morty was released in January of 2020. Avengers was March 2020, right? To be clear, they didn't take from each other. They're doing their own things and they were all designed different times, but I can't deny if that was first, that was first. My apologies. Credit to Spooky. Which does do some innovative things like I mentioned in our Pen Pal Award show. They won awards for innovation to me. There's an innovative action button that goes for ball search and everything. Innovative. You might say at the moment. That's true.
    189:10
    Okay. So that's it for innovation. Let's do pacing. Pacing is like that feeling that you're really close to something. And I sort of divide pacing into different groups. There's scoring pacing and there's event pacing. And I'll show you what I mean there. So in scoring pacing, it's when you play, the longer you play, your score exponentially goes up. To me, that's good pacing. Some people might disagree with that. It's just a preference, I think. But I think that's good pacing. And I'm going to create a pacing scale, if you will, on a scale from Venom to King Kong. That's my bad to good scale of pacing as it relates to scoring. It presumes that you buy my argument that one is better than the other. And you may not agree with that. I think you're wrong if you don't. But that is my argument, is that one is better than the other. Venom, just to start with that, and not to pile up on Venom every episode, but Venom, you get to points in the game where you're getting no score, like minimal score, a million here, a million and a half there. You're not getting any score until you unlock something else. And so the game has these dry spells where some players, like me, feel you're wood chopping at that point because, like, you just have to do something repeatedly. The most famous case of this, I couldn't find the video. I don't think it's searchable on YouTube yet. But it was Jason Zahler playing in a game of Venom where, like, he did the thing. He did the mayhem multiball and the carnage multiball, and then he got stuck. And he had to repeatedly just backhand the scoop from the right flipper through the right end lane over and over and over and over again to light his mystery, to relight his six locks. Like, it was just sad to watch, I would say. Great player. I get why he was doing it. It was just sad to watch. That's all I'm saying. So that's my opinion on pacing. Before you even talk about pacing on Avengers, what do you think about that, Nick? Do you buy that approach? I agree. I agree. And I think if I had to predict your chart for Avengers, it may be a little zigzaggy or seesaw in its graph. Okay, so the reason I have to bring up Avengers in this category here is we did have a comment from our Discord I'm not going to read the whole comment, but it's from a Josh in Discord, and he says Avengers Infinity Quest is a weird game the shots are super fun, he agrees with the layout, but in my opinion the code didn't do enough in terms of variety Soul Gem is neat, but everything else feels like chopping wood, that's what he said Now that's a harsh opinion, I'm not there but I want And, you know, that's our Discord talking, being honest. It's not me saying it. I'll point that out again. I think it's decent pacing. There are times where I get what he's saying, and maybe, for example, having to get all three collections of Avengers that get progressively harder to get means that's usually the last thing to do if you want to progress through the game, and then it's just hitting shots, you know, to get the collective Avengers. What do you think, Nick? Is that common too far, not far enough?
    192:13
    I think it's a little too far, but I get where people would form that opinion. I can see how they would get there. And it's something we touched on earlier. When does a side quest become a main quest, you know? Like, imagine you're playing Iron Maiden and you're having a great game. And you notice you're almost at Cyborg multiball. You just need two more ramps. So you focus carefully on getting the left ramp, ski pass trap up, get the left ramp again. You light Cyborg multiball, shoot up the center ramp to start it. You did it. You're happy. You get 100 million points. You've accomplished something big. But wait, suddenly there's a completely different cyborg multiball. If you do just the same thing again, if you get enough pop bumpers and targets and spinners, and you have to do it if you want to progress the game. And actually there's a third one you have to get after that point too. On the one hand, I appreciate that they give me three different things. That's like a good thing. But on the other hand, it's sort of a paradoxical thing. It's like it's good for depth, but it might interfere with pacing. if the number of things you have to do feel so far apart from each other. So it's different to depth. I like depth, but the question is can we put the depth events close enough to each other so that they don't feel like that's the wood chopping part if it feels too far away. So it's the intervals between the depth. The depth is good. I'm not saying I'm happy that they give me so much depth, but for me it's about the intervals between the depth. That's the concept I'm trying to get across, Nick. What do you say to that?
    193:33
    Yeah, I agree, and we had a comment from Brooklyn Pin that said, the third collection can be wood choppy, and it's true. And this is where you have to get kind of crazy and start utilizing those gems you've collected along the way to help you get there faster.
    193:48
    Use that power gem. Use the space gem to move the power gem. Yeah, yeah. You get it. Right. And then a separate way to think about pacing is game events. So different features in the game. You know, I like to, again, point out King Kong versus Venom. In Venom, you do the things. You get the carnage, and then you get the mayhem, and then you do the things, and that's what you do. Whereas in King Kong, this is, again, a ranking from Venom all the way to King Kong. Those are my worst to best pacing, I would say, as far as, like, modern games. And so here, this is good, too. There's a lot going on. I mean, I think, again, those three Avengers collections should be closer to each other. That's a problem at the end. But there's super modes and gem quests and portal locks and a lot going on that's not far away from each other. Do you think that's a fair analysis, Nick? Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's just kind of the nature of it. You know, there's ways to get through there faster. You just kind of have to know them. And, you know, that takes a pretty deep understanding, too.
    194:51
    Yeah. And I think with that, we go to our final and shortest, mercifully shortest criteria to talk about, which is bugs. Because the game doesn't have any. It's really a bug-free game, which is incredible, particularly for this game, given the monstrous complexity of this game and the code. And Ray Day and their team should get really maximal credit for many things with this game. But really, in particular, the fact that there are no bugs, like a bug-free game that has this much complexity to it is bonkers. I couldn't do it for what it's worth. And, you know, just hats off to there, if you haven't. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating, especially considering all the scoring, like, boosts. interconnection of the gems, like you mentioned, you have to believe it would mess up. You know, and I'm sure they had to squash a lot of bugs to do it. If I were to talk to him next time, Rite-A, next time we come to Starfighter's Pinball Festival here in Arizona, I would ask you, like, how hard was it to fix the, to balance the bugs here to get rid of them in Avengers specifically? That's what I would say. That's like the part that scares me as coding goes. Yeah, that'd be a good question for him. And with that, Nick and Kel, I have nothing left to say about Avengers. Do you have anything left to say about Avengers? Oh, I mean, I could go on, but I think we got crazy enough for one game. But, yeah, I think just, like I said, it kind of got, it came out during that weird time of COVID. It didn't really click with a lot of people. It's hard to understand. It's not clear in its call-outs and guidance to the game, so that kind of takes away from it. So I think if people kind of look at it again through a different lens, maybe hopefully after this episode, it could kind of maybe help them enjoy the game a little more.
    196:33
    Do you guys think the decision to go with a comic book instead of the movies hurt it at all? All right. I'll start with my opinion. Like, I prefer Avengers IQ over the Gomez 2012 Avengers, which did go with the movie, for example. And I prefer it not just in terms of the code, but the layout and everything about it. I would say I prefer it. And so I even add something different. I think in general, when there's a comic book version and a movie version, you should go for the comic book version in most things because when there's both. Because I think it becomes more timeless. Probably depends on the product. I agree. But that's my opinion.
    197:16
    Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that, Serge. and I think when it came out, it was kind of peak Marvel movie Avengers. And yeah, I think that did hurt it, Cale, that it wasn't that, because I think people were probably expecting that. But I think as time goes on, like Serge said, it'll be a little more timeless. Like years later, I prefer Spider-Man Vault to the other Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire. It's not that I don't like the movie or anything, but that movie's 20 years old or whatever. I don't have any connection to that as much anymore. But the Spider-Man Vault, that's just timeless, just with the comic. Now, the call-outs in that game are terrible, but that's another story. The point is, I generally, like, same thing for X-Men. Like, I like that it's the comic version of X-Men. I don't need, like, I don't need Hugh Jackman, even though there's nothing wrong with Hugh Jackman.
    198:01
    Yeah, I agree. It probably does hurt sales and initial adoption, you know, by people, but I think long run for the game is better.
    198:11
    What do you say, Cale? Good deal. So that sounds like about it. The next time you see us is probably going to be an emergency episode as soon as we see the Pokemon play field.
    198:25
    That's absolutely right. We're going to do a deep dive as soon as it comes out, probably within an hour of it coming out, and we'll post that as soon as it does. The other thing you'll see us on, Cale, I believe is Wednesday night when we do our finals commentary and tournament stream, which we're going to do on YouTube from now on, right, Cale? Yeah, 100%. and we're probably going to be commentating on one of Nick's games. I bet you're right. It's 6.30 p.m. Wednesday night, right, Nick?
    198:53
    Yep, I'll be there. 6.30 p.m. Mountain Time for those not there. Jamie, thanks for sticking around. Somebody must have woken you up to join us, and we appreciate it. Yeah, I kept bugging them, telling them to come in here. Okay, good.
    199:07
    All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me on, guys. I really appreciate it. I'm honored to be invited, and I've always enjoyed the show since you guys started doing it. And that first show you guys did, I was like, I've got to talk about Avengers with them because that's exactly what the show was designed for. It only took like six months, right, but we got there. Yeah, right. It's okay. Yeah, thanks, Cale, and thanks, Rachel, for always having that great community of Electric Bat. And thanks, Serge, for all your knowledge. You guys are both great assets for the community with all your work and everything you do, so I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Cool, thank you so much Nick and Serge, stick around because I'm recording this so stick around so your feed uploads properly and we will see all of you in the chat on Wednesday 6.30 AZ time Thank you for joining us We'll see you next time Thanks everyone