uh welcome everybody to canada spinball podcast happy saturday morning we are going to have to move the Saturday Morning Spectacular to tomorrow because Killian has T-Ball. I went to Allentown yesterday. If I didn't see you there, I did not stay very long. I stayed for about two hours, but I just want to say for those people I did meet, it was very nice meeting you. I got a chance to jump on the newest pinball machines, King Kong from Stern Pinball and Dune Pinball from barrels of fun. I want to share with you my first impressions of both games. I got a decent amount of time on both. I have some opinions I'm going to share. We're going to get to that. I just want to say though, if you went to the show yesterday or are going today, prepare to be disappointed. it, there is only one King Kong game there in the coin taker booth. That is a tragedy. The line to get on the game was about an hour long and it is on three balls. So we sat there and we played games for a while. So if you're looking to go on a Saturday when the show is going to be super crowded, you are most likely not going to get any time on King Kong on the ride back from the show Frank thanks so much for taking us I just felt like I should have just waited and gone to Automated Amusements not go two and a half hours to wait a long time to play the games but just go a half hour Mike is going to unbox the games he's going to get some games soon he's getting LEs in this week I see people are unboxing their LEs and setting them up. Congratulations if you got one. Congratulations because you just also lost $3,000. We're going to talk about it. You know, Retro Ralph, I want to give him a shout out. He hit me up. He's like, Chris, you keep harping on price and your show is stale because of it. Ralph, we're stale. He's not wrong in the sense that I haven't impacted the prices of pinball machines. I haven't. Like I've been harping on these high prices for a while. Have any of these companies lowered their prices? No, but you don't get change in life if you stop. And I don't think it's stale. I think it is the topic of the time. And as I went around the show and I played all these games, there was Evil Dead there. There was everything new. There was Avatar. And when you get your hands on every single new machine and you experience what all of these modern pinball machines are putting into their games, you can't help but walk away and feel like none of this, none of this is worth even $10,000. None of it. And heck, most of these games are far more than $10,000. And that's just how I feel. And when I play these games and I get satisfied with playing them. I would rather leave and go home and have $10,000 to $15,000 still in my checking account and just get my fill now on location if this is how much modern pinball is. I get that some of you out there, you want to spend your money on this. I just don't think most modern games are giving the magic that warrants these extremely high prices. Okay, let's talk about Kong and Dune, and then we'll talk about some of my other observations at the show, and we'll also discuss what's going on in Pinball if there is any news. Let's just start with Alice real quick. There's no way they're going to make all the Alice games by the end of the year. You guys know this, but what will happen is they will make, I don't know, like 350. Then the decision will be yours. If your game is not made, you can go get a refund. That's what they said they were going to do. Here's what I think is going to happen. I think they're going to come up short on that 500 number. I think they're going to be somewhere around like 350 to 400 and I think what's going to happen is the last 100 or so games they might not make because I think what will happen between now and the end of the year is enough alices will be made and once people start trading these things if they start to trade for below 12.5 and you can go get one then the people who have a deposit down for one at 12.5 that's non-refundable they're gonna get their money back and go buy one for less than they're on the hook for that is what i think is gonna happen if i were a betting man i would say they're not gonna make all 500 alices i think it might end up around 450 or 425 or something like that and it just goes to show you right there's only so long you can delay getting people the product. Remember, the product was supposed to go out the door in January and it's mid-May, people. It is mid-freaking-May. And does anybody have their Alice Adventures in Wonderland game? And with Harry Potter right around the corner, we didn't get anything on Harry Potter Day. Who told you you were getting nothing on Harry Potter Day? Kaneda did. I was kind of excited that nothing happened because it means I'm right once again. We are right every once in a while on this stale edition of Canada's Pinball Podcast, the only pinball podcaster that has almost 700 paying subscribers because each and every one of you finds this show to be stale. It's just the same show every time. Well, I'm about to tell you something that's not stale. I'm going to give you my hot take on King Kong and Dune. Okay, So let's start with King Kong first. Okay, this game is the latest game from Keith Elwin. It's got the same coding team. And I walked up to it and I will say in person a few things. The colors are not as bad in real life. And what I mean by that, it's not like over the top, like overly saturated clown puke like people were saying. It's much more muted in real life. Now, it's still very colorful. There's still way too much going on. And I will say this, when you look down at the playfield, because there's so much going on and there's so much happening with inserts and details and illustrations and Kong at the gate and there's a woman with a torch and there's a spider and there's a big gorilla, all of that stuff, the artwork on the playfield just doesn't do anything for me. It just doesn't. It doesn't leave any indelible impression. It's not a great art package. It's not bad. It's just not great. There's nothing about it that makes you feel giddy like when you stand over a game. I don't know. Let's say something like Ghostbusters art package. Wow, right? What a work of art. Kong's play field just doesn't feel like something when the game is off, you'd walk by it and really sort of like be mesmerized by what's on the playfield artistically. I'm going to give you an example. I felt the complete opposite when I first walked over the Uncanny X-Men. I think Uncanny X-Men is one of the coolest art packages ever on a playfield. I love the uniqueness of it. I think Zombietti's art style on that game. I think X-Men as an overall game is so much nicer to walk up to than King Kong. It's so much prettier. It's so much more cohesive. And that's the other thing. You know, I don't really love the artwork on the cabinet. I don't. It just feels a lot more like a kid's comic book versus King Kong, you know? And again, because I just think this isn't how all of us think about King Kong when we think about King Kong art. You know, I know we had similar response to Godzilla. It wasn the Toho Godzilla look and feel And I would agree I also don think Godzilla as an art package is one of Stern best All right The other thing I noticed when I first walked up to the game was how big King Kong is I think there's a false narrative and I was perpetuating it that this is a recycled version of the Incredible Hulk mechanism from the Avengers. And ladies and gentlemen, King Kong is twice the size of that Incredible Hulk in Avengers. So this is not the same exact mech. It might be driven by the same internals, but King Kong is big. Like he's really big back there. He's twice the size of Godzilla in Godzilla. Like he's up there. He's moving his arms. It almost looks like he's masturbating in midair, but he's up there. He's moving and grooving. He's shaking. He's doing his thing. He's hitting the subway car. He even stops the ball. I heard they're going to make him touch the glass as like a knocking moment in the game. And look, it is King Kong. Like he really does dominate what you look at when you look at in the game. You know, seeing him back there in the upper right really does sort of force most of your attention to go in that direction. But what's interesting about that is I did find like most of the interesting shots in this game are in the other direction. starting from the ramp up the middle to the shots on the left side of the game that seems to be where the more interesting stuff happens I spent in total maybe about like 15 minutes on this game I had one really long game on King Kong and after playing it you know what are my thoughts it's hard right it's my first time playing it so first impressions you always have to take with a grain of salt. Also, you know that I played the game at a show. So it's not like the call outs and all the stuff was coming at me in the right way. And I'm sure people who went to Stern had a similar experience when you're playing a game and it's noisy and it's crowded and there's people waiting to get on the machine behind you. All of that goes against your first impressions with the game. See, we know what's going to happen now is all these guys that unboxed their LEs and spent $13,000, they're going to gush about the game because they own it. They're going to justify owning it, and they're going to say it's amazing. I want to say this. I think this is a really good shooter. Obviously, it's a Keith Elwin game. I don't think it shoots as well as Godzilla, and I don't think this game pulls you in nearly as much. as Godzilla pulls you in. From the moment you hit start in Godzilla on day one, and I played Godzilla right when it came out, from the moment you hit start, Godzilla just grips you more. It grips you with the assets. It grips you with the music. It grips you with the call-outs. And I think the Godzilla layout is far more interesting than King Kong. I also think Godzilla's mechanisms, all of them are far more interesting than the mechs happening in King Kong. And that's what I want to talk about next. I just really feel bad that in a Keith Elwin game, right? This is the best designer in the world. His games are Stern's hottest selling games. His games should be statement pieces about what this company can do. Everybody remembers when Godzilla came out, it reignited our faith in Stern Pinball that they can really engineer truly innovative mechanisms, right? The building, the bridge, the Mechagodzilla, that magnet that grabs the ball and throws it back at you. Everything that's in Godzilla collectively, the wire forms, the ramps, everything about the game just came together in such an amazing way. And that is why Godzilla is celebrated the way it is. And then they hit you with every single asset you want if you love the theme. And I just want to say this about King Kong. Everything in King Kong comes up short when you look at it through that lens. None of the mechanisms are that interesting. They're just not. The gong is not that much fun, nor is it that satisfying to shoot. The spider is the modern version of a Thai fighter on a spring. I am so shocked that Keith Elwin and the design team ended up with that as a mechanism in his game. It's so lazy and it also looks so silly in real life. The spider is on this metal piece and then it just starts vibrating. And it keeps vibrating after you've even been in that area. After the magnets grab the ball. and it's just distracting. It's like someone taking their finger and just moving it up and down. And how did the biggest pinball company with the best designer in all of pinball, with the biggest team of engineers, both mechanical engineers, software engineers, just the most amount of people, how did they stand over this and say, this is going to go into the game? It just feels like a cheap trick. It feels bad. It feels like an afterthought. It was just disappointing. I mean, I just got to say that it was just like seeing the mechs in this game. And you think about the subject matter of King Kong. I really did miss not being able to A, bash King Kong. I did miss not being able to actually swat at and hit an airplane. I did miss not feeling like I was climbing a building. I did miss not feeling like I'm banging on a gate in a jungle. You don't feel like you're ever battling anything like a dinosaur or a T-Rex. All of that's happening on the screen. So I think from a mechanical standpoint and toys in a game, I do think the toys in King Kong are just underwhelming. The toys in Jaws were underwhelming. And maybe this is just it now, people. Maybe he peaked with his toys when it comes to Godzilla because we know that Keith Elwin's whole thing is not about toys, right? It's all about gameplay. So let's go there. Like, how does the game shoot? Well, the game does shoot phenomenally well. I think you're going to be very, very happy with this game. There's a lot of interesting things happening in this game. And that is really what is the genius of Keith Elwin is that there are more ball paths than you realize. and you discover them in all these different unique ways. And the ball doesn't always do what you expect it to do in terms of the shot geometry. There's this really interesting plastic in the middle of the left side. I think it's like the river where the ball goes through it. It's interesting what's happening down by the left out lane and how the ball is fed into the left flipper. The upper right flipper shot into the airplane that loops around that wire form. that is probably and easily the most rewarding shot in the game. It is super cool, super satisfying. It's definitely a game where you're not going to learn. You're not going to learn the magic of the gameplay in one day at a show in Allentown. I think this is going to be a game where homeowners, when they have it and they get a lot of time on it, they'll be able to judge better where this game falls in terms of Keith Elwin's best shooters. If you were to ask me right now, just from a first impression of all the Elwin games I've ever played, I think two of them stand out the most in terms of fun to shoot. And those two games are Avengers and Godzilla. I think those are his two best shooting games when you first hop on the game and you're just enjoying the gameplay. From there, I would probably go Iron Maiden and then Jurassic Park. And that's just me saying it's too early for me to know exactly where King Kong will fall into the mix. I am worried though after playing this game. I am worried that I think when the gameplay wears off a little bit, when the mechs don't really have wow moments, because none of these mechs do have wow moments, I do worry that this code and the way the game is coming at you is just not going to click. The moment I first played Jaws and you see Roy getting into the Jeep you in the Jaws movie The moment you first hit start on Godzilla and you hear that call out and the da da na na like you in it It just grabs you. This game does not have that feeling. And I'm just not sure it's ever going to have that feeling. I just think the way it's coded, the way the assets are coming at you are just not going to emotionally make you feel the goosebumps you'd feel when you play games like Godzilla and Jaws. There is a lot of code that needs to happen in this game as well. And because of that, here is my recommendation for each and every one of you. If you really want to play King Kong right now, I think what you'll enjoy the most about this game, it's not going to be the artwork, It's not going to be the mechanisms. I think what you're going to enjoy most is the shot layout. And that is why if I were you, I would just go grab a King Kong Pro. If you buy a Pro, you're going to get the best parts of this game. You're not going to miss out on anything that's really magical. And it's the same exact software, right? As in the premium and the LE. I don't think you're going to miss the balls locking into the subway car. I don't think you're going to miss the gong. You're definitely not going to miss that cheap spider. And you're going to get all the great shots. Also, if you buy a pro right now and you enjoy it, you're not going to lose much money. I really do believe if you buy a $13,000 LE, you're going to lose your shirt. The artwork, the armor, everything about that LE, it's just not that special. And again, I think making $932,000 at $13,000 this game, it's not going to be the next Godzilla. It's not. It's not going to grab people the way Jaws does. Jaws has 50 years of people loving that iconic movie. That's why people don't want to sell Jaws LE. It's also like the LE package of that game is so much nicer than the premium and the pro. but Kong man it kind of all looks and feels the same so that's my first impressions of King Kong great shooter mechs that are not that magical Kong is really big and will be the focal point of your attention when you play the game I wish he interacted with the ball a bit more and I also just think the mechs in this game I think it's just really disappointing to see that spider mech in a Keith Elwin game it just felt really cheap it needed more magic in the mech department that it does not have and given the source material of King Kong climbing a building and hitting planes and battling major monsters on an island I just don't think the creativity in the mechs is there they just didn't go far enough with the creativity and when you're playing the game, you don't really feel like you're either in a jungle or a city. It's just all happening in front of you. It's not terrible. You know what I'm saying? Like it doesn't feel like a world under glass. It feels like a King Kong pop-up book where he's just up there in the upper right corner, but I don't feel like I'm in New York City and I also don't feel like I'm in a jungle. I just feel like I'm in this like colorful pop-up book that is inspired by King Kong, if you will. So ultimately, I think all of you should just wait. I would absolutely wait because there's a lot more code that needs to go into this game. And I don't think it's ready for prime time. And I think if all of you wait, you'll be able to get any model of King Kong for much less money. Heck, I'll probably buy Retro Ralph's for 10 grand when he's ready to sell it. We all know he didn't pay 13 for it. Oh, damn. Shots fired, Ralph. Damn it. Canada, stop firing these stale shots at your boy Retro Ralph. No, I love Ralph. He's a great guy. We have good back and forth. He can take it. He can take it. All right. So Dune Pinball. Dune Pinball. Walk over to Dune Pinball. There was more than one Dune machine at the show, which was nice. I was able to play with Cliff Albert. Cliff, it was awesome watching him blow up the game. I mean, he's a good player and he was on this game for a long time. Here's the thing about Dune Pinball. Walking up to it, it is a really beautiful machine. It is. I know it's brown, but it definitely, if you're a fan of these Dune movies, it definitely does the movie justice. The trans light is really nice. Seeing all of those actors up there, it is Dune movie in pinball format. Looking down at the game, such a radically different looking game than King Kong. It's almost so jarringly different when you go from the colorful King Kong world to the sandy world of Dune. And look, there's not a lot of artwork on this Dune playfield, but coming from the clutter of the King Kong playfield, I actually really do appreciate the simplicity of the Dune artwork. I do. I do. Maybe it's something as I get older in life, I'm more about simplicity and Zen. And when it comes to art, I think it's important not to overdo it and you know you want details you also want there to be an area of focus and I think Dune has that and Dune is obviously pushing you up the artwork it's moving your eye to the north of the play field where they can show off all the sculpts the sandworm all the shots that are in the game now here's my take on Dune right now there's just not enough in this game right now to really adequately review the game and not only when I was playing it Cliff was blowing the game up he was on the game for like eight minutes and he's like, I'm hitting everything and nothing is really happening right now. There is no call outs. Nothing's guiding you through the game. When there were movie clips up, it said on the clips themselves waiting for licensor approval and there's just not much game. You got that cool screen in the back under the glass. Nothing's really happening on that screen right now. I just want to say this. This game is not ready and I just don't think it's ready to be shipping to customers like this and so my review of this game or first impressions of this game is just that it's just not ready like the things I did like the sandworm mech I got to see that go really cool mech in the game I mean it is and I think they're going to obviously incorporate that in really interesting ways was it too slow I didn't find it too slow. And coming from King Kong, it was just nice to see a mech do something absolutely cool that I'd never seen before. I'd never seen a mech do that before. So I applaud the creativity that went into that mechanism. The other thing that I noticed, and I noticed this on Labyrinth, and I'm not sure what the fix is. The flipper power in this game was really weak. Now, Sometimes you get weak flippers at a show, but that wasn't the case with King Kong. It played perfectly fine and it was at the same show. So I just don't understand why any game in 2025 has weak flipper feel. Everybody has told these companies, we want games that feel like a stern. The flippers should be strong. They should be snappy. The other thing I noticed about the Dune flippers is when you flip them, they don't really flip up at a steep angle that makes trapping the ball easy. At the top of the flipper travel, it still feels like it's only at like a 30 degree angle. And the ball rolls off those flippers a lot easier than other games. I prefer games that have a little bit of a steeper, you know, like 40 degree angle on the flipper where it's easier to trap. It's easier to control the ball that way. But the flipper power was my biggest concern because there's this steep ramp on the left side of Dune. And the first few games we were playing, the ball couldn't make it all the way up it. It would only make it up that ramp if you hit the ball on the fly as it was coming off the right flipper. But you couldn't trap with the right flipper and make it up that ramp successfully And that an issue right I just don think the game was set up right the thing I like the most about Dune was the music and there moments in this game where that orchestration is going and you've got the music and you've got this sort of like intensity of the scenes from the film itself which is really awesome to hear now what I don't know is if the gameplay with flippers that are not so strong and you've got this intense music going, I think the gameplay needs to mirror that excitement of the music. And I think it's all way too early. It's a shame, right? Because if you're bringing Dune to a show, it's not done enough to leave a successful first impression, then what's the point of releasing it right now? What's the point of having it at a show? it's like then the only way you're going to win people over is with the art is with the theme and we all know this that I just don't think Dune is a strong enough theme where you're willing to buy it early on because it's a bolt to your floor theme I just don't think people feel that way about Dune and so my overall feeling about this game is I want to play it in like three to four months when there's a lot more in it. I don't think buying one right now makes any sense because it's just not far enough along. And I'm worried about that with them because when Harry Potter comes out in just a few weeks, it's going to be fully baked. This isn't going to be like, oh yeah, we got to wait to see what, no, no, no, no, no, no. Harry Potter, when it comes out, will be like 95% done. Right now, as it stands, Dune feels like it's 40% done. That's not enough. And again, you only get one chance to make a first impression. And I've said this to David, I'll say to the team over there again, I think these guys put a lot of passion into this machine. But if you can't serve it up on day one, in a way that is showcasing magic, you got to hold back, you gotta wait because you're not gonna get another chance to make that first impression so that's my take on Dune is another one where I recommend you really should just wait until the code is further along and I'm just shocked that with all the people over there they thought that this was ready to get out I think a lot of people were afraid of getting lost with King Kong and with Harry Potter but if you're afraid of being lost in the mix and it's gonna get very crowded. Still though, like if you show up in a crowd, think about this metaphor. If you show up and there's a crowd that's formed, do you want to walk into the crowd half naked? And that's what they look like. They've showed up and they're shirtless with so much missing in the game. I don't think most people are walking up to Dune just so giddy that there's finally a Dune machine in the world. And I think they need to win people over. And this is not how you win people over. by releasing it way too early. Evil Dead was there, got to meet Spooky Luke. Great guy. He's the only thing at the show with bigger arms than King Kong. He's built like a tank. I need to get him as my security when people start calling my show stale. I will say Evil Dead, I know I was wearing a shirt that said Spooky Shill. I still think Evil Dead, when it comes to total package, even though it's not a theme I love, Evil Dead is, out of all the new games, I mean, there's King Kong, Dune, Avatar, all the new games that are out there in the world right now. I got to see Portal, which looked really cool. I didn't get to play Portal because the line was so long and I wasn't going to wait. But it looked really cool. Nobody was online to play Princess Bride. I played that game. It feels empty. Next to Portal, Princess Bride feels so empty. But I will say Evil Dead looks the best. It looks the most loaded. It just aesthetically looks the best. It's just a game that puts a smile on your face like nothing else at the show. I mean it when I say it. If these guys have Beetlejuice next, it's going to sell out in 10 minutes. Not even one minute. They're going to sell a thousand Beetlejuices in less than 10 minutes. To me, Spooky is like, it's crazy to me. Spooky's now got the most impressive looking pinball machine out of all the manufacturers. Did you ever think we were going to say that 10 years ago? And this is the issue. It's like, has Stern Pinball elevated its game over the last decade? Has Jersey Jack? Everybody else is still making the same games. And that, to me, Ralph, is what's stale in pinball. Where's Stern Pinball's expression lighting in King Kong? It's not there. Where's the larger screen? Where's Spike 3? Where's innovation? It's just the same over and over and over again. You know, Jersey Jacks, same platform over and over and over again. And they've yanked all the toys out of its games. The only company that's like innovated and advanced is Spooky Pinball. Now you could argue they needed to. Yeah, but now they've gone a step further than everybody else. Even though the price is north of the $10,000 I was talking about, they sold every single one of these Evil Deads. I'm telling you right now, if Beetlejuice is a game that's like 12 grand and there's only a thousand, I think the demand is going to be so damn high. You're going to be looking at a game that stays, stays at like 15K to get one. If it looks like this and we know Franchi is going to crush it, we know they're going to put tons of toys in the game. And then the goodwill of the company, it's just total package. Everything about it makes you feel good. You know, when I look at King Kong, I feel like they cut corners. I feel like the creativity wasn't really there. Dune's obviously an improvement over Labyrinth, but still, you know, it's still half-baked. You can't show up to the party now with a half-baked, incomplete game, and you need to take your time to get it right. Take your time to get it right. Fuki Bimbo didn't release Evil Dead and ship it to people when it was so incomplete. They didn't. There's enough in it to make you feel great, and that should be something that all these manufacturers take into consideration. We can't launch these games until there's enough in it that makes people feel great on day one. And I'll end this show by saying on my trip back, as I think about a lot of these new games like King Kong and Dune and Evil Dead and Avatar, you know, we're now in a stage where it really is gameplay that a lot of people are gushing about, right? You're not seeing people gush about the Kong mechs. It's the gameplay. and I'm just here to tell you right now out of all the games I've played in the last like two years if what I wanted was a game that was just the most fun to shoot let's just stop there the game that I've played that's just the most fun to shoot doesn't have the greatest toys it still is a beautiful game but if game plays your thing if the fun that you want to have to justify the prices of pinball is all about how fun is it to shoot there is no better game than Elton John Elton John is so much more fun to shoot than King Kong it's more fun to shoot than Dune it's the most fun I've had from just a gameplay standpoint I still don't want to own it because of the theme but again but for those of you out there that are going to defend King Kong's lack of magical mechs because it's got gameplay. I'm just here to tell you, it doesn't shoot as good as Elton John. It's not as much fun to jump on it as Elton John. And also right now, it doesn't have the moments. Elton John really has like awesome moments in the software that are so much fun. And it's just a rocking good time. Everybody, thank you for being a member of the world's most stale pinball podcast. Never a shill, not in the back pocket, not sponsored by distros, not spending my money to fly to manufacturers. I'm keeping it real and I know you love it. Canada out. Bye.