This is our second pinball school segment it's all right because it's pinball school all right sorry and you just heard the song and then we're doing it again it's annoying apologies we're gonna do it every time yeah we have to it's just fun to say so what's the game today so the game today we're kind of going chronologically at least for my perspective the games that helped me to develop as a pinball player sure so the next game after hook was the first game that i bought and still one of my favorite games of all time and a game that i wish i still owned and will own again one day and that is bram stoker's dracula dracula so season one we talked a little bit about getting the game and you know i love dracula the movie so this was like a dream theme for me and really the clincher I would say that got me all in on pinball because before Dracula, I hadn't had to spend a dime on pinball. Just had hook to play for free. Right. As soon as I put in 20, 30 hours on hook, I was like, all right, I'm going to get a game. I just started going pin side and just like, oh, holy crap. There is a Bram Stoker's Dracula game. Never played it because there wasn't one around yeah and i just found one on pin side i drove like four hours to the hillbilly pinball guy i forgot like his username was like hillbilly pinball or something like really that was his actual yeah he used to have a store online where he sold parts the dude got hundreds of games at auction all in a big lot like closing arcades and stuff and yeah yeah he literally got like Multiple hundreds of games is my memory. And they were all in disrepair. And he's just been fixing all these games over the years. He has a transmission shop on his property in the country. And he also fixes pinball machines. Living life. He looks like Joe Dirt. Like straight up. Like skinny? Looks like long hair. Oh, man. Just picture Joe Dirt with a stronger southern accent. anyway so i show up at dude's house i don't know what i'm doing i'm just like yeah you're just like i'm here for the game the game's like 4500 and i've never played it before and i'm driving four hours away by my first pinball machine i don't know anything and i played a few games on it it probably should have been apparent that it wasn't working that great when i got it but you know whatever i took it home and i was here man like i helped you unload it it was exciting it was fine i mean we fired that thing up it was amazing i couldn't tell anything was wrong with it man right right it wasn't that bad within so miss multiball i think didn't work great from the beginning which is pretty common but other than that it was good enough for somebody who didn't know anything about pinball to play a bunch of games and enjoy myself but let's talk about what professor dracula taught us about pinball sure okay so i think i kind of made a mistake in some ways like dracula is a fairly tough game hook is a fairly tough game yeah i didn't make it easy to get into pinball for myself agreed if you know that you're all in or if you're the type of person that's gonna go all in on it then why not just get the hard games and challenge yourself i agree dracula is not like the easiest but yeah it's different when it's on free play though yeah you know like that feeling that's there like a little bit of frustration but you want to go even harder because yeah you could just go again you just want to try again you want to try again you want to try again and you want to hit the coffin you want to try again you want to hit the bats you want to hit the rats so i guess in that way maybe just picking a theme that you like is the thing to do because it's gonna keep bringing you back even if you suck yeah which i did i was legit pretty bad at pinball when i bought my first game dracula is hard there's like a three bank stand up target, basically Dracula attacking you. Yeah. It's a wide thing just right in the middle of the play field. Yeah. And if you hit that thing, it's just going to rocket right back at you. 50-50 chance. Out of control. So very quickly I learned, do not shoot that thing unless you want to drain your ball. Yeah. Those stand up targets light the left ramp. Right. Which can help you start a multiball, one of the three multi balls. But there are other ways to light that ramp too. So you don't have to hit those targets. I learned earlier, just avoid that shot. Not unlike in Hook, that skull shot. Just avoid the shots that are impossible, that are causing you to drain. Let it happen naturally. Yeah, because guess what? You're still going to hit it by accident a ton. And that's how almost every game with stand-up targets, from that game to Avengers, every game that has a bunch of stand-up targets, you're going to hit them by accident because the ball bounces around most of the time just don't even bother with stand-up targets there's very few games where you actually have to consciously hit the stand targets so dracula taught you that yeah that was one of the big things necessarily go straight for the stand targets Yeah Let them just hit naturally You suck You going to hit them anyway You're going to miss 50 other shots, and they're going to get hit. Yeah. Or, you know, look at lots of times, like, games have multiple ways of achieving the same thing. Right. So find the easiest way to achieve the thing, you know, lighting that ramp to get the multiballs, rather than just going for the most obvious way to get it. Right. Because going for a dangerous shot, you're going to drain a good percentage of the time, and it's not worth it. You'll extend your play times and have more fun if you just avoid, especially as you're learning, if you just avoid those difficult, dangerous shots. And the other thing that that game taught me was just freaking reflexes. Yeah. Different games have different levels of reflexes reflexes that are required of you right if it's got a bunch of stuff all at the back of the play field and all the shots are kind of long or kind of slow you have a lot of time to react when the ball comes back down towards you right but if it has a lot of stuff close like dracula or like johnny mnemonic has that really close ramp that you can hit all the time then you're you have to build those pinball reflexes right it's a feeling yeah you can just you just know to react you don't even think about it you just like boom hit the flipper real quick and stop the ball from draining yeah yeah if you're trying to develop your skills maybe it's not your first game your second game or even your third game but having a game with like close dangerous shots will help you build up interesting your reflexes i never i never thought about it in that kind of like logical way yeah it's just like oh it's just how this game is but it's true yeah games with closer targets posts or whatever that reject easier yeah rejectee games require faster response times i mean just by default like if you miss something you're screwed yeah and it like your brain is going okay next time i'm gonna see that coming you build it up you know it's just like anything else you're gonna get better at it and reduce those reaction times and improve your flipper skills interesting i think that game was really good for just teaching me at the level that i was at like just some of the basic like reaction time flipper skills it's also kind of a fan layout so i got to like learn the far left shot the one right over from that the far right shot is the video mode then it's got a scoop on the far right for the rats the rats yeah it just teaches you just where on the flipper to hit those shots my biggest takeaway playing that game it was probably the most notable game that i can recall where i felt like i was basically fighting the game yeah like a battle mode yeah like not the typical pinball like oh the ball's gonna go on that lane or it's gonna drain it was more of like every time i try to hit something it sends it back or it hits me with something else and i have to like quite literally like counter the game like maybe it is by design maybe it's just the theme maybe it's a combo of like the display showing his face and like the call out taunting music but that was a really cool experience especially on free play like here in the shedcade in the dark yeah even when we played together like your brother and i right like in a group session it was fun because we could see how we were all getting basically like murdered by the game it's fun to watch like you know yourself and then your friends getting destroyed annihilated by the same thing that got me got you and yeah yeah it is like a group battle it's like one of us has got to get dracula exactly which is like fits the movie you know it's like a team of people trying to take down dracula and i think that was the first time i at least for right now that seems like the best example of that feeling of like fighting this game yeah and i think a ton of modern games have done that as well you know not necessarily with just like one villain you know because dracula's like the villain in that game but like deadpool and so many other modern games have this like yeah you know you're fighting this guy and you're fighting this guy and then you're doing this battle it doesn't feel as personal though yeah this game you know it captures that it's perfect it perfectly feels like you are literally yeah fighting dracula you're fighting to stay alive yeah it's like the sole purpose of that game whereas a lot of other ones it's like you know this boss and this guy and then this guy and then this guy the game dracula directly addresses you yeah laughs at you yeah makes weird eyeballs at you yeah very sinister laughing and haunting yeah so that's that's that's my biggest take also that games can weigh like 300 pounds the thing was so freaking heavy dude yeah that game is extra heavy why because of the miss multiball neck it has extra supports because there's basically a hole cut across the entire play field so the play field had to be like reinforced dude moving that thing out of your rav4 what was the pilot oh your pilot yeah oh my god dude like i was like oh i got this you know that sucker is heavy wow yeah so i can't really think of any other game that's like as much of a battle between good and evil no yeah yeah like you like you feel it especially in the dark yeah turn the volume up a little bit so the lights down oh yeah yeah i would crank the volume on that thing it's loud it's really cool man if you ever have the opera listener i'm talking to you now if you ever have the opportunity to play this game in a dark environment with the volume you know at a loud moderately loud volume whatever yeah comfortably loud um it's tons of fun take the opportunity to do it along those lines like one of the things that i learned from that game is just how important vibe yeah is in a pinball machine yeah how much it can contribute to the overall enjoyment of the game totally owning that as my first game and being like a dream theme and just the music and the vibe and the cause of that game i can't think of anything else i've played or owned that come yeah even close to that was the red dot matrix display was that stock or was that was stock it's not actually red it's just got a filter oh it's like a film like a filter over the actual yeah so it's orange it's it's an orange one with a red filter over it yeah total vibe game changer i never felt like i wanted the color display because the red is just you need the red it's like blood and it matches the font yeah and just the whole vibe man it's yeah it's great yeah if it was orange it would not no way there's so much no way so much blood digital dmd blood dripping in that game yeah but i think one of the other big things that professor dracula taught me was just about rules and scoring uh because hook was like kind of basic and like didn't make that much sense to me like intuitively i didn't really get it it's not the strongest yeah and scoring yeah Dracula is 1993, so it's like a fairly early WPC game. It was before every single game was mode-based. What it did have was three different multiballs that were all easy to understand. Yeah. And that you could get all at the same time. So it has this simple yet achievable, like carrot, it's dangling, every multiball that you add doubles the jackpot value or adds 10 million more to the jackpot value one multiball jackpots 10 two multiballs it's 23 multiballs at the same time it's 30 million you can stack the multiballs and in that game I was just kind of like oh this must be a thing that most games do it's not and it's so freaking fun because it teaches you how to set up for the ultimate kind of... It doesn't exactly have a wizard mode, but you are trying to kill Dracula. It's like the vibe of delayed gratification. You could die or you could lose ball three, minimal score, because you're setting up for a greater score later. And not only with that, with the multi-balls, basically you're getting your two balls locked for this multiball, and you're getting your two balls locked for this other multiball. Then you're waiting for the missed multiball to come, and then you hit that. And the other two, once you have the two ball going then you got all three going amazing it's pretty easy to understand and it's so satisfying when you do it and it's hard to get all three of them going at the same time but it's still rewarding if you just get two going at the same time but the other thing that game has along the same lines is if you hit the rats modes earlier which is the far right scoop or the bats mode which is the left ramp then you get extra bonuses and that bonus yeah the bonus x carries over for every ball so the earlier you get right those the more your bonus is going to carry over to every other ball so that's just like a strategy thing right so i really learned like oh pinball has like pretty even this like fairly simple game has like some real strategy yeah to the scoring and i love those jackpots i feel like it's missing from modern games is just those like really big satisfying jackpots like you do something right and your score goes from like a hundred million to like a billion yeah like that yeah and it's so satisfying it's probably not the best for tournaments it's probably easy to exploit but it's so fun it's fun it feels really good when you get on a roll yeah i miss that on new games where it's like i have already have 200 million and then i get some jackpot worth 5 million it's like great 5 million jackpot to add to my 200 million you know it's just not the same it's not as satisfying it's much more linear nowadays it is more linear for sure and probably like it makes sense with the more complex rules and like there probably would be insane loopholes right if you could stack up some bonus multipliers with this kind of exponential scoring. It would probably be something insane. I know. But I get it. It's not like Godzilla, dude, like the road to a billion. It's just like a chore. It's a grind, yeah. Not to say that it's not worth it, but I know what you're saying. It's more fun to hit big jackpots. There's also something about those games where you have a lot of really bad games and you have a few amazing games. I don't know if that's really a good thing. I think modern games, when you get good at them, you can kind of have like all good games pretty like averaging out yeah you're like you're having fun like every game dracula i was having fun like 10 of the time but the other you know the 10 that i was having fun i was having the most fun yeah yeah i don't know fight for your life man or have the time of your life right yeah the last thing that kind of spoiled me about that game that dracula taught me video modes can be good they can be good that game has i still think the best video mode ever dude and it was like my first game dude and then every other one after that has been a disappointment if you're not familiar with bram stoker's dracula video mode it's like it's like first person DMD view of a gun and you're shooting werewolves coming at you left and right flipper to shoot left right and then both together right to hit center or something no no they just left and right so werewolves are coming at you first person view so they like there like the depth in dmd and dominic tricks display there depth of werewolves coming at you start really far away and they get closer and closer and you're not supposed to shoot them until they show their teeth which is like they're like right up on a millisecond before they kill you so it's incredible it's like a reaction game basically yeah dude it's incredible like i remember one of the best ones i had i just kind of like blacked out man i just i was just like flying by like i don't even know man just all pure emotion and feeling i think i got them all right in that round or whatever yeah but it was like i don't even know what happened like how did i even do that it was just like a reaction like you know yeah just hitting the button it's really satisfying when you get it they get faster and faster and faster and you have to hit the buttons left right left right right left you know just faster and faster and faster it's crazy yeah and then the first playthrough of the video mode you can get to where you can do that pretty consistently the second time is genuinely difficult yeah the way i approached it was like okay i'm gonna try to count in my head like one two three like yeah i was figuring out like a rhythm of like how long i had because it gets faster like after the first two or three and then faster again so i was figuring out like this rhythm like one two three shoot one two three and then like you gotta increase it Anyway. One, two, three, shoot. One, two, three, shoot. One, two, three, shoot. Yeah, it was really fun. I had like a timing. The first time it would be three beats and the second time it would be two beats. Yeah. And I don't think any game has surpassed. I haven't played every video mode of every game, but that one. It's a clincher. My whole body's tight. Like my butthole was like clenched so hard because I just, I don't want to get, you know, it's fun, man. It's a good one. Bring video modes back. Good ones. If they're good. Otherwise, do not bring them back. it does seem like some of the more modern games have used similar types of strategies as dracula because that one is the gold standard for me yeah so taught you that video modes can also be great that game kind of spoiled me on a lot of levels i'm sure it did man it spoiled me and i didn't even own it i didn't want you to get rid of that thing man that was like the first black rose for me like i had to deal with loss when you sold it yeah but the whole reason i sold it because I bought the hillbilly mechanic version of the game and I wanted... I was like, you know what? I've literally played it over a thousand games. And I was like, I'm going to take a break from this. I'm going to find a really nice one later. One day. Hasn't happened yet, but it will. Also, lightning flippers, man. Oh, I taught you about lightning flippers. Yeah, that's some bullshit. Lightning Flippers. Seriously. On that game too, man. It came with Lightning Flippers. It shipped with Lightning Flippers. Everybody's like, you know, you go on Pinside. People are like, oh, I keep the Lightning Flippers on there because that's the real way to play it. No, it's not the real way to play it. It's the way that they shipped it because some distributor in Germany. Wanted to make money. Was like, your games are too easy. And so they agreed. after the game was designed. Wait, is this a true story? This is true. Wow. Yeah, so they had a big presence, a big distributor in Germany, and he's like, wanted the games to be harder. Right, right. And so after it was designed, they shortened the flippers. Wow. This is true documented Beriaursler, our boy Berio. Berio. It was designed with normal length flippers. like it's not supposed to have lightning flippers that's some dumb ass in germany guy dude who made that change not a designer that throws off everything geometry and everything i swapped those things out as soon as i learned the truth i swapped them out and never looked back night and day oh yeah it's like the far left and right shot i mean it's the far left and right shots Plus, the flipper gap is smaller with the normal size flippers. So for all the pin babies out there, can you explain lightning flippers? Yeah, they're just shorter. They're like an eighth of an inch shorter. So it gives you a quarter inch bigger gap between your flippers. You can tell that they're lightning flippers. They do look a little bit shorter just looking at them. But they have a little lightning bolt on them. Like on the sides of them. And they're typically yellow. so they also don't even match the aesthetic of the game but yeah like unless you have some nostalgic reason for like oh I used to play this at the arcade and it had lightning flippers and I want to relive the way that I because they did all ship with lightning flippers otherwise just switch them out just put normal size it's easy to do or if you're just a masochist yeah if you're a masochist and you find it too easy and that's your thing it's not an easy game if you just want to get whooped Yeah, but it's not just that game. A few other games from that era. Fishtails was another one that had lightning flippers. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and it was all because they weren't designed with lightning flippers in mind. They were designed with normal-sized flippers, and they made the switch to appease the Germans. Well, look at that, man. Thanks, Professor Matt. Yeah, lesson learned. Outro Music