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A Bad Case of the Smurfberries

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 12m·analyzed·Oct 25, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Blockade discusses Pinsim build progress and Stern Pinball Arcade VR's controversial Smurfberry monetization model.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss Netflix show cancellations and streaming TV habits before pivoting to pinball topics: Chris's custom Pinsim controller build project (with 3D printing, cost analysis, and potential commercial viability) and a deeper dive into 'Smurfberries'—predatory in-app purchase mechanics now appearing in Stern Pinball Arcade VR, where only four tables offer Premium/LE editions but LE versions cannot be purchased with in-game currency, only real money.

Key Claims

  • Netflix cancelled Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Punisher Marvel shows due to Disney launching its own streaming service and hardball licensing negotiations

    high confidence · Chris explicitly states Netflix cancelled these shows because Disney was creating its own streaming service and didn't want to renegotiate licensing terms

  • Luke Cage had a fully submitted season breakdown and incorporated Marvel notes before cancellation

    high confidence · Chris: 'With Luke Cage, they had already submitted a full breakdown of the season, the upcoming season, what the storylines would be. They'd already had back and forth with Marvel about those, taking care of the notes that were given back to them and incorporated them in. And even still, they went, no, we're done.'

  • Building a custom Pinsim controller would cost approximately $500 in parts ($350+) if purchased new from retailers

    high confidence · Chris: 'it would be about $500 bucks. Parts alone is currently ranging $350 plus, thereabouts.'

  • Chinese circuit board manufacturers now offer single PCBs for $2-3 with custom designs via tracing software

    medium confidence · Chris references conversation with arcade machine rebuilder: 'you can get a single board made now for $2 in China. All you need to do is you trace over it with this program.'

  • One online PCB manufacturer is currently batching 137 other custom boards alongside user orders in a single production run

    high confidence · Chris: 'they go, currently we have 137 other boards that we're going to be cutting at the same time.'

  • Stern Pinball Arcade VR only allows four tables (AC/DC, Mustang, Star Trek, Ghostbusters) to have Premium/LE edition variants purchasable with tokens

    high confidence · Chris: 'So in the game, you can buy... We're talking about AC/DC, Mustang, Star Trek, and Ghostbusters in terms of machines that have your Premium model, and then you have your LE editions'

  • In Stern Pinball Arcade VR, LE edition tables cannot be purchased with in-game currency—only Premium versions and the base Pro model can

Notable Quotes

  • “With Luke Cage, they had already submitted a full breakdown of the season, the upcoming season, what the storylines would be. They'd already had back and forth with Marvel about those, taking care of the notes that were given back to them and incorporated them in. And even still, they went, no, we're done.”

    Chris Freebus @ early in episode — Demonstrates Disney's aggressive licensing position against Netflix, cancelling shows even after significant production commitments

  • “Smurfberries is in-app purchases that go beyond what is really acceptable in a game.”

    Jared Morgan @ mid-episode — Defines the core concept being analyzed for Stern Pinball Arcade VR

  • “It tends to be a mobile-only approach... It has filtered into other games, but it's that whole idea of, hey, you can download and play this game for free with the intention that they want to get you hooked. And then next thing you know, you're making a $10 purchase here, a $5 purchase there, and there's no end to the purchases.”

    Jared Morgan @ mid-episode — Explains the predatory psychology of Smurfberry monetization models

  • “The psychology behind it is once you've made your first purchase and they've got that first purchase out of you, in the Smurfberry model, it is much easier to get you to unlock your wallet again.”

    Jared Morgan @ mid-episode — Describes the behavioral economics exploited by Smurfberry mechanics

  • “They are just pillaging from what collectors know, because they know that they've got Beatles collectors out there... That is purely, hey, we're going to fleece the very people that we know would be interested in this. We have no concern whatsoever for the person that is just a regular pinball collector.”

    Chris Freebus @ near end — Critiques exploitative pricing targeting collector passion

  • “Because that means they can tell their friends, well, I have a $10,000 pinball machine. It's purely status... They are the Earl of Ego.”

    Jared Morgan @ near end — Identifies status signaling as driver of high-tier collector purchases

Entities

Chris FreebuspersonJared MorganpersonBlockade Pinball PodcastorganizationPinsimproductStern Pinball Arcade VRproductNetflixcompanyDisneycompanyFarSightcompanyKapowcompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Kapow replicating extreme LE pricing model from Batman 66 with Beatles release; pattern suggests strategy to monetize nostalgic IP through artificial scarcity and status signaling rather than mechanical innovation

    medium · Chris references Batman 66 qualification video requirement and notes 'Same company. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not surprising that they're going, oh, wow, $50,000 for a pinball machine?'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Hosts express frustration with collector status-signaling and willingness to pay premium prices for nostalgic IP regardless of mechanical innovation; characterize buyers as 'Earl of Ego'

    medium · Jared: 'Because that means they can tell their friends, well, I have a $10,000 pinball machine. It's purely status... They are the Earl of Ego.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Stern Pinball Arcade VR introduces Smurfberry mechanics (token/paywall system) that community previously rejected in beta; LE editions now locked behind real-money paywall despite availability of in-game currency for Premium versions

    high · Chris: 'They wanted to throw a token system at us back when they changed the UI... we freaked, and they held back... So all of a sudden we hear about SPA—Stern Pinball Arcade—and VR with the addition of having this token system' and 'You can purchase the Premium version. You cannot purchase the LE version.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: FarSight previously faced community backlash against token system in Stern Pinball Arcade; system cancelled/never went to beta; reintroduction in VR version suggests developer moving forward against community preference

    high · Chris: 'They wanted to throw a token system at us back when they changed the UI... Yes, we all said nope, and it never even went to beta'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.217

0:00
this is a blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the blockade pinball podcast i am your host chris freebiss aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway around the world jared morgan hello howdy howdy howdy find Sunday slash Saturday for you. Yes.
0:31
You future liver you. Oh, yes. It's bright here. There's nothing bad happening yet. Yet. Let's keep going with the goodness. It's only a matter of time.
0:45
So, I don't know about you and what you watched on Netflix, but word came down last week that Netflix is cancelling Iron Fist, which is their Marvel shows, which are Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Punisher, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage.
1:08
It's quite a lot. The first season of Iron Fist was laughable for something that was supposed to be about this guy that's an amazing martial artist. It featured the worst martial arts of all their series. right okay so that was and it was corny as hell just yeah ridiculously corny um the second season of it just came out uh i think three weeks ago or so and i finally got around to watching it because i really didn't want to but i was like all right whatever i'll watch it and it was much improved which isn't saying much from where they were starting but it was better and so when they news came down that it got cancelled, I just kind of went alright, whatever, good riddance. You know, it wasn't that great to begin with. Well, then news just came down and what everybody was thinking was, oh, okay, well, that's okay because Iron Fist will just get morphed into with Luke Cage because I guess there's a comic series called Heroes for Hire and the two of them are always paired up together and battles and then there's two characters from, the female characters from both respectively Luke Cage and from Luke Cage, it's this character named Misty Knight. And then from Iron Fist, it's Colleen Wang. No, Colleen Wing. And those two pair up to become Nightwing or something like that. I can't remember what the thing is. But anyway, they pair up also. So everybody figured, oh, okay, well, Iron Fist is canceled. They'll just morph those people over into the other show. Except for Luke Cage just got canceled. so there's nothing which again I found the second season of that to be a complete waste of time so there's a reason why they're cancelling all these shows because they're actually rubbish the reason is because of the Fox Disney merger and oh no excuse me not the Fox Disney merger it's the Disney coming up with their own streaming service oh right so here Netflix has these particular Marvel shows and Disney is maybe going, you know what? We can be hardball. No, we don't like your renegotiations. We're going to pass. I guess we're going to pass. It's scientific on you. With Luke Cage, they had already submitted a full breakdown of the season, the upcoming season, what the storylines would be. They'd already had back and forth with Marvel about those taking care of the notes that were given back to them and incorporated them in. And even still, they went, no, we're done. it's kind of funny it's one of those things where it's just like yeah welcome to being an actual network Netflix where sometimes yeah but I think Netflix also was just kind of like yeah we don't care because they've been cancelling shows they went from never cancelling a show to suddenly cancelling lots of shows yeah I heard news, we've got news down here that Orange is the New Black is final season so I mean that's seven seasons I mean, I know what happened with Dexter over seven seasons. They really should have canceled it at five. So I don't know if Orange is the New Black is the same here. But yeah, same story, but not interesting.

high confidence · Chris: 'there's only four tables within Stern Pinball Arcade that... that you can tokenize or Smurfberries. That would have an LE version. You cannot purchase the LE version... You can purchase the Premium version. You cannot purchase the LE version.'

  • Beatles pinball machine pricing models include base ($10-15k), Premium ($18-25k), and LE ($50k) tiers

    medium confidence · Chris cites conflicting pricing: first mentions '$15,000' / '$25,000' / '50 grand', then Jared offers alternative '10 grand, 18 grand and then 25 grand' which Chris finds more believable

  • The Beatles pinball machine is a reskin of Sea Witch with added spinner/spinning disc feature

    medium confidence · Chris: 'It's a reskin of Sea Witch, although it has a spinner in it. Or a spinning disc in it, I believe.'

  • Kapow is the manufacturer responsible for both Batman 66 and the Beatles pinball machines

    high confidence · Chris: 'Kapow is the same company that was responsible for Batman 66' and later references Kapow with Beatles pricing

    • “It's not even a single-level playfield. It's a reskin of Sea Witch.”

    Chris Freebus @ near end — Highlights the low mechanical complexity underlying premium Beatles pricing

  • “You can just go and scan the board in, draw the tracks back on it again, and these guys would print you off 20 and off you go.”

    Chris Freebus @ mid-episode — Describes DIY board reproduction workflow enabled by cheap PCB manufacturing

    • Beatles
    game
    Sea Witchgame
    Batman 66game
    AC/DCgame
    Star Trekgame
    Ghostbustersgame
    Mustanggame
    This Week in Pinballorganization
    Steamcompany
    Trials Fusionproduct
    Iron Fistgame
    $

    market_signal: Stern appears to be using collectible three-tier pricing (Pro/Premium/LE) as revenue optimization strategy across physical and digital products; LE exclusivity maintained through paywall despite narrative of 'free-to-play' token system

    high · Chris: 'This is Stern's way of... this is Stern's Smurfberries' regarding LE-only real-money paywalls in SPA VR

  • ?

    community_signal: Chris's Pinsim build demonstrates iterative design methodology with friend's technical expertise (3D printing, CNC, rendering); cost structure requires bulk purchasing and capital amortization for commercial viability

    high · Chris discusses 3D-printed coin door, CNC cabinet cutting, part costs ($350+), and deliberates on commercial pricing given $500 design/rendering labor cost

  • $

    market_signal: Beatles pinball pricing structure ($10-50k tiers) represents extreme price stratification targeting wealthy collectors; described as 'fleecing' by hosts; reskin of Sea Witch commands 50k LE tier despite single-level playfield

    high · Chris: 'They are just pillaging from what collectors know... That is purely, hey, we're going to fleece the very people that we know would be interested in this' and '50 grand' LE price for Sea Witch reskin

  • ?

    product_strategy: Stern Pinball Arcade VR LE editions artificially differentiated by art/cosmetics only (no rule changes vs Premium); paywall creates artificial scarcity despite digital distribution model eliminating manufacturing constraints

    high · Chris: 'LE is obviously different. It's the exact same rules and the exact same layouts as Premium. It just has a different paint scheme. Yeah. Different backbox, different trim, but it plays the same'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Chinese PCB manufacturers enable DIY board reproduction at scale ($2-3 per unit, batching with 137+ concurrent custom orders); reduces barriers to restoration and homebrew electronics

    high · Chris: 'you can get a single board made now for $2 in China' and 'they go, currently we have 137 other boards that we're going to be cutting at the same time'

    • 4:29
    If you did a five seasons of a show and you were had never seen any of them, though. Right. And then you go across them on Netflix. I mean, each season is only 10 episodes long. It's not too daunting. Like you feel like I'll sit down and I'll watch this. if you know that you have 80 episodes to watch of an hour long show that becomes a whole other ball of wax where you're like do I really want to commit this much? That's a lot of time a lot to watch so in this new paradigm of TV and viewing habits I think we'll be seeing a lot more short series short but really concentrated and good see I prefer that Like I don't have Netflix at all because I know that if I had it, I just wouldn't watch it because I don't have the time to watch. I just have the regular TV on and I'm doing other things while I'm watching it. So I don't like to watch TV like that. So I wouldn't watch it. But yeah, for me, if it was, if you had to say, well, look, you know, you can do a three series show. It's like, yeah, sign me up for that because that's easy. that's easy to fit in.
    5:44
    I didn't think that I would watch Netflix nearly as much as I do watch Netflix now. It's one of those... Again, it's daunting when you first get it and you're like, oh my god, there's like all this stuff. Where do I even start? The thing is that once you start, you kind of go, oh no, I'm kind of interested in getting this a shot. Then you give something else a shot.
    6:09
    Next thing you know, you have this whole new palette of things that you want to watch, and instead you stop watching regular TV, which is what I've done. I don't watch any network TV now. I wouldn't have a problem not watching regular TV, because I'm sure it's probably the same over there, but free-to-air is just junk reality TV, and that is it. No, we've got plenty of scripted, but the scripted is what I dub short attention span theater. It's, oh God, we've got to make quick edits and throw everything at the audience before they dare to hit the remote and switch channels. Right. So panic.
    6:46
    It doesn't let you just melt into it and watch. And then worse than that is the fact that, and I don't know if they do this in Australia, but here they do what we call lower third advertising. So it takes up the lower third of your TV screen, and it'll be a live action. People film the video, things happening down there. typically advertising another show on that same network that's coming up or airing on Tuesdays or whatever. And it is so distracting. Oh, it is. Yeah, it's terrible. We sometimes have, yeah, we all have the lower third, but we have little watermarks, of course, in all the free-to-air channels. And sometimes they'll have like a watermark and then there'll be like a celebratory watermark and then there'll be some advertorial watermark. So it's like this big creeping thing across the bottom of the lower third. And then they'll have that interrupting thing, a big interruption, like live action promotional in show banner. It's just like, okay, you have enough chances to promote this in the ad breaks. You don't need to do it in the lower third, in the middle of a show. See, maybe this is why when I'm playing Xen, all the pop-ups don't bother me at all.
    8:03
    We're conditioned to be aware of it. and know that it's actually, our eyes are trained to understand it. Yeah, maybe. The networks surely train us.
    8:20
    All right, enough of that kind of stuff. People are doing pinball, apparently. Where should we start?
    8:31
    So what have we got on the dance card today? We've got two things. We've got updates to your Pinsim. Yes. And then we've got some talk about customer experience in games, right? Why don't we start with the Pinsim then? Because that's a shorter instance. And so I posted the one article about the beginning of doing this project. I have been getting parts in over the past couple of weeks after I did my big order. in the meantime my buddy has done 3D render of what this thing looks like and we've made some decision choices and everything so I'll be making a post about it soon so everybody can see where it's going to go and stuff but some of the decision making that has taken place rather than using the actual Bally Coindor that I have that weighs a ton even with big parts of it stripped away decided we're going to 3D print one. It's going to be more of a... It actually looks a lot like a Data East style coin door.
    9:43
    But my buddy has a 3D printer and he kind of thought it would be an interesting project and it'll weigh next to nothing. We won't have to cut a hole into the front of the cabinet. Because you'll just stick it on. Stick it on, yeah. So he's going to do that. The difficulty is that because his 3D printer isn't large enough to handle that wide of an object, he's going to have to quarter it and then join the quarters together. And then because those coin doors always had a texture on them, I'm just going to get the same stuff that I'm going to texture coat my legs in. We're just going to spray on the front of that, and that'll hide all the seams. And it'll be fine. And then what he was pointing out was, he goes, yeah, and if anybody else decides they want a Coindor like this, he goes, then we'll have to think of other options. One option would be him buying a bigger 3D printer, which he's like, I'm always looking for excuses to upgrade my stuff.
    10:47
    Your biggest enabler, basically. Right. And option two, this would be if you were going to mass produce a bunch of these. So like we're talking 50 of them do injection mold, which he does.
    11:01
    So that was that was one thing. We came up with the paint scheme, which I think is pretty awesome. It looks good. Is it going to be like this decal printed on a transfer? What we're going to do. So for our audio listeners, I chose Whirlwind Blue as the base coat. Oh, nice. That's my favorite machine. And then everything else is going to be white and black. Basically put the white racing stripe up the front. And then on the side of the cabinet, we're going to have the Blockade logo in white with a black outline, basically. That we're going to have to get printed up in vinyl. Okay. And so that'll get put on that way. Nice. But again, I'm leaning towards, you know, once I get this assembled, I'll find out if it's something that I actually want to make more of for people that want to buy them. But sorry, folks, you're going to be stuck with that paint scheme and our logo slapped on the side. That's right. Branding, baby.
    12:01
    Paint over it if you don't like it. Think of it as merchandise. Exactly. Instead of a T-shirt. What other podcast show on the internet actually has controllers?
    12:11
    I think we're the first. You know. Yeah. It'll be good. But some of the things that I've shown the renderer a couple of people, and I had one person say, oh, but you only got a four-button layout. Why don't you do the six-button layout? I'm thinking, well, A, I'm not planning on playing any six-button games myself, but B, that's not what the Pinsim card is designed for. It's designed for pinball. And now if we're doing six-button, I guess you could wire it so that it works appropriately. And then he goes, oh, wait. it's wide enough why don't you have two joysticks and two six button configurations i'm like okay now we're going nuts a i'm personally i'm never going to have two people over to play a fighting game b i don't play fighting games on my pc exactly um so no and three now we're really into a new uh pcb card to control this whole thing uh well since you need two pin sim controllers exactly to do it yeah but now you're not even why would you even you wouldn't bother with the pin sim controller you would just do your own arduino board and do it that way which my friend was like why don't we just do this in arduino why did you buy the pin sim board i'm like not like i didn't mention this entire thing the entire time because he's like i know how to code those i'm like oh my god so that's the other thing so i started doing a price breakdown of all this of what all the parts cost. And it's not how much I've paid because some of you have donated things and others I've bought used and I've kind of scrounged it around. But this would be, if you went out, went on to pinballlife.com, went on to Amazon, purchased all this stuff for yourself, how much would it cost? It's pricey. I'll put it this way. It would be about $500. bucks?
    14:02
    Parts alone is currently a ranging $350 plus, thereabouts. But, now there's another guy on our forum that is building his at the exact same time as me. I was like, hey, how much is this running? Does this seem to be about fine? He goes, yeah, except for I didn't have a table saw, so I had to buy one of those. Oh, if I want 3D print, I'm going to have to buy one of that. I was like, oh yeah, see, my friend has all this. your time sharing all this stuff from your friend, but if you had to buy all this stuff outright, it would be ridiculous. Yeah.
    14:36
    And like, table saw nothing, he's using a CNC machine to cut all this. Yeah. So he was kind of commenting, he goes, obviously you're my friend, so I'm doing this all for you for free. But just the render,
    14:51
    because he does this for a living. Oh, right. Does design consulting, stuff like that. And he goes, just doing the 3D render and getting it all prepared for a CNC. He goes, I charge $500 for that. Yeah, it takes a lot of time to do. He goes, even if I didn't charge for that, the mere fact of you using my CNC machine, you know, me running it and using the 3D printer, he goes, that's going to cost money too, you know, per unit. So it's one of those things where I'm going to have to really look at the cost and see. Because some items, you buy bulk, it goes down in price. Oh, absolutely. Some of the stuff. Yeah, like my joystick that I bought came with eight, no, excuse me, ten buttons total. Eight of them are the arcade style. Two of them are the little smaller buttons. I'm only needing four of the arcade style buttons. So right there, now I have an extra four. so I mean it's kind of all the little like if I buy a wire spool because I'm going to need to wire this well I can buy it on Amazon six spools of 100 feet per spool you know in different color well how much am I literally going to be using just for my project you know maybe max 20 feet you know of each color if even that so again now you have all this left over but if you were building it just for yourself that one time hey it doesn't matter you got to pay the cost no matter what.
    16:22
    There's where it's one of those things where I'm thinking that it'll be the cost can come down for parts but still have to charge for labor and stuff. I don't know what the end price will be if I decide to go forward with this, but we'll see.
    16:38
    Oh, I did have somebody else ask me they go, I liked it, but it's too tall. What about just sitting it on the desktop so chopping it way narrower?
    16:48
    Again, that's not what this is being done for necessarily. I mean, it's possible, but... So what they would like to do is rest it on top of a table instead of resting it on top of the legs.
    17:00
    Right, or holding it, or putting it on their lap and playing with it. See, I've tried that before, and it's really hard to explain this in the theme, but you've got to contort your hands like this to flip. It doesn't work if you're sitting down. So even on your lap, it still doesn't feel right. And you wouldn't be able to tilt it. It's not really the ideal form factor for it. No, no. No. I mean, the one concession I'm almost thinking of making on this would be drill a second set of holes for the legs up much higher.
    17:29
    So then you can have two heights. Yeah, so then you can have two heights. So technically you could have it. I mean, you'd have to crack the thing open and readjust everything and all that, but it's an option.
    17:41
    I'm sure. Yeah. But let's see how the first one goes first. I was going to say, a lot depends on what it feels like to get in my hands and go, okay, now that I'm playing with it and touching it, here's the adjustments that I would make. Yeah because you can absolutely assume that you going to be making tweaks to it after you produce it No doubt you will But then I was joking around with I like you know what I want to do I want to stamp number into the side of it like on a real pinball machine They always had the serial number stamped into the wood right So I was like, I want to stamp this. Let's just do triple digits.
    18:15
    And so, you know, I would have 001. But then I thought, oh, you know you'd want the 007 cabinet. I mean, that's just cool. And then I went, oh. instead of painting it blue and white, paint it gold and black, and then instead of where the Blockade logo is, put the James Bond gun barrel with Bond in the silhouette in the middle. It was like my brain started going nuts.
    18:40
    It's a super limited edition version. Super limited edition, yeah. When I get to number 24, it's like, oh, it's going to have to be painted Laker colors and have Kobe's name on it.
    18:53
    Well, let's just get ahead of ourselves. Right. Let's just see if the thing works first. Exactly. See if it works. See how it plays. See what fun we have with it. We were actually talking about running circuit boards because you know how the Pinsim board is actually done through one of those Chinese manufacturers. Yeah. And apparently, I was talking to a guy who actually rebuilds arcade machines where I work. And he was saying it costs, you know, you can get a single board made now for $2 in China. All you need to do is you trace over it with this program. You trace out your tracks, and that will do one-off boards for two or three bucks now.
    19:31
    It's great. Yeah, I got the notification from who I bought this from, and they do a mass stamping, not of all the same board either. It's a site where, yes, you can indeed design your own board and then submit it. but they were like, Oh, we're currently building our order for a single stamping of this two layer or three layer board. I forget how many layers the board is. They go, currently we have 137 other boards that we're going to be cutting at the same time. It's just like, wow. Okay. That's interesting. So it is crazy. And it's apparently, you know, you could, if you think about this, like as far as restoring old boards, boards you could just go and depopulate a pinball board and if you wanted an original board with all the original pins and everything like if you're that you know some collectors are very very particular about the boards they're running in the machines you can actually go and do that you can just go and scan the board in one for one draw the tracks back on it again and these guys would print you off 20 and off you go which i imagine is what because you can buy replacement boards that aren't official manufacturer or new old stock.
    20:50
    They're typically $100, $120 for these boards. I imagine that's exactly what somebody did. They took the time, mapped it all out, designed it, and submitted it. Yes, you could do it yourself, but how many hours are you willing to sit there and do it for?
    21:05
    All right. That's all we have about the microcab. Like I said, I'll be making a post pretty soon. Lay out all my parts and all that jazz.
    21:17
    Let's talk about, though, the customer experience in our favorite digital pinball platform is going on. Now, let's first explain what customer experience is for people who don't know what customer experience is. It's your enjoyment of the actual product.
    21:37
    And also as a paying customer, what can be expected from said product necessarily? You know, it's what the product asks you to do after you've actually paid. A, are you happy with the experience that they're offering you? Is there any chance that it's going to change? Are you having buyer's remorse? Are you going, you know what? I thought I enjoyed this and now I realize that I don't. And then it also comes down to the, you know, what are the add-ons that are within a game? You know, are you having to pay even more money to get further? It's your favorite word, Smurfberries.
    22:17
    Exactly. So if you've never heard us talk about Smurfberries before, this is a Jared term. Let me explain what Smurfberries is. Yes. Smurfberries is in-app purchases that go beyond what is really acceptable in a game. So this is like, there was a game, the reason why this term Smurfberries came around, it actually wasn't my term, it was another term that someone came up with. And it's like, there was a game called Smurfs and it was, it had layers of in-app purchasing. So Smurfberries were one currency in this game, but you also had two different, I think it was two different types of currency that flowed back into Smurfberries. So it's a classic case of you might have, you know, you might be able to earn coins in the game, but you need gems to actually go a long way in the game and you have to buy the gems, whereas you can basically grind the coins and you can grind the coins to buy a gem. And you might need 10 gems to do something basic in a game. And it tends to be a mobile-only approach. It tends to be. It has filtered into other games, but it's that whole idea of, hey, you can download and play this game for free with the intention that they want to get you hooked. And then next thing you know, you're making a $10 purchase here, a $5 purchase here. and there's no end to the purchases. It's not like you can pay $60 like you would on console. Right. It's always going to have paywalls. I ran into that. I was playing a mobile game called Fusion's Trial or Fusion Trials or Trials Fusion. I can't remember. Anyway, it's one of those you're on a dirt bike kind of game and they put obstacles in front of you and it's all about trial riding. It's like Infinite Runner style game, right? I don't know what Infinite Runner is. It's one where you're constantly moving. you don't control the acceleration. No, no, no, no, no. No, this is you have complete control of acceleration. You can do flips, tricks, you know, any manner of things, but you have a course that you have to run. And trials is something that actually takes place in the real sporting world with, you know, custom motorcycles and stuff. That's what it is. And so it's boulder climbing and, you know, hopping and rock hopping and stuff like that. Yeah, right. Well, you start with a certain class of bike, and then as you progress, you can then buy a better bike. and then, of course, you can purchase upgrades to all your parts on your bike. And when you first start playing it, boy, the currency is just flowing. It's like, oh, yeah, you can upgrade. This is easy. I can upgrade like crazy. But then it started getting into very specific parts that you needed. And you never were quite getting those in the free collection. You'd get maybe a handful, but you needed two dozen of them, you know, kind of thing. and i was content to be like okay hey i'm gonna write out the energy bar and i'm gonna do my you know allotment per day and wait for it to get and and stuff like that and it was going started getting to a crawl for earning this stuff and then i finally hit the absolute wall where i was like i cannot progress any farther without having an upgraded bike and the problem is is that there is no more trails or courses for me to run to earn any of this stuff on anymore so you you are at the basically the wall i'm at the wall and if i want to go yep and if i want to go further i have got to put money into it and i was like nope you're not gonna do it delete the app and i've been playing it for a couple of months it's gone yeah so a lot of people at that point we go, or no, look, I'll just buy one upgrade pack. It'll be fine. Like it's only $5. It'll be fine. And then they go, yeah, yes, excellent. And they have you hooked. Because once you buy, it's much easier. The psychology behind it is once you've made your first purchase and they've got that first purchase out of you, in the Smurfberry model, it is much easier to get you to unlock your wallet again. Yeah. And that's how it is. Like it's just that first purchase is the hardest. But after that, everyone else, they've done studies and it is much easy to get money out of you after you've done that first purchase. So what did I do instead? I purchased the... This was a variation. I forget what the actual name of this was. It was Trials something, but it was set in kind of a western themed desert territory or whatever. But if you go onto Steam, there's quite a few Trials games. and so I bought one of the Trials games there for less than, I think it was maybe five bucks during a Steam sale or whatever and played the crap out of that.
    27:18
    And it was probably Heath's better. It was Heath's better, it looks a lot better and I never had to worry about paying for upgrades anymore. But it was Smith's very speedy. Nope, it was just purely about, hey, if you beat the time, then congratulations, you'll move forward. So, why are we bringing this up? Because Jared is not aware of this and most of us are not aware of this because we do not have VR. And within the Stern Pimble Arcade VR experience, Farsight finally introduced their Smurfberries that they have been planning.
    27:48
    They wanted to throw token system at us back when they changed the UI from the old UI into the current UI.
    27:58
    It was outright. Yes, we all said nope, and it never even went to beta. that we never even saw any iteration of it whatsoever. There was just mention of tokens, and we freaked, and they held back. Yeah. So all of a sudden we hear about SPA. SPA, that's my natural inclination to call it a SPA. Yeah. A Stern Pimple Arcade and VR with the addition of having this token system. And what did Mike tell us? He said, oh, and you'll have the ability to buy the tables with your in-game currency. So no money out of your pocket. You can go ahead and do this. No money.
    28:40
    So my friend, who I went over to his house to experience the VR, he was all excited about this. And he was like, hey, you know what? I'm willing to support the app. I'm willing to pay.
    28:53
    He goes, I'm not that good of a player. I don't want to deal with trying to grind tokens and stuff like that. So then he sends me a message.
    29:04
    So in the game, you can buy... We're talking about ACDC, Mustang, Star Trek, and Ghostbusters in terms of machines that have your premium model, and then you have your LE editions, right? All the other games, the other tables that are in there, there are no... Yes, there are no LEs. it was just always, you know, there was only one version of it. All the Seegers were just like basically LEs because there was no LE at the time. They had basically LEs. What was the difference between pro and premium? LE is obviously different. It's the exact same rules and the exact same layouts as premium. It just has different paint scheme. Yeah. Different back box, different trim, but it plays the same, as opposed to the pro model, which has been hacked. Yeah. So back in the days of Ripley's, there was only one edition. That was it. There was nothing else.
    29:59
    So this is Stern's way of – this is Stern's Smurfberries. In a way, yes. In real life, which if you've heard the prices on the Beatles table that they're going to be coming out? I haven't. Oh, holy crikey. I'm just going to tell you this right now. They are just pillaging from what collectors, because they know that they've got Beatles collectors out there.
    30:28
    Now, there's been a couple of different prices, but the first one that I heard from This Week in Pinball,
    30:34
    base model table, $15,000. Oh, $15,000. You want the premium version? $25,000. Oh, $25,000. You want the Uber Deluxe LE version? 50 grand.
    30:53
    What is... Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay, fine. Obviously that Beatles license is expensive. It ain't that expensive. I can guarantee... That is purely, hey, we're going to fleece the very people that we know would be interested in this. We have no concern whatsoever for the person that is just a regular pinball collector. So this is introduced by Kapow. Now, Kapow is the same company that was responsible for Batman 66, if that puts it in perspective for you. So the super-duper LE that was available for Batman 66, we had to send you a video in to actually get considered for it. Yeah, qualify for it. Same company. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not surprising that they're going, oh, wow, $50,000 for a pinball machine? Yeah. Now, I've heard a different price model that said it was 10 grand. I want to say 10 grand, 18 grand and then 25 grand. That sounds better.
    31:50
    Sure, better. Half price. Yeah, I'll take it. It's a sale. No way. The thing is, it's not even a single level play field. It's a reskin of Sea Witch. Is it? Yes, that's what they said. It's a reskin of Sea Witch, although it has a spinner in it. Or a spinning disc in it, I believe. Wow.
    32:17
    Jeez. I mean, Sea Witch, don't get me wrong, it's a great game. I really like Sea Witch. Well, it isn't that great.
    32:24
    It's not 10 grand great. And I wonder if this is, I know this isn't a site because we're here to talk about VR and Smurf Ferries, but I just wonder if this is the plan with Stern. That's how they're going to be doing their really old Stern electronic vaults. they're going to be getting the power to reskin them and put a $50,000 price tag on them. People want them. People want reskins. Yeah. People want the old games back. Here's the funny thing. People want these hyper-expensive machines. They've been requesting that there be these uber-expensive. And to me, it reminds me it's the people that love doing Kickstarters. It's like, what's wrong with you? Why do you want to spend more money than is necessary? I don't get it. Because that means they can tell their friends, well, I have a $10,000 pinball machine. It's purely status. Yeah, it is. It is bragging rights. They are the Earl of Ego.
    33:22
    Okay, so back to my whole point was, there's only four tables within Stern Pinball Arcade that... That you can tokenize or smooth varies. That would have an LE version.
    33:33
    You cannot purchase the LE version. What? you can purchase the premium version you cannot purchase the LE version the only way to get the LE version and again all this is is just changing art right? it's not anything else just a matter of changing art the only way you can do that is by buying it with gold bars now within the game you don't earn gold bars you earn tokens ulti tiered smurfberry is my favorite type it takes 1000 tokens to buy one bar of gold. Uh-huh. It takes 40 gold bars to buy one table. Right. I remember. I picked that out. I picked that out in the interview that he was doing. No, it's 40 gold bars for all the other Stern tables. It's 50 gold bars for these. For one table. Or something like that. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. It might be 30 and 40 or it's 40 and 50. Still, it's 40,000 coins. Right. So here's the thing. Earning tokens, when you first start playing, is relatively easy because you get some for beating challenges.
    34:48
    But the problem is, is once you beat the challenges, you can never earn tokens again from those. So the one short way to earn tokens after that is posting high scores. But that means repeatedly having to beat your previous high scores. and there's some other contingency anyway, it's virtually impossible.
    35:11
    Now, you can buy 12,000 tokens for $10. So, in order to get the LE version, if you didn't want to go through all the hassles of earning, grinding like crazy from what would be an impossible number to even collect, for one table, right let alone trying to do it for all four you're going to spend about fifty dollars a skin and that's for one table that's for one table two hundred dollars for four skins yeah yeah i know so in some cases the the le models did actually have some variations in toys in them. I seem to remember that the premium... But it like if you look at Ghostbusters right The ramps are both the same between Premium and LE and the spinners are all there All the bits are all there. Okay, fine, maybe a toy looks different. It's just trim, but functionality is all the same, as opposed to you look at a pro version of Ghostbusters, and it's wildly different. Yeah, true. I do seem to remember, though, that it's certainly in the ACDC, era of tables, their ACDC Lucy or their ACDC Premium... It's just a different paint scheme.
    36:45
    Yeah, I thought there was something different. Because with ACDC, the big difference between Pro and everything else was the lower playfield. Pro didn't have the lower playfield. Yeah, that's true.
    36:55
    Stern is literally the LE is just so you can have a plaque on the front of your table that says number 18 of 500. And have the apron signed by Gary Stern. That's it. That's right. I was just wondering, because I thought that in the LEs, there's some LEs that actually had slightly different mechs or something like that. And then your translight will be different and your sidearm will be different. But that's it. So it was just literally just the art package. Yes. That's what I'm saying. For skins.
    37:28
    For 200 bucks. Accurate. yeah yeah and and it's a complaint that has suddenly popped up in the forum to which one of the guys one of the farsight matt who has doesn't have anything to do with with he has he termed it he goes i'm completely isolated away i don't know a thing that's going on with stern pimple arcade and to which somebody commented boy that's pretty amazing considering how how many employees are actually at our site, you can be completely left out of the loop of something like that. Yeah. The fact that it's probably the only actual game that you're producing now.
    38:10
    Let's be serious. So the comment was, oh, we might have to look into that and readjust it. You think?
    38:17
    Yeah. Probably. Odds of that happening? Next to none. Yeah. We totally love to do Indiana Jones. The same statement.
    38:31
    So yeah, it's one of those things where it's just like they're dangling the carrot and you're going to put in some time thinking that, oh, this is totally doable and then you realize it ain't doable in the least. And it is pretty insulting that they won't let you just buy that version of the table instead of buying the premium version, I'm going to buy the LE version.
    38:53
    They need to make it, like if it was fair, they need to make the cost of the table the same price as to buy it outright, the same price as doing it through the free method.
    39:09
    There needs to be equality there in the way they're pricing. It just needs to be, hey, if you want the LE version, you pay $10. If you want the premium version, you pay $10.
    39:19
    If you want both, you pay $20. I think ACDC, they have three different skins. Oh, do they? Oh, jeez. Because they've got ACDC Lucy, they've got ACDC Rock Case or whatever it is. They've got the other one and the regular one. Yeah. And more to the point, why aren't they offering the pro versions? I mean, I get that why would you want to play, but then again, there's plenty of tournaments that that's all you're playing on as a pro. So wouldn't you want to maybe practice on the pro version and learn how the scoring is different on that? Why isn't that even an option? I don't get why that's not an option. Because they only had the premiums when they were doing the original batch of SPA. And they made it a call to only do premiums when they were first doing it. I remember, because that's what they said, yeah, well, there will only ever be premiums or LEs in the SPA. So Farsight being short-sighted, got it. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't think I particularly like to play the pro, because let's be honest, the pro of ACDC is junk. but have you ever played the pro of game of thrones compared to the premium well yeah i have played the pro is better pro actually is better but you know this is not a problem because then there's no game of thrones in the collection true true and i don't know look if i was this this is not being applied we should be clear this model is not being applied to any other tpa or pinball title that Farsight is producing at the moment. Let's put that caveat out there. We have a stagnant Stern Pimble Arcade on the PC. Yeah, which is basically the only reason why you even want to open it is because it has direct game code and not emulated game code. Which is nice, but You're going to throw your controller at the screen when you try and navigate to that game. Because it's literally impossible to navigate well. You can make it work, but you also hate yourself for doing it. Yes, exactly.
    41:18
    So you go back to the less suck experience in the main TBA game. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm just at the point where I'm not going to cut these guys much slack anymore because I could see what can be done if you actually have, if you actually care. I'm going to put it out there. If you actually care. Speaking of, I've been messing around with the Zacharia pinball game. and there's a reason why I've been messing around with it some more and I'll get into that in a moment but as I'm navigating around now look their UI needs some work too there's too much information you don't know where to look basically you wind up missing things and that's what happened to me I was going through the various segments and I open up this one box and there was all these there was 10 tables that were locked and I went what are these and I kind of look and I'm like, none of these are for purchase. They're just locked and you have to do achievements in order to unlock them. And I went, oh no, because I'd just been hearing about Stern Peeble Arcade. Yeah. And so I contacted Mart, who we interviewed a few podcasts ago. I said, what's the deal with these achievements? How do you do them? He goes, oh, well, it's real simple. When you open up a table and you push play across the top of the board, It says play classic or you can do a 90 second challenge or lamp chaser. There's like basically modes. Okay. And by completing those modes, you are an achievement. And then, but also you can select the achievements tab down at the bottom. It tells you what achievements you have yet to do within the game.
    43:03
    And, uh, so it's kind of like doing the standard goals and wizard goals in, uh, TPA. Except for each table probably has anywhere in the vicinity of 35 to 45 achievements that you can do.
    43:21
    So those are how you earn your achievements per table, right? So by earning 150 achievements, you unlock your first table. By earning 300 achievements, you unlock the next table. The final table in the batch requires that you've earned a total of 1,500 achievements. Which is everything. That's earning...
    43:46
    What do you mean everything? That's basically every one of those games with that option available. You've got to complete them all. No, because there are over 3,000 achievements available within exactly... 3,000? Wow. So you literally only have to do 50% of the achievements in the game, and you'll unlock all 10 of those. Okay. So, totally doable. That's fine. That's just time. Time is just putting in time. So how much would you pay to not have to put in time and just be able to unlock them outright?
    44:19
    I think, so just to fast forward time, $20. How does about $4 grab you? $4? Yes. That's it? That's it. Shut up and take my money. So there you go. So that, folks, is giving good customer experience. That's amazing. Because I'm going to have to grind this. I can just get access to these tables. No, and the thing is, is the grinding, it's not that I'm having to grind every table to death.
    44:52
    I can only have to grind each table 50% of the way. And that's actually really achievable. So it's achievable. It's still maintaining fun. it's not saying you have to earn all 26 tokens of Safecracker.
    45:09
    Imagine how much that IAP would be unlocked in Smurf Fairyland. That's what we're talking about where it's much better customer experience where you can still have fun and earn achievements or you can be like, I don't got time for this. I just want to play these tables and pay your money and go. It leaves you four bucks. I mean, yeah. I guess they had to put some value on it, though. They probably would have just gone, look, you know, if you want, you can go down the path of earning these or you can just have them. Yeah. And I guess they had to put some value on not having to earn them. I mean, maybe it would be that for some people, if it was like, if you spend the money to unlock it, you don't get a badge or something like that, right? if you don't pay the money and you earn it, you get an extra badge and an extra achievement. For some people, that will be motivation enough to go, yeah, I'm going to do it the hard way and actually get the sense of achievement. Some people just don't care. Here's what came as a surprise to me. I picked a table. I picked PinballChamp83 to try and do achievements. I wanted to see how difficult is it to actually earn achievements. How fast can you build them up?
    46:27
    Well, while you're playing these modes, okay, for instance, Lamp Hunter, it's kind of actually cool. It lights up a series of inserts, and as your ball rolls over the insert, it goes out. You have to roll the ball over all the inserts. If you do that, congratulations, you've won the mode. That's awesome. So they've actually put detection on the inserts. Yes. How cool is that? That's awesome. There's another one that basically goes, you need to hit these two drop targets. All of the drop targets will be down. These will be the only two that are standing, and they've got a light on them, so you know exactly where they are. As soon as you knock down those two, it'll be like, now you need to hit the spinner ten times.
    47:11
    Only that general illumination light is on near there. What I found kind of helpful was because on this particular table, there's an upper playfield. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get to this thing. I didn't know where the shot was because, let's face it, the Zachariah tables, they're a visual mess. They are a bit of a clown moment, yes. And so all of a sudden it came to where it was like, launch a ball up to the second play field. And there the inserts were lit like a landing strip going, shoot here! And the thing is, I'd shot there before. I didn't realize it was just a metal scoop that basically the ball plops up on. Because I'd hit it, but apparently I hadn't hit it perfect and so I thought it was a dead end.
    47:56
    So now I know, oh, I just have to keep on trying to shoot it. Eventually I shot it, made it up there. I was like, boom, I know. So it taught me the shots on the table. Now that table is so much more enjoyable to just play in regular mode. Because you learn something. Because I learned something. So again, beneficial. I'm guessing that that's not the way it is with earning achievements in certain pinball arcade VR. I wouldn't think so.
    48:20
    So again, here we go. customer experience. It's so much more their present. They have you, the gamer, and mine instead of we, the accountants.
    48:33
    Or let's work out a way to actually sustain the studio now. We kind of lost our main revenue stream. I do want to... I'll throw it out there, folks. If you are a Stern Pimple Arcade VR player and you've been earning tokens, let me know. What clip are you earning them at? Send us an email. Blahblahblockade at gmail.com. I want to know what your experience is. You can also contact us at Blockade on Twitter.
    49:06
    Maybe, I mean, are we in the wrong? Are we not thinking clearly on this? We're missing something, yeah.
    49:12
    We have no way of testing it ourselves. And my friend, honestly, is not a very good pinball player. But that's what he's saying. The problem is that he's already hit a wall just on the free tables. He's already hit his wall, and he can't get past it.
    49:28
    So, I mean, it depends on the type of audience you want to target, really. And really, the type of audience you want to target is literally everybody, not a specific channel of audience. So, you want to make the ability to unlock the tables and actually have fun with the game. Because the thing is, if you're not having fun with the game, you're not going to play it and therefore no one's going to be spending money in your app right so the idea with in-app purchases is to get the balance right and the smurfberries there's a classic example of smurfberries which you may remember me talking about um and it was a game called sky force on um on android now sky force is one of those shoot-em-ups um plain shoot-em-ups and it was single currency stars you collected them in the game you got plenty of them and you if you wanted to unlock your ships or upgrade your weapons, which you really had to do in the game, you would just, you could literally go through, replay the levels on the high difficulties because the higher the difficulty, the more stars you get. So you just go play the earlier levels that you can pretty much do it with your eyes closed and grind your way through, get stars. No worries at all. You'll get there eventually, but you know, you could buy a stars pack for something like $1.99 and you get 10,000 stars. That was enough to pretty much upgrade one weapon tier and have a bit of change left over. So, you know, I happily purchased some stars from that game to upgrade some weapons and had no problems doing it because it was fair, it was well-priced, and I didn't feel like I was being ripped off because it was very upfront in the way that it presented the pricing tier. But this multi-tiered rubbish that basically it is multi-tiered rubbish that Fastlight's put into this title would be an instant turnoff for me if I had a VR headset. There are plenty of other titles out there on Steam that I would prefer to spend my money on. Yeah.
    51:29
    It is just the ultimate turnoff for a customer when you insult them with this type of pricing model. It is dumb business. Yeah. So I mentioned there was a reason why I was putting a little more time into Zacharia. And it's hard when I really want to play some of these end tables right now.
    51:50
    But I wanted to get familiar with certain aspects because their next remake table is called Stars Phoenix. Oh, yeah. And I'm going to be doing all the call outs for it. Oh, right. OK. Nice. So I wanted to find out what... Now I've got a whole list that I'm going to have to do recordings for, and it's not going to be this voice that you're hearing. I'm actually going to be doing a character voice for it. But yeah, I wanted to familiarize myself a little bit more with what to expect out of that and stuff. Cool.
    52:29
    And yeah, so that'll be coming soon. So that should be fun. That should be fun. All right. So we've covered Stern Pinball Arcade. We've covered Zachary Pinball. Now let's go into Zen Pinball, where the honeymoon has worn off for a couple of people.
    52:49
    Basically, everybody oohed and aahed over their initial plays. And now there is some people that are, this has nothing to do with the censorship of the tables. This has to do with the physics on the tables. most of the complaints seem to be centered around fishtails and junkyard junkyard is one of those tables that i don't think most people have ever gotten their hands on and so they're it's hard for people to go hey is this really how it's supposed to play versus it doesn't feel right the doesn't feel right part is hitting the center shot all the way up the top of the play field bashing the wrecking ball and getting past it for multi-ball. It's not an easy shot. I remember playing this game in the arcade. It's a long, hard shot to get repeatedly. What the complaint is is that where the ball is coming off on the flipper, that it seems like you're having to flip it way early. Much earlier than you normally would. It's the same thing with Medieval Madness. In order to hit the castle, it's a quick flip from capture as opposed to when we were playing it in Pinball Arcade, where it was let the ball roll down to about the middle of the flipper and then you'd flip up. Yeah So there been some questioning about that The bigger questioning is with fish tails What are you allowed to backhand
    54:18
    Because a lot of people are saying that they should be able to backhand the monster fish, uh, on the left, left flipper to the left orbit. Oh, okay. And the same should be true for the extra ball on the right side. Um, I believe, I believe we're able to backhand that relatively, I shouldn't say easily, but it's definitely doable. But backhanding the monster fish orbit, that's where people are saying it's impossible. So I had to go at it.
    54:54
    And I only had a couple of times where I actually was able to do it. It's possible, but I don't think it's consistently possible. more often than not you're backhanding either into the sliding shot or up the boat ramp.
    55:10
    But I have had instances of it going. I know it's possible. That's another complaint that some people have been having with Zen is that there's this weird variance. There's this not consistent shot thing. To me that falls into the category of your flippers get heated up or the ball is spinning or there is these variances.
    55:35
    It's called physics, people. Yeah, you play any real pinball machine. You're not going to be able to do the same shot consistently over and over and over again. It's just not going to happen.
    55:47
    So there's that complaint. And then there's the complaint of, oh, it's so steep. And oh, the ball just is so fast. And oh, it's so hungry on the outlane. and... Welcome to pinball. Real pinball. Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing.
    56:09
    Oh, the one that kills me. I read one where they're like, okay, fine, live catches in TPA were a little too easy, to which I say, like, that you could do it every single time.
    56:25
    That were actually railroaded to a particular part of the flip-up. Right. And they go, but I can only get it like maybe once every 30 times in Zen. Try doing it in real life? Right. I've tried doing it in real life. I can, but it literally takes me, you know, 20 tries before it finally happens. To dial yourself into the way the flippers work on the machine and the way it's set up. I certainly can't do it two times in a row. I guarantee you I can't do that on a real machine. I don't have that level of talent. And there's the other thing. They'll go, well, I was watching Keith Elwin play on a Papa video, and he was easily able to do this. He's Keith freaking Elwin, people.
    57:07
    If it was easy, everybody would do it, and everybody would be a top pinball player. So when I got my 8-Ball Deluxe, I threw on his Papa video, and I watched it. Because I was like, guy, hitting the 8-Ball drop target is really difficult for me. And I watched him do this trick using the right flipper where he just did a real quick tap. It sent the ball back up the in lane and then came up. And from it rolling, he dropped the flipper and then knocked it. And it did this perfect backhand into the eight target. And he was able to do that thing over and over and over again. I'm like, oh, my God, there's the key. Let's do this. So I go out to my machine. I try. Like, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't even get the ball to go back up into the in lane. It just wasn't happening. I'm like, okay, what's the deal? Well, soon after, I got new rubber and I waxed the play field.
    58:09
    Suddenly, I was able to get the ball up the in lane. So I'm like, sweet, now I'm going to be able to do this. Yeah, it turns out it's also still ridiculously hard to do.
    58:18
    I think I've achieved it like twice, maybe. And it was pretty much on accident. And then you lost the ball because you were so surprised that you actually did it. Oh, yeah, because if you've played A-ball deluxe, having the ball drop down from that lane is a lot of times a center drain, unless you nudge it right when it's exiting. Yeah. So it's just killing me seeing some of these people's comments where it's just like, it's not supposed to be easy, folks. It's difficult. The problem is you've had seven seasons of it being easy. Yeah. And now you're actually getting a reality check. So I actually started this whole experiment by playing fish tails in pinball arcade.
    59:00
    I wasn't able to do a backhand up the monster fish ramp every single time I backhanded into the standup targets, which seems near impossible.
    59:09
    It's way too obtuse that angle. Yeah. So I was having a hard time just getting it up into that lane and I never did. I played the game a couple of times, never did. I got it.
    59:22
    As opposed to I actually got it in Zen. So go figure. The other thing is, once you've played Zen's version and then you go and try and play TPA's version, it's so unnatural in TPA. The ball is so weird in how it floats and how it moves.
    59:42
    My timing was suddenly way off. It just didn't work at all for me. As opposed to then I went into Zen, I was like, no, this feels natural. This feels like I'm standing in front of a pinball machine flipping this thing. It really did.
    59:55
    So I, again, it's how much does Zen need to cater to that customer experience? Well, they did folks. And this is the other thing. If you have a complaint about how you're playing a table, please specify what version you're playing. Are you playing in Zen single player mode? Are you playing in classic arcade mode? Are you playing in classic tournament mode? It makes a difference. well yeah, a completely different physics model so yes, you need to be specific because if you just put it I can't do any of this in fishtails which one? which version? and then we can actually test it and then you can actually file a proper bug report and they can actually work on it and things can progress if I can't play the fishtails then it's like they're not going to do anything about it so I was trying to do a dead catch in fishtails couldn't do it, but I was able to do that what do they call it, a drop catch? Where as it comes, you just let the flipper go limp, and then it just slows and rolls. The problem is then I couldn't get the timing of immediately flipping it again. Yeah, because it's really safe. Oh yeah, it was really difficult. I just center-drained every single time.
    61:09
    The ball didn't bounce. It caught, and it just rolled. It just stalled and dropped. Yeah. It's some crazy skills. There's one thing I'm going to be looking forward to actually trying out for really real when Star Race actually has its boards in it. Like actually doing flipper tricks on a real pinball machine in my house.
    61:28
    That's going to be fun. It's different when you don't have to plop quarters in and you're actually able to or just have the glass off and you can constantly drop the ball in the proper spot and go, oh hey, oh and practice. You don't have to let the machine set it up for you and you can actually sort of get the feel of it Right. Because that's the hardest part. If you get the feel right with a staged environment, then it takes, you might have 80% of it right when you're actually playing it on when the ball is wild. So that helps you, right, to actually dial it in. But, you know, then you go to an arcade and you don't have the glass off and you have to actually spend five plays or something like that working out how the table works before you can do it. Yeah. So, you know, it's not easy. You can see why people who are really keen about tournaments and stuff will go to the tournament venue an hour or two hours earlier and start playing games on the tables to learn how they feel so that when tournament time comes around, they know what to expect. Whereas me, I just walk up there and do one game and then go, okay, well, that was my game. Next game. And so I pay very little care about, you know, what the table's doing. I think if you get someone like Keith Elwin or something like that, they don't need a warm-up because they can adapt on the fly. Yeah. And I'm not saying for a second. They'll adapt within those three balls that they're playing. I've seen it happen. It's amazing. Yeah. Where it's just like you get all excited because they blow their first two balls. You know, like you're playing against this person, and the first two balls are terrible, and you're like, yes, they are immortal. And then they get the third ball, and you're like, what happened?
    63:07
    Okay, so that's what the tilt's doing. Okay, and that's what the rake is doing on the table. Cool. All right. Well, it's just like, what switch did you just hit? Cause that's not fair. Yeah, exactly. Right. So yeah. Yeah.
    63:22
    True. Well, yep. There you go. Yeah. I, I think it's hard. Let's go to the mall. It is one of those things where I just wonder, you know, at one point are, are people going to just accept, uh, that this is the new, normal with Zen.
    63:45
    Yeah. They're just going to have to. It probably won't take them long, because then they'll just start to... The thing is that they'll start playing these games, they'll hate them for a bit, and then they'll start getting used to it. It'll click with them, and then they'll start to be able to blow it open, because it'll just fill up. And from what we've seen to date, the physics is going to be pretty consistent. So they're not going to change much per table.
    64:08
    It seems that the flipper models on most of the core pack that were released seem pretty consistent.
    64:17
    So that aspect at least, which is arguably probably the most important, is going to be pretty consistent between tables. So who knows what's going to happen. Hey, Jared, I just learned something. What did you learn?
    64:34
    That people are chatting, watching the YouTube live and I didn't have that chat window open. All right.
    64:42
    Hello, everyone. Well, it's difficult. I don't know. Maybe I got to figure out if there's a way of having it on our dashboard or because without actually opening another window for YouTube playing. I don't know. I mean, there's a group chat screen that we can see for Google Hangouts, but not for Google Hangouts. So YouTube live is has their own chat but there's been people have been talking up and going we can hear you how come you're not responding sorry folks i didn't even think to open up youtube live session the live session yeah i wonder if we can because we're using essentially youtube live is like the encoder let's call it because you know with youtube live you can actually use x x vid or whatever it is um or all the other like twitch broadcasting software as your encoder but we We just choose Google Hangouts on air because it's easy and we don't have to worry about hardware or software. It just does it all for us, and it's quite good.
    65:43
    But, yeah, I think YouTube Live, if you're using the encoder, it will actually, or like one of the Twitch encoders, it will bring in all the chats into the one interface for you. So we're just using the easy option, which is why we're missing your comments, so sorry about that. Well, it's funny, too, because the second I loaded up the YouTube, it started talking at me. and I was like, wait, wait, no, now I'm getting this weird echo going on. I can't have that.
    66:07
    Well, the way you do that is you close that Hangout window, I guess, and then you use the YouTube Live one. Maybe there's a way to launch the Hangout for you through the YouTube Live, and then I'd join on Google Hangouts on there. I don't know. We'll have to investigate this. We will. This is a problem for another day.
    66:26
    That it is, because we've pretty much hit our time limit. Well, our fake time limit. We have no time limit, but we're not one of those two-hour podcast people. No, we're not. We tend not to be. No.
    66:40
    So, all right. So keep your eyes open. I think this week I should have that post up regarding the microcab.
    66:50
    So hopefully people will get a look at that, and I'll kind of break down everything that's going on with that. that'll be on our website which is blockadepinball.com slash episodes which got a nice eye roll from my friend who is web savvy he's like what the hell is that so then I had to explain the whole medium fiasco of us not getting our own URL that's right he's like he goes he goes I'm gonna buy that URL so then you guys have to charge or I can charge you an exorbitant amount of money for it and he looked it up and apparently somebody already has unless you have what blockade pinball.com no just blockade.com a blockade.com yeah oh i don't know i haven't bought it yeah somebody did okay good on them good on them we ain't buying it from you we don't care because the reason why we changed the blockade pinball is because we weren't getting very good seo from just blockade right so they can have the really crappy SEO version of our name. That's fine with us.
    67:58
    Please enjoy. Oh, all right. Um, beyond that, we already mentioned it, but, uh, why don't you go ahead and follow Jared and I, uh, on Twitter. Jared is at Jared morgues. I am at shut your traps. Have you gone to red bubble.com yet? Go to red bubble.com search blockade. That's B L a H C a D E. Up will pop up products. Now, you might only see two products when you first do that. Just go ahead and click on them, and then you can go ahead and navigate to our store, and there you're going to find that we have four different versions of our logo available, one in black, one in white, and then one with the circle in black and one with the circle in white. And you can go ahead and slap that on all sorts of merchandise, picking your colors of merchandise. and that merchandise includes mugs, shirts, stickers, mobile device covers, whatever. Basically, we get a small percentage cut of that and that will go towards us being able to host this podcast on our servers because we get those fees every now and then. It's not fun.
    69:11
    Yeah, it's true. And then we've also had people asking, which our friend Greg at Spacey's Arcade, Greg, thank you very much. Greg passed along a donation to us via PayPal, basically saying, Chris, I want you to finish your microcab so you get addicted and then go ahead and build a full virtual cab.
    69:33
    So basically, gateway drug for Greg. What is that? So no, we are not on Patreon. I don't... No. Because the thing is, with Patreon, we'd have to work out content you'd actually want to subscribe for. and we're flat out producing a podcast each week. So, you know, you can subscribe, but you get the same content as everyone else did.
    70:01
    If you do enjoy the show and you feel like contributing, go to our website, like I said, blockadepinball.com slash episodes. There is a ways to donate to the show tab. You can do that. Jared will need to update that because it has our old t-shirt website on there currently. at represent.com. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah, the thing. I'll do that. Yeah. I'll do it.
    70:25
    But go ahead, and that way, if, yeah, you want to show your support, there's various ways of doing that. And in the case of Greg, he specified when he donated that it needed to go straight to the micro-camp. So that will happen, Greg. Don't worry.
    70:39
    The money's already spent. It's already spent, yeah, pretty much, pretty much. I think that about, oh, and email. If you did want to email us, and again, if you have any experience trying to earn those tokens and gold bars in Stern Pinball Arcade VR, we want to hear about that. Email is blahblahblockade at gmail.com. All right. I think we've hit all the posts that we were supposed to hit. We'll be back again next week. Who knows what that show will be about, but it'll be about something, and it'll have to do with pinball. and we'll probably also mention something about something that isn't pinball because that's how we roll. That seems to be the general premise of the show at the moment. So, yeah, let's stick with that. All right, let's stick with that. All right, folks, we'll figure out how to get the YouTube comments so that we can comment on them live next time too. Maybe that'll be better now that we know that people are watching it that way.
    71:39
    Until then, have a good week. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. See you later. wizardamusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter rolls, easy to install, totally unique, mention blockade podcast for 10% off your order wizardamusement.com, sales, restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how, now stop listening and play some pinball
    72:13
    you