Welcome Welcome to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is episode 34, and my name's Martin, and with me each week is... USA. USA. USA. It's Ryan C. What? Really? I'm in the USA. I'm more about Americans right now. You are definitely in the USA. Whereabouts are you exactly? I'm in Las Vegas, but I can't tell you anything about it. Because what happens in Vegas, C's in Vegas, baby? I will tell you about it next week. But I kind of just arrived fresh off the plane. I'm feeling funky fresh, Marty. I'm feeling very well slept. I'm ready to do Vegas. Why are you laughing? I took your advice. I took all the tablets. If you were looking out your window right now, what would you see? Well, it looks like I'm in France because I can see the Eiffel Tower little thingy. I can see a pyramid. Right. Okay. The culture here is all over the place. Make up your mind. Which place do you want to copy? I can see hookers. I can see a crack dealer. I can see a cocaine dealer. There's a button next to my bed. I'm sitting right next to my bed right now. There's a call button that says, call, like, the front desk, call a hooker, and then call for cocaine. That's how easy it is. It's like a... There's three buttons, yeah. The Prozzy hotline. Actually, prostitutes are illegal. They're called escorts. Oh, for sure. That's how they get around it. Yeah, professional companions. Yes, professional companions that ask for a tip. You don't pay them, you ask... Anyway, that's enough about hookers. Is it... But now anyway, I'm sure next week we'll have even more stories. More stories, sure. So why are you in Vegas anyway? What's going on? It's not like you're going somewhere that you've never mentioned before. Yeah, a couple of days in Vegas and I'll be heading off to Texas Pinball Festival. I was talking before to Bruce and Jeff and my mate got married on Saturday. It was a great wedding. My mate got married and I almost booked the trip when he was going to get married and he just would have never forgiven me. And I was meant to do Canada and New York first, but it's all backwards now. So Vegas first, then Texas Pinball Festival, which I've got some news on, some late-breaking news, then New York, then Toronto. Awesome. I don't know why I'm going to Toronto because the entire place is frozen over. I was just like, yeah, I'm going to go to Toronto Island. No, you can't because the lake is frozen. and I'm going to go to that little theme park. No, it's not open until May. The entire city's on lockdown. I'd have to find stuff to do indoors and hang out with Jeff Tells for like one day. Well, I'm sure you'll find some other people that you can have fun with as well. Cool. If you're Canadian, hit me up and show me what it's all about. And you'll get a roost sack for your troubles. You've probably given them all out by then. Yeah. I'm very happy that I've passed through customs without having to answer the question of what are these things. Did you have to surrender any packets of Tim Tams? No, the Tim Tams made it through. And, yeah, I'll be... Whoever I give the Tim Tams to, you're not allowed to say, yes, I'm going home and giving these to my wife. You have to open them up and everyone has to... Put a message right away. Yeah, but someone messaged me during the week and they got Tim Tams from... You can buy them from Amazon. They're just super overpriced. No, I don't buy them. I bought them all the way for nothing. And that's hard to Chris Well it's like I mentioned before Caramel by Cadbury It was put on the market then taken off And then for a block of caramel chocolate Was $1,500 on eBay Really? Ridiculous what people will pay I don't think anyone actually bought it But I tasted it It was good But it wasn't $1,500 worth That's all I'm putting out there So what are we going to talk about this week? Okay, the biggest news of the week. Our friend Jeff Teolis, a.k.a. Jeff Shmielis. No, Shmess Meolis. Shmess Meolis. Yes, he had a quick little interview with, as they always are, with a bunch of people at an arcade expo. And one of them was Lime and Sheets. Go have a listen to it. Episode number 100 and something. You'll find it. I can't remember the episode number. He interviewed Lime and Sheets, and he said he's kind of not happy with ACDC still and he's going to revisit the code again. And his goal is to balance every single mode so that whatever mode it presents you with at the start, you play that and then, you know, when there's a new song, you go on to play that song. Because I guess that's the issue with ACDC, if you want to pick at the issues of it. You know, people choose one song that's the strongest and they just keep on playing it over and over again. They never move to the next song. That's right. Hell's Bells all day, depending on, you know, who you are playing. But for competition, I think people play Hell's Bells all day, but that's now changed with the new code that's just come out. Yeah, I'm not smart enough to know what to play now. So, yeah, I've always played, I think I mentioned before, I always play War Machine because I know that it's fairly strong and I like the song, but I've never tried to get it to encore and I know I'm probably not good enough for it, but maybe I should just kind of finish a mode. They should give you a mode finishing bonus. Like, if you play... I don't think there is. Correct me if I'm wrong. Please email into airtoairpinball.gmail.com. Jordan? I think you get, like, a million for choosing the same song and for completing the song. Sure. They should give you, like, five million for, like, not playing the same song over and over again. Well, what was interesting is that, you know, he was talking about code and the balance that he has to do and how difficult it is to balance home players and competition players and, you know, all that kind of stuff. and, you know, with, what are they, 12 songs? Is that right? Something like that. I can't remember. To me, it's just the war machine. The war machine. Well, that's right. So, well, here's the interesting thing. Like, where has there actually been a machine that's had so many modes where every mode is enjoyable as the other? You know, something where you start and, you know, you would want to have that all over the, you know, it didn't matter which one you chose, it's still enjoyable to play. and the point I'm making is that I reckon that's really ambitious for him to be able to fix the ACDC code so every single mode you play is what you would want to play and it doesn't matter. You can just pick one and that's fine. I still think people will find one and stick with it. Yeah. And you made an interesting comment, Keith, on the Slamsuit podcast as well about a good pinball machine only needs five good modes that have different strategies on how to attack it and I guess that's true. There's no point in having so many modes if they're kind of repeating over and over again, like with your other 12 modes where there's only really six unique types and they just repeat each other. And I think Lord of the Rings is a really good example of that, where each mode is kind of very different to the next. Like, you know, Destroy the Witch King, one of the pretty much the hardest modes. I think I've only ever completed one spike, and it's totally different than any other mode. Yeah, well, I was going to say probably more in recent times, a mode-based game being dialed in. Do you find that that's too many modes? Because that's obviously more than five. No, because they are pretty unique and they make you shoot all around the playfield. I think the only area of the playfield that no mode makes you shoot is the drone area. So that area, to me, is pretty much dead, even during the two-ball multiple. It's the only area of the tool machine that doesn't get used. I mean, the bob stand-ups are used, and that fire one, the side ramp, it really makes advantage of pretty much the entire thing on the machine. And that's what you want out of modes. You want a mode to make you, as I said, have different strategies on how to attack it and maybe a bit of risk-reward on when you want to cash something in or how long you want to keep it going for before the timer runs out. Okay, so then dare I bring up another machine that we've talked about and criticised? It's modes. The Hobbit, right? Because each of those modes, they are quite different in what you actually have to do. Some of them. Yeah. I remember reading a Pinside post where someone literally broke down every single mode and he grouped certain modes together. It's like these three modes, you think they're different, but they're not. You bash this and you bash that. But there are a couple. My favorite one is the Resurgence of Siren, I think it's called, where it's basically a switch hit frenzy, but you get to cash in five times. So there's a real risk-reward with that where how many times do you want to cash it in, depending on your time. I wish there was maybe less modes and more thought going into them like that one. I don't know. Yeah, it's just hard to put my finger on. Obviously, we've been on record saying that that's probably the area that's suffering the most, but for me it's hard to work out whether it's the actual, you know, structure of the mode or whether it's a limitation of the playthrough being so sparse and really sort of having, I guess, some limited shots? To me, the biggest frustrating thing is that there's no end. And if you tell me to do all these things and it's just to play three, I guess they're called major wizard modes, but there isn't one kind of penultimate one, the one that just brings it all together, then to me it's just going around in circles. and people say, well, it's for score and this and this and that. But if you give me a reason, like, you will get to Valinor. It's really freaking hard, but you have to finish at least 10 modes, complete all three major wisdom modes. Then I'm playing with purpose. But that was the thing with The Hobbit. I stopped playing with purpose and it became just this kind of multiball test. And I don't know. I don't think anyone out there has ever, you know, someone has, but playing that face frenzy, it just happens. If you play multiple enough, it just happens, and then during freeze-frame, you do absolutely nothing. You keep on playing your game, and it is just kind of this side thing. And I don't know. They will update it, and hopefully they bring it together, because I think it can survive by, you know, in my house. I will bring it back home, because it has a lot of things that I like in pinball, including a sweet, sweet soundtrack. Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say, it is one of the best pinball machines ever made, and people should get in contact with me to buy my one that's on, that I'm trying to sell. I'm serious. Before I left, I went to Animal Paradise again and I played it. And every time I play it, I just think, ah, you know, the Hobbit kind of isn't as good as I thought it was. And then I point it to Ball and I'm like, oh, no, I do actually like this game. I just said it's a thing. Yeah. We have to move on, Marty. We can't talk for 10 minutes about Jeff Teolis' new game. That's way too long. Okay. Well, can we just also just quickly, whilst we're talking about Jeff Teolis, Okay. Did you hear who we had on his latest? Well, what did we say, Marty? We said we'd make Jeff famous, and we did. Did we? We did, because he got Alice Cooper on the show, and it was all thanks to him being on Head to Head Pinball. Yeah, it was. So you're welcome, Jeff. But give it a listen. There's a little bit of talk about Pinball, about the machine coming up, but I still found it interesting just hearing him have a chat and how easy he was to talk to. The biggest surprise for me, that is, who is, like, I think almost 70? Yeah. He is 70, yeah. Oh, he's 70. Yeah, that's crazy. You look at some people and you're like, I guess he's in his late 40s or something. No, he's 70 years old. Nah, he's looked that way for the last 30 years. Makeup. Makeup is the one. He probably does. Or Botox, one of them. Yeah, either one. Okay. Big news today. Yeah, Jeff from... No, this wasn't today. It was a couple of days ago. Is it? Jeff from This Week in Pinball dropped a bit of a bombshell. It was. Yeah, so Expo... Well, he said Expo was cancelled, but then he retracted that because basically there's two people that control Expo, Mike and Rob, and one of them apparently isn't very nice, the other one's a bit better, and I've got them mixed around. Because everyone says that one of the guys is a bit of an arsehole, and I thought it was Rob, and then... Well, we're not saying who it is. Okay, you didn't beep it out. Apparently it's the other guy. Anyway, yeah, they've... split apart, and they kind of, I think, may possibly both own the name Pinball Expo. So Mike is going to be running something called Pinballpalooza. Mike is still running Pinball Expo, apparently. It's the other guy that's doing Pinballpalooza. Yeah, it's so easy to get confused. Rob is going to be doing Pinballpalooza maybe a month or so before Expo, and apparently Expo is still happening, which is just, let me just say it now, It's going to be an absolute shit fest. It's going to be a mess because you're going to be asking vendors and... To invest twice. Not only invest twice, but they can't. So it's just like, choose a side. No one's going to book a trip twice. People that live in Chicago, they're like, cool, I get two expos in a row. But everyone else that kind of books a flight over, people from overseas, vendors, like people that have to haul machines across the country, they're going to do it twice. So they have to make a judgment call. Do I go to the new one under new management, or do I go to the one that's been running for 33 years that everyone has said that's kind of turned to, you know, not very good anymore? No. Which one is it? So basically what Rob said in the interview with This Week in Pinball was, you know, they asked, you know, is it because of disagreements with Mike? And he just said, I believe it's a difference in opinions on several different ideas about how the show should be run. at the end of the day, it just needed a change, needed a new venue, and it needed some more exciting aspects to it. It was time for change, and I decided this was the time to do it. Yeah, and I don't know, I guess it's the other side of the story as well. I don't think Jeff knew when he published this story what was going to happen. There was a lot more to the story than he thought. I guess he got contacted by Rob and said, hey, I want you to publish this news, and he did, and then it opened up a can of worms because they dragged spooky pinball into it, and and then he's going to make a statement on his podcast, which is 20-something days away. Maybe he should just make a statement to the Speaking Pinball or something. But anyway, it's going to be a total... This happens in, I guess, September and October, so we're still a couple of months away from it. But, I mean, the Power 100 on the IFK website, that was meant to be happening, the Power 100, the first kind of tournament where only those players were invited. I guess... You'll probably end up being at Josh Rupp's basement again. Yeah. So, I don't know. This news had a lot of implications because 33 or 34 years is an incredibly long time for something to be running and then for things to change. It's going to have a lot of after effects, I think. Well, look, I haven't heard necessarily the same stories about you with the personalities running it, but certainly what I've heard that's been overwhelming overwhelming over the past three to four years is that it just hasn't sort of had lasting appeal over that time. It sort of just started to sort of just die away and less vendors are going and less people are going and they're going to Texas Pinball Festival instead. Yeah, Steve Badenpost something said, as a joke, said, you know, people said that Texas was the new expo, but then this is meant to be a new expo. But then the other expo is still happening, so, like, which one is the real expo now? There's three different ones. If it was a real expo, please stand up. Exactly. Eminem. All right. So, moving on to the next bit of news, which is just a small little update of the Star Wars code, and it's just mainly bug fixes, but that's available now. Hashtag, where's the code? There it is. So, shall we do our Texas Pinball Festival predictions for all the companies involved? Yes, my first prediction is that people are going to talk to you about your triceps. Not about me. Oh, sorry. I thought, oh, okay. That's a prediction. And for those people listening, talk to them about their triceps. I'm wearing a long-sleeve shirt. Another prediction, Jeff Teolis will talk to you about speech impediment or maybe your hair. He's not going to be there. He's not going to be there. Oh, what? He's not a big enough competition team. Right. Okay. Hey, I got an email from Colin MacAlpine. He said that I'm moving up the list. Wait, did I say that last episode? No, probably not. Okay, I can't remember. I might be playing in the tournament. Oh, okay, cool. That takes a bit for a start. Okay, so let's talk real predictions. And this is obviously from the manufacturers. Yeah, I've got a list here. So I'll go down the list and you tell me what you think, Marty. Okay. American Pinball. They're going to have Houdini there. Yes, they are going to have Houdini there and that's it. And are people going to love it? Are they going to hate it? What are they going to think? Oh, I think people will come back saying the shots are tight. The strikes? The strikes are? That's Oktoberfest. That's Oktoberfest. They're going to say the shots are tight and they're going to say it's floaty. Floaty? Well, that's what everyone's been saying so far. Okay. I haven't been reading that much. This thing was announced a year ago and I still haven't played it, so there's absolutely zero in Australia. Well, so go to what we know is definitely going to be revealed, right? So the big prediction is that Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle will be there. Yeah, don't worry. I'm going to go beyond that. But the reason why I want to say that it is going to be there is my prediction is going to be that that is what the benchmark of this show will be and everything will be compared against it. But is there anything else to compare it to because there's nothing really that you... Well, no, no, no. That's what I'm saying. When you say Houdini's going to be there, I think people are going to compare Houdini to that machine. And if something else happens to be there or not, it'll be compared to that. That's what I reckon. So that's going to be the benchmark. So a silly prediction, but do you think people will be more impressed with Alice Cooper than Houdini? Yes. Okay. I have nothing to base that on. Just gut feeling. Well, I mean, look, I don't know. I think that the problem with Houdini, and I know other people have talked about this before, the problem with Houdini is that people are going to be seeing it for the first time when they go to Texas Pimple Festival, like in the flesh, but we've already seen so much of it, so much video footage, so many pictures. There's going to be some wow factor like, oh, there it is, and yes, it's bright, and the toys look great, and the lights look fantastic, but it's coming from a base where we already have an expectation of what it's going to look like. Alice Cooper, no, McCaskell, nobody knows anything about it. Well, we've seen the art. We've seen snippets of it, but, you know, as Charlie said to us, you know, he's thrown everything at it. So if he's thrown everything at it, then he's going for broke with this one. Yeah. Highway Pimble, they said they're not releasing, they've said they're not releasing Highway Pinball number 3 because they're concentrating on aliens. So I don't think they're going to have a presence there but Cointaker is the American distributor and I'm guessing they'll have a couple there. I'm guessing people will like it but they can't buy it. If Highway was to surprise us with a machine what would it be? Queen. Yeah. Queen. I don't know what I mentioned. Bye-bye. Did I mention that I saw Queen and Adam Lambert a week ago? Amazing. Is Queen really Queen without Freddie Mercury? Yes, it is, in that it's Queen with Adam Lambert. It is different, but he is every bit the showman, and he can hold his day. Why don't you tell me? I just saw that up on Facebook. I'm like, fuck you, buddy. You know I love Queen. I know you like Queen, but keep going. Okay. so yes who else is going to be there that we can rub okay Stern what's Stern going to be doing Marty well I don't think Stern are going to be showing anything at the show that's my prediction what do you think yeah I I don't think they would kind of play down well I don't think they made an official statement but um have they made an official statement I don't even know I haven't been kind of keeping up with the similar news I don't think they have but it's It's not like they can have a statement about something that they never stated. That's true. Well, I guess I can say we're not going to bring any new machines. Maybe I had a dream about it, but I thought someone made a statement. But anyway, there's going to be Guardians and Star Wars. Sorry, Guardians and Batman New Code is going to be there and demoed and, I guess, crash tested at TPF for the first time. Will Supreme be there? No. No. It'd be cool if I played it. Will there be a coke vending machine and that's just as good? I guess I'll have all the machines I have on offer at the moment. So I'll have Guardians, Star Wars and Batman and people will play them and they'll be like, cool, you know, but I've played these at every single arcade and pinball, you know, location around town. So we sort of had this tip off. And again, I say this all the time, that we hear lots of things. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. But if they weren't going to be there, why do you think they wouldn't release the space at Iron Maiden at Texas Pimple Festival? Either it's not ready license-wise, because apparently it is ready in mechanical form. It's done. A pro has been made. Not a white wood. It's kind of sitting there. But maybe it's not ready. maybe there's some bugs or the licensing issue they just have one last little thing. I mean, they can't... It's been a year since Star Wars has been announced, around a year, and they still don't have a topper for it. That just, I guess, proves how hard licensing is. If that was a licensing issue, I doubt it was a mechanical issue to make the little R2-D2 topper. So if they can't do that in a year, then I'm sure there might be some little hold-up with Iron Maiden. But also... Yeah. They probably don't want to have the same experience as they did with Batman, where the code wasn't ready. I mean, it was so close, but it wasn't ready. It was so close. It was so close. It was 18 months away. You know what I mean? Like, for it to actually be flippable and not have, you know, code breakdown or whatever. So, you know, they just had it roped and people could watch it but couldn't actually play it. they probably just, if this code just isn't quite ready for it to be in a form that won't break down, they probably don't want to have them there for people to see and make that same mistake, because they got a lot of flack for that. Yeah, and it's crazy because, you know, when TPF was coming up and I was deciding when I was going to go or not, I mean, I was going to go anyway, regardless of what was getting revealed, but, you know, Highway dropped out and said, you know, no, game number three. Cross that off the list. Stern, it looks like they're not bringing, I mean, cross that off the list. And then this week, Chicago Gaming Company said, yep, we're not bringing our number three pinball machine as well, which is rumoured to be Monster Bash, because like a fine wine, we'd have to fine tune it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, fuck me, there's three pinball machines. What the hell are you going over there for now? Yeah, I really want to play Monster Bash. I've never played it before. That was the one that I was just like, wait, why am I even upset? I've played Monster Bash. Like, who gives a shit about the bigger screen? Like, it's not like a new experience or anything. Well, it is. We've talked about that. Attack from Mars doesn't feel like the original Attack from Mars. Looking at the animations, yes, it looks great, but it's not worth flying over. No, I know, but you were going over there with the promise, and I'm talking to you, manufacturers, the promise that you gave personally to Ryan that he would be seeing your machines, and now you're all just dropping like flies, cancelling. What's that about? so CGC let's move on to them so they're not showing Monster Bash or whatever number 3 is going to be and I guess they'll bring Attack from Mars and Mabel Madness and people will play it and realise yep these are cool games they're in the pin side number 1 except the flippers are a bit funny but keep going flippers are a bit funny delay people can't find their shots Jesse Jack sorry just on Stern sorry just one last thing I wanted to say the last thing it could be why they're not bringing Iron Maiden is that they don't feel the need to... This is just me guessing. They don't feel the need to form their release schedule based on major shows. They want to release it when the time is right and they want... You know, they have their means through Jack Danger and all their... You know, the way that they... They give themselves fucking boatloads. It doesn't really matter. Yeah. Especially Iron Maiden. People, you know, have a flow on effect. People go to shows. and they change the opinion of others. Like, if Daldin was released online, there would have been no one to jump on board and say, hey, hey, hey, I know you guys are saying this is, like, the worst freaking pinball machine ever. This actually shoots really well, and then the conversation changes. When it's released something online, then you try and control the narrative of what people are saying, but if you get it wrong, then there's no one else to tell you that's not, you know what I mean? Like, oh, this is actually shit. Like, Star Wars kind of suffered a bit from that when they showed it on the stream. everyone's like, oh my god, this is just multipliers. And then as they turned it to stream, they made sure that no one moved the multipliers around. So that was, yeah. I hear what you're saying. You're not getting the visceral experience as the launch. You're just getting it on video, and that really doesn't translate all that well sometimes. Exactly. And people will be asking me for advice on what to buy next, because, oh, hey, Ryan, you've played American Pinball. Is it good, is it not? You know, if they ask me that on Iron Maiden, then I can't give them an opinion. Anyway. So, that was Spooky. So, Spooky are going to have four total nuclear annihilations, which would be the largest amount they've... I mean, that's a lot, and that's more than JTP bringing pirates, and I think they're going to sell a shitload of them based on that. People still haven't played them. Within a couple of weeks of Texas, they'll hit 400 units, because the people they're ordering now are not ordering because, oh, I just heard about this game now. they know about the game they just wanted to wait to play it they play it and they're blown away this really didn't get to Expo properly they kind of just brought it in kind of like last minute on one of like the last night or something so this is four machines that'll be running the entire time I can't wait to hear it booming over because it is louder oh yeah it'll clap over anything like if someone is next to them and they want to crank up the speakers to compete they can't it's got winds there you go it's a better sound system it does so here's another prediction when you walk in the main hall you will hear TNA from wherever you are it doesn't matter which entrance you go in you're going to be able to hear that TNA is going off at the same time chug it, chug it, chug it, chug it, chug it, chug it, beep yep anyway they will also be showing Alice Cooper on Saturday afternoon Saturday night I think that they're going to change that because they're going to realise holy shit we have like no competition there's no point in building up this kind of extra day of hype let's let people play this machine because no one's going to get a people are going to be left with a bit of a sour taste in their mouth if they wait an hour to play this game. Apparently they're only going to be two there. They wait for an hour, you know, they have a short two minute game and then that's it, you know. So the more machines that are there and the longer that they're there, the more people are going to enjoy the game I think and really get to feel what it's like. So I think it I think that Charlie is not dumb enough to not dumb enough He not stupid He not going to be hyping up his machine for the last year and a bit simply to hype it up He's hyping it up because he actually believes that... I think he knows. He knows that they've gone the extra mile. And I think, you know, you think about Castle, all right, this is going to be like medieval madness, but a spookier version. And I think... Do you think it'll have an upper or lower playfield, Manny? I do not know. I wouldn't know. I've got no indicators at all what the play field is going to be. I have no idea whether it's going to be this massive castle that looks amazing or whether it's just going to be some little cardboard cutout in the corner. Or band members that just move left and right. Left and right. You know what the first topic on Aussie Arcade was when I got my ACC? What's that? how do you disable that sound? Because when I'm playing multiball, all I can hear is tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Everyone's like, oh, you get used to it. And I did. But when I first played it, I was like, wow, that is really freaking annoying. I reckon it'll have a lower play field. This is just a guess based off nothing, by the way. Lower play field meaning under the main play field? Under the play field. Kind of like ACDC, but not shit. Yep. And it'll also have an upper play field, but not an interactive one. Like, the ball will shoot up, like, maybe from the basement all the way to the top, and then it'll come down something. So I think it'll be a three-leveled castle. Okay. Don't disappoint me, Charlie. If that's not it, please make an alteration. If you fix it now, you've got a week, not even a week, make it happen. Who else is going to be there? Deeproot. I will meet Robert Mueller there and I'll apologise for all the jokes on his behalf and he will whisper into my ear the secret of the five days of Deep Root and I will be very sore afterwards. Possibly before. Did I tell you that I've got a Deep Root t-shirt? No. I've got three custom t-shirts that I'm going to be wearing at TPF. One's related to Spooky. You can have a guess what that's about. one's related to Stern and one is related to Deep Root so if you're wondering who I am I'll be that guy the guy wearing one of those t-shirts I know, I've only seen one of your t-shirts and it is hilarious don't hype it up, don't do it Charlie no, it's pretty crap actually nah, it's terrible okay so Deep Root, yeah, I guess the members will be there and people will be trying to get information from them but they're there apparently as pinball fans and not as a company representing themselves. Circus Maximus will be there. Yeah. They'll have one kingpin, and people will line up for two hours to play it and say, and then they'll take five years to bring it out. They don't have a manufacturing facility. It's just weird. It's just like, they'll have a PowerPoint presentation and they'll talk about their plans, but at this point in time, I don't believe anyone's plans until it's actually happening. We plan to find a contract manufacturer to make our game. Well, here's something I'm going to say as well. You can always judge how financial and sure you are that an organisation is going to deliver based on the quality of their PowerPoint presentation. So if they've just used really boring fonts and the images don't line up and it looks really basic, then you know there's a problem. Just putting it out there. Okay, and I guess these are kind of the newest guys to possibly enter the scene and maybe ask for money. Just in case they do ask for money, don't give anyone money. This is pinball rule number one because Deep Roots is not asking for money. All the other people are kind of well established. Don't fund any business. Give them your money. No. Yeah. No more pinball drama, please. No, they're good for it. No. Give it to them. And say, Ryan told me to give you my money because you are definitely going to release a pinball machine. Yeah. Who knows? I mean, yeah. We're not bagging the company and they're not going to be able to take that stuff. But you cannot. In this climate and at this time in 2018, in March, you cannot ask for money up front, even if it's 500 bucks to secure a spot because you're basically just picking away your money. Yeah, well, hmm. A message to the player, only pay by credit cards within, you know, shipping within a six-month period. If they don't deliver within six months, you do a credit card chargeback and your money is safe. That's all. P3, they're going to have at least ten machines there, if I read right. Okay. Which is just an insane amount of machines. There'll be a point where no one will be playing any of those machines. I'll try and get a picture of that. No, that's a horrible thing to say. Ten machines, that's a lot. and they're going to have, I guess, all of their games set up, including Cosmic Tart Racing. Is that what it's called? I think it is, yeah. So this is the next, I guess, big release for that platform. They've obviously got the minigame and the other add-on with the LCD on it that you played, the shooting piratey one or whatever it is. Cannon Lagoon. Cannon Lagoon, that's right. And so this is the first really fully-fledged alternative to Lexi Lightspeed. Yeah. I wonder if there's a farting mode in the slump. That was the best part of the lesson. It really was. Should I try and interview people when I'm there? Just like a quick, like, Jeff Teola style? Well, sure. Hey, how did you enter pinball? Hey, how did you enter pinball? It's the best person to ask. Why not? He's not going to be there. Somebody else has to go for it. I'm not very good on my feet with questions. You send me some questions, Marnie. I will do that. And so were there any other manufacturers that are going to be there? I don't think ZB Lebowski was going to be there. Hey, letter folding. This week in letter folding. You know, you talk about the letter folding machines and you're bagging them, right? I do not. For some reason, I was thinking of like these crazy industrial, like, letter... I know it's all in the name, letter folding. I was thinking of letter processing machines. like the ones that Australia Post has that sort out mail and automatically stamp them and divert them into different areas. For some reason, I was thinking of that and that's when I was just like, hey, letter folding. And then I Googled it and they're like $300 machines, $100 machines you can get from Officeworks. And they just, they're not even letter folding, they're paper folding, so you can put them into letters. I don't know what I was thinking, but I actually watched a couple of videos on YouTube and I was like, huh, I guess that kind of isn't that complicated. Sorry, let's link that in the show notes. You win. You win. I do. Anyone else going to be there? I don't think so. Possibly less. Ah, the Dennis Loman's Pigeon Bat, which is not really a tomorrow machine, will be there. Yeah. I'll probably have more fun playing that than anything else, and I'll be like, hey, I want one. Nah. So the reason I'm asking is that just some of the highlights of the Texas Pinball Festival Open, because there's going to be obviously some launches, but there are going to be other people doing seminars there, including good friend of the show, Jonathan Houston, of People Magazine, and not quite so friend of the show, Christopher Fanchi. He's not a friend of the show, he loves us. He does love us, but, you know, we love his hexagons. He's going to have a presentation, and I actually got a sneak peek of this presentation, and there is a lot of good stuff in there about kind of unreleased Guardians art, and he may be dropping some hints on his next game. So very exciting to have a UBA packed house. It should be. So on the first night, Jersey Jack and Captain Jack and the Jersey Jack crew take you on a pinball voyage. I wonder what that's about. You know what? When I went to Expo, I went to a lot of talks. But this time, I think, I mean, the talk's going to be online. So unless they're revealing something, a lot of the show talks are kind of the same. And because we're in the podcast world and we're always kind of like consuming content, I don't want to sit in a room and kind of listen to a talk about something that I've heard the talk about. Like, I just watched a straight down the middle, like, three-hour thing on Pirates. Like, I know everything I need to know. Okay, so at 9 o'clock, I think, on the first night, maybe, you've got Steve Ritchie. Steve Ritchie holds court. Surely, you would want to be in there just so you could ask a really stupid question that you know he's not going to answer, but makes the room laugh and go, oh, that Ryan from head to head, he's hilarious. Hilarious. You idiot. This is the person. Marty just did that whole bit. This is the person I'm joking to. Okay. No, not high on the list. As I said, these are all going to be online. You can pretty much tell me what he said on our next podcast. Okay. Well, so again, Circus Maximus, they're doing this. Barry Osler is doing a Q&A. Yeah, he's working at Deep Root. He's under an NDA. And I don't think he's going to be talking about Highways game either. So, I don't know. Unless these people steal the beans, then... Time is precious, man. Yeah, no, I know. But I guess, like, if I was going, this is the stuff that would be interesting to me. There's also a tutorial on TNA with a good, great friend of the show, Bowen Kerins, who we will be having the second half of his interview later on in this episode. We kind of forgot to announce that at the beginning of the show. So that'll be good. You'll be able to go say hi to him. Then, obviously, Spooky's doing the Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle reveal. So that's day two at 4 p.m. That is going to be chockers. Yeah, absolutely. You know, based on what we now know, it's the big reveal of the show. So everyone will be there. Is that Aussie slang, chockers? Chockers? Probably. I don't know. We need to look it up. But hey, don't give it away, because we might have to do the mega Aussie slang test, or basic Australian terms explained. Okay, someone on Pinside wrote this little note here. Someone kind of was a bit concerned that after Alice Cooper is revealed, they're going to have so many orders for it that it's going to get delayed because of total nuclear annihilation. And this is the best thing about Charlie and Spooky. People ask these questions, and then people are like, oh my gosh, like, yes, like fear, uncertainty, doubt. and then Charlie just stopped the forum within like 10 minutes like, no, this is what's going to happen and you can kind of trust that he's telling the truth. So, I mean, the same thing happened with the Expo stuff. He got kind of dragged into it and he came up on the forum and made a statement. Same thing with this. He said that we're averaging 8 to 10 games per week and we're hiring to increase that, but our vendors kind of can't keep up. So, we just kind of, you know, got a bit of growing pains with that that we're going to sort out And they've built 120 TNAs, and it is possible that before Alice Cooper hits production in late May, early June, that we're going to build as many as possible, and then I guess they do a dual run. I'm not sure. But, yeah, they're saying they'll be fine. They're going through some growing pains, and they've got a lot of orders, but they're going to work it out, and it's not going to interfere with Alice Cooper. So I guess that's when Alice Cooper's coming out. you know, for the shipping May to early June. Okay. Well, that's good. I like that. And that's what I was saying about the whole Houdini thing. It's been around for a while now. We've seen it. At least with this, we're seeing it now a couple of months later. There it is. Yep. Yep. Love it. Shall we head to Bowen? Let's go to round two of Bowen Kieran's interview. Before we do it, have a guess of what pinball machine Bowen Kieran's has finished 23 times. It really is a great second half of the interview, and this is where we really start talking about tournaments, and I ask him about, you know, if somebody was wanting to start a tournament or a comp or a league, what would they do? And then we talk about rules. The best, the rules. We're going to talk about complexity of rules and how far is too far and what kind of rules that he likes. Although it's really funny because before we did the interview, I said to Ryan, you know, we'll talk to him about tournaments, and Ryan went, boring. and I said, oh, we'll talk about rules and you're like, yep, I'm back in the room. This is the whole head-to-head thing. I'm really interested in tournaments. You couldn't give a crap but he's also really good at understanding rules. Cool. Here he is. Compare to you. I'm mostly bad at bomb and Kirinzer. Don't hype me up too much. All right, here he is. Let's talk about tournaments then. All right. So, for me, wanting to have you on this podcast for a while, I mean, you and I, we've been speaking for some time. The first question that I've always had in my mind that I wanted to ask you was, what do you think makes a great tournament? And I mean that from a place of, you know, we're trying to get more and more tournaments and competitions up in Australia and some have come, some have gone. And it's kind of, what do you think are the recipe for making a great comp or tournament? All right. So what I think is the real recipe, and it's different from what I think a lot of people choose to do when they're building events, is I want the experience to be awesome for the worst player in the tournament. Okay. I don't really care whether the best player in the tournament has an awesome experience, because they're already the best player. They're going to have an awesome experience. They will come and play pinball tournaments for the rest of their life. But if I want to grow tournaments and make them more popular, I have to make a better experience for the people at the bottom of the barrel who are brand new, who have never played a tournament before, who are just out for a good time. And the way you do this, in my opinion, is you give people some guaranteed play experience, and you give them a play experience that has them actually encounter other people instead of just playing by themselves. So match play, I guess. Yeah, match play, especially four-player match play. Two-player match play is tough because if you have one person play against someone who's very experienced, they can feel dominated by them, they can feel intimidated, it can be a negative experience to play against one person. But if you're playing against three other people at once, that rarely ever happens, and you usually find a connection with at least someone in your group. so four player group play has been at the core of a lot of the events I've tried to help build and certainly Pinberg is the most visible one and it's all part of the goal of making it a better experience for the people who are going to want to come back for a second time or to tell their friends that they had a good time and that they should come too our league in New Robert Englunds has grown from 30 players to over 200 players in five years now. And it grows by having a great experience for the players who are often neglected by some of these formats and events. Yeah, so it's one thing I've always said about tournaments is when somebody rocks up to one of these for the very first time, they should be absolutely greeted by the tournament director and made to feel that this is a normal thing because it can be quite intimidating going to these things for the first time. They need to be made felt, I guess, as important as those people that have been doing them for years. Oh, no question, because you're going to get those 20 people no matter what you do. You say, hey, we're hosting pinball, and the surprise is that those 20 people are going to show up. And the more people you get, the better your event's going to be, and the reaction that those players have really drives the popularity or the long-term viability of the event, I think. So you're absolutely right. Most people need to know very comfortably and quickly what the rules are, what their expectations are, what they can and can't do, how it's different from regular casual play, and ideally done in a way that's not intimidating or very high stakes, I guess. So one of the challenges that we've got really is that location pinball, there are some locations that have got, let's say, more than six or even ten machines. But most of the venues will only have two to three machines. What you see would be, I guess, kind of a minimum requirement of number of machines to make a good tournament, particularly, you know, match play. because if you're doing match play, four players in each group, and you've got 30 people there and there's only two or three machines, that's going to go for a very long time. Yeah, it does create a limitation for you. What I recommend if that limitation happens is to have more of a rolling tournament than a tournament that has a specific start and end time. Like some of the events we ran, I used to run an event for charity for Papa called Cupid's and Canines. And the concept was the people were going to be at this charity thing just running around doing lots of things. And maybe they'll spend some of their time playing pinball, but not the whole time. And it was an area where you could come over, and as soon as four people were over in that area ready to go, they formed a group. And they played a four-player group together competitively. If you won your group, you got to qualify for another round of the same stuff, which would happen later, almost like a finals. But you could do multiple layers. But the benefit was that you could just come in, do an hour, and then back away. I see that in a few tournaments now, notably the one in the Pacific Northwest and the Tacoma show, where people sign up for shifts, basically, and then your tournament time is on those shifts. And the rest of the time you're free. You're going to be able to hang out and play the games in the convention. Sometimes at tournaments you end up not even seeing anybody else or doing anything but playing the tournament games, and it kind of sucks. So for a location that has only one or two machines trying to run an event, you almost would say, all right, here are some sign-ups and here are some times. and, okay, you've signed up for 3 o'clock. Come back at 3 and you can play your group rather than knowing that you're just going to be waiting around indefinitely all day. Yeah. And I know when people ask the question, what's your favorite tournament, pretty much everyone responds with Pingberg. And I know you're involved with the running of Pingberg. And before you kind of directly said that, everything that you do, you do it for your own self. So you don't get to play in Pindberg, which is everyone's favorite tournament. So do you want to talk a bit about, you know, do you wish there was someone else that could help run Pindberg so you didn't have to do that? No, it's all in my personal self-interest. There's a joy in being able to build this and being able to see just how excited people are for it and how popular it's getting, and how it's, how it's saving people that want to come back, or to run similar events in their own cities. Building that thing is a joy, and someone's got to do it. So I don't think handing it off to somebody else would be the right decision either. This is going to be the eighth year for the Modern Pinberg, and for all eight years I've been involved in building the event, building the rules, building the format, acting as one of the assistants to the tournament directors and running around like crazy for however many days it is, logging 20-plus miles of walking. It's pretty great. Well, so I'm going for my first time in, obviously, this year. I've got my ticket. Thank you. Even though it sold out in 45 seconds. So talk me through, what am I going to expect? What is each of those days going to look like? and I know this is going to probably bore Ryan because he's not so much into tournaments, but I'm really excited to know what it is. What am I doing for three or four days while I'm there? Well, it's not too complicated. What you'll be doing is that every couple hours we'll put you on a bank of games. There'll be four games in your bank, and you play them back-to-back against a group of three opponents, so a group of four on four machines. And you play all four games back-to-back, and you get wins and losses for everyone you beat. So at the end of your round, you might be, if you go perfect, you're 12-0. If you were average, you'd be 6-6. And it can be anywhere from 0-12 up to 12-0. At the end of the round, you get ranked against everyone else in the whole tournament. And then we receive you and put you in a new group with new players on new machines. We make sure that you never play the same bank of games twice in the tournament. so you'll keep moving from bank to bank as you go. But you might end up drawing the same opponent every so often if they happen to be exactly in the right place. It's hard to believe that happens when there are 840 players, but it does. Especially if you're at the very top, you end up seeing some of the same names because they're all fighting up at the top as well with you. So what that means is that the better that I'm playing, I'll then get grouped with better players. That's correct, yes. And that evolves over the day. So the better you're playing, the better your opponents will be. And in the end, at the end of the first day, after five rounds, you get put into one of the divisions, A, B, C, D, or E. And on the second day, you'll play only against divisional opponents instead of everyone. And when you're playing in divisional opponents, you're fighting among them to try and be in the top 40 at the end of the second day after 10 rounds. And then the third day, if you qualify, the third day is for cash prizes in the finals. For that division? For that division. So, yes, there'll be cash prizes in all of A, B, C, and D divisions, and then E just has swag prizes and trophies, but still has sort of the same glory of winning. Has the format changed over the years or is that pretty much the basics of it with some tweaks along the way? The only way that the format has changed is that the very first year we ran it we only ran three games per bank instead of four because we didn't know how long it would take and then we found out oh, we can actually do this within the time frame we think we can so we started doing four games per bank and we've been doing that ever since but the folks in Pittsburgh they do this amazing work of running weekly events throughout the year to prepare the games to make sure they're in bulletproof shape and also to time them to know how long it takes them to play so when we put four games together and say this is your group of four games we know about how long it's going to take you to play all four games together and so a really long game like you had to play Lord of the Rings or Godzilla, you're going to play 4 million BC next or something that's not going to take more than a minute and a half as compensation so that the whole bank plays about the same amount of time as any other bank. What is that time, like for a bank of four? We have a schedule. Our schedule commits for two hours and 15 minutes. So 16 games, all that? four players and four machines. Four players and four machines for 135 minutes. Okay. And is that pretty solid? Like, does it ever go over? Or is it usually you find that everything's done and everyone has at least 15 minutes break in between each round? Last year we went over twice, by five minutes each time, once for a very long game of Game of Thrones and once for a, I want to say torpedo alley, but I can't remember what it was. Often, if it does go over, it's because a group had a malfunction and had to be put on a fifth game because the game broke down. So if people just play their four games and they don't have any malfunctions, they usually get through no problem within the time. And for me, that's more important than anything else because that ties to the experience of the average player. If you have to have everybody sit around and wait for an extra hour while something is going on, that's terrible for everybody. We even have rules where we can just declare someone a winner. Like, okay, you've got $3 billion on Indiana Jones. You're going to win. You're a winner. Stop playing. Even if they're player one? Even if they're player one, yes. We can say, look, if anyone else catches up to you, they'll be the winner also. but they're not going to, you're the winner have you done that before? no, we haven't had to use that rule but those are the things you have to think about if you want the train to run on time and that's really important you have to have a commitment to that you have to lay out your schedule so that there are places where there's lag time so every day has 5 rounds there goes 3 rounds and then a dinner break and then 2 rounds so if something goes wrong in the first three rounds, all they really end up doing is eating a small amount of the dinner break. But we've never had that happen either. Logistically, it's all really carefully put together, and those are the details I'm very proud of. I was kind of imagining you sitting there and playing these hundreds of games to test them, but it's good to know that they're kind of being tested throughout the year. I still do that. I still have to do that. Every single one? Yeah. Wow. So, I mean, I know there are some games, and it's talked about a lot on different podcasts and forums, that, you know, as you said before, that, you know, Theatre of Magic, as an example, that, you know, it's not generally in tournaments. Long-playing games. So you mentioned before Game of Thrones. It's a pretty notorious long-playing game. So do you then take that out the next year, or do you just kind of heavily change the game and bastardize it so it doesn't play long? yeah that's exactly right we can't take the games out because we need them all we need 320 games to run this tournament yeah it's ridiculous but we need more in fact that's the reason people are saying this tournament is too hard to get into which is also ridiculous that this tournament is too hard to get into with 840 players um yeah what we need is more machines we need another 100 machines if we had that we would be all set sort of we'd just have to find tournament directors and space all of the other problems but that's the real problem that's why we can't have a thousand players this year but a game like Theater of Magic you can't just throw it out you have to accommodate so you put like a big yellow post over there to make it harder to shoot the left loop or you make it so that when it comes back down the right orbit, after entering the bumpers, it will hit the slingshot every time. There are definitely subtle ways to make the game much more difficult than it would be otherwise that don't affect the main gameplay. And this is where Doug and Mark and all the folks who are involved in setting up this tournament, they excel at making these little changes and making these suggestions so when you get there you going to find all the games play very fair but they also play very difficult because they have to If it took too long for you to play we just would not be able to run the event So, okay, besides turning off extra balls, are there any modern games, I'll say since 2000, that you guys don't need to pretty much do any modifications? so you think that out of the box it's hard enough. What era did you say? 2000 onwards. Well, certainly a fair number of games, honestly, I would say that with. I would certainly say for Iron Man, for Metallica, for... I'm trying to think what others come to mind. But what ends up happening most of the time is that those games are pretty much playable as is. Like the ACDC we play, there aren't really any significant modifications to it. But we also know that it may take a high-powered group an hour to play that game, and then the other three games they're going to play are going to be quick and dirty. You're going to have a mystic in there. You're going to have a target pool. You're going to have games that are pretty dirty, but they'll play. They won't play very long. You'll have a Joker or you'll have an Andromeda or something. Every game is timed, and we can tell. This is about how long it's going to take. We don't collect the data during the tournament itself because we just aren't able to track people well enough to have that data. Someday we will, and that will be even better. Just on Metallica, you said it kind of plays fine out of the box, or enough for you to level it out with other games. The last kind of two tournaments that I've watched, it was Indies and also the one that was yesterday, the Nationals, kind of sort of modified a rule set where crank it up, you only require five hits for the four things, to get in and Sparky and every other multiball was kind of increased to encourage, I guess, you to play the game in a different way. Is that something that you guys, you know, is that an interesting thing right now in tournaments or is it just a coincidence that the last two tournaments I've watched had the same rules? On Metallica, it's definitely something that's been popularised lately and I kind of like it. the thing that benefits from in a tournament perspective is that crank it up is all one ball play and it drives players away from the usual mantra of find a multiball, play a multiball find a multiball, play a multiball which tends to be a very safe way to play playing for easy crank it ups is the opposite, it's like get in the crank it up go crazy and see how great you can get, I guess. It also means that people drain faster. So if I'm designing a tournament and I'm trying to make sure people don't last as long as they will otherwise, that's exactly what I want. I want people to play one-ball play and do crazy difficult things, and that will cause them to drain. So I don't know what we're doing with Metallica for Pinburgh. Our tendency is to keep the games on relatively factory settings so that someone walking up to a beach, there's no practice, but someone walking up to the game won't be shocked by a variation on the rules that they get. Okay, so thinking about you now personally and all the tournaments that you've done, is there a particular player or players that you kind of dread going up against, or it does not matter and it's just you in the game? That's a good question. My answer is that there isn't a player that I dread playing against because as soon as you fill yourself with the dread over playing somebody, you may as well just have talked up a loss already. You don't ever play your opponent. You play their score. So most of the time, I'm able to just ignore that. And when I'm watching my opponents play, I'm watching for the feeds. I'm watching for the behavior of the machine. I'm watching for their decision-making. I'm watching for their shot-making. And specifically, I'm watching to see when they miss shots, how are they missing. Like, oh, this person's trying to take a shot at this shot on medieval, and they missed to the right. They took a second shot, and they missed to the right again. Well, that means that I'm going to take my first shot and miss to the right. And by the time I step up to the machine, I'm going to pretend like I had already missed to the right two or three times and just start by assuming it's already further left than I think it is. That makes my shot making more accurate out the door when it's my turn. That's probably the biggest advantage of being able to watch other people play on camera now is you get a lot more of that information. And also, by watching the camera, I don't actually watch the score. I just watch their actions. And when I feel like I have enough information, I stop watching because everything else is dread. Like, oh, there's a jackpot. Oh, there's another jackpot. There's, oh, jeez. Every so often you get into a moment where your opponent does something so remarkable that you just can't help but be awed by it, and then hopefully that doesn't contribute to you dreading playing against them. So if anything, like playing Keith Elwin, I can remember two instances where I played him on Congo in a tournament final, and he put $4 billion on the Congo on ball one. As player one. He got 200 diamonds and went through the Super multiball twice on his first ball. And I'm like, okay, let's do it. And I did not catch him, but I did get halfway there. I got over 100 diamonds. I got $2 billion, but I didn't catch up to him. But I feel like I played well. and the same thing happened another year we played a US championship game on fishtails and he put over a billion on the fishtails on ball one, player one then I started going, I had the ball bounce off the lock drop target down the middle so I had pretty much a zero ball then he got up and he spent the one billion up to five billion I'm going up the wall too and I'm like okay I'm behind by 5 billion on fishtails but do you look at it and think well I know what's done I can do it as well my reaction my brain at that moment was this is going to be the greatest comeback of all time and it was not But I got over a billion. I got a billion four or something like that. And it stinks to get one of the best three wall scores I've ever had on Fishtails and go like, well, you still only lost by three and a half billion. Nice job. But that same match, we played a best of seven, and I lost with over a billion on Fishtails. I lost with seven million on Banzai Run. and I lost with $45 million on Medieval Madness. And when those happened, he's like, okay. I played well. And sometimes you play well and lose. And on the flip side, sometimes you play badly and win. And I think that players often get tied into whether they won or lost far more than they get tied into how their play was. so whenever I'm done playing a game in competition I ask myself what's going well and what can I do better and it should always be an answer to both of those nobody plays perfectly and also you've got to find something that you're doing well because you're going to go up again and play some more you've got to have a good attitude towards your next turn Bowen, we have an event this year which is called Death by Pinball which is basically 24 hours of pinball play. Going off the model of 24 hours at the same time, which I know you competed in last year and you did pretty well. I think you were in the top five or so. I think you were leading almost the entire time. So talk us through that experience. Is that the first time that you played the 24 hours? I played the 24 hours the year before and I won by a lot. so I was kind of hoping to do that again, but it didn't happen. What I would recommend, just from my own personal experience, if you're going to the 24-hour bell or you're death by pinball, do not stay up the entire night before doing work for a deadline. That was very bad. I mean, what goes through your mind? That was me this year. When I got to 24-hour battle, I was already dog-tired, and I was asleep halfway through round one. Just passed out on the couch trying to recover something. And I held up for about 18 hours. I was in pretty good shape. And then when 18 hours came, I was cooked. And I blew it. I really blew it. What goes through your head when you're in the last six hours and you're playing a pinball machine? I mean, like, are you still thinking the normal, you know, way that you think about where to hit your shots, or are you just kind of trying to find the blinking light? I was surprised how lucid and normal it was in the end, because when you're on the machine and you just kind of get that little adrenaline kick and you can go back to normal. So for me, it didn't make that much difference. And I actually had some really good scores in the middle of the night this year and last year. I got like a $1.5 billion on Pinball Magic. And I want to say $500 million on Full Throttle. Something like that at like 3 or 4 in the morning. I don't know if that's a good score. For a great game like that, there are a bunch of piles of crap. so I think the thing that you first need to know about doing 24 hours is get lots of rest sit down sleep even when you don't think you want to just get recovery you'll be in the third hour I don't need this I'm fine no sit down save your energy you're going to be there a long time you're going to need that energy in hour 18 I also recommend if you're like a caffeine drinker, don't drink any caffeine for the first 12 hours. You're always getting jittery, I'm guessing. Because if you use up all your caffeine strength in the first 12 hours, there's no hope for you in the second 12 hours. You're not going to super caffeine yourself. There's only some limit there. So I try to just drink water and then stay on water and candy for 12 hours. I recommend coconut water it's nature's natural Gatorade and it has all the electrolytes you need not that I've ever played 24 hours of pinball let alone probably more than 6 or 7 but I've played 24 hours so you just got electrolytes so that's what the plants create right yeah I have no idea what electrolytes are but they're good for you alright let's move on to tutorials, what you're... I guess you're famous for a lot of things in pinball, but I've got a friend, Bowen, called Dave. Hi, Dave. And he buys a lot of pinball machines, and he refuses to read about rules. He will only learn about the pinball machines that he owns. He buys them new out of box. They cost $12,000 here in Australia when you bring out a tutorial for them. So he still doesn't know how to play Star Wars, Ali. he knows how to play his Kiss now and he's walking dead in his Metallica all because of you so as much as you think that you don't know how many people are watching your videos it does make a big difference because as I said some people will just refuse to read rules they just think oh that's boring I'm not going to read about pinball machines what would you say is your most famous tutorial that you've done on Papa? oh jeez that's a good question I don't know I'm not really sure I can do that well, but all right, you just answered it. It's sort of like every so often I get to show the roadshow to somebody for the first time who's never seen it, and I'm really happy with that. You guys actually counted that to an uninsured power supply, I'm guessing, and to cut that around? It was the same game, right? There's a lot of people who think that was just green-screened. Yeah. or something, and no, it was not a green screen. It was legitimately trucked all the way to the Grand Canyon, set up there, and connected to the power supply of a van. And one of the interesting things about that is, and I mentioned in the video, is because of the low voltage that was involved, we had problems with the flippers. Okay. And specifically, you couldn't flip more than one flipper at a time. If you flipped two flippers at a time, and I mean any two flippers, the game would power cycle. Wow. So particularly that means you couldn't flip the left flipper at all, because the left flipper would flip the side flipper and the other little side flipper. Yeah. So it would just power cycle immediately. and at first I can't believe we drove a game all the way to the Grand Canyon and now it doesn't work. We had to disconnect the wire or the center that would trip the upper flippers on the road show and that way we could actually flip it as flip the right, flip the left and it would only flip those bottom two flippers. Which turns out for a lot of games that would have been disastrous, but for Roadshow it was okay because we were able to demonstrate that on Roadshow you can actually do pretty well without ever flipping the upper flippers and just playing side shots. Okay. Then, that also means that you can't flip both flippers at the same time. So multiball gets interesting. No trapping, because if you trap, then you're going to use the other flipper to fire away at the other balls, power cycle. No flailing. You flail around and do a slap save, power cycle. You should set up a game as a pinball like this. Oh yeah, really quick. Well, this would promote one-handed play. And I know, I've seen you do it before, and other people that I've seen practicing, would you say that one-handed play is something that you would want to do to improve your overall game plan? Yes. One-handed play is absolutely the best at getting you to realize how much anticipation you have about where the ball is going when it's far away. When people look and they're like, oh, it trained down the side and there was nothing I could do about it. That's usually a lie. Usually there was something you could do about it. You just didn't do it when you had a chance to halfway up the play sheet. Recognizing when your ball is really in danger and why and what to do about it, one-handed play helps you immensely with that. It also helps you realize things like bounce-overs, dead bounces, and the fact that you actually do have more time to react to something than you probably think you do. So people playing one-handed, you'll be surprised how good you are at one-handed compared to two-handed play. It's shocking that it goes okay. like I've done three reactors on Annihilation one handed so is this something that you do regularly like to keep your skills up or do you just do it for fun yeah I do it mostly for fun and skills up I guess it's more like okay I want to have fun and concentrate right now what can I do or if a game is too easy what can I do to make it more interesting or I've got extra credits on something I don't want to burn off a credit let's play one handed I wish there were more one-handed challenges at events there used to be a one-handed challenge at Papa every year and I love that stuff, the best one-handed game is the Shadow I remember hearing you talk about this on a podcast how you did Vengeance over and over again, is that right? Yep, and you've got to so the one-handed challenge that one year Papa, I like to do it at Vengeance and he's like, okay, well we'll build one where you can only do vengeance. How are you going to do that? They blocked off everything else on the playfield. With rubbers and ropes, basically. The only shots on that shadow were the left ramp and the right ramp. And then you had to shoot ramps, use your one hand to change the furbos so that you could shoot the other ramp. So if you're in vengeance mode, and you... You're just all over the place. It's great. Yeah. If you're in Vengeance and you shoot... If you shoot all four shots in a combo, I think you get 100 million. Is that right? Yeah, you get Super Vengeance. And then it changes the whole thing into Super Vengeance, which is worth more as a base. And then any completion is 100 million instead of 50. And it'll say that. It'll say Super Vengeance is yours instead of Vengeance is yours. Okay. I haven't got there yet. I've got the machine, but I'm just horrible at the Shadow. It plays just absolutely too fast for me. But that'll be my new challenge against Super Vengeance. It's really hard. It can be any combo, so you don't actually have to finish... You don't have to finish, like, all four ramps back-to-back. You just have to finish them in a combo. Oh, okay. Okay, that's not that hard, then. Well, I mean, you'll probably struggle to do it, but that sounds a lot more less tempting than a four-way combo. Now, I've got a question I just want to ask And I'm going to sort of phrase this a very interesting way Well, in my head I think it's interesting It may not come out interesting But, you know, when people want to Let's say people think to themselves You know, I want to get my fitness And I want to, you know, be better And I'll go and get a personal trainer And I'll have a plan for the next 12 months If someone came up to you and said Bowen, I want you to be my tutorial or my tutor for the next 12 months because I want to be a better player, what would be the journey that you would take somebody on? And the subject of this really is we, Ryan and I, and I also when I do my streaming, people often ask me, you know, what can I do to be a better player? So I'm sort of just posing it that way to you to say, if you were somebody's tutor and they pay you lots of money, so that'll get you excited, what sort of journey would you take them over for 12 months to really become a much better player? All right. Well, I like this pay-and-money business. Exactly, Martin. He's not going to give away his secrets. No, I'm not after the details. I don't have any secrets. I think that's how people get better at pinball. I got better at pinball because there were players when I was in college that were funny when they gave away their secrets. I feel like I'm I feel an obligation to do that for everybody so but that said this person is paying a lot of money so they better get a premium experience a premium bone experience well when you give out money there's got to be guarantees for success so what I'm likely to do is to put them in a room with a Flash Gordon and ask them to come out in six months when you're good at pinball and it forced them to play nothing but Flash Gordon a lot. That's not entirely true, but it's actually quite true that Flash Gordon and Paragon made me a much better player. I was already a very good player at the time, but by playing games that were more brutal as well as more oriented around recovery, it made me way better at the games that I was already good at the shot making games I think that just about anybody can get good at shot making because it's all just the timing there isn't great advice I would have on somebody who said I miss ramps when I try to shoot them on As Hamlet or Twilight so I was like well the timing is what it is you can't really do anything about that you have to get better at timing, the only other way to get better at timing is to trap up more often so that the timing on a trap up is easier and more consistent than the timing on a moving ball. But what really matters to becoming a very good pinball player is control and recovery and to be able to do those little skill moves with the flippers. In particular, I did a tutorial seminar with Andrei Masenkov at ReplayFX last year, and one of the things we said during the seminar that people really resonated with is about the danger zone of when the ball is in danger of draining. And people think like when it's sort of near the flippers and bouncing around down by the flippers that that's the danger zone. That is actually the opposite of the danger zone. Everywhere else is the danger zone. The area where the flippers are is the place where you have the most control over what happens because you can influence where the ball goes. And you can't nearly influence the ball as much when it's just around everywhere. So using skill moves to get ball control and using your nudging to get recovery, those are the biggest things. And then you have to find the machines that prioritize those things as big ideas. So Paragon is an excellent choice because you get the recovery of bouncing the ball off the fence, but also the different control moves of drop catches, of tap passes, of post transfers, bounce overs. There are just a wide variety of moves that someone can do on Paragon to get the ball where they need it to go. and then when you move on from Paragon back to an Addams Family or to to a Metallica or something like that you find that those new games are easier all of a sudden much easier than they ever were before because you have those moves that you were practicing on the Paragon and a ball that ended in Paragon in 10 seconds you just don't really have that anymore so modern machines feel much easier if you've been playing late bottle EMs and early solid states. And I would say that that is the environment for someone to get really good. That's what makes it interesting. Like, Pinberg, always the final game at Pinberg in the final round is an early model solid state, and that's on purpose so that the last game can be interesting like that. Yeah. I guess what you're saying is that if people can't find these old machines, they should ring up KT and Charlie at Spooky Pinball and buy a Total Nuclear Annihilation and that'll improve their game? Is that what we're getting at? I don't think annihilation is the start of a movement back towards simpler rules and a greater emphasis on control and recovery. Yeah. In a lot of games, you know, you can play for a really long time, you're shot making controls, whether you get to continue playing most of the time, like someone playing Guardians or Aerosmith, if you're pretty great at making ramps, things are going to go pretty well for you on those games. And any time you do need to shoot something that's out of control, forcibly like Toy Box or Groot, it's far away. So recovery amounts to seeing whether the ball is going to go down the middle or towards the outland and then being prepared for it under only those circumstances. on Paragon or on Flash Gordon or on Annihilation you're just constantly on guard for what's going to go wrong next yeah and for me playing Annihilation is as much about just that sort of amped up oh my god oh my god kind of stuff than anything else and very few games are able to deliver that right now sure just lastly on your tutorials. A lot of machines have kind of been updated and updated unexpectedly as you saw with kind of the Walking Dead and ACDC. And you've done many tutorials. If you were to go back and redo one of your games because you think I guess the strategy or the information that people need to know about that machine that you presented in the tutorial has now changed, what would that machine be? Probably the most likely one that we would want to do over again is Star Trek because of the medals system that's been added into the game and the desire to play out modes and get points from them instead of just timing everything out and waiting for the Kobayashi. That's a major difference in that game. I mean, the tutorial, I'm not going to do that because it's boring. But that game, I think when we did Metallica, Crank It Up hadn't been programmed yet. so we should really go back and do that again. The other thing I want to do is that the earliest tutorials for several years even were done with just a single top-down camera instead of the multicam setup that has the flipper view and the scoreboard view. So redoing that for some of the better games like Whitewater or Funhaus, I would like to go back and do those again. But as it is right now, we still have so many games we haven't done yet, and the backers that I have under Patreon they're actually the ones who make the decision about what it is that I get to do as the lead game when we go film so they picked Poker Tour they picked what else did they pick I don't have the Doctor Who and they picked Lebowski and we still have a Lebowski video that's almost ready to go we've been waiting for like more Lebowskis to appear. I don't know. I try to stay out of that, but for some reason, there haven't been very many Lebowskis showing up on location lately. It's stuck in customs or something. I don't know why. Yeah. Yes. So you've obviously talked about some machines that have had updated codes. Would there, if there's a machine that you can think about, and I think because of the, probably the nature of the more complicated rule sets, so probably from 2000 onwards, but is there a machine that you look and you think, I wish they would go back and revisit the code and do something about it? And I don't mean, like, complete the code. I think Wheel of Fortune is probably one like that, but you may even choose that as one of these as well. But a machine where you just think, with what we know now and how machines play now, you would go back and you want them to revisit and update the code My first thought on this is actually Simpsons Pinball Party Even though I love the code and I love the depth that game does not deliver a good experience for new players. I've said this as well, Bo, and I've said it's absolutely the... Besides the theme, it is the most uninsured-ease pinball machine I've ever played, and no one that comes over to my house and plays that machine that is new to pinball enjoys that machine at all because you can't accidentally start multiball in that game unless you're itching and scratching maybe sometimes. The multiball start is so hard for a new player and the upper play field. I just wanted to get that in there. How would they change that? Because I think it's more to do with the layout than the actual code. You're not wrong. You're not wrong at all. But the layout, the code can be changed without changing the layout. The thing I would choose to do is to exchange the TV and the auto. So the auto, which is the shot up the middle, it doubles a shot, right? The TV up at the top starts rounds. Now, for a brand-new player, which one of those shots is more likely? Definitely the auto. Yeah. And they shoot the auto, and the auto says, hey, you doubled this. And the new player says, I don't give a shit. What did I double is what they're asking. Yeah, I doubled a thing that I don't care about. And there's a little red light flashing now that I didn't see flashing before, if I'm paying attention to that, which I'm not because I'm a new player. Do you think it'll turn into a right orbit auto, right orbit auto, right orbit auto? That's fine. I don't really have a problem with that. Okay. but so be it. I would rather have, I mean, that's like saying Adam's family devolves into shooting the ramp than shooting the electric chair. Yeah, yeah, it does. Well, if it's just that, I mean, I'm not sure how complicated it is, but I'm guessing you can just change those two switches around, like literally unsolder that switch and switch the wires. Would that work? I have no idea. You open a pinball machine and look at the bottom half, and I go, ah! I run away. But I know that, at least on Simpsons, that auto has two different switches back there because it can register two balls, one that lands in the hole and one that's behind it. Yeah. So you could potentially do it, but then that second ball switch would be a little cocked. The upper shot, I mean, besides the fact that it would be terribly confusing, right? I mean, like, just exchanging the whole system. So that would be there. But, like, modes change the way a game behaves. And if a player can start around and see, oh, the game's data has changed in a significant way. And, for example, on Attack from Mars, just being able to knock the saucer down and knock that little doorway down and bring up the saucer, you're like, ooh, something's happening now. And you feel very satisfied about that. Those are the experiences that a new player gloms onto and gets hooked on, and I don't think there is any such experience on Simpsons. There's better experiences for new players on the 1990 Simpsons, which is almost a universally hated game from advanced players because there's not much to do. But in some ways that's why it works for a new player, and that game was very successful on location. That's why people like South Park. That's why South Park still earns a ton of money on location compared to any other new game. Because it's clear what to do. You can do it. You can see it being done. And you feel like something went right. And for a player at our level, we just don't care. We're like, all right, enough already. yeah it's funny you kind of um you know mentioned citizens kind of twice uh today while talking to us and and and you said that it's almost designed for you um but it sounds like you don't want pinball machines to be designed for you because it's not for the greater good of of pinball i guess yeah um i i guess i would say that if i look around and see who's it i'm gonna i'm gonna enjoy pinball no matter what. I can enjoy a good game of something truly terrible. I'll play barbed wire and it's not... I won't hate it. I'll kind of like it because it's pinball. Yeah. So I don't know. It's something that I guess I look at when the playfield designer and the rules designer are doing a good job. What are they doing? And I don't know why this is something that sparked an interest in me to look at the decisions that people like Larry DeMar and Lyman make when they're programming to make things that are at these different levels of goal. And to put yourself in the mindset of a brand new player and how are they going to approach this game and how are we going to speak to them? Pinball as an interactive experience is really amazing that way. And also really, really difficult. Like someone actually going to program on my pinball machine and doing a good job, it's incredibly hard to do that because of all of the different things that are going on at once, and then the requirement to convey that information to the player in a systematic way, but a way that is visible. As impressed as I am with, say, The Hobbit, and how that display gives you all this information, it's overwhelming to have, like, here are their 37 modes and they're all hexagons, and here's your progress towards this thing in that corner and this thing in that corner. It's all really well laid out. But someone playing pinball for the first time, they're not going to make any sense of any of that. I mean, what's stopped you, I guess, well, not stopped you, but do you think that you would want to work in the pinball industry as a rules designer? Oh, God. No? Well, I mean, obviously you've got a love for pinball and a deep understanding and you obviously know what works and what doesn't work. would you say 100% no or would it be something that you consider? I definitely wouldn't say 100% no to that. It's not something I feel like I have any actual keys in. I don't live in the right place for it. I'm no good at programming. I mean, I'm okay at programming, but I don't think I'm very good at programming. And I wouldn't want to create something and then have people on the Internet shout at me about bugs. And I also don't think I have the creativity. And I'm not sure that that's true, because the creativity comes from probably looking at other games and going like, oh, here's something interesting that that game did. What if we did this variation on that? And then incorporate that into whatever game it is that someone is designing. The best thing they did was go into the Galaxy and say, hey, look, Aerosmith works. Oh, bro. Anyone can be a Timberwolves. If you do it that way. Sorry. I had to say it. Come on, man. That was all Star Trek rules. Come on. Exactly. Yeah, it's the same guy as well. Sorry. I had to say it. All right. Before we finish up, Bowen. I wanted to give you an example, if it's okay. Go for it. Yep. like on Walking Dead there's this thing called Horde that you get to when you finish all the weapons and it's like it's a wizard mode but it's not impossible to get to Horde is the video mode from Dracula where the things are coming at you, the wolves and if you kill the wolves when they're really close to you they're worth a lot if any wolf if any wolf eats you, you die and that's translated into a pinball mode on Walking Dead so the zombies appear and you can kill them right away and they're worth points, but if you wait and you wait until they get closer to you they're worth two or three or whatever times as many points by killing them when they're close to you for like style points almost and it It took a lot of skill on the part of presumably Lyman, the programmer there, to see this other thing. I presume he looked at track and to recognize that this is a thing that could be adapted and what the adaptation would look like and then make it all right with all of the detail about how everything appears and when it appears and what it sounds like and what it looks like and what the lights look like and how much it scores and how many times a smart bomb could appear. The level of detail in this work is incredible. And now it has a crank it up, cash it out as well. Yeah, and now there's an extra layer of that even. So this is what I mean when I say I'm totally intimidated by ever trying to do that work. The people who have done it and done it well, they're busting themselves. They're working their butts off to do the right thing and do it well. and when it's done well, it's hard to even notice that it's being done well. Yeah. Sound, like, sound and music is like that too. When the sound and music is great, you just kind of don't notice it. It's just kind of in the background. When the sound and music is bad, you're like, oh, you notice it right away. A bubbly bobo. The wizard modes, like the unachievable wizard modes, I'm going to quickly go through a list of pinball machines, and you tell me if you've been there or not. Okay. Simpsons Pinball Party. Have you been specifically to the Mega Extreme Wizard Mode? 23 times, yes. 23? Just the casual 23 times. Lord of the Rings. Yes, five times. Five times. Okay, you have it now as well. Okay, World Poker Tour. Never. Never? Okay. Wizard of Oz. Never. Dive in. Once. Metallica. Once. Does The Walking Dead have ACDC? Without cheating, without cheating, like you did in the proper tutorial. Cheating? Hey, there's no cheating. There's no cheating in pinball. Glass on. I want to say six times. Okay. And finally, The Hobbit. Just joking. I have no idea what's going on. There's no Wizard Mode on the Hobbit, so that was a trick question. Yeah, of those, the hardest to me is Poker Tour. I don't think I'll ever get anywhere near that, simply because the requirements are so onerous. Has anyone ever had a claim to find that they've done it? It's probably been done. I don't know if there's anything online. and I feel like I saw someone posting a video of it sometime. But I don't know. Okay. Well, thanks for staying up until I think it's possibly 1 o'clock in the morning over at the Empire to talk to us. We do run a long interview, but we thank you for everything that you do in Pimble. We thank you for taking up your time in the day to talk to us, and I think I'll see you at Texas. Are you going to be there? I'll be at Texas Pinball Fest and I sort of get asked I've been asked vaguely to go to PAX Australia so we've got to figure out what and how to do that and when it is we'll get that sorted oh and I guess you'll see Marty at Pinderg as well that's awesome and if there's anything that you can think of that we can do better with how things are presented before or after that. We're always looking to improve every year. It's like running a wedding, except everybody brings money and they all want money back. And then most of the time, everybody's so friendly. It's so nice. It's like a party, a reunion, and then at the end we give out a bunch of money and a bunch of people complain they got beat by bad breaks. Welcome to pinball. Yeah, look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you. It was really nice talking to you. Thank you so much. Really do appreciate it. And Ryan looks forward to seeing you. I look forward to seeing you. And hopefully Australia will look forward to seeing you at the later end of this year. Oh, my God. Thank you. That would be awesome. Good stuff. Thanks, Bowen. All right, Bowen. See you. Have a great day. Bye. So there we go. That was the interview with Bowen. Yeah, that was good. I mean, he's just full of just deep, deep knowledge. I mean, and all of his answers are kind of like just right there. Like, he doesn't even need to think about what he's saying. I know that sounds like, you know, condescending, but he's been involved in pinball so long. I looked at a little video in the last show, in the last episode of when he was interviewed, when he was, I think he was 18 or in his first year of university. And I don't know, it was just so exciting. It was so cool to see him, like, just so super excited. And now it's just like pinball is just this thing that's still part of his life. I know. The only regret I have of the interview is, and obviously we had to keep it to pinball, but I really did want to talk to him about his involvement now in working out sort of the rules and the probability for game shows. That kind of stuff is fascinating, but just wasn't pinball related. Yeah. So there you go. Shall we do Slam the Top 100? Yes, we should. And let's recap on what happened last week. Uh. Batman won. You won again, money. Yeah. So who was it between? Tiffany and you. There was no one else involved. No one else that we ever speak of again. No. Vanished. Was involved. And we had a fantastic response to it. So five entries. I posted at the wrong time. We got millions of people just overloaded. But anyway, it was easy to count all the wins, all the vote that Batman had. Batman had the best, okay. So I win again. Yeah? Yeah. All right. Can we do it again? Yep. Are you going to do it this time without cheating? Yep. Okay, cool. Please generate a number between 0 and 100. Oh, fuck. No. Please generate a number between 0 and 100. Sure. Please be one or two. 31. 31. 31 is Ah, the shadow I was playing it today Like a fucking seller Alright I love the shadow, okay Alright, come on Please generate a number between 0 and 100 Coming right up Pretty sure I can just say give me another one 70 Ha ha Hmm, what is 70? Medusa Jared, you know nothing about Medusas No, I do know Medusa. You do? Yeah. I do. Let me just pull up the flyer. I'm getting excited already. This is not the first one I'm excited about because I... But you know this one really well. No, it's the pinball machine that I'm the worst at, but I do love it. So you go first. All right, let me get some out quickly. Okay, The Shadow Pinball Machine. Actually, a horrible movie, Marty. I'm just going to give a mess first so you can't bag it about the movie. It doesn't matter. You treat it as an original thing. It is one of the fastest pinball machines, and it has amazing call-outs when you hit vengeance. Diverters. You can physically press a button on the pinball machine, and it moves diverters from left to right, which makes the two shots into four shots. Oh, wow. Three-way combo. One of the best call-outs ever. And if you keep on going four-way, five-way, six-way, seven-way combo, it's amazing. Best upper play field in pinball. Bam. Can I really extend this for a minute? Because I've got a lot to say about this show. This really isn't enough. No, I understand. All right, you ready? Yep. Go for it. So, Medusa is... It's really one of these machines that has got a bit of a cult following. And I'm not even trying to be funny. So, 1981 it came out. It's a ballet machine. And what's really great about it is it's single level, but it's got two distinct playfields, It's upper and lower, even though there's no ramps. It's designed by fantastic designer Wally Welch. He's designed some fantastic machines. In fact, he also did the mechanics on Dial In. I'm just letting you know. But the best thing about Medusa, the sound and the art. Art by Kevin O'Connor. Amazing. You can't just... I don't know. I can't believe you're still winning because I haven't read one IPTV or anything and you're just reading facts about who the artist is. It's true. People love artists, but I have actually played this game. It is a really, really good game to play. Okay. My 30 seconds. Okay, Medusa Pimple Machine. I've never played it, but it was made in the 80s when pimple machines were more popular than 1994 when Shadow was made, and the Shadow outsold it. It outsold it on a shitty Alec Baldwin movie. Shadow, what else can I say about it? one of the coolest locks in pinball, the sanctum lock. Khan multiball, super fun. The modes are all fun. You've got the secret duck mode, quack, quack. I believe it's the only pinball machine with an oriental call-out. It's very unique in that way. Asian call-outs, the best. Done. Is that really what you're going to leave your eyes on? Yeah, go! Get the shadow! I love it! You don't punch the ball, you are boring me! Makes me laugh every time. And it's cheap. It's still cheap. I've gone past my 30 seconds, but you let me. Sure. You ready? 30 seconds? Yep. Go. Well, the last thing I'll say about Medusa is, you know, it's Bally Medusa, a legend of features. But all I'm going to say really about The Shadow is two things. First of all, Alec Baldwin, back glass. Shit house. and the other thing I'm going to say is really confusing rules and those stupid ramp diverters nobody knows how to use them and they don't really do much there you go, Shadow sucks Alec, no one knows how to use the diverters you press the button and it changes from one side to the other most people don't know that they're there confusing rules, it's pretty much Indiana Jones hey, you finished? you had your 30 seconds so, you know I'm just letting everyone out there know that if Shadow doesn't win, I'm quitting the podcast. Well, I'll have a couple of extra seconds then, and I'll talk about the Playfield digital display with three separate features. No one cares about... Extended play feature builds, potential throughout Olympus bonus. So there's that as well. Is Medusa the chick that has the snakes on her head? Yeah. Yeah? Yep. Okay. So... Medusa is just the better game. You know it. Everyone knows it. Vote for it. I'm going to have fun looking for a gift. Back to two. Okay. Awesome. Shall we head to this week in pinball? Yes, we should. How was your week? Pretty good. I got, just before I left, I got a package from Charlie Emery and the TNA team for my total nuclear, well, not mine, sorry, NIMA's total nuclear annihilation. It's sitting at my house. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before. I think I did, but there was a problem with the flippers and the coil's overheating and the flipper's not being as powerful as they should be after the game was being played. That's now fixed. They used the wrong springs, and I guess it makes sense. The spring they were using was shorter, and it was pulling back on the flipper so hard that when the ball was getting hit and there was no EOS switch, it was going back. So the springs are stronger but not pulling back as hard, if that makes sense. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So, and then when I realized that, I kind of, like, realized what the issue was with my Shadow immediately, because I've had an on-off issue since I lent that machine to PAX. So I fixed that as well, which is a good 2-in-1 fix. I decided to go ahead and list up my little tournament that I'll be running. And I'm not very creative with names, so I called it Rage Tilts at Riser's house. So it's doubled out in a couple of hours, which is pretty cool. it's just 20 people at my house, match play, and I'm going to look forward to bastardizing these machines to make them as hard as possible. And AFM is going to have that little rubber on there. I'm going to look up and ask for advice from top-ranked tournament players, and I'm going to say, what is the exploit on an easy this machine? And they say, well, it's this. And I'm going to fuck with that so you can't do it, because this is going to be the fastest-run tournament ever, and it's a learning experience as well. If it's too hard and people don't like it, then I won't make it that hard moving forward. But I want to see how quickly I can run, was it six rounds of two each time with 20 people and then if I can run it in a couple of hours, like four hours or so, then I can increase it and it can become a monthly thing. Okay. You're having money? I'm absolutely coming. I love your collection. I love the group of people that come over to your place. So, yeah, really looking forward to it. Good. I'm glad you do. I love the Melbourne crew. I mean, the whole Melbourne crew is based around you. I mean, you introduced me to all those guys like Stacy and Stu and Jam and Jeff and... And John, yeah. We're not talking about that. That did not happen this week. Anyway, let's not talk about that. Okay. that's pretty much it I'm looking forward to playing some pinball here in Vegas there's a lot of cool places like pinball hall of fame and flip us flip us to you I think yeah that's how you say it so what do you mean I saw a picture of you Marty I can't believe you're going to bring that up and no I'm not going to talk about it because I know you've got the picture and you'll put it up in show notes do not do it I'm not talking about dressing up as Thor anyway No, look, I didn't get to stream that much because I did go to a conference and I dressed up as Thor. There you go, there's the end of the story. But the thing that happened this week, and I've mentioned this to you a couple of times, but the last couple of months, so did you know that there is a raffle that you can go in to win a brand new Stern pinball machine? I do know about that raffle because I think Ron from the Slant Self podcast has won it And possibly Bruce, yeah? And yes, he showed me the screenshot of you answering, so yes, I know it, Marty. Well, good. What you also know is that two months in a row, because I've only been doing it for two months, I have not won a free pinball machine. They do it every month. Yep. No, okay. So here's the thing, right? So there is charity, like money I give to charity every month, right? So this is a win-win, because I give to charity, but I also, there's a chance of me winning something. And, you know, I think they only sell about 250 tickets. So you've got a one in 250 chance of winning a new pinball machine. So I would say, first of all... You want to do Iron Maiden, that's what you want. I do want my Iron Maiden. But also... You'd be a pro or something, right? But also, I know that Jo has been on a couple of podcasts talking about it. But effectively what it is, it's raising money for the Pinball Education Centre. So it's a place where they're going to put pinball machines and children and families or families with children with special needs will come to this venue and it's a safe place and it's all about having fun and enjoying yourselves and watching children play pinball. There's nothing wrong with that. That is absolutely amazing right there. So I just wanted to give a bit of a plug for this as well. So pinball-edu.org. Go to their raffle each month. I can't even remember how much it is, but it's, you know, $40, $50 an entry, something like that. It's not a lot, and it's an amazing, worthwhile cause. And you know what? You never know. You may actually get a pinball machine out of it. So I just wanted to put that there, because it actually gets me very excited. And he streams the results, and I wake up and realize that I haven't won, but I'm still going to enter it. So I think everybody should enter in it. Cool. And that's my week. That's all? Nothing else in pinball? No. That's it. Ah, sorry, I want to say something else I did. Just before I left, I went to go check out my machines on site, and they were all playing pretty well, but I turned on Spider-Man, and I asked him before, I said, are there any issues so I'd know what to bring? And he said, no, no, no reported issues. And I turn it on, and Spider-Man, and the score is just going up, and there's no sound being made. Like, when there's a stuck switch or something, you'll get an error and it'll disable it. There was no switch in the settings. There was no errors. And there was no sound being made. So I was so confused. And it was going up maybe like 5,000 or so every couple of seconds, but it was going up by 10. I'm like, okay, I know it scores 10, so it's like a switch hit of some sort that isn't that important. And I tried to figure it out for a couple of minutes. And then I opened up my phone, and I was in a bit of a rush. I rang Bruce Nightingale from the Slant Tool Podcast. Of course. He's been doing pinball for like 30 years. And I'm like, I can Google it. I can, you know, I can use it. Is it a new school? Yeah. Old bastard. Like, why don't you just ask him? You know, friend of the show. Sure. And the weirdest thing is, he had exactly the same issue. Like, he just put his spine in and he had exactly the same issue, you know, a couple of days before. So he was like, oh, yeah, it's the Doc Ock. the Doc Ock opto is flaky so you need to kind of like you know resold it or do this and that and it was and I fixed it thanks Ron thanks to Bruce sorry and then I went to get away and there was an issue with that and I'm like I can figure this out as well I'll bring Ron I'll bring oh Ron bring Bruce back and yeah he helped me solve that issue as well so if you ever have a problem just bring Bruce Bruce Nightingale is your man we're the legends awesome well there you go alright Well, I am really looking forward to this week. Well, for you, I'm really looking forward to it because I just know how excited you are to go to CPF. But I'm also really excited to wake up in the morning and have hundreds of messages from you telling me what you've been able to see there. Should I start littering your Facebook page or Instagram with just pictures of everything I'm seeing? Yeah, of course you should. Should I make it only tomorrow or later? Or like every hooker or every cocaine? You just go crazy. All right. You're over there. I'll be at the hotels. Just show us all the local sites. Okay. Awesome. Well, until next week. See you then. Bye. You've been listening to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. You can find us headtoheadpinball.com. We're, what are you, H2H on Twitter, something like that? H2Hpinball on Twitter. And make sure you email us, headtoheadpinball at gmail.com. We're desperate. We love emails. Please criticize Ryan. It only adds fuel to the fire. and you can catch us on iTunes Stitcher and Google Play maybe I don't know