Who's ready for another hit for that Dawn's Pinball Podcast Flavor episode number 235? Let's make it happen. We are back from TPF. Pokemon LE did make an appearance, did have an unboxing on YouTube, and we'll talk about where it went from then. All that and a multi-morphic minute. Let's go! That's how it works, man. What's going on, everybody? Hello in the world of pinball. All of these games are made in the past, present, and future. This is why we do it. We have a lot of fun. And speaking of fun, what's more fun than new pinball day? How about Pokemon LE? How about that stuff showed up from flipping out pinball? I knew it was coming. I mean, I could see that the games are being made at the factory. I don't even know if all the LEs are out yet. And then all of a sudden, I get a call saying, this is FedEx. We got something for you. We're going to be there in about two hours. And since I was seven states away at the time, I called my wife and arranged to have it dropped off at her new job that's in town. So that worked out great. Back into town yesterday, essentially did a layover at my own house currently in Florida. And then I was faced with a dilemma. So thanks for those of you that reached out on the pin, the Facebook live feed that I did where I was asking, like, should we go ahead and unbox this brand new game, the hottest game out there right now? Or should I wait till I get back in a couple of days? And overwhelmingly the response was, dude, grab that Pokemon pack and rip it. So that's what we did. So we, you know, we set up a camera, we got everything ready to go. We jumped onto YouTube. It's up there live on the Don's Pinball Podcast YouTube page. You go check it out. And so slowly, methodically, I dug into what I thought was going to be just another Stern unboxing and oh, did it go sideways. Now, first off, I should have known something was happening. Karma's been looking for me for a while and it was April Fool's Day. So like the quadrasphere was aligned. I knew some, I was going to step into something. And so, you know, get the box open, get the legs on the game, pull it down. Looks gorgeous, right? It's got that purple armor on that we saw. I was waiting to check out like the new fancy armor, what they did on the sides instead of the stickers that they had. I was going to check out the paint. I couldn't wait to fire this thing up. I lift the backbox. The back glass looks amazing with its mirroring and everything. That's the first time I'd seen it, you know, seen it in person. And so like, you know, it's, it's in the house. I'm so excited. I look down and something looks amiss. Like I had the back legs up about two inches, the front legs only about an inch. That way I can fit my lift cart with the carpet underneath the game. You know, so it's pitched perfectly and maybe a little bit steep, you know? And, but I'm looking down at a play field that looks like Bugs Bunny's holiday anniversary birthday bash challenge, because the thing is tilting away from me. That can't be right. I looked down at the lockdown bar We're going to go through that beautiful HD glass that Stern puts on their LEs. And I'm seeing the hanger brackets about an inch upfield, an inch north from the receiver. Okay, so for those of you that aren't familiar, I learned the terms for all these things now. So the lockdown bar, you remove that. The piece of metal that's on the cabinet that the lockdown bar is received into is called the receiver. And the hanger brackets are at the end of the playfield. That's what you put in the notch to lock this thing in place. And it's out. And I'm thinking, okay, that's the first off, it's very strange. You know, I don't know how the course of shipping these things could bounce out of there, but whatever. So I left on the lockdown bar, I go to lift the playfield up, and I can't lift it up. And I'm looking at the back of the playfield, and there's some busted plastics under there. I look under the playfield, there's the pieces. So I knew something was amiss, but it took me a little bit. All this is on a live stream unboxing, by the way. So I'm going through this game. What had happened was somehow the game came out for a while. The game was tilted vertically, this playfield, the whole populated playfield, pretty weighty, just slammed down. There's a metal angle bracket, at least on the back right there, that sits, it's attached to the cabinet, the new spike three cabinet that I couldn't wait to dig into and really see like how this thing's put together. So the whole thing back there is bent. So something really jostled this guy and kind of smashed up the back of the playfield. And I'm sitting there and like the thought that's slowly sinking in, like you don't want to believe these things when it happens. It's almost like if you were to say, you know, bust your spooky pinball glass or something, you're just like standing there in disbelief for a while until it sinks in. Like I knew I wasn't playing this game that day. And then it got even worse. Like I couldn't lift the playfield. I couldn't figure out why. I'm like, what the hell is this playfield even sitting on to sit? It was low in the cabinet. Like the front is high, the back is low, and this thing is tilted up. So I go underneath and the pivot brackets, This is what actually rides on those slides. Both of them are located beneath the slide. Like the whole playfield must have fallen so far back into the back end of the cabinet that the hanger brackets slipped underneath the slides. I don't know what happened here, man. I don't know. But like, like something was amiss. So here's what I did. I went right to Facebook, right to Pinside, just started complaining right away, hoping that some stranger would help me. I'm kidding. That's exactly not what I did. This was again the purchase from Flip N Out. Had great service throughout the process of doing this. Thanks so much, Zach and crew. I texted him, I emailed him, and I got a response like within a couple minutes. At this point, I like, listen, listen, okay. I had finished up a 24 hour shift out there in Maine on the East Coast. I'm almost done out there. I stayed up all night, took a 3 a.m., got to the airport, took a 5 a.m. flight back home. Like, I hadn't slept in a couple of days, you know, and I'm just, I'm just trying to do a fun live stream. We play five games of Pokemon before I had to head to the airport again. So I said, heck, I gotta feed the family. So I went out to go grab some McDonald's from down the street because they got some new like hybrid Netflix collabs going on, like some super silly stuff are going on. Open your McDonald's app, man. They got some weird combo meals and things and sets and stuff. And can I just quick aside the Derpy McFlurry that they have right now is probably the greatest thing I've ever had from McDonald's. So go check that as Boba Balls in it. It's berry flavored. I don't even know what the franchise is that it's based on, but I want Derpy McFlurry again right now. More to come on that. So I went and get some food, and in the process of doing that, I'm already getting an email back from Zach, and he says, don't worry, man, we're going to take care of this. I sent him pictures and he's like, just I'm going to take the game back. I'm going to get another one out to you tomorrow. And it's currently on its way to the house. So so shout out, man. Shout out, flipping out pinball. Thank you so much for hooking this up. I don't know that all the ins and outs of what's happening, but I know that this thing is definitely not playable in the state that it is. And listen okay listen if this was a Stern Pro right and I happen to get one of them like I could probably replace ramps I could replace things on it I could replace a bracket I could take the pivot brackets off of it level the playfield put it back together and everything But like it still gonna to have that that smack of like not being pristine Okay And if this was a John Wick pro I shouldn be a problem man We'll go ahead and slap it on there. We'll get it working. This is Pokemon LE. This is like the greatest in demand game as Stern has produced. Probably ever, probably ever. Um, I'm trying to think back of other games Stern would have made that have been worth like money, money. And aside from like, you know, strange things like Bond 60th or something or Elvira 40th anniversary, like, like this is the one of the modern age, man. You know, instantly these things were going for like 25 grand and stuff. And it's like, it was almost like winning the lottery if you, your number with your distributor happened to come through. Um, so, you know, like, like I'm okay if this would have, we could have figured it out, but like for Pokemon LE man, like this was kind of devastating. Tim Kitzrow, Mirco Playfields. Check it out. I wasn't wearing, you know, a fun costume. I didn't paint myself purple, but like it was funny. It was really funny. I think people enjoyed it. Oh my God. I can't even imagine this is all real. Like it's still sinking in. So I wanted to cover that. So basically, you know, how would this, how would this even happen? I reached out to my buddy Jeff and he says he's seen this before. If like a game has got some shock damage, meaning like the game on the pallet was just like, you know, dropped directly onto the ground. Now I will say, the box that this game came in, essentially pristine. Some superficial little scratch on the box, but nothing that went through the cardboard. Nothing that looked like it had gotten a big shock or anything. The pallet was in excellent condition. Everything was centered on there. It was centered, Leonard. So I don't, you know, there was no outward sign that there was a problem here. So either, like something weird happened in transit, but okay. For this game, for it to pop out of the receiver bar with the lockdown bar, the lockdown bar was latched, both latches were down, the glass was in there really snug. So I'm not sure how this game could have come out of that receiver without busting the glass. Like I don't, I'm not sure like, like there's enough room for that to happen. Now this is my first time having a spike three cabinet, like the full cabinet. The first one that would have came out would have been Walking Dead Remastered. So this is the second one, the first one that's ever been in my house. So maybe there is a little bit of play in there where it just can happen. It looks like there was a little scratch on the inside of the glass there. So maybe that's what happened. Maybe the game just wasn't placed into the receiver and then was boxed up or may have slipped out or slipped someone's mind or something. And then when it tilted up, it happened. I don't know. Regardless, it was like, it was just such a drag, you know, because I don't want to be that person that's like, yeah, there's a minor imperfection here. I'm going to throw a fit. I want a warranty replacement something. I really think it was apt in this point. And luckily, my distributor I bought the game from agreed, and we're getting it fixed, man. We're getting it fixed. So thanks, Zach. Appreciate it, man. Appreciate the communication and everything. That was fantastic. So I'm not mad. All right. I did another live stream after this happened, still on zero hours of sleep. And I wanted to make a point because we've seen this happen. Other podcasts have been talking about this, too. A lot of newer people in the hobby, myself included. You know, and we get a game at home, something doesn't seem right. You know, maybe a flipper's dragging, needs to be adjusted. Maybe a pop bumper is not firing or or maybe all of a sudden, like your game just reboots and resets. And so you want to go to the community and say, like, first off, is this normal? Right. And I think that's totally fine to do that. But to go out and just kind of put distributors, manufacturers, companies, mod makers or someone on blast before you've given them an opportunity to like, you know, get back to you on what's going on. This could be something simple. You know, people that make these mechanisms will understand it way better than, you know, a casual user would or even randos on on pin side or on Facebook or wherever. So two things. I think if you have like an issue with your machine, right, this pop up is not working or, you know, this this start buttons, I pushed it, nothing's happening. You know, contact the service line for the manufacturer or better yet, if you bought it through a distributor, contact them first, Because somebody has probably had this problem before and it's probably something simple. And if it's the first time you've dealt with it, it's going to seem like impossible, but they'll, they'll work you through it. You'll figure it out. That worked for me. On the other hand, I still think it's okay to take your problem to an open forum, just because this may help somebody else that's coming down the road from you. They'll come into the same problem or something, and they can look back at your experience, even if it's years later and say, 1-839 Goddefiance Next! So, wh- what's, let's go with that. There's a lot of forums, there's a lot of discords, heck, I've got one myself, and it just has a life of its own, man. Shoutout to everybody in the Don's Pinball Podcast Discord, if you wanna get invited to it, just drop me an email, post something on Facebook or something, I'll throw a link out there, join in there, we got a cool community! Electic Bat has a cool community, Spooky Pinball's got a great community, they're, they're all over the place, man. P3's got a huge one that I, uh, I frequently troll in, uh, given that I am, like, the number one P3 multi-marker fan that ever existed. So yeah, it's fun, man. If friends are out there, we will help you. We'll help each other. We'll all play some pinball. It's gonna be cool. So I just want to say before anybody runs away with it, that Pokemon LE is a piece of crap. Did you see what happened to Don's one? I don't know, man. This is like... I don't know that this happens very often, though it's not completely unheard of for a playfield to somehow have slipped out in the midst of shipping or whatever. But I'm glad I did unbox it yesterday, because now there's a fix in place, this game's gonna come back, lightning's not gonna strike twice. All of these are great games that are going to be coming out in the future. I'm glad I did unbox it though, even though it wasn't ideal. I didn't have the purple body paint or anything. Otherwise, this thing would be sitting in my game room right now and I would be so excited. I'm going to get back, finally back in town. I'm going to open it up and then that's going to happen. Then it's going to be another week to wait for replacements and all that. Moreover, what if this was a game that I just bought and I put in storage? I just put in the archive and I like I gonna let this one marinate for like five years and then I gonna try to bring it out when it like thirty thousand dollars or something and then imagine if you were that buyer and this game happens to appreciate over time and you know the the Pokemon collector has to have it and then they get it and they pay this premium for the game like thirteen thousand dollars to me that is a lot of money And so you know if you paying 25 28 or something for this thing and then you open it up and it looks like that like can you imagine getting that phone call Like, I just sold this game. I got the wire transfer, man. Everything's awesome. I'm going to go buy something else, send my kid to college or something. And all of a sudden I get an angry phone call. What the heck did you sell me? This is a piece of crap. And by then it's out of warranty. My God, man. My God. So like if you're taking a chance on a new in box game, that's like new old stock. I mean, anything could be there, man. You don't know what was happening to that game. So it's been an exciting 48 hours for me. Gbus. I'm back home. Well, not back home, back in Florida. But I'm off work for about two weeks now. It's going to give me a lot of time for some projects. If you email me about mods or something, we're going to go get them made, get them out to you and get caught up. And thanks again for just emailing me. I know I've had the Pinside store closed on the mods, the Kong shooter rods, the Space Station shooter rod that's totally not a Death Star for Star Wars, Star Wars toppers. I've had the store closed because I know that I've been busy, I've been moving, I just haven't had the time to commit. I don't want to have people wait. But people are doing end runs around that. And they just email me directly like, hey, I know you make these things. Can I get them? And the answer is absolutely. And we're going to make it happen. So thanks everybody. Really appreciate that. What else is going on in pinball? It doesn't stop. It doesn't, this hobby, man. I used to hear things from other podcasters, like, listen, you know, there's just, there's just not a lot of news going on. There's not a lot to cover. Todayhrail9810, I'm still trying to recover from the last year, so I'm not going to make it to Pentastic this year. It was a fun show. I will say this about the show. They had the VIP rooms exactly where they needed to be. It was awesome. So you can buy a ticket to the show, and it's a free play pinball arcade show, just like you've seen. It's regional. It's fun. It's in a hotel. But if you spring for the VIP package, there's several other bonus rooms. I think there was at least three of them, where some collectors have brought some of their more high-end machines, All of these games are heavily modded, really pristine condition, and they're in those VIP rooms with much lower crowds. And so you can go in there and actually play these really cool versions of games, like some amazing mods in a Twilight Zone. I played an original Walking Dead LE, it was the first time I played an LE, like that was great. I had my greatest game ever on JJP's Hobbit, to the fact that it's added to the list now that I want to own this game at some point. Because it was just so fantastic playing this, just shooting well, I was able to hit everything, I played for 30 minutes. Hi, everybody! Hey, we're back here, with some of the great guys! The bees are coming real soon! Looks like they're going to hand out someordeas and coins. And, with a pinball trailer every six to seven days, I thought we would have all together to get a pinball world! This is Car- Pinball! This is a Car-izophrenia literally! Over this decade, we've over almost ten thousand hit diupt This is a guy, is it a guy? Is it a company? Is it a group? Is it a consortium? That's making 2.0 kits for older games. Like, I knew there was something for Totan, for Tales of the Arabian Nights. I knew there was 2.0 code for Funhaus, and oh my god, we cannot forget about Whirlwind and Sui and the Grannies, and just, like, a project that's more sideways than Galactic Tank Force was. I didn't know there was a 2.0 kit for no good gophers. And I don't think I knew about it for Black Rose, but apparently this Cardona guy has been doing this. Is this guy from the US? How come I've not heard of this guy before? Is he international? Somebody fill me in, man. I gotta go do some googling on who this Cardona person is. Apparently there's a new 3.0 kit, or 2.0 kit, whatever, an update kit for an older game. It's not released yet what it is, but we're gonna know soon because Pentastic's coming. So I'm gonna keep my eyes off for that. I've never bought a 2.0 kit for an older game. I have thought of picking up a Whirlwind a time or two. And you know, when I see one pop up that already has this $3, 000 add on kit that Pedretti, was it Pedretti that did it? Even though it's Sui and the Grannies, like I kind of always still want a Whirlwind. I've always wanted one. I kind of want one. And then just the idea that there's a 2.0 play code game in there as well, I think would be an added bonus. Even though Sui and the Grannies and like the Straw Boys and whatever that pig mode was, it just completely makes no sense to me. I still think it'd be kind of fun. Cengiz likes it. So I mean, there's that. I think Pin Sound had a board in there to make the sound like really better. And then there's a brand new screen, brand new screen, a screen in the game. So new back glass and all that business. So it looks fun. It looks fun. So, I don't know, man. I'm gonna wait and see kind of what this looks like. My interest slightly peaked at what's going on here. Now, when I heard, okay, that there was gonna be a new game module or something released, like, instantly I went to, oh my goodness, this is gonna be the P3 Multimorphic. Let's go into the Multimorphic Minute, everybody. I don't have a sound drop for it this time. We'll just go with it. Um, Jerry, I love your company and what you do, and I love playing these games, and I'm, I'm, I'm currently obsessed with Drained. I just don't understand. You know, it's like, it's like multi morphic exists on an alternate timeline or alternate universe, but it's it's it's passed through the wormhole into our reality. And so like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to conceptualize it, but I don't think my feeble animal brain is where it needs to be to fully appreciate like, like what I'm seeing here. And anyway, I thought it was a new module for P3. Now, P3 does have a new module that they're working on. And we do have confirmation of that based on, I guess, the little conference presentation they did at TPF. I don't ever have time for these things, man. I'm running around the show floor before I know it. It's midnight and they're kicking me off the floor and I've missed all of the conferences and things. So I'm just having a blast just with the games and the people on the floor. But apparently they said, they're very tight-lipped. I haven't heard rumor one about what this module is. But we know that it's licensed now. That was confirmed. So nice to hear. Nice to hear. Portal was a license. Weird Al Yankovic was a license. Portal, Weird Al, Princess Bride was a license. All three of those licenses I love. I love them in general. So the fact that there's pinball machines, even if they're not big sellers, very important to me. Something's going on in the water out there in Round Rock, Texas. Is that where they are? Where they're they're getting some licenses that are like perfect for the dawn and like of course I would wish they would just make an arcade version so I can just buy a one-off of the game and have it but whatever Whatever, it's fine. I can play it at shows Hopefully as long as they're still cool with me doing that so we're gonna see it not soon not at Pentastic It was Cardona but you know I don know sometime in the next year My thoughts are that you know portal is probably their selling game I mean I sure everybody that bought a P3 bought a heist but everybody has a P3 right now Of course they have a Portal 2 at least, right? So they're probably still fulfilling orders. So they don't want to release a game until of course they have some capacity on their line. So when are we going to see it? I don't know. But P3 was at Pintastic last year. We played us some Portal, I think with Brady Hearn as well, who's like doing music for Spooky now. And I guess he was doing it at the time, which is the top secret. But we had a great time at Pintastic. The hours go very long into the evening and the three of us were just having our jollies jollied, rattled on Portal late into the evening. It was great. The P3 multimorphic tech person that was there was awesome. Super cool. It was great vibes. It was super fun around the P3 game there. So they make a good showing. The other place that P3 shows up, MGC is coming up, but that's usually Wyze Trailers show. How come Multimorphic only has one distributor in the U.S.? It's Wyze Trailers, a guy that, yeah, he sells trailers and Multimorphic P3s and like, that's it. But he goes to Expo and he goes to Midwest Gaming Classic and he brings, you know, one or two games and lets people play the newest modules and things. So super fun. He's let me take modules and swap them in and out of the P3. So I like I've got some hands on with it. Like I'm getting to know the machine pretty well for someone that's never owned one of them. And that's why I call myself, you know, the number one fan of P3 Multimorphic of the system. Just there was an arcade version of it, but I know that's sacrilegious. You're not supposed to say that, Don. What else is going on? Let's end with this pin graphics. OK, pin graphics, a guy that's got a sticker printer machine. He's got templates for cabinets, for back boxes and art blades. And I've partaken in his products before and I dig them. I dig them. I dig the tilt graphics guy too. I don't know which one I like better. I think I've bought a couple from each of these guys. So of course with Pokemon being like the NKTOB, right, the new kid on the block, NKOTB, there's been, there's, sorry, there's, there's, there's, I'm doing air quotes right now. There's Pokemon Art Blades available and they're $89. So like that's kind of a reasonable price for Art Blades and you know, The print quality looks good. The graphics, it's essentially like a pastoral scene, right? Like something right out of the anime, you know, the nice flowers everywhere, meadows. And there are monsters prancing out there, but this is heavily AI. I know AI gets a lot of criticism. It's got its place. I think it's going to get there. I think anytime you bring out a new tool, it's always criticized. Computer animation was criticized in the days of early Pixar. dist mobility kennedy and then you go to the other side and there's a character that at first looks like a jigglypuff, right? posed by Peter Hurd, , pencils and lightestenings I'm going to pick some characters that nobody would argue are not direct copies of the Pokemon characters and we're going to put this out and maybe that's what happened. But either way, I would not put this in my game. I was planning on getting a premium, I was going to put Art Blades in it, I was probably not going to wait and get the Stern ones because I do like aftermarket ones better than what Stern typically offers. I would not put this in there. It's nightmare looking. What the hell is going on with Pikachu? It's ugly, it's terrible. Okay, just do the pastoral scenes and put those in there without these strange AI monsters. That would look better than what this looks like. Okay, and I'm not usually critical of these things, but this is bad. You know, or maybe like do Pikachu's tail only like sticking out of a bush so he's like hiding there. You know, like maybe that would work if you don't want to run a file of copyrights. You put like little suggestive things like there's creatures out there. You know, if you look, there's little details like that could be fun. and just fill it up with licensed characters and you'll probably get away with it because it costs too much to go after you or something you know but like this is bad go look at it man um maybe i'll post a link in the comments or something if i could figure out how to do that in this hotel room uh that was that was kind of amazing seeing that like i had to share it with some friends and they're just like what what is this where'd you find it i'm like it's on the website pin graphics check it out now i like the pin graphics guy i like the tilt guy too I don't think the tilt guy and the pin graphics guy like each other, but I don't know all those the backstory of that. Someone wants to fill me in. I'd love to hear it. Um, but you know, I bought products from both of them before. I probably will continue to do so. The prices are pretty reasonable. Quality's pretty good. Easy to insert and everything. But what is going on with these AI Pokemon? Um, I don't know. You guys tell me. Uh, what else is there? There's going to be so much more, man. Pinball keeps rolling. Pintastics coming up. Allentown's around the corner. Uh, we're going to get another, Speaking of corner, another cornerstone from Stern soon. Hopefully it's Transformers. We'll see what happens. Sonic is gonna be this summer. Hey man, enjoy your springtime. We're having some fun. That would've been so cool if I like actually hit that button harder so like it would've punctuated what I was talking about. Let's try it again. Spring is fun. Oh, the Pokemon hype train keeps going. I can't wait. I'm gonna get back home. We're gonna, we're gonna reset. I'm gonna find some purple body paint. We're just gonna do it live again. Who gets to unbox two pinball LEs anyway? That's awesome. That's amazing. Daniel Brown, do you need help sweeping up all that busted spooky glass? Poor guy got a Beetlejuice and his glass just shattered. Nothing against... I don't know what happened. Maybe it's temperature change or something, but... He's getting replaced again! Distros are there to help out. Contact them first! And then go on Pinside and let us know about your experience so we can all learn together. Don's Pinball Podcast at gmail.com. Patreon.com backslash Don's Pinball Podcast. If you want to help, kick me a couple of ducats. I'd really appreciate it. We're gonna get those giveaways soon, as soon as we get back home. Uh, what else? Discord? I don't know. What are you guys up to? I'll talk to you later. Be good.