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Episode 42 - The Don Returns!

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·2h 7m·held·Aug 27, 2017
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.027

TL;DR

Eclectic Gamers interviews Pinball Life owner Terry about parts supply business and Scorgasm Master bagatelle project.

Summary

Don returns as a guest on the Eclectic Gamers Podcast to discuss personal updates and pinball industry topics. The hosts interview Terry, owner of Pinball Life (a major parts supplier), about the company's history, operations, and customer base. Terry discusses Pinball Life evolution from hobby to full-time business, manufacturing operations, and the Scorgasm Master bagatelle machine project he co-created with Andrew Barney.

Key Claims

  • Pinball Life started 14 years ago when Terry bought a pinball machine and struggled to find parts online

    high confidence · Terry's direct account of company founding: 'it was 14 years ago I bought a pinball machine back then there was very little going on online for parts'

  • Approximately 90% of Pinball Life's inventory is manufactured by the company, not sourced from old stock

    high confidence · Terry explicitly states: 'I mean, 90%, we're making it' when discussing sourcing strategy

  • Pinball Life's customer base breaks down into three equal parts: 50% direct website sales, 25% wholesale to resellers in 23 countries, 25% OEM supply

    high confidence · Terry provides specific breakdown: 'It's basically broken down into three categories, and 50% of it is just direct website sales... Another 25% is wholesale... And the other 25% is OEM supply'

  • Pengolt drink holders are Pinball Life's most popular and consistently best-selling product

    high confidence · Terry identifies this as the standout product: 'The product that probably stands out the most that I would say actually is building in sales over the years would be the Pengolt drink holders'

  • Scorgasm Master is a bagatelle/pin game project started ~3 years ago by Terry and Andrew Barney as a bucket-list side project

    high confidence · Terry explains: 'It's probably been close to three years ago now. Me and Andrew Barney kind of started this thing'

  • Scorgasm Master was based on a Harry Williams second design, originally called a 'pin game' not bagatelle

    high confidence · Terry notes: 'it was actually Harry Williams' second design ever, before he even had Williams' and discusses the bagatelle/pin game terminology

Notable Quotes

  • “The problem is I would need one part, but they want to make you 1,000.”

    Terry @ ~13:40 — Explains the business challenge that led to Pinball Life's founding and eBay sales strategy

  • “We have another word for backorder here at Pinball Life, and that word is mistake. It's like, we told you we had it, but we don't.”

    Terry @ ~27:30 — Demonstrates company philosophy on inventory management and customer service

  • “If you don't antiquate yourself, someone will do it for you.”

    Terry (attributing to a friend) @ ~30:15 — Business philosophy driving continuous product innovation, specifically mentions retooling Pengolt drink holders

  • “The average life of a hobby is about three years.”

    Terry @ ~35:50 — Explains why many hobbyist mod makers stop production; relevant to understanding mod availability in community

  • “I wish we had never had those beers, honestly.”

    Terry @ ~49:20 — Humorously reflects on the difficulty of the Scorgasm Master bagatelle project that resulted from a casual drunken decision

  • “Replace them when they need to be replaced. It's common sense.”

    Terry @ ~33:45 — Terry's practical stance on pinball replacement frequency, contrasting with industry practices of annual replacement

  • “You know when we replace a pinball? When we can't find it.”

    Terry (quoting A.H. Amuse operator) @ ~34:00 — Illustrates the spectrum of pinball maintenance philosophies across commercial operators

  • “Everything was different. I mean, the ball size is different, so everything's different.”

    Terry @ ~50:45 — Explains unexpected complexity of bagatelle machines vs pinball, highlighting mechanical redesign challenges

  • “You would be surprised. Seems like such a simple thing, but it was like – actually, it's very complicated.”

Entities

TerrypersonDonpersonDennispersonTonypersonAndrew BarneypersonPinball LifecompanyScorgasm MastergamePinball Hall of FameorganizationAPP Enterprisecompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball Life expansion trajectory: home-based operation (4 years) → small warehouse → knocked down walls for larger warehouse, indicating sustained growth and market demand

    high · Terry describes progression: 'we worked out of our home. We worked out of a smaller home for four years and then moved to a bigger house with a bigger basement. That lasted a couple years. Then we bought our first small warehouse. That lasted a couple years. And then we knocked down a wall and bought a bigger warehouse'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Life acts as retail hub for hobbyist mod creators (Laserific, Bright Mods, Pinball Universe, Cliffy Protectors, etc.), facilitating product distribution

    high · Terry discusses relationships: 'Laserific sells a lot of their products through us. Bright Mods sells a lot of their products through us' and notes handshake deals are typical

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Strong interest in bagatelle/pin games as novelty/historical category; Don's desire to own one influenced by Pinball Hall of Fame experience

    medium · Don explains he saw bagatelle at Pinball Hall of Fame Vegas and 'I'd always kept an eye out for it' and eventually acquired one at a garage sale

  • ?

    community_signal: High-quality aftermarket mod availability historically limited by hobbyist maker burnout; average hobby lifespan ~3 years creates supply discontinuity

    medium · Terry explains: 'The average life of a hobby is about three years... he finds the next hobby or he just loses interest... And then he's not going to want to keep doing that. Now it's really work'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.381

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Saturday, August 26th. This is episode 42. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're joined by a super special guest. Don. Yeah. Super special? Super special. Don, formerly of the Pinball Podcast, formerly of the Link Cable Podcast, and currently of the No Podcast, is on our podcast. So welcome to this podcast, Don. Thank you. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. So we got all sorts of stuff, but as we love to do before we roll into our main topics, we do our introductions. So just generally, outside of pinball and video games, Don, is there anything that's been going on? Your listeners, of which you've now abandoned all of, haven't heard anything in at least a month, I think, if I remember my last listen of the Link Cable Now Canadian Cable podcast. Yeah, it's been five or six weeks. I have a technically not pinball, but sort of pinball news.
1:18
Last week, I picked up a Bally skill roll game. It's a 1958 coin-op game. You drop a nickel in, and there's little handles on each side of the cabinet, and you flick them, and it'll flick to a different slot for the nickel to drop in, and you get different points. So it's an EM game, and I think it's only got two reels, two stepper units in the back.
1:43
And a buddy of mine knew I wanted one and saw it at a garage sale, so he grabbed it for me, and I picked it up. A little bit of cleaning and tweaking, and it works great. So what is the What's the term for those style of games Is there a category That they're just called I don't know yeah just an arcade game I guess I don't know There's a few different types And different brands and this one was actually Remanufactured in 1998 With a billiard theme And it has a DMD Bad Girls This one's got a DMD So closer to cue ball wizard I don't know yeah It's a good nickel flipping games. I don't know. Hmm. Well, someone can write in if they know. They won't know. We won't hear back on that. It's a really cool game. They've got one at Pinball Hall of Fame in Vegas. I spent a lot of time playing that one, so I'd always kept an eye out for it. I have never been to Vegas, much less Pinball Hall of Fame. God, go to Vegas, man. It's awesome. I don't know. What if I lose all my money? Don't gamble. I don't gamble. I go and I eat lots of good food and play pinball and see a bunch of cool stuff. you could set up you could go to Evo might as well watch Evo in person oh gosh but then I'd feel like I should have entered well you should have you just get into pools and get knocked out in the first like 40 seconds your lack of capabilities is frustrating do that then just hang out and have fun in Vegas hmm it'll have to go on the list of potential tourist trap places for me to Tony, what's going on? Did you buy a nickel flip EM also? Surprise and surprises, I didn't. Boo. I know. I have been mainly just working on getting stuff ready. My youngest birthday is tomorrow. That's why we're recording on a Saturday. And just been working on stuff around here and dealing with work stuff. I haven't done a whole lot. I'm playing way, way, way too much Coldwaters. Let's see. I bought Sniper Elite 4, Coldwaters, and No Man's Sky within a day of each other. And we'll be talking about all of them later. But so far, Coldwaters has over 30 hours of play. And everything else is much, much lower. Well, I'm glad that you're putting the time in on it, because I know that was the one where you didn't wait for a big sale. So I recall your initial debate was, well, should I have waited? But it sounds like you shouldn't have if you're playing it. No, no, yeah, it's been enjoyable. Awesome. Oh, I've also been organizing my Steam games. I've actually been putting them into categories and organizing stuff, so maybe it's a little bit more coherent than just a list of games, 99% of which have never been played. Can you do folders and whatnot inside of Steam? Yeah. You can go into a game and you can choose set categories and you can make custom categories that they fall into. Okay, let's do that. I mean, I've got categories like episodic or card games or first-person shooters. And I've also got ones that are like, I need to finish this game or I should really start this game.

Terry @ ~51:30 — Reflects on underestimation of difficulty in developing Scorgasm Master bagatelle machines

A.H. Amusecompany
Harry Williamsperson
Scott Deniseyperson
Greg Ferrisperson
Yancey Blaylockperson
John Papadukeperson
Justinperson

design_philosophy: Scorgasm Master project based on Harry Williams second design (pre-Williams era), identified as underestimated in mechanical complexity despite apparent simplicity

high · Terry states: 'it was actually Harry Williams' second design ever' and 'You would be surprised. Seems like such a simple thing, but it was like – actually, it's very complicated'

  • ?

    community_signal: Scorgasm Master bagatelle project was informal, part-time effort by 7-8 people working evenings/weekends after full-time jobs, combining mechanical design, electronics, and audio production

    high · Terry describes: 'basically about seven of us seven or eight of us and we all had our own full gigs And after work a couple times a week we would get together and we brainstorm on this'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Pengolt drink holders recently retooled with hand-removable design to maintain competitive edge; illustrates continuous innovation strategy

    high · Terry states: 'We've actually just retooled that whole thing and made it removable just by your hands' and cites philosophy 'if you don't antiquate yourself, someone will do it for you'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Bagatelle machines required significant modernization from original designs: added music/call-outs, redesigned mechanics for reliability, incorporates contemporary sound design

    high · Terry notes: 'we were adding music, we were adding call-out sounds' and 'we needed to redesign it to get it to work really reliably, which took a lot of work'

    • 5:12
    That's good. It gives me something to do on a rainy day. Don't know what to play next. Yeah, I do mine by genre.
    5:20
    Mine's just a big list. That's what mine was up until just recently. I just had a massive list of... Oh, except for I was using the favorites, because any game that I was playing currently, I would put in favorites so I didn't have to hunt it down. It'd always be at the top.
    5:36
    Well, I could keep doing the big list thing. I have less than 100 games on Steam, so it's not hard. do you uh pin games on xbox one dennis i do if uh if they're not retail discs i've got the digital copies i'll pin them if i'm playing them constantly or i need to do uh like a daily login for some of the free to play stuff that i want to keep getting the boxes so i don't have to do any work okay i'll pin those yeah so so digital games i'll pin so that i can just stay on the home screen and jump right to them and then i unpin them when i'm done playing playing them yeah so same kind of idea That's what Tony's doing, it sounds like. Yep.
    6:15
    Well, for me, not a whole lot. Actually, Tony and I went and did one of our area monthly pinball tournaments last weekend, and it's only noteworthy because there were actually four of us, a couple guys who just, like my brother-in-law and another person, who just go to that one. They just go to that one monthly. It's a little more friendly, I'd say. Everyone's friendly at all the tournaments But I think it's a little less intimidating for people who don't play all the time And it was noteworthy because it was, I think, the first time I ever saw When I finally looked over at those IFPA ranking tracks Where we all finished above last place So everyone was a winner We were all losers Because that's pinball Other than that, actually, earlier today as I had to do laundry because I've been out of town for work. I went down and finally put my name at the top on the Sharky Shootout leaderboard. Tony came over the first day I had it working. It was after our pinball tournament, and he got to put his initials on the game. He had like a 10-minute first ball. It was ridiculous.
    7:26
    And then another person put their initials on, and I didn't have my initials on my own game, which, of course, is humiliating. So I had a couple successful games during the week, but I was like, no, I need to be the grand champion. So I finally was able to do that.
    7:43
    Congratulations. Now I don't have to play it anymore. I've won. It'll never play again. It'll just sit there. Probably not. I've won it. I won the game. Don't let Tony play it again. No, no. Well, considering the way my other, ball two and ball three were so terrible, it was just ball one and, well, and the extra ball on ball one that was really good. Well, the extra ball on ball two wasn't bad either.
    8:06
    Yes, but Sharky's is my bad girl's replacement since I couldn't get a hold of one. Just had to make do.
    8:13
    So sad. It was. It's very sad. But you know what's not sad? Our first segment. Actually, it is sad. Not our very first segment. We'll get to that. But in happier news in pinball, I actually did an interview earlier in the week with Terry, who is an owner. He and his wife own Pinball Life, which anyone who's ever had to work on a pinball machine is probably familiar with Pinball Life because it's a parts supplier.
    8:44
    And so I contacted him to talk about the company itself and sort of how it's organized, the things they sell, things like that. But thanks to Don, I also learned that Terry was involved in a Bagatelle project called Scorgasm Master. So we did talk about that at the end of the interview because he just sort of gave a background on what went into all of that and an update as to where that project sort of stands, as it were. And so I'm going to go ahead and I'll drop that interview in here and then we're going to come back and we're going to continue doing the podcast. Hello, everyone. This is Dennis with the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. I'm here with Terry, one of the owners of Pinball Life. Terry, thanks so much for taking the time out of the day to speak with me. No problem at all. I guess to start with, I think a lot of people on the pinball side who have ever had to acquire parts are familiar with Pinball Life, but I was wondering if you could give us a little bit about the history of your company. Well, it all started by accident, really, which I guess is probably the way most good things do. it was 14 years ago I bought a pinball machine back then there was very little going on online for parts especially an add to cart environment basically just really didn't exist I learned pretty quickly that your machine breaks first of all because they're all one ball from broken and then you have to try to fix it And it was actually quite a struggle. So I then realized that I just happened to live by complete accident in the city that originally made all the pinball machines. So I just started reaching out, trying to see if I could, first of all, find NOS stuff. Because I figured, well, if I could find manufacturers. At that time, it hadn't been so long since Williams had closed. Willie was like, well, it had just been a couple years. I figured, well, maybe they've got just stuff sitting around. I know this is really naive, but I just thought, eh, I'll call them. I ended up getting a few relationships with different companies. There wasn't a whole lot of NOS to be found, but there was parts that could be made. The problem is I would need one part, but they want to make you 1,000. Right, right. So I ended up, you know, that's back when eBay was really hot, if you remember that. And eBay was a great catalyst for my company because I don't even think I was calling it a company yet. I'm not really sure. I was a stay-at-home dad messing around on a computer. I would sell the extra parts on eBay, and I would also throw in a little information flyer about the tiny little site that I had because how is anybody ever going to find it? That really helped. So everybody who bought a little part on eBay, and people used to go to eBay all the time to buy pinball parts. It was a big place to buy them at one point. I don't think it is as much anymore, but I could be wrong. I maybe just stopped paying attention. I'm not sure. I turn to it still from time to time for very obscure things, like Atari parts, for example. Right, yeah, something that maybe someone's selling or they just have some NLS stuff that they're finally dumping or something like that. But for us, it was great because it helped get our name out there. Every time you bought a card on eBay, we'd put our little flyer in there about pinball life. And, you know, obviously at the time, I mean, the first year we were in business, I mean, I was just basically messing around. I wasn't even really taking it seriously. I was raising two kids. I was working a full-time job. My wife and I were trying to raise two kids. It got to the point, basically, you know, cut to the chase that I got busy enough that I basically was going to just shut it down because I had a full-time corporate gig. And I would do that 50 hours a week. And then I was working another 40 hours on Pinball Life. And it was, you know, that's just, you end up being productive in neither end. And I was going to shut it down. And my wife said, like, well, why don't you just quit your corporate job and do that full-time and, you know, stay home with our kids. And so I thought, well, if she's with me, that's great. So we did that for a couple years.
    13:13
    And basically by the time my wife was pregnant with her third child, I asked her if she wouldn't mind not going back to her corporate job. So then it ended up being we were kind of live without a net. And we worked out of our home. We worked out of a smaller home for four years and then moved to a bigger house with a bigger basement. That lasted a couple years. Then we bought our first small warehouse. That lasted a couple years. And then we knocked down a wall and bought a bigger warehouse right next door, and that's where we're at right now. So that pretty much brings you up to speed. And anyone who goes and visits the Pinball Life website, which we'll have a link to you in our show notes so people will be able just to click and go there, obviously there are a lot of pinball products that are available through your site. I was wondering how you organize it all. Is it sort of departmentally coded, or do you do some other method to keep it from becoming madness?
    14:14
    You know what? It's a struggle. We don't have the sort of volume that, say, like an Amazon has that has automatic pickers and everything is super computerized, every SKU is scanned. and we're never going to be a big enough volume business where that makes sense. I've looked into that sort of thing. And not only is it expensive to buy that sort of system, inventory and stock system, it's also very expensive to use it because you buy the equipment and then you still have to lease the software. Basically, it's infinity.
    14:54
    They never really sell it to you. Right, right. So, you know, what we do here is, you know, it's a pretty manual process, but we've got it down. There's thousands of parts to keep organized coming in, going out every day. I do have a full-time purchaser, receiver, and shipper in Justin here who does a great job. So, I mean, there is somebody who that is their full-time job to do that. Okay. And in terms of a customer base that buys from you, what sort of entities? Obviously, private collectors, since that's me in my limited case. It's basically broken down into three categories, and 50% of it is just direct website sales, which the majority of that is going to just end users who need a part or 10. That's about 50%. Just add your part and check out. Right. Another 25% is wholesale to resellers around the world. I think we have wholesalers in 23 different countries around the world that will ship out either large boxes or even pallets or multiple pallets of parts, too. And they resell it in their country on their online shop. And the other 25% is OEM supply. So that's making assemblies, rubber, plastic, metal parts for companies that are manufacturing pinball machines. Okay. In terms of the diverse assortment of parts that you have at Pinball Life, what are, at this stage, what are the chief means of your acquisition? You noted that you started with NOS, new old stock sourcing, but at this stage, is it mostly just having pieces manufactured for you, or do you still? Yeah, we own more tools than I can count for rubber, plastic, and metal. So we own lots and lots of tooling. Some people tend to think that there's this secret place that all the pinball parts are, and I know about it and you don't, and you have to buy it from me, which is, by and large, not the case. Just about everything, the vast majority, I will say, of everything, we are manufacturing. manufacturing so we are making the drawings submitting it to industry getting tools made running our tool and getting the getting the product made so some things that are you know you just don't really think about you take for granted i mean if you break it down something like a flipper assembly i mean you're looking at 10 12 different tools uh seven or eight different manufacturing entities to bring that whole thing together. There just isn't a place that you can just secretly go get stuff offline and that's where we get it. I wish it was that easy.
    17:49
    It definitely isn't. So our sourcing is pretty much, I mean, 90%, we're making it. Oh, okay. I had no idea it was that high of a level. I figured you must manufacture some of it. But what about people who, there are a lot of, I'll just say, hobbyists that do things like mod construction and stuff or do very niche sort of things in pinball. Do any of them have relationships with Pinball Life for having their products sold through you? Sure. Laserific sells a lot of their products through us. Bright Mods sells a lot of their products through us. Pinball Universe makes a few different things that we sell. So, and that's, I mean, Greg Ferris, he has some prints of back glasses that he sells through us.
    18:41
    Cliffy Protectors, we sell his product. Pinscore, which is not really a mod, I guess, but, you know, we sell those. And there's various other ones, too. There's a lot of people that, you know, they've just made something, and they want to source a retail outlet, I guess, is what you'd call it in the Internet sense, to sell their product. If they get a hold of me, it's usually just always just a handshake deal. As long as they want to make it, we'll make it or we'll sell it. We've been selling that laser mod for Star Trek Next Generation that Big Rubella makes for about as long as I've been in business. He's been really good. He's real consistent. The arc I usually see in people who have made one or two items and want to sell them is They're super excited at first, and they pressure you to buy the product. You get the product the next day. They're like, I don't see it on the site yet. They're like, okay, give me a minute. You know, we'll get there. Get it up on the site. Start selling it. Yeah, if we're lucky, we run out of products. We order. Yeah, they're excited. They get the next set of 25 or whatever right up to us, and then the next time I order, they say, oh, well, okay, give me a week. And then the next time, they don't answer your email for a week. and they realize that this thing that they are really excited about is just now work. Oh, yeah. It just sort of fades off into the distance a lot of times. So a lot of these mods end up having a life because people just get sick of doing it because it's exciting to make a new product and get it out there, develop it, do the research, do the testing, the QC. But when it comes to the factory work end of it, you know, sitting there in your kitchen putting them together, you know, three nights a week. Right. And it's not a living, you know what I mean? So you get people that are, you know, a lot of times that sort of dies off. But, yeah, I'm always open to selling other people's product. I think it's like, why not? I mean, if someone else does all the work and they want me to sell it, I will definitely do it. Yeah, and I have noticed, I guess that's why a lot of those mods that I've just seen out and about over time are usually eventually unavailable after a relatively short period. Creation is fun. Construction is not. Well, when it comes from a hobbyist sense, I mean, you know, a lot of those people, they stop doing it because they get out of the hobby. Oh, sure. The average life of a hobby is about three years. So, you know, a guy can get into a hobby and be really into it and want to do all these things. And then, you know, he finds the next hobby or he just loses interest for whatever reason. And then he's not going to want to keep doing that. Now it's really work, you know. So, yeah, you'll see, like, you know, mods that were available. And they go, yeah, it was available, like, five years ago. I don't know what happened. It's like, well, the guy moved on. It wasn't his business. So in regards to most parts, moving back towards especially these items that you're making on your end for sale, what should someone do if there's something, say, out of stock, so to speak? Do they contact you? I mean, what's the best course of action? You could never see it out of stock on our site unless it's a modifier for a color. So take something like a Star Post where there's like, I don't know, 13 different colors. It may run out of red at some point, and I'll put on the website, red is out of stock, and I try to have an ETA of when we think it's going to be back in. Otherwise, other products, if I'm out of stock, it's not on the site. I hate going to sites that have every third thing is out of stock. It's kind of like walking into a Walmart and the shelves are half empty.
    22:21
    If I'm out of stock, I take it off the site. We have another word for backorder here at Pinball Life, and that word is mistake.
    22:32
    It's like, we told you we had it, but we don't. It's a mistake. So, I mean, we really try to avoid those mistakes, so I really try to avoid backorders. And I'm not saying it never happens because it does now and again, but percentage-wise it is insanely small. I try to fill every order. And if I can't, if I don't have the part, I pull it off the site. And I don't leave it up there as out of stock. And some people disagree with that because they want it there for reference. But I just think it makes the site look messy, so I take it down.
    23:05
    In terms of categorically, what would you say is the most popular item that gets ordered? Like, for my part, I know I buy more rubber rings from you than anything because they wear out.
    23:16
    Well, the product that probably stands out the most that I would say actually is building in sales over the years would be the Pengolt drink holders that we have. I mean, that's kind of like the perfect mod that goes on every game. Oh, you didn't even think about it. but every location, place around here in the Kansas City area has those on their pins that I can think of. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, they've been great sellers for us. It's a great product. It's a commercial product, you know. So, you know, for a commercial machine, it can stand up to commercial use.
    23:54
    It's, you know, a no-brainer in your house. We've actually just retooled that whole thing and made it removable just by your hands. So if you want to get in between your machines, you can just pop it off and pop it back on. So we've actually, a friend of mine always says, if you don't antiquate yourself, someone will do it for you. So we've actually got a new version of that that we're selling now. We sell the old version, too, where people want everything to be the same. But that's the product really for me that stands out as something that has sold consistently. And actually, the more they get out there, the more we sell. The more people see them, the more people want them and want to buy them. Oh, yeah. They get used a lot. Every time I'm out to one of the barcades, they're very convenient.
    24:41
    And I would say for other things, I mean, mainly it's consumables. I mean, it's the things that get replaced even in home use. You know, that's like something as silly as leg levelers. They go bad in home use. You know, they're down there on the floor, no matter what floor it's on. People get a new game, they like to put on nice, fresh leg levelers, you know. And then there's people who throw out their pinballs every year, whether they need to or not, which I can't talk them out of it, but they do it. So, of course, there's something like that that you're just selling tens of thousands of a year. Because I've seen conflicting statements on that. Let me ask you, what would your recommendation be in terms of pinball replacement?
    25:24
    Replace them when they need to be replaced. It's common sense. So just check for pinball? Don't replace them because it's January 1st. I don't understand that.
    25:34
    It's not a battery that might leak sometime through the year. That kind of makes a little more sense to me. But a ball is either, you know, good or it isn't. Most people also don't realize that the play field is way less smooth than the ball. So it's really the play field's fault, not really the ball's fault. Now, I'm not saying play your pinball machine with rusty balls or anything like that. But I look at, you know, when I'm playing, when a game, I'm somewhat aware of what the balls look like. If it looks like they're starting to get a little beat up, I replace them. But, you know, I've met people who replace the pinballs every three months in home use. And that means you're getting what? About, you know, 20 games and you replace the ball? Hey, I'll sell them to you, you know. Yeah, it's just, you know, going on the pinball forums, I see the people, they say, They replace the balls every year, wax the table every month. It's just they have a system. I'll tell you how operators, which I'm not going to say it's right, but it's kind of a funny story.
    26:37
    Years ago, there was a place called A.H. Amuse, but there are pretty big operators around here. I got to know one of the head guys over there at one point. And I was, you know, trying to sell him some pinballs. I asked him, like, oh, who do you get your pinballs from? He goes, oh, I don't know. I'm like, I'd like to quote you. And he goes, look, we've been in business since 1940. My dad started this company.
    27:01
    So, you know, we've been in business for 70 years. I think we've bought about 40 pinballs in 70 years. He said, you know when we replace a pinball? And I said, no. And he goes, when we can't find it.
    27:22
    So there's one end of the spectrum, and the other end of the spectrum is like change it every three plays. So my answer is I'm going in between. Find your happy medium. But I guarantee you there's lots of pinballs that get thrown away that are perfectly fine.
    27:39
    That's interesting. Speaking of, I guess, interesting stories, I was wondering, obviously, aside from my questions here, which we can say no comment on, what are the dumbest questions you've received from customers? Well, I had one guy ask me what the name of the ball was that the machine used.
    28:00
    Okay, okay. I hope he was new to the hobby. And I had one guy call me who said, do you have a rubber kit for my game? And I said, I don't know. What game do you have? And he said, I don't know.
    28:16
    So the chances of success in that phone call were slight. It's impossible to know for sure, I suppose. And I had a person, last one, who had called me and said, wanted to know if we did repair. And I said, no, we don't do repair. I can send you the name of a repair person, but we don't actually do repair ourselves. And she said, okay, well, give me the name of that repair person because I'm not going through that coin door and changing that light out myself. Just a burnt bulb was her issue? A burnt bulb, but she had no idea that you could take the glass off. Okay, yeah. he was going to crawl inside the machine and do it. Wow. Well, I guess if she was thin enough, I'd get my head stuck in one of those things.
    29:00
    I just have one final question, not really related to pinball life, but I was talking with Don, formerly of the Pinball Podcast, and he is familiar with the Scorgasm Master project, and he wanted a follow-up on that. And so I wondered if maybe you could explain what that is, and then, I guess, give an update. Yeah, sure. It's probably been close to three years ago now. Me and Andrew Barney kind of started this thing. Andrew Barney of APP Enterprise, the wines and coils for pinball machines. But we've been buddies for as long as I've been in the hobby, so 15, 16, 17 years. And we had always wanted, as a bucket list thing, to make our own game, which a lot of people have. But being that I'm in the parts business, I certainly don't want a conflict of interest. I'm not a pinball machine manufacturer. I have no interest in being a pinball machine manufacturer. So we thought, well, let's just do something really crazy. Like, what's nobody making that nobody cares about? It's like, oh, bagatelle machines, which, as far as I can tell, were not even called bagatelle machines back in the day. They were called pin games. And so we started kind of looking around at this and looking at some different machines, and a friend of ours, Yancey Blaylock, had just bought a bagatelle from none other than John Papaduke. and we were playing it and having fun. It was a great dollar game. So we started looking into that game, and it was like, oh, it was actually Harry Williams' second design ever, before he even had Williams. He was just designing stuff and selling it to companies. Okay. And so we learned this. We're like, oh, yeah, because it was a really cool layout. It had kind of neat ball function, a couple coils that moved the ball around in particular ways for different bonusing and scoring strategies. So we were having a lot of fun. And so we said, well, hey, I think we were drinking a few beers after our expo open house three years ago. So you know what? I'm going to make it. Just for fun, I'm going to make it. So we decided we'd do a run of 30. And I don't know where that numbers number came from. We just said 30. I wish we had never had those beers, honestly.
    31:16
    You know, we soon realized that bagatelle machines, or pin games as it were, they don't really have anything in common with pinball parts. I mean, everything was different. I mean, the ball size is different, so everything's different. And we realized the machine really hadn't been designed that well mechanically, we needed to redesign it to get it to work really reliably, which took a lot of work And basically what we would do there was basically about seven of us seven or eight of us and we all had our own full gigs And after work a couple times a week we would get together and we brainstorm on this and we'd work on getting the prototypes made and, you know, just work on all the – you would be surprised. It seems like such a simple thing, but it was like – actually, it's very complicated. I mean, you know, we had to get – the originals were obviously weren't even – they were just powered with a battery. But this, you know, we were adding music, we were adding call-out sounds, and so we got, you know, for the music, actually, we got Scott Denisey involved, who now is doing Total Nuclear Annihilation and doing all the music for that, too. But the first game he did music for was actually Scorgasm. So we just worked on it, and, I don't know, by six months later, we had a few games done, and we took them up to MGC and sold them there. and then just by word of mouth, I'd sell one here and sell one here and sell one here. Distributor in Europe heard about it and took a few. I never actually did have it for sale anywhere ever. It was never advertised on our website. There was no place you could go find it. If you look now, you try to buy one, you can't. People think that they're gone. I actually have, I think, four of them, but I don't know. I guess I like walking by them and owning them because I guess they'd be for sale if somebody offered me enough money. But basically, I got down to about four left, and the collector side of me kicked in. And I was like, I'm keeping these. So that's what happened. We sort of did a full cycle on it. And I had lost money. Not a lot, but a little. And all the work was free. All the guys, actually, we do have a little work left. Everybody that helped was going to get a free machine, okay, at the end.
    33:35
    Well, everybody is so burnt out on working on it. We have the machines for us, and that would be mine that I'm actually going to, the number one machine that was going to be mine, one of the ones that's boxed. We're so burnt out on it. We have about 40 to 60 total man hours left on this to finish our own machines for us. Right. And nobody wants to do it. So eventually we're going to get that done and close the books officially. But it was really just, it turned out really well. I mean, we got John Yousey did the art for it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it turned out really, really nice. I mean, you know, it's engineered well, plays well, it's fun. It's, you know, it's really, really an old style of game. but we brought a bunch of modern components to it when we made it. I'm super proud of it, although I never had any illusion that, you know, we were going to actually go into manufacture of this because, well, first of all, once you manufacture full machines, it's not fun.
    34:44
    I don't know how so many people in this world just walk by a pinball machine and think it's going to be easy to make and then start a company because it's very difficult. I was going to say, I have seen on the site for it, and I'll show a link to this as well, where you went open source with a lot of the documentation. People can 3D print their replacement parts. And we put a little blog up, just sort of the kind of journey that we went through to get it to MGC. I think the blog is still up. I haven't even checked. Yeah, at least day1pinball.com has information all about it. Yeah, yeah, it's all still there. But, yeah, it's very open source. You can change all the music in it if you want, whatever you want to do. And throw out Scott's music? I don't know. You might get judged for that.
    35:33
    Just saying. At this point. Back then, nobody cared. They'll care now. Just let them 3D print a good subwoofer for it, and it'll be good. The sound on it is incredible. The machine was small enough that it kind of made its own little speaker box.
    35:52
    I mean, all of us were kind of blown away when we put just a normal 8-inch speaker in that thing. It had two little tweeter speakers as well up on a little mini head that we made. We were just blown away how good it sounded. I mean, that was one of the big surprises. That wasn't even really a major thing for us, like, oh, we've got to make this thing sound great. But, like, it ended up just sounding awesome. Cool. And, of course, you know, Scott's original material is good, so that doesn't hurt either. Yeah. All right. Well, that's all the questions I had for you, Terry. All right. And unless you have anything for me, I'll leave you to it. I'm all good. Thanks for calling. All right. Thanks for talking to me. Well, my thanks again to Terry for participating in the interview and telling us about pinball life. I appreciate it. So now we move to the sad topic on pinball. This was breaking news as of yesterday. Dawn actually was the first I'd heard it from, but it turns out that a search warrant was issued, and John Trudeau, a famed pinball designer currently employed by Stern Pinball, who worked on games such as Ghostbusters, Judge Dredd, Silver Slugger, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, he was arrested on a couple of charges for child pornography. so I'll have a link to a news article that summarizes that sort of issuing of a search warrant and the arrest in the show notes note that this has not gone to trial yet, this is not a conviction this is an arrest and a warrant that was served so it's all alleged but obviously it's quite an issue and one I'm not aware of ever really coming up with the pinball community before I'd say, just to start off with, obviously the number one issue is if the allegations are true, it would be justice for the victims. But since we're a hobbyist podcast, we're going to focus in on the impact that this might have on the hobby, to which I'm going to say I think there's two primary issues. One will be whether or not this has any impact on Stern Pinball and the release of the next game that Trudeau was working on. Ghostbusters was his latest pin, So I think the ongoing assumption is either the next pin to follow Star Wars or the one just after that should be a Trudeau pin. And I think the secondary topic that we can talk about is whether or not these allegations, and if it does actually end up going into conviction, will have an impact on the popularity, availability, pricing of the games that he is a designer on from the past. So the floor is open. I'm trying to know where to start. Yeah, this is a really tough start. This is a tough one to hit. At first I thought it was a joke because I hadn't heard of the website that I saw the link on. So I started researching the website, and it seems to be a legit site. And then there was a press release from the sheriff's department, I believe.
    38:49
    They kind of followed it up. I saw that on the sheriff's or the police department's Facebook page. had a very detailed, legalese-style explanation of the warrant issuance and that sort of thing. So to my knowledge, there's no suspicion at this point that the arrest isn't legitimate and that this wasn't actually some sort of bust.
    39:14
    Yeah, I think with these type of cases, they don't just post stuff willy-nilly unless they have a pretty solid arrest. yeah you want it to not be true you want to give them the benefit of the doubt and what not but in the end the police found something and there are victims on that material and hopefully they can yeah find justice like you said that would be the main concern as far as how it affects the hobby I saw a lot of people putting the games up for sale I think they're in my opinion there is some separation between the art and the artist and the dozens of people that worked on the games and it's kind of like people aren't burning their Ferris Bueller DVDs when Jeffrey Jones was arrested or Roman Polanski people still support his films I'm not trying to justify it at all but it's not just a one man sin that was committed to damage these items.
    40:23
    I think it's possible to separate something from the creator. I mean, case in point, I love the book Ender's Game, but the author is kind of a monster in his views on people and stuff. But I still think it's one of the, it's still a great book. I can separate those two items. And I think this might be a situation where it ends up with some people can do that and some people can't.
    40:55
    Yeah, I could see it splitting a variety of ways. Obviously, there is a pin-side thread that's ongoing. I'm not caught up with it. Some people are expressing what you, Tony, and Don are saying about separating the art from the artist, the machine from the artist. in some ways it's a little more I suppose complicated or easier I guess depending on how you think of it in the case of a pinball machine because these are collaborative projects involving a multitude of people versus say a musician who could probably claim almost sole credit for a created piece, depending of course, but on the flip side there are some that are just like, it makes them uncomfortable we're saying they're uncomfortable to play their Ghostbusters or the Creature of the Black Lagoon just with the allegations out there. And so obviously that's going to be a challenge for folks. I think longer term, I don't think if people are imagining that there's going to be a huge Trudeau design backlash and that prices are going to tumble on his games because so many people are going to try and dump them, I don't think you're going to see anything like that. I think there may be a short-term blip here where some people who are really uncomfortable, who don't want anything associated with someone who might be associated with child pornography, be it production, distribution. I don't know what exactly the allegations are other than possession at this point, but they just don't want anything to do with that. They'll probably try and unload. I don't think they're going to have to cut their prices to get rid of those machines. I think there are enough people that will be able to distinguish and say, no, I don't think of it. A lot of people don't even think necessarily, oh, Creature, yeah, that's that great Trudeau game. They'll probably just think, that's an awesome Williams game I love, and they'll just buy it without a second thought. So I don't think it's going to have a big impact on the used side of things. Now, what happens with him and Stern, I don't know. I mean, at the very least, I can imagine the newly hired Zach Sharp might have to market the Trudeau pen in a very different way than perhaps they planned to. Well, if he's got something in the can, I could see them making a small change to it, sort of like Steve Ritchie I know Steve Ritchie and George Wilma went in and made little changes to Pappadoat Games or whatever they make enough tweaks that say oh it's a collaborative effort and it's not his design at this point even CSI now it's known as like a Pat Lawler design but it was changed so many times I could see them, Stern just, oh no the game's been redesigned, his project is no longer being used and as far as Ghostbusters, I'm guessing they'll just keep rolling with it as far as production. I don't see them stopping. Yeah. I'm curious to see if they'll make a press release or what they'll say about the whole issue. Yeah, I'm going to guess they're going to stay silent at least until conviction time rolls around. I mean, if the case is dismissed or, honestly, if it's not going to be dismissed, I wouldn't be wholly surprised if there's a plea.
    44:03
    And based off of whatever those penalties that are agreed to, CERN may be able to say, okay, it doesn't look bad enough that we can still keep him. Or maybe if it's anything at all, given that the category is child pornography, they might just have to cut ties and say we've got to get rid of him just because the hobby is too niche. Too many people know the designers, and we would never have an easy time marketing a design from someone like that. Whereas Ghostbusters, I think we're past the marketing stage. Obviously, it's in production and will still be in production for probably at least the next two and a half years. But it's, you know, the ship's kind of sailed on that one. They've already done all the marketing. Now all the marketing is Star Wars. So, but you bring up a good point, Don, about the nice thing for Stern at this current juncture is we don't know what the next pin Trudeau was working on is. The rumor mill is he had Iron Maiden, but the rumor mill also is that he had Guardians of the Galaxy 2. And so even if those two things are true, we don't know if, I mean, everyone's thinking Trudeau would be next because we just got Richie and we had Borg before that. But we don't know when Elwin's fallen into the lineup of the four developer cycle that they're using, assuming that, you know, Gomez and his Batman 66 was just a one-off.
    45:27
    So, you know, people won't really know for sure, especially if they did do some tweaks and say, okay, well, it's a Borg design now. Iron Man's a Borg game. And we who follow the hobby might go and say, okay, Borg just had Aerosmith. We know he didn't put this game out by himself. But it'll still be his name as lead designer on it, so to speak. Or they could do, if too much was out there or it was too risky, they'd pull an American Pinball and say, okay, well, we're still going to do a Houdini theme. But, you know, Jay pops out, Balser's in, everything's redesigned. Yeah, I could see that happening And you said something about Maybe Stern not Having enough evidence to get rid of him I would guess Unless he's totally 100% cleared He's gone If he is completely cleared He might be gone just for Because of the image issue The stigma, yeah Maybe Let me clarify a little bit In the sense that I imagine Unless the charges are dismissed Stern would end up getting rid of him because of the fact that it's child pornography. The reason I'm hedging is that he might get a plea bargain offer where he doesn't have to do jail time, for example. If he's not... Because I don't know the details of the distribution. If they don't think he's producing, though, and isn't directly victimizing, they might be more lenient. I don't know how these cases work. So because my guess is that they served a warrant. The suspicion is not that he downloaded a couple of illicit images, but rather that he'd probably be fairly deep involved in some sort of distribution system. I don't know. So two counts of possession. I don't know what that means.
    47:19
    And from as narrow as I as narrow as I could understand that it could be as specific as saying, I mean, some people see that and they go, oh, does that mean he had two underage images? it could mean that there were two different computers with material on it. Yeah, I would guess if you're part of a sting, it doesn't mean you don't just have one image somewhere. Right, and so from what I had read, with what little research I was able to do before we went to air on it, a lot of times the charges will be categorical, and they don't tend to do it image by image, or not at least on the initial charging, but if they need to start, They might try and use that as a plea bargain tool, and if there's the insistence of going to trial, then they might say, okay, we're going to do a count for every single image now. Because a lot of times they just use enough that would be able to get them life, and then they don't need to worry about the rest of it. They'll have the stuff where they have the really solid evidence chain. because from what I could find out a lot of times on the investigations, they try very, very hard not only to show the possession, which in a way is the easy part once you've gotten the warrant and actually have the computer, but to show that this person meant to download this. They're not out to try and get people who went to a standard adult pornography site which inadvertently put up a 17-year-old model who lied about their age. That's not what this is about. No, that would be on the site, right? Right. I'd be on the site. That's not the you know, this is a case. And from what I could tell in most of the child pornography cases, it's either that it's a sting where they pretend that they are a peddler and people go to them. And you're actually trying to make the arrangement with the police directly like a drug buy.
    49:03
    Or they are able to gain access onto like a peer to peer system where there are known child pornography distribution. They know which files have the child pornography, and they're able to track it. They track the IPs, and then they get enough evidence to show, well, did they have an open Wi-Fi? No. Was there anyone else using the computers? No. Do we have enough now for the warrant? And they go in with a warrant, and then, oh, you saved copies? This doesn't look good, especially if it's a few thousand. I mean. Yeah, this is. I mean. I'm getting kind of grossed out, but I don't know. It's hard to even think about.
    49:41
    Yeah. It's so strange because these designers, by a lot of people, are often idolized. I mean, Judge Correa is a part of our body. Yeah, it's our hobby. And we talk to a lot of these people. So, I mean, you go to a show and you can meet John. You see Steve Ritchie at Texas Pinball Festival. You see almost all of them except J-Pop around at various places. Yeah, the blip is going to be in our hobby for sure. I don't think, you know, you put Creature up on Craigslist, somebody who just remembers the game won't have a problem buying it. But, you know, the pinball collectors might have a second,
    50:24
    at least for a little while, might have a second thought about it. Yeah, and it depends on the collector. I mean, for example, there are, I know there are the people we play with locally at the competitive level who are very good competitive players, many of which have at least a few machines. A lot of them aren't really familiar with the designers.
    50:42
    That's interesting. I've noticed. I was talking to one of our better players last year, and we were playing World Poker Tour, and I said, yeah, I think it's a really different layout for Steve Ritchie. He's like, this is a Steve Ritchie design? Really? I thought he always just did stuff that was like Star Trek. It's like, no, it's a Steve Ritchie. I'm pretty sure. but yeah sometimes they don't know and sometimes they do because the closest thing we have to a legendary designer scandal before this was obviously J-Pop but that wasn't financial that was a financial bad business dealing we didn't see his games tumble in price his old games but definitely people are not interested in whatever he's doing from here on out it might be kind of a similar thing by and large By and large, that's right, though. I still, on occasion, I tell you, Pinside is a dark place, and I see people still hoping that somehow J-Pop can be rehabilitated and make them some new magic-themed game.
    51:45
    And I'm just... I'd love for that to be true, but he just destroyed too many lives, basically. Yeah, I don't see how you give him a chance to come back from that. No, no. Because he didn't try and make it right, so... He wants to crank stuff out for free, by all means, but nobody's giving him money, and nobody's buying his product again.
    52:04
    Okay. Well, that was dark. It's very unfortunate for the hobby, but we'll keep our eyes on, you know, what happens with the court casing and stuff and continue to report on that, but it does not look good for Mr. Trudeau.
    52:19
    All right. One more pinball segment. This one will be more theoretical and thus happier than our prior topic, which was only tangentially related to pinball, and that is a follow-up on our segment from our last episode, episode 41, which was, is pinball too expensive? I guess before I go into it, Don, is pinball too expensive? Yes. Okay. Thank you, Don. Okay. We had an email from Anthony S., and I'm going to read most of his email because it raises a couple of points that I think are going to be worth addressing. It's going to be carved up by two manufacturers that we didn't touch on in that segment, one of which I don't think other than maybe in the most passing of ways have we ever mentioned on this show specifically. But here's what the email said. Hi, Dennis. I found myself yelling at my Bluetooth speaker during your latest episode as you discussed the question, is pinball too expensive? Because you almost, but not quite, touched on something that I had been thinking about for a while. You finished the discussion by saying you felt that pinball prices are unlikely to decrease anytime soon and that the only way that prices would fall is if one of the already established manufacturers expanded their operations to offer a less complex and cheaper line of machines. However, I think we're about to see a major shift in the industry as products from two new companies come to the market. Although these two companies will mount the first significant challenge to Stern's low-cost pro model, they will do this in completely different ways. The first of these companies is HomePin. HomePin, as you know, is a new pinball manufacturer based in China and run by Australian Mike Kalinowski, an engineer who has very strong convictions with regards to pinball. He has set out to make high-quality traditional pinball machines based on serviceable embedded control systems. He believes that pinball gameplay should be based on physical, mechanical action instead of LCD displays. HomePin is well-positioned to compete with Stern at the lower-priced end of the pinball market because of a number of factors. Number one, they have spent the last three years preparing and tooling up to manufacture pinball parts and make almost everything required to build a pinball machine in-house, from plastic posts to circuit boards and pinball cabinets. They do this to a far greater degree than even a well-established company like Stern. Two, located in the electronics and manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, they have low labor and operating costs. They also have ready access to a range of low-cost parts manufacturers and suppliers for any generic items like screws and capacitors, which they do not make themselves. Three, they have a steady income stream from their already established production of pinball boards and arcade machines and are therefore more financially secure than some other boutique manufacturers. These factors will allow HomePen to offer pinball machines at prices lower than Stern's Pro model, with their first game set to sell for around $5,000 US.
    55:08
    HomePin, however, have up until now mostly flown under the radar. This is because Mike's somewhat prickly character has meant that he has received a less-than-warm welcome on Pinside, and also because the theme of their first game is relatively unknown outside of the United Kingdom and Australia. They are currently building two prototype machines, which will be revealed at a pinball show in Australia in early October. The second company I believe is poised to shake up pinball prices is the Texas-based pinball company Multimorphic, headed up by Jerry Sellenberg. This company is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the uber-traditional Home Pin, but has also been largely ignored by the pinball community. In Multimorphic's case, it seems that this is primarily because their innovative approach is too extreme for many traditional pinball enthusiasts. This company has created a unique pinball platform which allows users to play a theoretically infinite number of different pinball layouts and games on the one physical machine. This means that once a customer has invested at the initial platform price, at the initial platform at a price at around the cost of a Stern LE or Jersey Jack machine. Additional gains will be significantly cheaper than anything else available at the moment. New gains are expected to cost between $1,500 and $3,500 US. Like HomePen, Multimorphic has an established revenue stream. They sell pinball control systems for custom pinball machine developers and should have received a boost recently because of the success of the spooky pinball game Total Nuclear Annihilation, which uses Multimorphic's P-Rock control boards. Multi-morphics P3 machines are already slipping and should be ramping up production over the coming months. While it remains to be seen whether these two companies can gain a foothold in the market, they represent two very different new options at the lower end, which up until now has been solely occupied by Stern's pro model. Exciting times indeed. Regards, Anthony. So, very long, but I wanted to get into that because I don't think we've ever, other than I noted in passing, talked about HomePen. So I guess let's go ahead and start off with that and this argument that HomePen is in a decent position. That seems to be Anthony's, you know, that's his argument, that HomePen is in a decent position to compete against Stern at the cheap pro price point.
    57:19
    I always forget about HomePen. People bring it up, people mention it, and all I ever remember is that there is a Chinese manufacturer building up to pinball. I think if anybody's got a chance to do it They probably do, they're in the right place They've got the right The short What's the word I'm looking for The short line for parts and everything And everything's low cost It could be built cheaper But I don't know It's all going to be based upon the game And I think that's going to be the real answer It's got to be a game that sells big enough That people are going to remember them and pick it up and allow there to be a game two and then a game three.
    58:04
    Yeah, the theme, Thunderbirds, is not going to fly over here, so the gameplay has to be rock solid. If it plays really well, maybe they'll get some traction and people will be interested in the next game. But I don't see, if people aren't popping on Jetsons, people aren't going to pop on Thunderbirds. Yeah. I mean, I've got a couple friends from the UK. They love Thunderbirds. They grew up with that stuff. But this is, yeah, for us over here, I remember it as a campy thing that I think I saw something once or twice. I think all of my memories of it come from stuff referencing it because I don't think I've ever actually seen a full episode. It's just not in the American lexicon. The UK market's way smaller for pinball. I mean, America's kind of the big fish, and then you got Australia's probably up there too. and then Europe. And if it's just the UK, it might be kind of a slow seller in that area besides the UK. I mean, in Europe besides the UK.
    59:05
    But I do like the idea. If you can keep the price low, the price of Thunderbirds is $5,432.10, I think. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Oh, how clever. Yeah. So, I mean, that's not a bad price. It's a little bit more than a Stern Pro, though. Yeah. I mean, is that with shipping on the Thunderbird? I doubt it. Yeah, I doubt it. Yeah. Star Wars, I think, most distributors at this point that I've been hearing are around $5,300 two-year door. Yeah. So sort of $5,200 to $5,400. Those numbers vary based off of which game, because I think Star Wars is going for about $100 more than Aerosmith is. So, yeah, it's still higher. and is that price fueling is that price low because it's their first game kind of like Wizard of Oz started at $6,500 or is it high because it's their first game and they had to build a factory we don't know what the pricing on the second game would be if you can keep it sub $5,000 that puts them in a good spot I think Spooky being sub $6,000 is kind of one of their banners and one of the reasons people are interested in their games is they go oh it's not going to go over $6,000, and that's cheap somehow for a pinball machine. And Spooky does a lot of stuff in-house, too, so I'm not getting screws or anything, but doing their playfield art and cabinets and whatnot, that's not something to sneeze at.
    60:33
    Yeah, I think it depends on a number of things. What you, Don, and Tony have both talked about, the theme of the first game is it's not the right choice if you want to target America. My sense of Australia is there may be actual higher per capita level of pinball collectors, like how many pinball collectors per thousand in population. They may actually have a higher per capita level, but they have less total numbers overall because they have such a smaller population. So I get it because he's an Australian manufacturer based in China that he would want to do something that would appeal broadly to Australia. But I do wonder about the numbers if this is going to be... I mean, it really comes down to future themes. In an ideal world, I would have said, do Thunderbirds or go for your UK and Australia markets and then go and work out a deal with Trey Parker and do Team America for the US because it's the art style. I mean, that's what I know Thunderbirds from is when Team America was coming out, people were like, oh, it looks like that old show Thunderbirds. It's like, I don't know what Thunderbirds is. I've seen some clips. I don't even think I've ever seen an episode.
    61:48
    But, yeah, I could see the argument that they might be well-positioned, though, to compete on pricing. I think that part's very true. The fact that they're doing the manufacturing is – the obvious argument there is Chinese labor is cheaper than American labor would be or Australian labor or European labor. So you could get cost savings on the manufacturing side. But I think the big question setting aside the theme issue that we have with Thunderbirds for a broad market penetration would be how many machines can HomePen produce in a month? I have no idea. The quality concerns. Some people are just they're just going to stereotype by default that China is going to have an inferior product. There's no practical reason to think that that's going to be the case. There are plenty of things manufactured in China with excellent quality. and so that's going to come down mostly to Mike's choices in terms of his quality of parts and then also the training of his workforce, which I know has to be a hurdle because they've never built pinball machines before. But that's a hurdle that almost all the manufacturers have had to face and some of which have tripped over that hurdle.
    62:55
    Did you guys see the flyer that came out this week for Thunderbirds? I did, yes. I did not. It's a picture of the cabinet and then the flip side is just a list of really basic pinball bullet points. Like real pinball action, real mechanical action, that kind of thing. Doesn't really... I don't know why they made it out. Real pinball action! Yeah, if they're unveiling the game in six weeks, I don't know why they put the flyer out now.
    63:23
    Underwhelming. Mike had played really close to the vest I feel on Thunderbirds I actually thought about contacting him but I always assumed he be more comfortable going on an Australian podcast when he ready to do a discussion about the game itself And I do like that he hasn't fallen into that highway pinball trap or Dutch pinball trap where they just started announcing stuff and then there was delay after delay after delay, and that's just plagued so many of the boutiques. Honestly, besides Spooky, it's plagued pretty much all of them.
    63:54
    Yeah, I respect that. So yeah, I respect that as well. So I guess in terms of Anthony S.'s query or supposition, I would say yes, I think HomePin could be in an excellent position to compete with Stern on price. For me, it's a question of output volume, and secondarily, it's going to be about what themes they go with. I get that a lot of collectors, they just go gaga over wanting unlicensed themes. but dialed in isn't good because it's an unlicensed theme. It's good because it plays good but it would undoubtedly sell better if it was licensed to something.
    64:32
    It's just not the move to make. This obviously shows that HomePen is interested in licenses. They just aren't so far showing they're interested in American licenses.
    64:43
    Even then, Multimorphic, their Lexi Lightspeed, I'm more interested in that theme than Thunderbirds. because it's something new and looks cool.
    64:53
    And I've actually had a chance to try it. I mean, not the latest iteration. So let's transition over to the multimorphic argument about multimorphic competing with the lower price point because I'm more skeptical of this claim personally, even though I think the multimorphic platform is really interesting. I don't view it in the same way that Anthony's viewed it in his submission, but I want to hear your guys' thoughts.
    65:19
    I think the price makes sense when you get into, like, game three or so, because they're $10,000. That's the price of two Sturm Pros right there for just one game. And then you add on a second game, you're up to, let's say, $12,000. So you're still kind of up there. Once you get into game three, game four, if they're things you're interested in, then it starts making more sense. And I think they're pretty open with letting people program their own stuff. So I could see if people want to homebrew and kind of get one and then build their own games and maybe license some of those, then maybe we could see a rush of several different designs in a couple years. But $10,000 is still a big buy-in. It's kind of like video game designers aren't like dev kits like $10,000 or more.
    66:09
    I've heard all sorts of things about how the dev kit things work. Yeah. I don't even know if they always have to buy them. And sometimes the manufacturer, like a console manufacturer, might go to some of the big ones and say, we want you on our platform. The big ones, sure. I'm talking like a homebrew guy buys a dev kit.
    66:28
    He still has to make something and then sell it down the line for it to be worth spending that money. This might be the same kind of thing.
    66:36
    Yeah, I can definitely see. I like the system well enough. But at $10,000 just for one game and a couple other things, it's not nearly as huge. It's not a big savings until you're, like you said, you get game three, game four thrown in. And then it starts becoming something realistic. And then it comes to how many different bits of exchangeable hardware need to be picked up to make the adjustments. because I know they've got the modular sections you can change out to get different playing. So it's just a question of how much of that, how much does that cost, how much will new ones cost, how much will new games cost.
    67:20
    It looks like you can fit. Oh, sorry. No, no. I was going to say, in Anthony's email, I think that's why he listed the price range of the $1,500 to $3,000. I think the $3,000 is when you're assumed to need a new module, and 1,500 would be more if some existing module would already work and it's just a different set of rules and maybe different graphics and such. Yeah, software update. Yeah. If I remember correctly, you can fit three units underneath your cabinet. Like it's, you know, a two-by-two kind of square box, each modular unit. And the system is really cool. Like they put a lot of thought into how you work on them. I've seen it taken apart in person, and it's really neat. I wish other companies would use a lot of their ideas, or they would get the traction where they could compete with the other companies. I hope that does happen.
    68:11
    Yeah, I think that Multimorphic's module system just looked a lot better, cleaner, and more efficient from a storage perspective than Highway's proposed idea with their playfield swaps ever was. I know you could move the highway pins around a lot. I mean, it didn't take a lot. Let me rephrase that. You could take the play field in and get it all hooked up for a new game pretty quick. But it's still, where do you hold the whole play field sort of thing? Oh, it can kind of go under the machine. I get it. But for me, the issue with P3 is, well, the first one that both of you touched on was that initial price barrier, the $10,000. I think for a lot of people I mean if you're a budget minded consumer that's a lot to ask for up front especially if they're in the habit of having to save up for a pin and so I mean I'm going to use me as an example because I know exactly how my purchasing behavior works I've only ever bought one new in box game, I bought Star Trek in 2015 and how I justified being able to afford that was I had not purchased any pinball machines since 2012.
    69:23
    So if I were to go about looking at the P3 and saying, I really like it, I really want it, to justify the price point that getting into it is, I would have to wait six years without buying any pinballs. And that's a pretty long hold. And while I have the discipline to do that, I'm not sure if the reward really is worth such long-term frugality when I could buy used games. so now I'm just one person but it's an example of you need to still come up with the $10,000 another issue that Highway kind of faced as well but it's the lineup issue where some people, and again it depends on the collector I love the idea of P3 especially in small collection areas I like the idea that you can have a game and change that game out and not have to move it around and stuff but there are others who want that, they want a lineup They don't want to have to swap anything to go from Lexi Lightspeed to Cannon Lagoon. They want to take one step to the right and then play it. And obviously, if that's your obsession, this is going to be a very pricey proposition. But again, that comes down to individualized behavior because there's clearly a way around that. But if you wanted multiple P3 games, it's $10,000 each time. and then the for me the final thing though that's more of a that's a that's a minor and that has to do with people's personality but I think the bigger issue is the resale factor if I buy say a Aerosmith and I don't like it I can sell it if I buy a module for the P3 I can only sell it to someone else who already owns a P3 and that's really limiting so people who are used to buying games and then selling games to fund more game purchases can run into a problem if they're investing into the P3 architecture because currently that market is really, really small. Yeah, your game maybe only costs $1,500 or $3,000, but $3,000, other than my Star Trek, I've never paid $3,000 for a pinball game, ever. Everything has been less. And so if I buy it, I'm like, okay, well, I could probably sell it for $2,800, except I can only sell it to the 50 people with a P3. They have to already not own that and want it at the same time. So that ability for people to feel like they can get P3 items and then sell them to buy more P3 items, that can become viable, but only once there's a certain amount of market penetration, and it's not there yet. And I don't know how quickly they'll be able to get there. So that's why I don't think it drives the price down on the... I don't think it forces Stern to lower their pro pricing. Long story short. It's not a good idea to buy new in-box games to resell.
    72:15
    If there's a new game you want, wait until somebody else opens the box. I wouldn't buy them as something you're going to flip. So if you're buying modules, it's going to all go as one kit. I wouldn't drop three grand on a kit to not be sure you're going to keep it. Because you're right, it is a much smaller audience. But that's true of CERNs. Like, don't buy a new-in-box CERN if you are planning on selling it right away.
    72:39
    Right, right. The issue there is, for a lot of existing collectors, they're used to staying inside the new-in-box thing. They're used to being able to go in, okay, let's see. Oh, well, there's a used pin. I've never tried it before, but it's $2,500. I'll buy it. And if I don't like it, you know, I'll trade. I'll trade someone for something else. But they won't be able to do that with the P3 stuff because they won't know anyone else with a P3, is what I think the initial problem is. As more and more P3s get out there, that problem can go away. But I'm trying to imagine how many multimorphic P3 units can be expected to be sold in, say, the first year. When we're looking at, look at the buzz, the huge buzz around total nuclear annihilation. That thing has, it's a great, it's a, I don't know, have you ever played it, Don? No. I tried it at the Whitewood, and I really liked it. It was my favorite game of TPF this last year, but they still haven't sold 200 of them.
    73:36
    And it's doing well. You kind of hit on something I hadn't really thought about, is that if you own four games and you're tired of playing Walking Dead, so you move over and you're playing Aerosmith or whatever, if you only have room for the one game, you can't do that. And you're going to have your favorite. You know, Metallica is your favorite. Aerosmith's not, so you're going to sell Aerosmith and get something else. You can't do that with the P3. You can't sell just the one part, probably. That's not your favorite once you have it in your collection. And if you have your favorite installed all the time, you're not ever installing the other ones, you would be kind of stuck with them.
    74:12
    Especially if they get a, you know, oh, well, Cannon Lagoon, that's everybody's least favorite, so then it's going to get that stigma and then nobody wants it.
    74:21
    And that could be tricky. And if the saturation were there, and because people pick which games they want, They don't get them all from the get-go, especially as more and more of the libraries filled out. Then that wouldn't be an issue, and it could be like, oh, yeah, well, I got this, or I traded this for – okay, I'm tired of Cannon Lagoon, but they've got the training program for kids, and I've got kids, and I want them to learn to flip. Let's trade. I could see that, but you have to have a certain amount of volume. Otherwise, the likelihood of those trades is going to be next to nonexistent. So that's just – it's one of the – I mean, I don't think Multimorphic's going into this thinking about trades and stuff. But I'm just trying to look at it from the angle of that this would be pressure on Stern to actually make them think that they'd have to, for competitive reasons, lower their pro pricing. I just don't see the penetration. HomePen would have a better likelihood of having that sort of penetration because they're playing by the traditional rules. Multimorphic's rewriting all the rules as they're going along. And that's what makes it so dynamic and interesting, more interesting to watch than any of the other manufacturers. but I also think it doesn't position them to compete at the low price point in a way that actually provides competitive pressure for others to respond with price cuts of their own. No. I think, I'm going to bite my tongue a little, but Stern's got the arrogance that they're not dropping their prices anytime soon, unless the whole market starts to bottom out.
    75:46
    I think that's the only thing that would bring prices back down from Stern, yeah, or even any of the other major manufacturers. is that if sales start dropping off, prices will start coming down. But as long as they're selling at this price point, nobody's going to drop their prices. I mean, it's just like, oh, no, we're making more money. I mean, it's just like when gas went up 50 cents and it only came down a dime and everyone was happy, even though the price per barrel of gas has dropped through the floor, it only came down a dime. I mean, it's the same type of thing. They're only going to lower it as much as they absolutely have to to keep people happy. And if people are still buying them, they're just going to leave it. Yeah.
    76:30
    So we'll all just be broke. Sad. No, there's still thousands and thousands of old machines out there that are really fun. That's right. I know my first machine is going to be an old machine. There's no way I'm going to buy a new machine first in box or new in box. No. If you can get any, it's almost always a better deal. I say almost always because obviously there have been very few cases of games that have actually gone up in price. Right. And then there are some people that think that the game they bought for $4,800 is worth $5,000 because they stuck in every mod. Some of those mods are crap. I'm sorry. You need nice, shiny mods. Happy mods, not classless trash mods, people. We haven't done an episode on mods because I have only ever bought one mod, which I like. Well, which one? I bought a little, a little, a measle mod for my Star Trek. I bought the little Vengeance Explodey LED thing. It replaces a little flat plastic. So it's low-key. It's low-key. It was inexpensive. It looks nice. It's not, you know, it's not garish. Gaudy, gaudy, gaudy. So, so yeah, I like, I just like them. I like them nice. And I like them affordable too.
    77:43
    Okay. Well, you know what? We're done with pinball. So we got a ton of video game content. Holy cow, you guys. I blame both of you for this because I've only been playing one game lately and we've talked about it enough. So I think what we're going to kick off with is some major news that Tony and I both saw, though Tony has definitely caught it before me, and that's regarding Mass Effect Andromeda and the essential abandonment of single player support. So, Tony, you want to go ahead and kick us off with that one? Yeah, I caught this shortly after the announcement, and the announcement, we'll have a link to the announcement, but basically what it amounts to is they've decided that they are no longer going to support the single player. There's going to be another announcement about story-based Apex multiplayer missions coming later. But they plan on continuing to tell the stories Of the Andromeda Galaxy Through their upcoming comics and novels Including the fate of the Aquarian Ark So basically their last update Which is update 1.10 Is the final update Of Mass Effect Andromeda They're not planning any more patches So Mass Effect I mean the Mass Effect games have been huge They were massive They were even super popular Even with how terribly the third one ended and everyone was looking forward to this game, and here we are, not even five months after the release, and it's just dead. It's done.
    79:13
    It's been completely abandoned, and it's just, it's one of those things that kind of surprises me, but at the same time, you think, oh, well, it is EA, so you have to expect EA's always going to do something horrible. Have either of you played Mass Effect Andromeda? I don't know if you have or haven't. Ten minutes. I've not played Andromeda. Okay, I haven't played it either. Tony, have you played any Mass Effects? Yes. Which ones? One. Don, which ones besides Ten Minutes of Andromeda? I played one and two. I played a ton of two. Okay, and I played through one and two as well. One time each for both of them. Okay, yeah, Tony, it's odd. I mean, EA does have a habit of killing online server support on their sports games and such. It's sort of notorious. for achievement hunters, for example, those online ones often become unavailable, so it always was lamented, and EA was seen as sort of the worst offender of that. But it's sort of interesting, having not played it, but Mass Effect Andromeda, which broadly, I would say, seemed to have overall, critically, good reviews, but not good reviews compared to other Mass Effect games. Is that fair?
    80:28
    It seems to be. They had kind of a rough launch. They had some visual issues and some think issues on their launch, too. I do still. I admit. I am one of those people who still calls it Mass Effect Clayface. I don't ever call it Andromeda, except professionally when we're recording. It's Mass Effect Clayface.
    80:50
    That stuff doesn't bother me. But that tank, Assassin's Creed Unity, they couldn't get it out of the gate because those type of videos are popping up with the bad animations. Well that's the thing Yeah and that's one of those things That makes you wonder how much Is That kind of video and that kind of Review and like The streamers and the People on Twitch and YouTube That play stuff and how big of an effect Are they having on stuff like this at this point I mean I know there's a lot Of games that I've only purchased Because of watching somebody play it Or watching somebody stream it that I would never have purchased otherwise. And there's been games that were on my list that walked away after actually watching it being played and streamed.
    81:35
    Yeah, and this one was really interesting. I don't know how much of the impact was due to the bloggers and what game changers or whatever they were calling them all at E3, ridiculous titling.
    81:48
    And I'd heard that the developers indicated that they were trying to blame EA, that EA was insisting they had to use the Frostbite engine, and the Frostbite engine wasn't designed for an RPG, and that's why things look so bad, is because it was an FPS engine, and they just couldn't, they had to keep reprogramming it, and, and I'm sure that's true to a degree for this as well, but, you know, it was a, it was EA's, one of EA's greatest franchises, and I, this doesn't, this whole thing with the single player and the abandonment is in no way surprising. They'd already announced months ago that the Montreal Studio was going to be put on support status rather than developing new games, which was, I think, a major slap across the face to them. Basically, EA saying, you have failed us as developers. And then I believe it was announced a little while ago, before this announcement regarding Andromeda, that they were rolled into another studio entirely within the EA system. So, you know, it was like they were done. They were eliminated so that EA is trying to kill off that stigma, that stench of failure on this. I imagine we won't see another Mass Effect game for at least three years. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if they go back and say it's Mass Effect 4 and they drop the whole, you know, maybe they wrap it up in their comics or whatever. But they're done with the Andromeda galaxy. This is it. If they move on with Mass Effect, it's either going back to the original setting or something brand, brand new again. I could see it getting rebooted like they did with Tomb Raider, you know, five years down the line. But I was looking at release dates, and it was released March of 2017, and that was a huge month for games. That's when the Switch came out, Zelda came out, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier Automata. Like, why? I don't understand why they stuck it in a Christmas time slot. But this year, spring has been crazy with all these huge releases. So they should have waited until June or something and then pushed out. Were they maybe relying on the Mass Effect name to power it over some of the other things? Not that I think it may be Zelda because it's bloody Zelda.
    83:58
    Yeah, I think, Tony, I lean more towards your theory that they probably thought it's Mass Effect. It will be the 800-pound gorilla. Horizon is a brand new IP, so even though it was getting great reviews from all the footage people were seeing, it still didn't have a built-in fan base near arguably a niche game.
    84:24
    Yeah, I don't have any excuse for Zelle, but let us bear in mind EA is also the same publisher that decided, hey, we just put out Battlefield 1. Let's launch Titanfall 2 two weeks later and then complain that. And then complained that it had no freaking sales. And it's like, yeah, I still don't own Titanfall 2, and I thought that looked awesome, and I liked the first Titanfall, but I was busy playing Battlefield. I wasn't going to go buy two FPSs. Yep. That was the way behind that. And they defended that. They still claimed last I heard with their shareholder meeting that that was a smart move. It's like, no, it wasn't. It's been $20 for the past six months, and it was sold at full price for a very short time, a month or two. That's right. Same kind of with Mass Effect. Mass Effect was $20 over a month ago.
    85:10
    It's not that old. Nope. It's sad. Crazy. And go play Titanfall 2, man. What are you talking about? Go play it. It's six hours long. Go rent it or something. No. I've heard it's really good. I've heard the single player is amazing. It can live on my list. It can be like a birthday or Christmas fodder thing. By then, it'll probably be $5.
    85:30
    When it hits $5, I'll pick it up for you. Play that game. No. You just got to trust. You just got to trust it. It'll eventually fall into my lap. That's what happens with these games. That's what happened with Titanfall 1 is that it finally fell to like $10. And I was like, okay, I'll try it. Actually, wow, this is really confident. I bet Activision is furious they lost the Infinity Ward crew to making Respawn. You know, now maybe I've got a feeling I just want to start going through and finding $5 games and just gifting them to you. It's like, here, you have to play this now and tell me what you think. and then just start finding weird stuff, like God Save the Queen. How do you like visual novels? We'll start getting you some visual novels.
    86:12
    Drowned dentist. New segment. This is no. This is a bad segment. We're not doing it. Instead, let's have Don. I want you to talk to us about a game I've never heard of. It's called Ironcast. So apparently I've heard of it, but that's only because I just heard of it. Heard of it today. It just came out on the Switch, but actually I bought it on the PS4 this week. It was down to like $5, and it's been on PC for over two years. $5?
    86:40
    Yeah. It's a steampunk strategy game where you have giant mechs that battle each other, but the game mechanic is a match three, so that's how you power up your weapons. You get ammo. That's how your cooling system is through match three. your speed and defense all that stuff is you get three matches per turn basically and you have to juggle maybe ten different items on your mech while doing damage and trying to take down your opponent. There's little stories like one level I went into was just a bartering segment. I was just talking to a guy about how many of this item can I trade for that item and it took a couple steps to kind of get the best deal out of them and that was the end of the level. I was really impressed with how cool it was. And it has permadeath, which is something kind of like Rogue Legacy or Neon Chrome. I'm not sure if you guys have tried those. But once you die, you're awarded tokens for how well you did. And your character is gone, yes, start from the beginning, but you can use these tokens towards permanent upgrades. So I think I just died. My campaign just ended. And I was able to use them to get more health. you start with more health than initially, or more defense, more shield power. Anyway, it's really cool. It's not the best-looking game, but it plays really well. There's a lot of thought in it, and the system for learning how the game works is you can always access the tutorial, which I love, in case you put down a game for a while and go back to it.
    88:16
    And it also doesn't slow enough that you kind of pick up each system. It would be overwhelming if they just threw you in, but it teaches you just a little bit each time and you become really confident in no time anyway yeah it's a good game I've got it on Steam and I thought from the day I got it on Steam this needs to be on phones or something portable it is a perfect portable game so I searched it sorry I searched it on the app store last night and I'm like man this has to be on mobile I'd rather play this in bed or something Yeah, that's what I thought playing it on Steam. I've got about 25 hours into it, and it is, the whole time I played it, it's like, man, this just screams to be on tablet or computer or phone or something. So at least being on the Switch, that gives you the portability that it looks like it should have. Okay, so you both would recommend then that if you own a Switch, it's probably the platform to buy it for. Yeah, on the Switch, it's either $15 or $20. It just came out last week, I think. But I'd love to have it portably. Yeah, I think portably would be the best way to play it. It's fun on the computer, but this really seems like a set-and-break type game that I'd really like to be set-and-break and just knock out a couple rounds real quick. Yeah. And I like the Match 3 games. I feel are really phone happy. They like your phone a lot. I think that's probably why there's so many of them. But I think it would be better than using the mouse even.
    90:01
    Yep. Great. Interesting. Well, speaking of interesting, I know Tony has another underwater submarine update for us regarding cold waters. I hope, Tony, that you've finally stopped destroying yourself with your own active sonar torpedoes.
    90:17
    No. Oh, God, no. If Red October behaved like you sound like you're behaving, Tony, I don't think the Americans ever would have gotten a strategic ballistic missile submarine.
    90:30
    No, yeah. I wasn't originally going to talk about this until they released the – they've got a new patch. It's still a beta patch. It hasn't gone fully live yet, but they're set up so you can play the beta patches, which brings a whole bunch of quality of life improvements about giving you more control, so you can just set a depth instead of having to watch. So if you get busy looking at something else, you don't plow into the bottom of the ocean because you weren't paying attention to how fast you were diving. You can actually set, okay, I want to be at 500 feet, and it'll level out at 500 feet, and you can set a course. Instead of having to steer yourself to the course, you can just set a course now. And they've gone through and fixed, and the voices are all really good now because the voice before wasn't the greatest.
    91:24
    But, yeah, with the difficulty moved up, it's still hard. I killed myself the other day twice. Just bad luck. I was dodging away from the torpedoes they shot at me, and I successfully evaded them, and suddenly there was another torpedo coming at me, and it was one I'd shot at them that they'd successfully evaded. So, but no, it's still being a good game. Like I said at the start of, I've cranked 30 hours into it so far. My last played it yesterday. I played it last night for like two hours, and it's still being a ton of fun, and I am going to start rereading Red October because of it. I haven't read that book since probably high school, but I've decided I'm going to reread Hunt for Red October. Do you think rereading that will give you the inspiration to then immediately go up to elite difficulty?
    92:25
    No, no, not at all. Probably not because, yeah, it's still hard. I'm actually thinking about moving up to Elite just to try it, but I'm afraid I'm very, very afraid This was coming from a man who played XCOM on Iron Man at the highest difficulty settings Yes Yeah, why don't you believe in yourself? Don believes in you Oh, fun Yeah, stream it One thing only Please We're just going to do it for charity and the stream's over All right, guys, we did our best. It was 15 minutes. Thanks for the 47 cents we raised.
    93:09
    Wow, that's not a bad rate of return for us that we were getting 47 cents every 15 minutes. Yeah. I do need to keep, I mean, I keep trying to set up, I keep attempting to stream, and I just keep having issues. I just think my home Internet might not be quite good enough to make it with everything put together. it's either that or it's the fact that my I need a second machine I think it could be that my one computer is not good enough to handle all the streaming stuff and running the games it's giving me some frame rate issues hmm yeah I don't know I don't know enough about streaming I tried to do set up a stream on pinball once and it was the processor on my system it just couldn't because it could handle it when it wasn't live but if it was trying to actually render it all on the fly. It was like 20 frames a second. Horrible. It's like playing a Sega Genesis game.
    94:09
    Easy. Sorry, I did grow up on the Nintendo side, so Sonic can just go and spin. Hey, I actually heard that Sonic Mania is actually getting good reviews. It's fine. I've been hearing really good things about it. Yeah. I didn't put on my list, but I've been playing that too. it plays just like the first couple games or it plays how you remember they should play I haven't played them side by side but it plays like you remember and it feels really good yep lovingly crafted Sonic Mania but you've been playing something else Manic Agents of Mayhem which if I've heard of it I want to think isn't that in the Saints Row universe Sean? it is yeah it took one of the alternate endings from the last Saints Row game and kind of turned it into its own game. So the idea is instead of playing as gang members, now you're playing as secret agents.
    95:04
    And it is the same universe. They redid the engine, though, so it feels totally different. Volition still made the game but it does not feel to me like I a huge Saints Row fan it does not feel very Saints Row But it looks good There 12 agents and you can have three on your team at any time After you unlock them all, you can choose whoever you want. And you can always switch between those three on the fly.
    95:30
    And everybody has different skills and whatnot and different attitudes. They record the entire game with all 12 characters. I think there's actually two DLC characters coming. So they spent a ton of time doing custom voice work, because every mission can be spoken by fully voiced actors for 14 different characters or whatever.
    95:49
    I wish I'd spent a little more time on variety of the missions. The missions are super repetitive, and that's the one thing that's kind of made it a slog. Whereas even Saints Row 2, which came out probably close to 10 years ago, there was a ton of variety. That's one of the best things about the game is there's so much variety. You can do anything. In this one, you're kind of limited. So I'm hoping they'll keep hatching quality of life improvements over time. Tony, have you played any of the Saints Row games? I haven't played Agents of Mayhem. It's on my wish list, but it hasn't happened yet. But, yeah, no, I've played Saints Row 2, 3, 4, and Get Out of Hell, plus pretty much all of the DLCs for at least 3 and 4.
    96:37
    Yeah, I played Saints Row 2, and I think I played all of the DLC with Saints Row 3. I did not play Saints Row 4, however.
    96:47
    This one feels most similar to Saints Row 4. 4 was like a superhero game. You're inside a computer, so you can do whatever you want. This one's a little bit like that. You have triple jumps. Driving is kind of crappy, and there's no map. There's no mini-map on the screen. That's one thing that really feels different. your character kind of moves too slow to just walk everywhere like Saints Row 4 you could just fly wherever you wanted right I heard about that this one you kind of have to take a car but it's real boring you're just going in a straight line for the most part and trying to hit turbo to make it make the time pass faster I feel like they could add more variety to that they could just add a lot of things you also cannot shoot while you're in a car and the only way to damage other cars is to ram into them anyway so So, that's kind of weird. It is, yeah. I think the driving in Saints Row 3 was good.
    97:41
    Yeah, all of them. It was the first game with crew control. Yeah, and 4 was good. You could just drive and shoot everybody. Yeah, and 4 was good. You just got to the point where it's like, well, why should I get a car when I can run so fast that there's a shockwave around me that's throwing cars and bodies and stuff everywhere. Right. And that was super fun, too. That was awesome. I would occasionally run around with that wings. Yeah.
    98:06
    I think it was a simple series that wanted to just be a GTA clone originally. Yeah, I've had a lot more fun with the Saints Row games than with the GTA games, and I like both. But, yeah, it just feels like it's missing something. Maybe Agents of Mayhem 2 will be what I want it to be, or maybe they'll just keep patching this until it's got a little more shine to it. It looks fine. It's just there's no variety. You're kind of doing the same type of thing over and over.
    98:35
    Which is a bummer. Well, I did not. I'll have to look more into this one then because I know I don't currently have it on any of my lists to watch for.
    98:43
    One that I've thought about putting on my list that Tony now has, because I played the second version in the series, was Sniper Elite 4. So, Tony, did you finally get a chance to put some time into it? Yeah, I've put about 15 hours into Sniper Elite 4 now. So I'm well into the game It's If you've played a Sniper Elite game It's a decent Sniper Elite game I mean it's still about what Sniper Elite's About watching Slow-mo massively Graphic kill shots and Being Rambo in World War 2 But It's been pretty good it's been a lot of fun And there's lots of Little interesting things to set up And I found myself kind of almost kind of like you do in like you would in a Hitman game, setting up stuff that is not necessarily the fastest way or even necessarily the best way to do something, but it's perhaps the most fun, where I'll find myself setting up on a spot, and I will lay traps in front of me, and then I will intentionally lure people into traps,
    99:53
    but just messing around. So it's been pretty enjoyable I know there's some DLC for it That lets you go to Germany But right now everything's in Italy And I'm pretty certain the whole game is played Through Italy So there's a nice little Different styles of architecture Than you would see in a lot of the World War II games Normally most of the World War II games Are either on the Russian front Or it's after Normandy And you're going through France and Germany And so this is kind of interesting Because you are going through Italy and Sicily and all that.
    100:28
    Don, have you ever played any of the sniper elites? Yeah, I just had to Google it because there's two of them. Two sniper games and I always get them mixed up. I have played the first two of these and a little bit of the third.
    100:41
    I don't know what other series. Is it Ghost Sniper or something? Yeah, I think it's Ghost Sniper or Sniper Ghost or something like that. Yeah, that's where I get mixed up. This is the one where it does x-rays and you hit somebody, right? Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, this was the better of the two series. Yeah, it was one of those Microsoft Games with Gold is how I got the second one. I was really surprised at how, because I normally, I don't like in multiplayer games, I hate the sniper class. Part of it is that as a console gamer, you don't have the precision with a mouse. So it's always just a little tedious to play, and they don't usually make you. But I also just hate getting headshot, so I tend to have all this rage, this anti-sniper rage. and so it's sort of like do I want to become that of which I hate but I actually yeah I thought that it was just really the x-ray stuff is cool you know I did play it on a higher setting so I did have to factor in my bullet drop and such so it was challenging so I really like that aspect I like the idea of sniper ghosts though I'm just envisioning this 50 cal gun being held by Casper just floating there maybe you're onto something Maybe with some aviator specs over his face and a cigar.
    101:56
    My problem is I just want to headshot guys. I just want to snipe. I remember, I think it was 3, where there was a lot of traversing through the level before you get there. I wasn't into any of that. I don't want to play a World War II third-person game. 2 did have you walking around a lot. There was a lot of sneaking, more than I thought there would be. 4 is the same way. It's got a lot of stuff. Half stealth game, half snipe game. sort of thing.
    102:22
    I've had a couple levels where I got bored of it and I just went out and I was just like, whatever, I'll bring everybody to me and we'll just see if I can plow through the oncoming wave of death. You're going to make Metal Gear and Splinter Cell sad with those statements.
    102:37
    Not for me. Hitman, he's sad too now. Yeah, how often do you play Hitman as a stealth game? The last two I have been trying. I've gotten better.
    102:50
    I've gotten better about it. I liked the mobile Hitman game. Oh, Hitman Go? No, not Go. Go was good. I forget what it's called. Sniper Assassin maybe or something. Oh, no, it's Hitman Sniper, I think. You're just sitting on a cliff or whatever, and you can look all over a hotel, and still all the different events will happen in different order depending on what you shoot first. So there's still a huge puzzle element, but you're not moving around. You're just shooting stuff.
    103:17
    Oh, I haven't heard of that one. I think it's free to play now It's worth checking out It's one of the biggest earning mobile games Is it Ubisoft I think Anyway I think it's Ubisoft Or no it's Square Isn't it It's all weird Square Bot got them When they acquired EDS I think And then they just recently Spun off Square didn't want him anymore. I guess the latest episode of Hitman didn't do whatever Square expected it to, and so the company is independent now, but they did get the rights to all the Hitman stuff when they left Square, which is good. Good for them. It's their one IP. It's IO Interactive. Thank you, IO. IO, okay. Yeah, one game of the year from Dram Bomb last year. It's an awesome game, and even I can tolerate the stealthing in it. So it's really fun, it's challenging. And there are different missions, and you can design your own missions in it. So if you want to make one where you're not going around everywhere and you just want to snipe people, you have a lot of flexibility on how you lay out how the mission will go. Oh, I should do that. The one where you have a shotgun and you just run around, that's the one I want to do. That's what Tony was referencing about my traditional, we call it my traditional Hitman play style. Except I usually use the M16, but with my old commando slash predator days. Just dual ballers. That's all she needs, just dual ballers and just walk in the map.
    104:52
    As long as the person you're supposed to die, it doesn't matter how many other people die. Yeah. Civilian casualties getting racked up. Yeah. It wasn't so much hitman as sociopath, but, you know, you make do with what you have. That's a catchy name, too. Yeah. That would have been my series, but I have no talent for design.
    105:12
    Speaking of talent, Don, Miracle Merchant. This sounds like the name of a guy who would be selling some magic pills in Princess Bride. It does. No, this actually reminded me of Tony because he was raving about Potion Explosion or whatever. Yep, Potion Explosion. This is not like that. This is a card game. You have four decks, and you get to lay four cards down at a time, and they create different potions. And you have a line of customers coming in, and they want different potions. Like one guy might want a blue potion. So you have to have blue in there, but then the other three ingredients, you kind of put in whatever you want. And it's an iOS game. It was supposed to be a SpongeBob hamburger-making game.
    105:56
    So instead of having dark magic, they would have, like, a tire that you have to integrate into the Scrabby Patty that you're making. But it was not picked up by Nickelodeon or whatever. So the guy just decided to release it on his own. It has great art. I think it's two bucks. and this has become the game over the past few weeks. I do a lot of mobile gaming and this is the one that I keep going back for one more game. Or if I'm standing in line somewhere, I play a quick game. Because you can, it's similar to Solitaire in that not every game is winnable.
    106:29
    Just the way the cards are dealt, you might not be able to satisfy somebody right away. And you end your game immediately and you have to try again.
    106:39
    Overcooked with cards. I wouldn't go that far. I've gone out of the box there's no multitasking there's no timer you can just kind of go at your own speed but I think it's tiny touch tails or something is the guy who made it and he's made a couple other card games card crawl and card for kind of the really big ones this is not nearly as deep as card crawl but it's really fun super polished and once usually I don't give card games the time to figure out how they work. I just want to play poker or solitaire or blackjack. But this one didn't take that long. In five minutes, I felt like, oh, I get the strategy here. And I've been playing it for weeks, and it still feels really good when I actually finish a hand and win.
    107:27
    So, worth a look, for sure. I like card-based games, so I might have to give this a look. So you're saying, if it started out as the, originally planned as a hamburger-making game for the SpongeBob, so it's kind of like those I know my wife and kids, they like to play those cake baking games where they have to make cakes for customers and stuff, so it's kind of like that where you have to make the right one based off of what you got? No, like the gameplay is not like that at all. The gameplay is similar to Solitaire. There's four decks of different color right in front of you, and you take one card off of each deck to make a potion. And that's it. The guy either likes it and leaves, or doesn't like it and the game's over. so that's really simple gameplay and I did just check it, it is on Android as well yeah I think it's free to play on Android with ads it contains ads and it has in-app purchase options okay worth the two bucks or whatever it is to get rid of the ads yeah ads can be it's amazing to me how long on mobile games people will sit there and complain about the ads and it's like really this game is 99 cents right I know Think of the value you're getting out of a 99 cent game Yeah I mean You can get a coin doubler and no ads For a buck or two Yeah I mean it's not like it's Galaxy of Heroes where Every time they pop up a thing it's 60 bucks It's like hey you can have these cards For 60 bucks Yeah Or people buy a 60 dollar console game And then they play it for an hour and never touch it again what though to play a mobile game for four hours a day yeah I was we got to change the stigma of paid mobile games yeah I agree with that actually because paid mobile games are it would be something that would be a decent way to spend you know because most of them are a dollar to even five dollars I mean I've spent five dollars on games that I've got almost no play time in at all I use the I don't know if you've ever used it but there's the Steam database where you can pull up and look at your account on Steam and it tells you like all the games you have and how many hours you've played and done all that stuff but since we were talking about stuff I went ahead and pulled it up and I mean I've got my average game play time per game I own is 15 and a half hours but the thing is most of those games cost me probably 30 plus bucks.
    110:04
    So, I mean, if I can spend more than that on a game that costs me 99 cents, or I can watch ads and get annoyed by ads, I don't see why I shouldn't spend the 99 cents.
    110:17
    Yeah. And the reason why those ads are there, because people wouldn't pay a dollar for so long, so they had to start making games free to play. Now you've got to sit through ads all the time. Isn't your time more valuable?
    110:29
    A 30 second ad every two minutes. What is that, 15 minutes an hour? Yeah, it's pretty heavy when you think about it compared to what you'd see with TV or whatnot. Yeah.
    110:43
    Pretty sad. It's interesting how different, in different categories, how different it is. You look at the price one's willing to pay for a retail video game versus what one's willing to pay for a mobile game, even if they're going to put more hours in. And we can extend it to the other categories. and you look at the price per game of pinball when you buy a pinball machine and the people who will buy a brand-new machine and they sell it with 200 plays. And it's like, well, I get it. They're getting a lot of their money back. But still, it's sort of like you've probably just gone on location, dropped some quarters. Well, yeah, if you're on location and you see a WWE, you've never seen it before, you go, oh, I wanted to try that. Oh, it's a dollar? Okay, well, I've wanted to play it. I've never played it before. You still pay a dollar right there for three and a half minutes of WWE. Yeah. And the whole thing was an ad. So you kind of got screwed both ways. That's true. And there's the fact that you just wasted a dollar because you played WWE. But they didn't know any better. They didn't know any better. Yeah, that's why I was getting that. So I see the final game we've got listed here. Oh, and this is very full circle because when Don was last guest hosting with us, we had him discuss No Man's Sky. And, Tony, you've noted No Man's Sky because there was a fairly significant update that just recently hit. So I'll let you guys explain what is going on. Don, have you revisited No Man's Sky? Tony, have you gotten a chance to try it as of the new updates? Yep.
    112:09
    I have. I picked it up. I've played four hours and changed about four and a half hours of it. And it's not bad, actually. I mean, it's required three major updates, Which is humorous because they've had three major updates To put out a game that has probably had The worst launch of any game ever But Mass Impact Andromeda Has been abandoned already So They got all their eggs in one basket Yeah It's not Terrible I'm not saying it's a magical game It's definitely nowhere near What people were expecting But I think the hype on No Man's Sky I hit the point where it would never be what anybody was ever expecting. But I have actually enjoyed the time I've put into it. It's got some quirks, and it's got some UI things that I think are a little annoying. I'm not big on having to hold a button for five seconds to acknowledge that, yes, this is the button I wanted to hit.
    113:19
    But, you know. You did not play it pre-patch? I did not play it before this newest patch. This newest patch. So I don't, I read about it. I know it didn't have the, you couldn't, you basically had no ability to fly low altitude. You had no, and they've added some of that, though it's still not great. And I know they've added, they've just been adding tons and tons of stuff to it. Well, yeah, you're saying like it's still not great. It's got some quirks. This thing is like Witcher 3 compared to how it first came out. Oh, wow. Wow.
    113:54
    It's come a long, long way. I played a ton of it when it came out, and then a little bit here and there, but I played about two hours this week after the big huge single-player patch, and it's way different. I had to remember the controls. They had changed so much stuff and added so much.
    114:13
    It looks way better. It plays way better. When you walk into an outpost, there was like five aliens in the first outpost I went to. You'd only ever seen one on a planet, period. There'd be one guy in there. And if he didn't have what you needed, you had to fly to a different star system and find another space station to talk to somebody else. This one has bartenders and all kinds of stuff. I couldn't believe how much stuff they had. Just walking around that first space station that I was docked at was totally different. Getting down to the planet, there were tons and tons of animals. There were fauna everywhere, where usually you might see one or two. here and there, then you'd have to get up and fly to another location and maybe see another couple.
    114:55
    I was just nailing it. I had like probably 15 in the first 10 minutes of walking around on the planet. It was overwhelming to me. I probably played 30 hours of it when it came out.
    115:08
    I'd say, did you just buy it or did you own it already? I just bought it. I was on my short list to buy and it reviewed so badly and some of the streams I watched of it and talking to you, I left it on my wish list, but I spent my money on other stuff instead. But I left it on the wish list. Do you remember how much it was now?
    115:34
    I got it. It was on sale for $23. Okay, yeah. I'd say for $20, around $25 or whatever, it's fine. I think there's enough content there, and it's kind of fun exploring. your opinion is probably more valuable because you're literally in that position but since I spent 60 or no I bought the limited edition so I don't know how much I spent where did the limited edition get you?
    116:01
    I think it came with a book and a steel case and some DLC which by the way you got the DLC so you redeem it right away you get a new ship but the game didn't support the ship so I used my ship and I flew to another star system and it didn't give you enough fuel to get back or to go anywhere else. So I was stuck in a stellar system and I couldn't leave it. So I had to restart my game six hours in.
    116:23
    Yeah, it's come a long way. Did they expand the story with these updates? Yeah, big time. Yeah, it was like a 30-hour thing. Yeah, it has a 30-hour single player.
    116:37
    Basically, when I started it now, it said, oh, you have a beacon here. Do you want to go check it out? I went and checked it out, and there was an actual person talking to me, which I had never seen in the game, and you start to explore who this person is, and there was nothing like that in the other one. It was basically just get to the next solar system so you can get to the center of the galaxy was your only drive previously. So it was really cool, like, getting to know some dude talking to me. I don't know. I didn't finish the story. I'm still working on it. So we'll see where it goes. It's kind of neat. Yeah, like I said, I've been working on it. I've just slowly. It's been not terrible. I mean, like I said, it obviously still has room for improvement, but not having played it, and obviously, from what you said, it's come a long, long way. It is not a game that at this point where I'm just going to go, well, no, I'm not going to play this anymore. This isn't worth it. It's enjoyable enough. I'll keep playing it as I get the time to play it. And when I'm not busy chasing the Russians. if this launched at 30 bucks with no physical copy maybe it could have ended up like a battle what is it, Player Unknown Battlegrounds? something like that, the game's trash you see this cool game, there's this indie game that lets you explore all over and kind of snowballs from there but advertising screwed it I heard a comparison on a different video game podcast talking about that, brought up the Player Unknown and the idea of that No Man's Sky might have been a game that could have thrived if it had been early access in the condition that it launched at and that it would have been forgiven in those cases. But now they're basically patching their mistakes versus, or they do the Don method here, kind of what ReCore did, where that game wasn't fully polished out. They launched it at $40 because it wasn't up to snuff for a full retail release. Though that game apparently I heard is getting patched up with some 4K support. And apparently you go through the – I won that game. I mentioned it a while ago. There was a robot I never found, and I didn't need him to win, so I didn't think about it. Apparently that robot was never put into the game. He was on the cover and everything, and they didn't put him in. And he's been added now. So I'm glad I didn't try and find him because I wouldn't have thought about that. Oh, wait, wait. They have an outline for him and everything. Where is he? Oh, well. I won. I'm tired of it sort of thing. So you kind of have these two other options. You launch at a lower price point and basically acknowledge this is not going to be what you expect of a typical retail release. Or you pull a PlayerUnknown and say, we're going to do early access. But maybe you don't do what PlayerUnknown does and he's like, we've been in early access forever. And we have millions and millions of people and we're still not out of early access, which I think is a little weird. I find it a little disconcerting. Is it up for Game of the Year awards or do we have to wait for it to be released? I don't know. It's really common, though. Look at Minecraft. Wasn't Minecraft like early access? Yes, yes, but I haven't played Minecraft. Five years? I can be as judgmental as I want. Well, so was Kerbal Space Program. Kerbal Space Program was early access for years and years and years. Elite Dangerous, I think. I know Elite's been early access. I question whether or not they should be early access that long, but if it's getting good games, that's fine. It's up to the consumer if they're willing to spend that much money for a game to basically be a beta tester. Oh, did you buy Star Trek New in Box before the code was done? No, 2015. No, there have been no code updates since I bought. Okay. No hypocrisy. You did not get to box me into hypocrisy. That's right. I have skilled in myself. You did not beta test it. No, I'm not. I'm on whatever the, I guess what the latest one is, 1.21 or whatever they called it, post-Dwight Center. Carl Urban. Okay.
    120:28
    Or wait, no, who do they have intervene on that? No, I guess it was Lyman came in and added the metals or whatever. I don't know. I haven't gotten to do a code update on anything except with ROM chips. So Jurassic Park. Sharky's wasn't on the latest code. I had a ROM chip. I took the same ones as Jurassic, actually, because I bought like a set of 10 from China. Got my burner out, put on the latest ROM so it wouldn't burn out the magnet.
    120:54
    Tech. Fancy. Yeah. My $20 burner. Keep ROM burning. on the slow boat from China. Yeah, that one was slow, too. They're all slow.
    121:06
    Okay, well, that was the entire list of video games. I didn't know if you guys had any other ones you wanted to talk about.
    121:12
    Just a quick thing to throw out there, because there's nothing to talk about at all, other than the announcement itself. But apparently Age of Empires IV is coming.
    121:24
    Oh, I did see something about that. Are you a big Age of Empires fan, Tony? I played the first two a fair amount. At least the first one. I know I played Age of Empires a lot. I think I played three of them.
    121:40
    So, I don't... Have I played the third one? I don't know. I know I played the first one a lot. I remember playing the second one for sure. I think I played two the most. The third one I played was not number three. It was a Games for Windows Live free-to-play one. I forget the name of it. Yeah, these were... Yeah, because I played them. They're not in my Steam list because I played them without Steam.
    122:05
    It's amazing. You used to hate Steam. I did hate Steam. I dodged Steam forever with a passion. And now that's like, oh, it's not on Steam? I don't want to buy it anyway. It's not quite that bad.
    122:20
    But... Yeah, almost. Almost. But yeah, no, it's kind of shocking because if I recall, Age of Empires 3 Came out in 2005 So it's been 12 years Since an Age of Empires game came out And they just announced 4 Okay well All I remember is that If you won an RTS game with lots of civilization choices It was a decent one To consider Yeah the first one was 97 That makes sense It was 97 That was when we played I played lots of Age of Empires I seem to recall I know we played this at one of the land parties That was primarily us playing Total Annihilation for a month Yes, not the pin But the reason why the pin had to be renamed Yeah The old Total Annihilation RTS game Back when we could do stuff like Have a month long land party Oh man, my power bill was so high that month So high No surprise from the heating though Well, yeah, it was from the heating and the fact that we had, what, seven computers running in the apartment from the day winter break started until the day before we went back to school. just nothing but computers going on full time playing Half-Life like original Half-Life and Age of Empires and Total Annihilation that was a good month yeah it wasn't my bill so it was great you guys have known each other that long? we've known each other since kindergarten yeah we were in the same kindergarten class whoa You need to do a throwback episode, the origins of the Click to Kingers podcast. Maybe not. Well, I mean, if people think that we've been too exciting and really need to tone it down some, I guess we can go into a not interesting history of all of that.
    124:29
    Well, speaking of toning it down, I think we're at the end of the episode then. Don, I don't know, do you have anything you want to plug? Nope.
    124:38
    That's right. Thank you for having me on. No problem, yeah. It's always great to have you. Your diversity in playing a variety of video games is a good counterweight to my constant playing of, like, two video games. Yeah, when are we going to do the Overwatch Onslaught segment? Oh, gosh. Next hour? Yeah, I got to put it, as much as I lament having to hold it for another two weeks, I'm hoping the finalized player test server stuff is going to be kind of cobbled together. because they're... Don, there's so many changes. It's incredible. So many changes. They've got to fix their little broken thing.
    125:17
    Yeah. They've got to fix some stuff, but it's going to be incredible. Yeah, it's a... All I can say... Tony played it quite a bit before I finally tried it, and I really like it. I'm not normally a multiplayer person, but I like... It's class-based, and I like that because I feel like I can play different roles, and I can impactful, even though I'm not a great shot, which I'm not. Yeah, they screwed up Mercy, though, and she's my go-to. No, no, Mercy. These changes, she's a god now. Valkyrie online forever. Maybe I'll spray her again. Last time I played was the day Anya came out. Yeah, she was very overpowered. But the announcement that we're not really announcing, but I'll go ahead and mention since you brought up Mercy, is that they're changing Mercy so she can do her resurrections without... That's not her ultimate it anymore. She just does that regular now. Instead, she turns into a flying goddess with an unlimited ammo pistol that can headshot everyone. Sounds dope. Yep. They wanted to make her more fun. So, how do you make someone more fun? You give them more guns. That's how you do it. That's video games. Well, I guess I'll just say, if anyone wants to write to the podcast, the email address is eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We're on a variety of social media platforms, namely Facebook, facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. or on Twitter and Instagram at eclectic underscore gamers and Twitch at the very same place when Tony does his donation drive at elite level of cold waters be ready for that announcement it is imminent yeah as soon as I buy a new computer yep well until those two weeks I'll say I'm Dennis I'm Tony and that's Don goodbye everyone bye