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Marvel at Timelords

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·52m 5s·analyzed·Sep 26, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

BlahCade previews Doctor Who (Farsight) and Marvel Women of Power tables (Zen) with mixed impressions.

Summary

Chris Rivas and Jared Morgz preview two upcoming digital pinball tables: Doctor Who from Farsight (releasing next month) and Marvel's Women of Power tables from Zen (A-Force and Champions, releasing later this week). They discuss beta gameplay experiences, identify physics issues with stand-up targets in Doctor Who, praise A-Force's bouncy ball design by Thomas Cross, and critique Champions' overly cartoony design and complex layout by Zoltan Very.

Key Claims

  • Doctor Who from Farsight will release next month, not this month

    high confidence · Chris states directly: 'turns out that Doctor Who Regenerated will be coming out next month, not this month.'

  • Zen's Marvel Women of Power tables (A-Force and Champions) are releasing this coming week

    high confidence · Chris confirms: 'it'll be 29th i think they release um us time so it'll be 30th right uh we get here' when discussing the release schedule

  • A-Force and Champions are two separate unique storylines, not based on comic book storylines

    high confidence · Chris states: 'Zen created, for both these tables, created unique storylines. So these aren't following comic books.'

  • Doctor Who on Pinball Arcade has physics issues with stand-up targets washing off ball speed

    high confidence · Chris identifies and reports a consistent issue: 'all the speed and momentum of a ball gets washed off when it hits stand-up targets' and raises it in beta

  • A-Force has a very bouncy ball design with good physics feedback

    high confidence · Chris reports: 'A-Force is designed by Thomas Cross... I am happy to report it's a very bouncy ball. Oh, excellent.'

  • Doctor Who features lightning/zipper flippers with a huge center gap and shallow flip

    high confidence · Chris identifies: 'the return of the zipper flippers... lightning flippers' with 'a huge center gap' and flippers that catch balls poorly

  • Champions' storyline and tone are 'exceedingly cartoony' and very youth-oriented, similar to Miss Splosion Man

    high confidence · Chris criticizes the coffee shop robbery premise: 'Was this written for 12-year-olds?' and compares tone to Miss Splosion Man

  • Champions has complex habit trail layouts that make ball flow unpredictable

    high confidence · Chris describes: 'it also got a bazillion habit trails that are very difficult... to figure out where the hell the ball is going to come from' as 'a maze of habit trails'

Notable Quotes

  • “I have to say, it's looking pretty good on mobile. This is the first table that they've decided to try out PC assets on.”

    Chris Rivas @ ~5:30 — Highlights Farsight's technical improvement in Doctor Who with higher-poly 3D assets for mobile/PC

  • “it all the targets in the game. They have this physics element to them where it's like a dead zone sort of thing... if you glance one of those repair targets, it washes all the speed off”

    Chris Rivas @ ~12:00 — Identifies systemic physics problem in Pinball Arcade affecting Doctor Who gameplay realism

  • “Very lightly. You'll also be glad to know that, and this is the case for both tables, neither one of them is Spell-O-Rama.”

    Chris Rivas @ ~28:30 — Confirms both Marvel tables avoid the Spell-O-Rama mode design that many dislike

  • “In the name of Hydra. And I just kind of went, oh, God. It's just I mean, I don't it may work in comic book form.”

    Chris Rivas @ ~30:00 — Critical of overly dramatic voice dialogue in A-Force, finding it cheesy

  • “Ms. Marvel has opened up a coffee shop and has just finished her first day of business and is taking the lockbox to the bank when Bombshell comes out of the bank having just robbed it... Was this written for 12-year-olds?”

    Chris Rivas @ ~38:00 — Strongly critiques Champions' storyline as juvenile and dismissive of its target demographic

  • “there's no reason why girls can't have a table that they thoroughly enjoy, too. It just seems very youth.”

    Chris Rivas @ ~39:30 — Acknowledges design intent to appeal to younger female players while expressing concern about backlash

  • “the strength of the tips were lower than they should have been it's been adjusted it's usually the result of tuning for tip passing”

    [name withheld pending review] @ ~20:00 — Documents how flipper physics tuning works in TPA — different strength zones along the flipper bat

Entities

Chris RivaspersonJared MorgzpersonFarsight StudioscompanyZen StudioscompanyThomas CrosspersonZoltan VerypersonMike LenzpersonBobbypersonDoctor WhogameDoctor Who RegeneratedgameA-Forcegame

Signals

  • ?

    product_launch: Doctor Who from Farsight Studios releasing next month (September 2025), with extended development timeline allowing for quality assurance and tuning passes

    high · Chris confirms: 'Doctor Who Regenerated will be coming out next month, not this month' and notes this extended development allows proper tuning versus rushed schedules

  • ?

    product_launch: Zen Studios releasing Marvel's Women of Power bundle (A-Force + Champions) this week (late September 2025) for approximately $5 USD

    high · Chris states: 'it'll be 29th i think they release um us time so it'll be 30th' and prices estimate at $5 for both tables bundled

  • ?

    product_concern: Pinball Arcade stand-up target physics create dead zones that wash ball speed and momentum unrealistically, making glancing shots slow down instead of ricochet

    high · Chris identifies and reports issue: 'all the speed and momentum of a ball gets washed off when it hits stand-up targets' with specific examples from Doctor Who and Fishtails, raising it in beta for developer review

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Doctor Who exhibits flipper spongyness where tip strength differs from base strength due to zone-based flipper tuning, creating uneven shot power across the flipper bat

    high · Chris reports and receives confirmation that 'the strength of the tips were lower than they should have been' due to 'tip passing tuning' and developer adjusted it

  • ?

    design_innovation: Farsight's Doctor Who table is first to use PC-grade 3D assets on mobile version, featuring significantly higher polygon count habit rails and crisp insert lighting

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.156

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to The Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Rivas. He is Jared Morgz. Good night.
0:43
I did something I've never done before, and that's address the camera, so not that it plays to you listening in audio land, but if you happen to watch this podcast on YouTube, then that was just for you. You did? Yes.
0:57
So we skipped a week here. Yeah, we did. Because, you know, we had things. We had life. We had life and also then we had anti-pinball life, or at least I had anti-pinball life, where I just hadn't played anything. I hadn't gone on the forum. I had nothing to talk about, literally. And we know how much Jared hates me talking about movies and stuff.
1:19
Yeah. So we decided, you know what, let's not do one this week. Let's just have a gap week and we'll come back fresh the week after. I had to go up to the North Coast and sort of stay with the in-laws for a night, which was really good. Had a great time up there, and it was very relaxing because they're sort of close to the coast, and it's just very relaxing up that way. So it was good to have a break.
1:43
Yeah, we're allowed to have those now and then, right? Yeah, that's right, because, you know, I don't know what the blockade policy is on vacation time, but I think it's pretty flexible.

“So of the two, I can definitely say that so far I'm enjoying A-Force much more than Champions.”

Chris Rivas @ ~43:00 — Direct comparison verdict favoring A-Force over Champions despite both being bundled together

Championsgame
Pinball Arcadeproduct
Medieval Madnessgame
Aliensgame
Twilight Zonegame
Masters of the Forcegame
Black Holegame
Miss Splosion Mangame
Ghostbustersgame
BlahCade Podcastproduct
BBCorganization

high · Chris observes: 'This is the first table that they've decided to try out PC assets on... practically round. Like there's so many polys in the habit rail'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: A-Force uses selectable mission system where first playthrough doesn't require completion but subsequent playthroughs demand full mission completion with timeouts

    high · Chris explains: 'you don't have to complete the mode in order to have it light... but the second time around they expect you to actually finish these' with timeout mechanics

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Champions table designed with youth-oriented, cartoony storytelling (coffee shop robbery plotline) and cel-shaded graphics to appeal to younger female players, intentionally diverging from serious Marvel aesthetic

    high · Chris critiques the Ms. Marvel coffee shop storyline as juvenile ('Was this written for 12-year-olds?') while acknowledging the intentional demographic strategy

  • ?

    product_concern: Champions features extremely tight flipper shot placement with confusing 'sweet spot' positioning, making natural flipper launch positions send ball to slingshot instead of intended targets

    high · Chris reports: 'what seems like the natural place for launching the ball sends it into the slingshot instead... I'm still trying to figure out where on the flipper it is that you're supposed to flip'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Both A-Force and Champions feature original Zen-created storylines rather than adapting existing comic book canon, indicating creative partnership rather than direct IP adaptation

    high · Chris confirms: 'Zen created, for both these tables, created unique storylines. So these aren't following comic books. That's pretty cool.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Zen's Marvel Women of Power tables attracted sexist online criticism about 'invented' characters and feminist themes, with defenders noting parallels to criticism of female-led films like Mad Max Fury Road and Ghostbusters

    medium · Chris references Twitter discussion where 'people were going oh well I haven't heard of any of these why are you inventing new characters... got accused of being feminists'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: A-Force features sequences where lower flippers disabled during multiball with ball converted to visual 'pink balls' and controlled via upper flippers with timing-based interaction, inspired by Twilight Zone power zone mechanic

    high · Chris describes: 'it zaps the balls completely into these little pink balls... your lower flippers no longer work... it felt a lot like the power in Twilight Zone'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Doctor Who's extended pre-release timeline (announced far in advance, releasing next month) contrasts with typical rushed schedules, allowing Farsight to conduct tuning passes and physics fixes

    high · Chris notes: 'That's what happens when you have a long ramp up for a game. You can actually spend the time you need on it to actually get it out to a quality level.'

    • 1:55
    Yes, yeah. We have many. We have flex days. Yeah. So things did happen this week, however, which gives us things to talk about. Both Zen and Pinball Arcade have tables that are about this coming week to be released. And those of us with beta access have been able to sample said tables. So we're going to give you a first look of Doctor Who from Farsight and of the Marvel's Women of Power tables from Xen, which is A-Force and Champions. And just kind of give you a little preview of what you may or may not. A narrative preview. Yes. This is definitely not a review because I haven't had time to review them properly. To be honest, I kind of feel that I can't review a table properly until I've spent probably an hour with it. yeah i think that's fair enough yeah i mean you got to get a feet for it and yeah exactly you got to sort of get a bit of a run on and get comfortable with it before you make a call on it i agree yeah um before with that though i was kind of checking in some stats i wanted to just kind of uh notice this uh so on steam they tell you how many hours you've played any particular game. Okay.
    3:21
    Turns out with Zen, I've played a little over 130 hours. It's like 136 hours or so. Okay. With TPA, I've played 594 hours. Wow. Oh, geez. Yeah, that's about 24 or 25 days worth of playing in a 24-hour period. That's quite a bit. Yeah, it's a fair amount. And I wonder why none of my other games have much play. yeah exactly yep that's fairly good hours and I had no idea how long I would have been spending on TPA Android but I'd say it's probably pretty ridiculous when you add it all up yeah because we don't have those sort of stats and again going back to circling back to the fast side ID discussion we had a few episodes ago you know that sort of statistical stuff would be kind of good to collect it would be fun to see yes I would love to know like I said what table I play the most I know in my head what table I think I play the most but reality might be completely different yep sounds about right so why don't we start off with the table that I've had the least experience with and you have been able to play quite a bit more and that's Doctor Who from Farfetch'd yeah so we finally got it and have a look at this it's actually landed at the time they said it would amazing Yeah, I know. That's what happens when you have a long ramp up for a game. You can actually spend the time you need on it to actually get it out to a quality level. And I have to say, it's looking pretty good on mobile. This is the first table that they've decided to try out PC assets on. And you can tell because those of you familiar with Doctor Who will know that the ball pops out of the TARDIS on the right-hand side of the table. There's a habit rail there that feeds the right return lane. Well, on past tables, you know, the roundness of those, the rings that connect the habit rail together, they're okay. But, geez, on the mobile version this time around, it's practically round. Like there's so many polys in the habit rail that you go, wow, like I can just see the angles on the rail. But that is, yeah, it looks amazing. and it's pretty much like they're like all the other assets in the table too like it looks super crisp on android which is really nice because it's the table you want to actually have super crisp assets on all the inserts are really nicely lit like there's none of that sort of weird flicker you get with the on off states of the inserts they're all nicely lit they they don't really bloom because we don't have any dynamic lighting but they've got they've got this nice warm feel to them when you're looking at them. And everything looks really presented quite well.
    6:14
    The things that I've observed in it, though, like gameplay-wise, it plays very faithfully. At the moment, they're doing a tuning pass in beta just to adjust the break a little bit. It's a little bit floaty at the moment. Yeah. Because, you know, you've played it in real life, haven't you, mate? I have played it in real life, but not enough for me to really form a solid memory of it. You would know, though, that playing a real life is fast. It's a fast table.
    6:43
    Especially when you're shooting the time expander and it comes back down at you from the mushroom targets, it flies back down the table at you. At the moment, it's a little bit too floaty, and they brought it up in the beta, and they said, yeah, we definitely agree. It's floaty. We're going to do a bit of an extra tuning pass on it to make it a little bit faster. What I noticed in probably my three or four playthroughs of it was the... Now, I don't know what the pieces of the table are even called.
    7:11
    Yeah. But at the top there's like a loop that goes from the left side that feeds into the bumpers. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, the behind the time expander loop thing. Right. That, I've noticed, seems... Now, it's flat with the table. It's not a ramp, but it seems like as soon as the ball crosses a certain threshold, it ain't coming back at you. It's going to make it all the way around, and it kind of vacuums to me. Yeah, it sort of behaves like that. Well, it kind of behaves like that in the real table. The reason why is because it's very, like it's a very slight pitch at the back of that ramp. So on a good shot, like even if you glance off the repair targets, which is that bank of targets on the left-hand side, even if you glance off there and shoot and then go for the little, what would I call it? the pop bumper in lane. Let's call it that. Okay. The pop bumper in lane. It's normally really fast. It whips around there real fast, and it doesn't generally come back out again because it's just flat behind there.
    8:16
    So that's behaving. I haven't seen anything unusual with that, but what I have seen that really is a problem across all tables in TPA is the way all the speed and momentum of a ball gets washed off when it hits stand-up targets. Have you noticed that? slow shots to things like in particular I noticed this on fishtails when I was playing it, it's when you shoot the fish targets if you just glance one of those, if it's not a very strong shot and it just sort of glances the fish target it slows the ball down, it's like it's got a magnet on it and it actually it's like it's sticky so the ball stickies onto the target and then it completely washes all the speed off the targets and then these repair targets the reason why i noticed it the most on doctor who is normally what you do is that if you glance the top two repair targets when you're shooting the um the pop bumper in lane um it will just sort of ricochet off them and and go at quite a lot of speed right behind that lane into the pop bumpers but in the tpa version at the moment if you glance one of those repair targets, it washes all the speed off and it just floats around the back there. And as soon as I saw it, I went, nope, that's wrong. Maybe that's why it felt like a vacuum to me then. Yeah. Like it sort of like slowed down. You thought it was sort of like predictable pace around the back there. Right. Yeah, it might have been that illusion. Yeah, it's all the targets in the game. They have this physics element to them where it's like a dead zone sort of thing.
    9:51
    There's two ways of doing it. I've noticed in, what is it, Black Hole, that if you shoot, if you have a really slow shot to one of the drop targets and it contacts the drop targets, it shoots it off like it's a slingshot as well. So basically it's the inverse of that. Okay. I think what needs to happen is if you do hit a drop target, it should be behaving the way that the stand-up targets do. But if you hit a stand-up target, it should be ricocheting it away like it does with those drop targets in Black Hole at the moment. So I think it's almost like they need to flip the physics around on those two elements in the game. Right, I was thinking that the drop targets, it's viewing them as almost a rubber. Yeah, it is. And then as opposed to the fact that it's physically pushing against an object and then that object is going away and the momentum of the ball is going to carry just a little bit farther in and then bounce away. Or even if the drop target hasn't dropped completely, the drop target typically has that give. Yeah. As you push it before it drops, that's going to make it slow down, obviously. That's right. Yeah, stand-up actually does have the bounce, the reflection. It does, yeah. So you would expect a bit more speed off those. And I think that's what's happening here. Like what they need to do is take a look at those two elements across all tables and just take a look at the physics on them and see exactly what's happening there because it's something that's become really apparent in this table, and I know it happens on other ones as well. So I have actually raised it in the beta for them to take a look, and I'll make sure they follow up on it, because it does make a big difference to how you take that shot and how it actually plays. So there's that. And I also found it's really hard to replicate, but I've found that in some cases, from the left-hand flipper, the left-hand lower flipper I should be specific about, I can actually sometimes glance it up into the hang-on ramp, which is the one that you shoot from the upper left flipper around. Okay. You should not be able to make that ramp at all from the lower left flipper. It's just physically impossible on the real game. Whereas, for some reason, you can make it on occasion, I'd probably say 10% to 20% of the time on the actual game. And it's sort of like if it ricochets and bounces a certain way of other Playfield objects, you can glance it up the ramp, and then the ramp just takes control and takes it up around. So I don't know what's going on there. It seems bizarre, but I can't really bug it because I can't replicate it consistently. Yeah, that's a hard one to replicate. Yeah, really hard. So it's very tricky.
    12:37
    I've also noticed, and this is, you know, some of you are going to love this, some of you are going to hate this, but it's the return of the zipper flippers. Oh yeah. Or not the zipper flippers, the lightning flippers. Lightning flippers, yep. And it's meaning two things. One, that center gap is huge.
    12:55
    It really wide And the other thing is that the flippers in their relaxed state or excuse me not in their relaxed in their flipped state it a relatively shallow flip So catching the ball is very difficult. It is, yeah. You do a lot of shuttle passing in this game. And I've noticed, too, this is a really interesting point for those people who like to know about physics. I found that in the first couple of iterations of the beta, when I was shooting the ball off the tips of the flippers it was almost like the strength of the flipper was like incorrectly balanced like there wasn't it seemed different when I was shooting it up towards the base of the flipper than at the tip and it turns out that there's actually this is a byproduct of the physics tuning of the flippers themselves and I think it has something to do with the what do they say it's tip tuning tip pass tuning when they're actually playing around with that so my report was flipper tuning appears spongy because the ball travels through the but the the i said bay slightly that was a mistake on my part so i said this is a hard one to describe but it feels like the ball is not contacting the flipper correctly on strokes towards the tip of the flipper particularly on shuttle passes or tip passes and then um rob confirms yeah the strength of the tips were lower than they should have been it's been adjusted it's usually the result of tuning for tip passing so So it's actually, you can adjust, this is the thing we learned from this, is that you can adjust the strength of the flipper along the whole path of the flipper bat. So each zone in the flipper can have a different strength, which is really interesting, right? Yeah. Well, and it kind of makes sense because obviously the, I mean, physics will tell you that it's going to have a different strength, you know, based on the pendulum of the flipper itself. The point at which the leverage, basically, of the flipper is different. Right, because of how much stroke it actually, how much travel it actually is having. Yeah. So that's kind of cool to actually learn that that was it. And that's why it was, yeah, behaving the way it was. And, yes, I did. I just wanted to make sure I did raise the issue about the repair target sapping the ball speed. And, yes, I have. So that's in there too. So for those of you wondering, turns out that Doctor Who Regenerated will be coming out next month, not this month. So we still have that to look forward to. Obviously, Farsight has a little bit more work to do on that aspect. I would imagine that once they get this particular table tuned, that exact same tuning is going to carry over to that, unless they've added a whole bunch of different things. Well, yeah. I mean, have they, like, one of the things I was wondering is that have they switched around the position of certain key play field elements? Like, have they moved the time expander to be a upper flipper shot only? You know what I mean? Like, they could have done that. So it could be a very different looking table. Who knows? We'll have to wait and see. And hopefully we'll be able to get Mike Lenz from Farsight in to talk to us about all things Doctor Who regenerated. because like we've mentioned before, we're very curious to know about the licensing, how that all happened, how working with the BBC was, and just what hoops did the monkeys at Fireside have to jump through? That's right. I'm sure there's a few. But yeah, it will be interesting to get the canonical account of it from Mike when he joins us. Moving forward, Zen this week will also be releasing Marvel's Women of Power. So these are two tables. One of them is called A-Force, which features Black Widow and Madam Mask battling out an altered reality where Russia has taken over the U.S. And Stark Tower now has flying a giant red star.
    16:52
    And the two of them working together to try and restore what should be instead of what is. and I guess the main bad guy of this is Titanium Man. I don't know these comics at all.
    17:07
    It's all a big mystery to me. I do know that Zen created, for both these tables, created unique storylines. So these aren't following comic books.
    17:17
    That's pretty cool. I actually found them. That's really good though, right? So I was following on, I follow Bobby on Twitter and she was commenting that when they announced these tables, people were going oh well I haven't heard of any of these why are you inventing new characters and stuff like that and then they got accused of being feminists or something like that for releasing that's the same batch of trolls that are pissed off at Ghostbusters being with women and Mad Max Fury Road essentially not being a Mad Max movie but being a Furiosa movie they just need to get back under the rock they crawled out of what I responded back to yeah I don't really care if I don't know the franchise because pinball Right. So, yeah, let me play them, and then I'll make my own choice up. The other table is called Champions, and this features a whole host of characters,
    18:12
    which in some of the names I'm kind of going, huh? So it stars Ms. Marvel, and then the cadre of people is Squirrel Girl, Bombshell, Sister Grimm, Spider Gwen, America Chavez, and Hawkeye.
    18:30
    and I can't tell you the storyline of this one. No, it's a unique one. It's bonkers. That's all I know. It's bonkers? Well, that's good. That's going to play well for pinball, because pinball is generally bonkers. Right. So I'll start with A-Force. A-Force is designed by Thomas Cross. He's the guy responsible for aliens and droids, and I am happy to report it's a very bouncy ball. Oh, excellent. Excellent. Very bouncy ball. As soon as the ball dropped on a dead flipper and it bounced heartily over to the next flipper, I was like, yes, this is what I like to see. Awesome. That's great. Very lightly. You'll also be glad to know that, and this is the case for both tables, neither one of them is Spell-O-Rama. Good. Excellent. Thank God for that.
    19:21
    So instead, it's a lot of hitting your shots, the design shots and comboing, essentially. Okay. I was a little bit fearful, though, because as so A4 starts off with kind of a prologue. And these are very story based tables. So it starts off with a prologue to give you an idea of what's what you're in for. And then one of the first lines of dialogue coming out of Madam Mask right off the top. In the name of Hydra. And I just kind of went, oh, God.
    19:53
    It's just I mean, I don't it may work in comic book form. But whenever Thor does any of his, buy Odin's hammer, I just kind of go, come on. I'll give you Odin's hammer in a minute, mate.
    20:09
    Yeah, it just really, really is kind of annoying. Thankfully, that's about the only annoying voice thing that came in A-Force. Although the voice is one of the voices I kind of went, weren't you in Alien vs. Predator? Oh, really?
    20:25
    Oh, yeah, the AVP voice, oh, yes. Yeah, the female voice. He's like, I've heard that voice before. Anyway, so much like the Aliens table, and I already know that I'm going to like this table more than the other one just because of how it's designed. And that is one of the things that starting the modes, you basically have to hit the A-Force tower about three times, which is typical for any of these mode starts now that Zen has been using. But you can hit it two different ways. There's two different ramps that you can hit it with. So that's nice that you have that option that's not limited to that one shot. Once you do that, then you can start a mode. And just like the Aliens table, you can pick whatever mode you want. And there's five, I think, five or six that you can choose from.
    21:15
    And you don't have to complete the mode in order to have it light. Collect all those modes, then you start the wizard mode. Now, once you have started the wizard mode or gone through the wizard mode, thereafter, you do have to complete all the missions. And I can tell you right now that's going to be a pain in the butt because I was not able to complete a single one.
    21:37
    Oh, so you've actually got to complete, as in finish completely. Finish the mode, yeah. So they'll give it to you the first time around, but the second time around they expect you, hey, yo, you've got to actually finish these. Yeah, and they're not two-part missions or anything. They are straightforward, just you need to hit this shot, this shot, this shot, and they will time out on you eventually. Okay. Well, as long as it's not like each mission is like an eight-stage mission, like some of the tables are. Like they're ridiculous. No, it's literally, you know, hit these three lanes and you'll be finished or whatever. But they're tricky shots. It's tough. and there's sometimes activity happening on the table that winds up getting distracting. There's a helicopter that flies over the table and stuff and kind of obscures your view of the ball. One mode that was particularly interesting had the, and this might have been the finale, the wizard mode, but it zaps the balls completely into these little pink balls that float around, but you can't use your lower flippers at all. And there's two upper flippers and two lower flippers. Your lower flippers no longer work. And so the two superheroes come down to the base of the table, and they use their wrist lasers or whatever, and are zapping your ball. So it felt a lot like the power in Twilight Zone. Oh, cool. That's kind of cool. You don't get to hold the flipper up and have a constant stream and catch the ball. It's literally the ball reaches a certain zone, and that's when you're flipping. And so aiming is a bear. Oh, yeah. that would just be like random acts and I think it was like a 4 or 5 ball multi-ball oh good try playing, I mean it's probably not like this on Zen because they're actually not dealing with real physics but remember how hard it was in Twilight Zone to actually control more than one ball up in the power zone I don't know, I've never had more than one ball up in the power zone I've shot a couple up there and it's just like, the magnets just can't keep up with the amount of balls that they've got to actually launch up there. It's very hard to do anything. You drain faster than you actually do anything up there. But, of course, then not having to worry about real-world physics from that perspective can actually do better with six-ball multiballs and stuff. It's also got a pretty cool skill shot in that it's not just launch the ball and have it land into a lane. If you do get it to land in the lane, then that gets you into having to hit one upper flipper shot to a ramp, which leads to the other upper flipper, and you've got to hit the ramp with that. so it becomes a combo to get the super mega skill shot. Oh, cool. That's awesome. Which I always like those. I think those are a lot of fun.
    24:19
    The thing that I'm having a lot of trouble with at the moment in Masters of the Force, the two sides table in Star Wars, is getting that skill shot dialed in right. It's really hard for me to get that. I think I gave up.
    24:37
    I've been able to get it a couple of times. Okay, cool. I have to remember that exact pixel position on the planet in that view. Because that's just it. It's literally a scale. No. Like, there's actually no indication of scale. Like, a lot of the tables have, like, a little gauge that you can go, okay, well, if I get it up to that point, I know that it's going to drop into that lane. But this one's just like, pull it back and launch it. So, anyway.
    25:00
    Game course is much more of, think of Avengers or Iron Man. It's more your serious Marvel table. Kind of straightforward. The sound effects are all pretty much what you would expect on a normal pinball machine, that kind of thing.
    25:20
    Now, Champions is designed by our buddy Zoltan Very. Oh. Sorry, Zoltan. Who we kind of maybe railed against recently. Yeah. Now, it's not so much the dead ball. there is a little more bounce so that was nice um the layout it kind of follows some of those early 80s valleys where uh it's got that weird outlane with the uh the curvature outlane that feeds back to the flippers whereas it's got the straight down so the in lane is on the outside and the outline is on the inside you know what i talking about oh yeah yeah so it has yeah right okay yeah so it it got that But it also got a bazillion habit trails that are very difficult in my short gameplay time to figure out where the hell the ball is going to come from. All right. So it's like a maze of habit trails. It's a maze of habit trails.
    26:17
    Again, no Spell-O-Rama, so that's good. That's good. But this one is exceedingly cartoony. Right. So there's cel-shaded graphics everywhere in it. Well, no, I don't. Well, both of them have a cel-shaded look to them. Yeah. No, when I say exceedingly cartoony, I mean it starts from the storyline, which is basically that Ms. Marvel has opened up a coffee shop and has just finished her first day of business and is taking the lockbox to the bank when Bombshell – comes out of the bank having just robbed it, and the force of her blast sends Ms. Marvel to the ground, and she drops her lockbox, and Ms. Bombshell goes, oh, look, a bonus, picks it up and runs away, and Ms. Marvel goes, ah, our first day's pay. If we don't get that back, the shop will close. Oh, no.
    27:14
    I'm like going, what? Was this written for 12-year-olds? I mean, is Marvel or is Zen going to do a My Little Pony table next? Anyway, but it doesn't stop there with just the storyline kind of being very, I don't know, very youth-oriented. It, in a lot of ways, reminded me of Miss Splosion Man, where it's just that kind of, it's definitely not masculine.
    27:40
    And I do worry that the backlash that Zen's going to get from that, I don't mind them making that choice, because there's no reason why girls can't have a table that they thoroughly enjoy, too. It just seems very youth. that's kind of my takeaway. It's very youth.
    27:56
    But the sound effects in it are very cartoony. Think Gilgan's Island cartoony sound with that pinball table.
    28:07
    I mean, there have been pinball tables, real machines that have just the straight up Scooby-Doo feet running noises. Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. So that's, that's a little, it's a little odd hearing. Um, like most Zoltan tables, it seems like you have no clue what the hell is going on. There is dialogue and sound effects happening every which way and figuring out who's talking, what's going on is a mission of futility.
    28:43
    Right. Okay. So it's definitely going to have a look at the rule sheet for that one. To have a look at the rule sheet. Um, The missions, I still don't know how you start the missions per se, but basically you're collecting other various superheroes that are going to help you. And based off of which one you've lit up, then this little, it looked like a Quidditch hoop pops up and kind of travels. You've got to shoot the ball into the Quidditch hoop, and then it drops down, and then you shoot it into there one more time. and this is what winds up teleporting Bombshell back to the play field. Okay. And then based on who you have lit up, it changes what you have to do on the table. So, like, if you've lit up America Chavez,
    29:38
    you need to shoot the ball into the pop bumpers, because as those go off, that's going to make Bombshell lose her balance and fall actually onto the table, at which point then you can shoot the ball at her to injure her. Okay.
    29:54
    As opposed to if you have Spider Gwen, then you need to shoot a certain saucer, in which case that'll shoot spider webs and trap Bombshell, and then you have to do something else. So it winds up being different areas of the table that you have to shoot. So that's really cool. I like that, but it's not always the same shot. What I don't like is, welcome back to the return of the tight shot.
    30:20
    Everything is super squeezy. Well, the pop bumpers are all the way to the right side of the table. So it would be one of those, flip it off the tip of your flipper to go to the far right orbit, let's say. Okay. but what seems like the natural place for launching the ball sends it into the slingshot instead. And so I'm still trying to figure out where on the flipper it is that you're supposed to flip and what is the sweet spot. Right. And it seems like it's such an, it would be such an easy shot to make, but it, I was having a bear of a time getting it there on command. So that's kind of, that's kind of falls into the negative aspect. but it's definitely not Masters of the Force. It's not that narrow. It's not that bad.
    31:13
    Yeah. So of the two, I can definitely say that so far I'm enjoying A-Force much more than Champions.
    31:20
    But hey, you know what? When you buy one, you get both. Oh, right. Sweet. Well, look. You don't get a choice. Oh, right. So the pack is like five or six bucks probably down here in Australia. It's probably going to be five bucks. Okay, that's all right. Geez. I imagine. Yeah. That's like the cost of one bacon and egg sandwich for me for breakfast one morning. So whatever. That's easy.
    31:43
    So I definitely – I'm not giving it the rousing endorsement that I gave the aliens tables. But for the sheer fact that we get a bouncy ball pinball table again and the other one is semi-bouncy ball, that makes me happy. And add on top of the fact that it's not Spell-O-Rama. It's great. That's good news. so yeah for sure that sounds really good i can't wait for them to release later this month i'll get it later this week it's this coming week yeah that's right because we're in 25th yeah at the moment on today's well in the future we're on the 25th of september so uh yeah that's pretty cool eh it'll be 29th i think they release um us time so it'll be 30th right uh we get here so that'll be very cool that it will be our email address is blahblahblockade at gmail.com also you can find us on twitter at shutyourtraps at jaredmorgs or the all important at blockade if you would like to download past seasons I can say seasons we don't have seasons we could well technically we do we sort of like trying a lot of things to blockade table pack releases so typically we do have seasons if you want to listen to past sessions of the blockade why don't you go to our website blockade pinball.com where they are all there along with timing notes letting you know what the heck is going on with each episode somebody uh just had tweeted at me that uh they loved a particular uh podcast we just done and they were bummed that we weren't doing it this last week because then were they going to listen to and I said, well, if you want some really sad comedy, go ahead and listen to our first podcast. In which the person responded, I already did that. I was like, you're still listening? Wow!
    33:35
    You are a trooper. I think what we're going to call our episodes, we're going to call them DLCs. So we have DLCs for the season. That's what we're going to call them. I like that idea. Maybe I should task you with an exercise, Jared. And that is to have you go back through, say, the first 10 podcasts that we did and create a best of podcast out of those. Oh, God. And then we could save that up for one of those weeks that we take off, and we could drop that little nugget, and it would be really fun, because then you could take the very best bits, which there aren't many.
    34:15
    It'd take me like 20 hours in post-production with the length of those how long those run. Jeez. Yeah, but you can skirt through them pretty quickly, right? That's what two times listening is for. Yeah, true.
    34:28
    I don't know. Maybe I'll do that and send you the notes. Yeah. Anything else? Should we mention the t-shirts? We have t-shirts. Should we mention that you can go to Loot Crate?
    34:40
    Sure. Why not? Try lootcrate.com. I believe I'm getting the address right. use bridge 10 as the code and we get like 10 or 11 bucks each each time you subscribe so it helps us out absolutely and you get cool junk and they update the stuff every single month and if you follow it on twitter you'll get to see some of the stuff they just did one that was uh all firefly that's pretty cool yeah so it's a good thing to uh to look into um that's our show for this week folks until next time when uh hopefully we'll have gotten to play the non-beta version of dr who the actual real thing and maybe by then jared will have put in actual time on these end tables and we can go dive in a little bit more into those um do you want to put out the challenge that um sven said this for a bit of avengers um blazen action this time oh is that what he tweeted at me about... So what table does that accompany? Just any of the Avengers?
    35:46
    It's just, well, he's just playing Avengers at the moment. He said he was doing... He beat mine and your Ant-Man score, and he's part of the Avengers. So does that mean Hulk and Iron Man and Thor? I don't know.
    36:03
    You're in our comments section. He's saying it's the Avengers table. Okay, so there's an Avengers challenge. If you play, post your score on Twitter and hashtag it Blazen. Blazen, that's right. B-L-A-H-Z-E-N. Because it's a Blazen plug for Blockade and Zen Pinball. Ah.
    36:26
    Sven's posting right now he has 282 million on the Avengers table right now, so have fun, folks. That's going to be something I won't be achieving for a while, but I'll see how it goes. I've actually got some followers on Google Plus. I put a post on there on Google Plus saying that I'm doing some score chasing on Xen. I've got a couple of extra people following now on Google Play Games, so that's been good. I will say, if you want to skunk my scores now, now is the time because I have no time to play and I have no time to respond.
    36:55
    Skunk my scores now and then when I've got some free time, then I'll be able to devote to crushing you all. I will crush you. I will break you like a little girlie when you are.
    37:07
    Yep. All right. Until next week. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Warning. The following contains little to no actual talk about pinball.
    37:22
    I thought I might mention that I've had one of those work weeks where, although the hours weren't terribly hideous, the people organizing the work week were kind of oblivious. and what we in the film world we have what's called magic hour I know what the magic hour is it's where the light is perfect it's like sunrise and sunset isn't it? sunrise and sunset and basically you have an hour where the at least here in North America yeah at our particular longitude so yeah it's when the sun is low on the horizon it casts this really lovely natural glow upon your actors. And it is truly spectacular lighting. Everything looks amazing in this light. And so they call it magic hour. Now, what we in the film business also call it is tragic hour. Because in that hour, they tend to want to pack two hours worth of work. Into one. So you really have to clone yourself, really. And so there's a lot of panicky running around with your heads cut off. and it's rush, rush, rush, and safety goes right out the window.
    38:36
    And typically they didn't plan very well in terms of they work right up until magic hour, and then they go, oh, hey, we've got to set up our magic hour shots, rather than having us have them set up and waiting for magic hour, because time is money in the film world. Yeah, exactly. We like to, normally it's hurry up and wait, unless it's magic hour. and then it hurry up and why aren we already shooting Yeah that right I remember there was one movie that I remember that did a whole car sequence It was like a really elaborate car sequence all in Magic Hour. It took them a couple of months to actually do that scene. Jupiter Ascending just did that in Chicago.
    39:20
    Well, I shouldn't say just, but for that movie, they did that very thing where they were flying the people like they were on a hoverboard kind of skate things.
    39:30
    And it was, they had six minutes of usable light every day for what they were trying to achieve. Yes. Cause they were looking for a particular glow, not just any glow, but it was a particular glow and glint and they had to keep that consistent. And, uh, yeah, they did that for months, just shooting a little sequence bit by bit by bit. And if you've seen the movie, you go, what a waste. Yeah. Well, okay. because it looks like it's nothing but green screen to me. So it was just kind of like, well, you know what? You did a really bad job of selling all that time that you spent doing it. So anyway, on the show I'm on, we have kids, seven of them to be exact. Now, when you're shooting with kids, you only get them for a limited period of time.
    40:23
    They have to spend so many hours in school, and then there is only so many hours that they are even by law allowed to work. Yes. And they have to have mandatory breaks and stuff. Mandatory breaks. Yep. And so it's this whole juggling of the cast and making sure that you get max, you know, because we're not only going to work an eight-hour day. We're going to work a 12-hour day. So it's how you parcel them out. Well, the particular episode that we're working on, unfortunately most of the kids were all together at the same time. Oh, that's good. no it's bad because that meant we only had a limited amount of time with all of them and it's really hard to get that much coverage on every single one of them also all of their all of their sort of time entitlements don't line up so they're all there they've they may sort of have done some school but not enough school or they may not have had quite enough break oh man right so what it's amounted to is though every single day even when we're on stage not shooting outdoors all of this particular episode, we've been primarily outdoors, resulted at about 5 p.m. every day, us having tragic hour. Because when kids have to go off the clock, we call it, we say that the kids are about to pumpkin. About to pumpkin. Yes. Like Cinderella. Her carriage is going to go poof.
    41:43
    I love that. That's nice. And there is no, well, we'll pay them extra. No, it's absolutely bye-bye. They're gone. No, it's like, you know, breaching the rules of the Humane Society. Like, it's like the Humane Society for kids. Right, right. So we have literally every single day for the past two weeks had Tragic Hour. And it's not fun knowing that it's coming and knowing that you're about to run around with your head cut off. and thankfully this episode is now completed and our next episode is a more standard way of how they're shooting it which is just us on stage with limited amount of kids at any one time so it should be much more sane. I'm looking forward to that but to say the least I was pretty much coming home eating, maybe watching a half an hour of a TV show and then if I was lucky being able to stay awake long enough to walk to bed Otherwise, I was falling asleep on the couch and then waking up later and then going to bed.
    42:43
    So, yeah, that's why pinball was kind of taking a backseat. Warning. The following contains little to no actual talk about pinball. In other news, TV season has started for us. Oh, is it? Oh, okay. And I've sampled two shows. Neither of which has impressed me. So I'm off to a depressing start.
    43:13
    Yeah, I've got – I don't even want to think about how many series of TV that I would need to catch up on since, you know, having kids probably or, you know.
    43:22
    I'm five years behind basically in anything decent on television. Yeah, I – last night I actually tried watching the – there's a new Lethal Weapon TV show. Oh, really? I was dreading to begin with because I love the Lethal Weapon movies. Yeah. The second one is I have such fond memories of and has one of the single best stunt setups that I can recall. I mean, I just love this one particular setup in the movie.
    43:55
    Briefly, for any of you, those that have seen the movie way back in 90 or E9. Yeah. is when they're driving up to the stilt house, and there's a tow truck driving up the road, and he's got a car on the back of the lift gate, and there's a guy with a surfboard on the back of his pickup truck driving down the road, and a car chase is happening, and through a series of events, the tailgate or the ramp of the tow truck gets dropped down so that one car jams into the back of that, sending the car that was on the tow truck flying over the top of the tow truck, which lands on the road and goes head-on collision with the guy that has the surfboard on top of his car, sending the surfboard flying forward and decapitating the bad guy in the car. Hoorah!
    44:49
    It's a total Rube Goldberg setup. And the thing is, they set up the geography of this a full 30 seconds in advance. So by the time the action actually happens, you know exactly what's going to happen. And you're just sitting in your seat going, ooh! And then it actually does happen. This is opposed to watching any of the Bourne movies. Well, not the first one, but the following ones, where you have no clue what is actually happening because, as I like to call it, you don't get to see the action, you get to see the aftermath of the action. Because it's all, hey, I heard a noise. Well, let's look over there and see what that noise was. Oh, hey, look, a car just exploded. Too bad I didn't get to see what made it explode. To me, that takes away the tension and the joy of those sequences. I want to see the setup. I want to get that giddy sense of anticipation and know what's happening and going to transpire. So anyway, I'm off the point, as I like to do. The Lethal Weapon TV show, I was just really kind of going, there's no way they're going to be able to do this justice on TV. And they were kind of cribbing from the movie, which again, I'm like, come on, just do your own thing. I don't know. And I'm not buying the Murtaugh and Riggs, the cast, although the cast, Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh, the Danny Glover part. So that's not bad.
    46:17
    Mick G, who did the Charlie's Angels movies, he directed the pilot, and I fell asleep halfway through it. Right. Was that just purely because you were knackered after your week of – I was a bit knackered, but for an action show, that's pretty sad. I mean, it just – to me, it just felt like they were clicking off check marks. Okay, we hit that bit that's in the movie. We hit that bit that's in the movie without having earned any of it. And then I realized I was like – so they had – TV shows are 44 minutes long. They had 44 minutes.
    46:52
    A Lethal Weapon movie, it was only an hour and a half, maybe two hours. Yeah. So why is it that the Lethal Weapon movie was able to have so much better chemistry and make you care about the characters where the TV show,
    47:04
    nah, don't care. Yeah. Maybe they had a lot longer to perfect the script. I don't know. It's one of those things where I was just kind of like, nah. And then I started watching American Horror Story this season. I watched the first episode of that and they're doing reality docu-horror. Ugh. So obviously you weren't involved in this particular... No, I wasn't involved in the season of it. So it was a mystery to me what was going to happen. Right. And as with... I'm good and full well that American Horror Story, at about the fourth or fifth episode, they completely changed the script. And usually that's because they don't know what they were writing to begin with. And they've run out of ideas and switched them. So they dexterous.
    47:50
    Yeah, yeah. So there's still the potential for it to get better, but I hate docu-horror. So that was a bummer to see that. I saw the, this is well and truly behind. I'm sure this has been out for like years now in the U S but we are seeing the first time here in Australia on free to air scream Queens.
    48:12
    Yeah. I didn't make it through the pilot of that one. Yeah. It's very bizarre. Um, it's intriguing. It's sort of like looking at the sun, you know, you shouldn't do it, but you still do it anyhow. Uh, I don't know. It's a, it's too over. It's a little bit like glee. Well, It's the same creators. Oh, really? Oh, that would stand to reason then, right? Yeah. Yeah, so it's Glee Horror.
    48:37
    Yeah. I'm vague. I don't know how this is going to go, but I recorded it last night. There's also a new Exorcist TV show. Oh, jeez. What are they doing rebooting all these 80s franchises? Interestingly enough, it's getting good reviews. So I'm going to be very curious to see if it's any good or not. I mean, who knows? Maybe it's like Hannibal, and I love Hannibal, where I thought that that just surpassed the movies. Oh, there you go. That's pretty good.
    49:08
    We'll see if it pays off. Not holding out too much hope, but... Give it a go. See what you think. And if it impresses you, keep watching it. That's usually what you do. Exactly. And I'm not going to go into it here because it still makes my mind hurt.
    49:28
    But me and Heretic get into weekly discussions about Mr. Robot, which just had its finale, and, yeah, mind.
    49:37
    Yeah, that's one series that I've heard so many good things about, and I think I just really need to find myself an Internet backup of that movie and start that series and just start watching it on the train. Well, that's the thing. I don't know. Make sure you have your headphones on and make sure that you are able to pay rapt attention to it because if you aren't paying attention to it, you're going to go, huh?
    50:02
    What just happened? It throws so many things at you and it throws Easter eggs at you and it's a lot of visual. It's not just what the words are coming out of the person's mouth. You can't be doing one thing and watch it the next time. You've got to pull on it.
    50:20
    It's also one of those shows that after you watch a season, you need to go re-watch the season because now you have a whole new batch of information that applies to all of it. And now having watched the second season, I feel like I need to go re-watch both the first and second season because it's, again, holding in on itself. Jeez, that's a very good rod in that case. Yes.
    50:46
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    51:31
    I know Heretic love a My Little Pony table. Oh yeah? Are you being facetious or actual real? There was one time where I challenged him to let me pick his avatar and he had to live with that avatar for a couple of days. I found a My Little Pony and he He had to have that as his avatar, and he's hated me for that, but at the same time, he kind of grew fond of it too.
    52:00
    He made him a closet brony. Brony, yeah.