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Zen Through the Ages

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·57m 22s·analyzed·Jul 28, 2018
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Blockade Podcast critiques Zen Pinball's early table design philosophy—promising concepts undermined by poor visual hierarchy and obtuse rulesets.

Summary

Chris (Shut Your Trap) and Jared (Jazza Morgo) from the Blockade Pinball Podcast discuss Zen Pinball's early table designs, focusing on Eldorado as their current tournament table. They critique the visual clarity, unintuitive rulesets, and poor playfield labeling of Zen's first four PS3 tables (Eldorado, Shaman, V12, Tesla), arguing that while the layouts are conceptually interesting, the execution makes them frustratingly difficult to understand without external guides. They praise later tables like Biolab and Earth Defense for improved aesthetics but note they retain cryptic rulesets.

Key Claims

  • Eldorado's raised plastics are the same color as the playfield, making it impossible to distinguish lanes, especially on the right-hand side

    high confidence · Chris describes visual design flaw directly from gameplay experience

  • Insert labels on Eldorado don't match what's called out in-game; the 'airfield' insert actually corresponds to the U-turn shot

    high confidence · Chris explains specific mislabeling observed during play

  • Tesla's mode-start hole on the upper left flipper is so cryptic that Chris didn't discover the table had modes for months

    high confidence · Chris recounts personal discovery timeline

  • Zen produced early PS3-exclusive tables (Street Fighter II, Ninja Gaiden) with severe visual clarity issues; Ninja Gaiden is 'brutally difficult to see' due to flat red coloring

    high confidence · Chris and Jared discuss PS3-exclusive content and visual problems

  • Mars table rules were improved in FX3 compared to FX2, suggesting Zen can fix early table issues through rule updates without full redesigns

    high confidence · Chris uses Mars as precedent for iterative improvements

  • Early Zen tables have mode-start holes that are 'cryptic and impossible' to discover without external guides or trial-and-error

    high confidence · Both hosts express frustration with undiscoverable mechanics across multiple tables

Notable Quotes

  • “Everything blends into itself. The raised plastics are the exact same color as the playfield. And so sometimes you can't even tell what is a lane, what isn't a lane, especially on the right-hand side of the playfield.”

    Chris (Shut Your Trap) @ ~12:00 — Core complaint about Eldorado's visual design failure—establishes primary critique of early Zen tables

  • “Even after reading the instructions, I couldn't figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing. None of it makes sense to me. It's visually just painful.”

    Chris @ ~14:30 — Summarizes frustration with ruleset obscurity even with guidance

  • “I didn't even discover that there was actual modes on that table for months.”

    Chris @ ~22:00 — Demonstrates how opaque Tesla's design is—core mechanic undiscoverable

  • “It's a pinball table cut in half because you have a front portion of a playfield and then you have a back playfield. It does not tell you at all what you are to be shooting for.”

    Jared @ ~32:00 — Concise critique of V12's layout confusion and lack of guidance

  • “I would love Zen to go through and fine, don't mess with the layouts. You don't have to mess with the layouts, but maybe change where your mode start holes actually are.”

    Chris @ ~40:30 — Constructive suggestion: Chris identifies that the core problem isn't conceptual but in implementation/discovery mechanics

  • “Multiball, shoot the tombs. Multiball, shoot the tombs. Multiball, shoot the tombs... that's basically the strategy.”

    Jared @ ~43:00 — Demonstrates how Eldorado's complexity collapses to a trivial strategy, suggesting poor rule balance

  • “They're not where any table you ever would play out in the wild would have flippers. They're really strangely placed.”

    Chris @ ~51:00 — Critique of Biolab's unconventional flipper placement as a design red flag

Entities

Chris / Shut Your Trap / ShuttypersonJared / Jazza Morgo / J-RadpersonZen Pinball / Zen StudioscompanyEldorado (Zen table)gameTesla (Zen table)gameV12 (Zen table)gameShaman (Zen table)gameEarth Defense (Zen table)gameBiolab (Zen table)game

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Blockade Podcast using Zen FX3 tournament mode for competitive play and detailed analysis, indicating active community engagement with digital pinball platform despite design criticisms.

    high · This week's tournament table is Eldorado; Jared 'recently just bought the pack' and is actively playing; extended discussion of rules and mechanics suggests tournament preparation

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Early Zen Pinball tables (Eldorado, Tesla, V12, Shaman) exhibit systemic design flaws: playfield elements color-blend indistinguishably, mode-start mechanics are cryptic/undiscoverable, shot labels contradict in-game callouts, and visual hierarchy fails to guide player intentions.

    high · Both hosts document specific failures across multiple tables; Chris didn't discover Tesla modes for months; Jared characterizes V12 as 'a mess of a layout with next to no instruction'; Eldorado's airfield label corresponds to U-turn, not actual airfield location

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Zen secured early licensed IP for pinball (Plants vs. Zombies, Street Fighter II, Ninja Gaiden, later Marvel tables), but some titles have disappeared from storefronts (licensing/contractual issues).

    medium · Chris mentions someone angry at Zen for tables 'disappearing from them'; specifically cites Plants vs. Zombies (iOS table by third-party publisher, since delisted); implies licensing issues similar to traditional pinball licensing constraints

  • ?

    technology_signal: Zen released different table lineups across platforms (Xbox vs PS3), with some exclusive content (Street Fighter II, Ninja Gaiden PS3-only; Rocky and Bullwinkle Xbox-only), fragmenting the library.

    high · Jared: 'Xbox had had other tables...Their upfront release was different to PS3?'; Chris confirms Rocky and Bullwinkle and Pasha/Rome were Xbox-exclusive initially; PS3 parity came later in Zen 2

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.172

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast, with your hosts, Chris and Jared. G'day! Your ears to bells, the Blocky Penny Potty! Oi! Kick up your adidas, loosen the cargos, cause no worries, mate, we've gotcha caps over skulls when it comes to giving the fair dinkum about DigiPenny on this here chock-a-potty that doesn't cost Big Bickies now, or any Arvo. I'm happy to be Indo right now as it's dead dingles donger out there today My name is Bruce, aka Shuddy Joining me halfway, pappy cross as always, Bruce, aka Jerry Morgo Good on ya, Morgo, I see you've had your cuppa So, what's the John Dory?
0:48
Uh... hello That's fantastic, that made no sense whatsoever, by the way I'll break it down for ya In case you're wondering what the hell is going on here, folks, we saw a video this week that was how to talk like an Aussie, and Jared challenged me to do an intro of the show, talking like an Aussie but not in an Aussie accent. Not in a Crocodile Dundee accent. Right. So I had a go of it to see how much Jared would pick up. Here, let's walk this through. Yeah, let's walk it through, shall we? Because I did make up a few things. Which is fine. We do sometimes do that when we're speaking Oka in Australia. We do make things up, but I think you might have gone off the reservation a little bit with some of the words there. Well, what I've realized is that some of the phrasing that you guys use, it's not quite Cockney rhyming slang, but you can see that it seems to have its roots in some of that. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, we're all convicts. Right, right. So some of these things I kind of took in that direction. For instance, after the good day, I said, your ears to bells. And I was like, what's another word for listening? And I was like, well, if you put your ear up to the telephone, which is telephone is used to be, you know, Graham Bell who invented the phone. So I was like, ah, here's the bells.
2:25
And then before, like I said, I was pulling it out of my butt right off the bat. And then and then the idea that you guys like to shorten everything. So instead of the blockade pinball podcast, it became the blocky penny potty.
Mars (Zen table)
game
Street Fighter II (Zen table)game
Ninja Gaiden (Zen table)game
Plants vs. Zombies (Zen table)game
Zen Pinball 2 (FX2)product
Zen Pinball FX3product
Digital Pinball Fans Forumorganization
Hereticperson
PlayStation 3 (PS3)product
Xboxproduct
  • ?

    product_strategy: Zen's early tables lacked intuitive feedback systems compared to physical machines; hosts argue for rule updates without full redesigns, similar to Mars FX3 improvements.

    high · Chris proposes: 'don't mess with the layouts...maybe change where your mode start holes actually are'; Mars precedent cited as proof-of-concept for iterative fixes

  • ?

    product_concern: Zen's early digital table design prioritizes visual aesthetics over playability and rule clarity, creating a disconnect between concept and execution.

    high · Chris: 'It's visually just painful...None of it makes sense to me'; Jared: 'It does not tell you at all what you are to be shooting for'; both note the need for external guides despite reading in-game instructions

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Community sentiment regarding Zen's early table library appears negative based on hosts' extended critique, though later releases show design maturation.

    high · Sustained criticism across multiple tables; Chris identifies Mars FX3 improvements as evidence Zen can fix issues; hosts frame later Biolab/Earth Defense as improvements but still 'cryptic'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Early Zen tables experimented with digital-native mechanics (unconventional flipper placements, multi-tier playfields) that violated real-world pinball conventions, creating confusion; later Marvel tables repeated these experiments.

    high · Chris notes Biolab's flipper positions 'not where any table you ever would play out in the wild would have flippers'; Jared observes this coincided with 'they started making some of the Marvel tables. And some of those first Marvel tables have equally strange flipper placements'

    • 2:42
    Yeah, that's true. Usually we don't shorten names. It's usually just, like, if it's, it's usually the way you shorten things is if it's, for example, my examples last week were a garbage collector, Garbo. So if there's just too many syllables in it, we'll shorten it. But if it's like Bicade, we'd leave that.
    3:06
    Bicade Pinny, we'd certainly call them pinnies down here, that's for sure. And podcast, we'd leave as is. Okay. It'd be a Bicade Pinny podcast. Then I said, oh, I kick up your Adidas. Somebody had told me that only in America do we pronounce it Adidas for your shoes. We call it Adidas here. Oh, it's Adida. Say it again? Adidas.
    3:29
    Adidas. So not Adidas. Not Adidas, no. Okay. I got what you meant, though, but I said no. Yeah, it's Adidas. Loosen the cargos. I figured, you know, loosen up your shorts. Yeah.
    3:43
    Because no worries, mate. We've got you. Okay, here's another one I made up. Caps over skulls when it comes to giving you the fair dinkum. I was thinking of we got you covered. How do you get covered? You put a hat on your head. Again, that's not something we do.
    4:00
    But it sounds like something you would say, right? No, it would be something like if I was phrasing that, it would be we got you covered. it'd be I don't know what we'd say for that they'd probably just call it we got you covered right actually that's a pro tip if you're talking Australian it's like we got you covered mate so it's like you've got to say things really fast got you covered mate and cut out unnecessary things like a or we've got you covered okay any contractions can go in when it comes to giving the fair dinkum about DigiPenny on this here Chaka Potty Chaka Potty? what is that?
    4:49
    Chaka Podcast in other words, a full podcast Chaka Chaka's Podcast right but doesn't cost big bickies that's fine that means expensive or money now or any Arvo, there's your afternoon yeah And then I said I'm happy to be Indo right now. I just figured indoors, short net, Indo. No, indoors is fine to leave as is. Keep indoors. Right now, and I read this one on a – I went to an Australian slang chart to get some of these. Right now, it's a dead dingo's donger out there today. Is it boring? No, it's dry. Dry, dry. Yeah, well, you have to – you can't just call it a dead dingo's donger. You have to put the clarification. Okay. It's a simile. Okay. So it's light.
    5:41
    It's, mate, it's dry as a dead dingo's donger out there at the moment. Okay. I didn't realize that I actually still put in the dry part. Yeah, it's dry as a dead dingo's donger, mate. Jeez. Like I said, my name is Bruce because that's the Monty Python joke. Everybody down there is named Bruce. Bruce. I was going to say that. And instead of saying AKA, I went with AKA. No. No? Is your wife laughing in the background? Yes, she is. It's like an ear in Chuck Lee way.
    6:15
    And then instead of saying shut your trap, I said shutty. Again, your name is shut your trap. And then joining me, halfy cross instead of halfway across the world. That'd be half across. Half across. Okay. Close, though.
    6:32
    Calling you Bruce and then saying Jerry Margo. just because I thought that was funny my name can be people do often abbreviate my name as Jazza here, because it's Jared Jazza yeah Jazza, J-A-Z-Z-A that's if they're really pogan, otherwise they just call me any of my other nicknames they go by which is J-Rad or pretty much J-Rad or J-Man or anything like that They will just flop around and call me whatever they like, really. And that's fine. As long as they don't call me dickhead, that's fine.
    7:12
    And then finishing off with good on you, Morgo. I see you've had your cuppa. So what's the John Dory?
    7:20
    What's the story? See, that's cockney right there. Right. John Dory. And good on you, Jazz. It'll be like on your mate. On your mate. Also, you don't even say the good part. You just go on your mate. On your mate. Yeah, on you, mate. That's good. See, speaking Australia, it's all about efficiency. It's just like you cut out just enough syllables so you pretty much round down the words that aren't like proper nouns, like people's names or names of like companies and stuff. Right.
    7:52
    And you try and it's okay to shorten products, though. Like you can shorten product names if they're too long.
    8:00
    I'm trying to think of some examples. but we have in the past just bastardized some names because there was too many syllables and nobody got time for that.
    8:09
    Well, that's why – what is our friend Heretic over there in Ireland? What do they call Kentucky Fried? The Dirty Bird. Oh, we call it Dirty Bird. You call it Dirty Bird there too. Yeah, we love Dirty Bird. Yeah, it's good.
    8:25
    The Dirty Bird, yeah. Yeah, it's – McDonald's Mickey D's. oh and I see the thing I was reading said it was Macca's oh we call it Macca's too in fact down here there was a store in Sydney who actually completely rebranded using Macca's for the Olympics they even changed all the livery on the store and everything so it was still the big M golden arches but it was Macca's instead of McDonald's so we totally embrace it down here go to Macca's I think I've told you this before when me and my wife took our honeymoon in Australia and we were quite disappointed for the longest time because we weren't hearing anything other than how you speak. It was like, okay, so you have slight accent to our ears but it was not... It wasn't as much fun as we were hoping to listen to. It wasn't popular than me. So it wasn't until we were up in Cannes. Cannes?
    9:26
    Okay. and we go into this shop and this guy starts talking to us and we couldn't understand a single word coming out of his mouth and we couldn't have been happier.
    9:38
    What? I think they call it Jackaroo or His name was Red and he worked at Dry's Bone Shop. His name was Red and he worked at Dry's Bone. Which I did buy a jacket. They're good jackets. Except for the part that you got to, I got to re-coat that stupid thing.
    10:03
    And kangaroo blood. I want to say that, yeah, I can't remember what he said that that particular dialect was, but it was basically Central Australian. Central Australian, yeah, well that's where strine tends to originate. The reason why it's called strine is because it's, if you say Australian short when you're from the outbase of Australia, mate. Are you from Australia? Yeah. So anyway, it was absolutely fantastic. We couldn't have been more pleased, and I think we went in there a second time. I know when we were in there, we literally talked to the guy for like 45 minutes. Oh, really? We just couldn't get enough of it.
    10:47
    I mean, it would be essentially, I think it's if you came to the States and you went to Texas? Boston. No, if you went to Boston. you might hear the Boston I know I'm not doing a Boston accent at all but you know into the car there are no R's or if you went down to Louisiana and you want to hear that Creole accent where God knows what they're saying because they don't open their mouth they're too lazy to even enunciate I love those accents like see the thing is I don't know I don't have any problem understanding those regional dialects like that. I don't know what it is. I can get it really quite easy. It might take me 10 minutes when I'm listening to someone, but then I'm fine. I can totally do it.
    11:38
    All right. Well, maybe not heretics because he, depending on. You got to understand the deal with, for those of us who are on the Digital Pinball Fans Forum, there's an individual that's been on that forum for quite some time his name is Heretic and many of his posts are literally illegible but what you have to realize is it's not because he's talking funny although that's how I totally picture it in my head but it's that he's missing the keys and hitting a key next to it because he's typing on a not on an actual keyboard, he's typing on an iPad half the time. He never goes back and corrects any of what he types. He just pulls on forward. And if you've read enough of his stuff, you start to understand it. Because you've looked down at your keyboard enough times to go, oh, I see. Instead of hitting the I, he hit the O. Gotcha. I-O-N-P at the same time. The scary thing is he's pretty darn consistent with how he does his misspellings. And so you kind of start to be able to read it eventually. So it's this weirdest thing is being able to read an accent without it actually being legitimately an accent. It's funny that, too, because there's a guy who contributes, one of the contributors on the Android beta testing Google communities room. And he is, I'm pretty sure he is German. yeah and what he does i think is he either runs a german message through google translate and then and then posts it in the form which is really good of him to take the effort to do that if that's what he's doing but there i think sometimes he just has a go and and like initially i i was reading his bug reports i was going i don't know what you're talking about i'm really Sorry. And you don't want to say that to someone who's not a native English speaker because it sounds really rude if you do that.
    13:44
    So I had to, like, try and softly, softly and sort of try and go, oh, when you say this word, do you mean this or this? Yeah. And it was like he was using the terms. He was using an abbreviation, which makes it even harder, that meant something to him but didn't mean anything to us. So it was really quite hard to kind of understand what he was getting at. When he uses high score it HC not HS for example And that must be a translation thing Right So score in German must start with C or something like that And it was just like I need to just think about what you saying here for a minute before I just start launching into a response
    14:34
    But, yeah. Well, he's good. He's getting better now. And, I mean, I've decoded it enough now that I can understand what he's talking about when he's posting bugs. So that's the main thing. I think everyone else has kind of adjusted to it, too. I can only imagine what I would be like trying to speak in a non, what isn't my native language, into some other form. Oh, my God. I just could imagine how butchered I would do. Oh, yeah. Well, even if you run it through Google Translate and you're trying, you know. Yeah. If you, like, say you're looking at an only French forum, for example, and then you want to read a thread, you'd have to go each time, if you weren't really good at the language, and copy and paste and translate each thing that you're trying to read. Yeah. And then if you want to respond to anyone, you'd have to, like, do some sort of crazy Google Translate thing back and forward. It would take a lot of effort. So for these people who aren't native English speakers, who like to contribute to English forums, my hat tips to you, sir. Thanks for making the effort because I don't. It's hard. It's really, really hard.
    15:42
    It makes me wonder if that's what's always been so off to me about Zachariah pinball machines because they're so foreign. It's so Italian. Everything about them is just weird to me.
    16:00
    they're bizarre. They are. Everything about the artwork is completely different and the layouts are different. And yeah,
    16:09
    they, they do that crazy. Let's put random EM things like in the old EM design days when they were experimenting. It's like they went, Hey, we've got this, we're going to make pinballs and we don't have the internet. So we can't see what all the other pinball manufacturers have been doing. So let's just start from scratch. That's already been grounds already being covered and uncertain to then buried again but we don't know that so we're gonna do these crazy things again so yeah it's bizarre very bizarre speaking of uh bizarre we're going to kind of uh delve into this a little bit but this week's zen table that we've been playing in fx3 in our tournament mode has been eldorado and when i posted that eldorado was going to be the table i made mention of how it's probably my second least favorite of all of Zen Tables.
    17:04
    Yeah, it's a bizarre table. For me today, this was the first time in the tournament, because it was the tournament table that I've ever played it. Because I recently just bought the pack, and I went, oh, this is a good excuse to play this.
    17:20
    I don't know. Let's talk about it more, because it's weird. Let's talk about it, because this kind of applies to what I consider, and this is I know these aren't the first four Zen tables that were put out, but on PlayStation they were. They were put out on the PS3 as Zen Pinball, and the first four tables that came out were Eldorado, Shaman, V12, and Tesla.
    17:49
    Right. It was only later that I found out that Xbox had had other tables. So their upfront release was different to PS3? Yeah, they had had like a Rocky and Bullwinkle table. Oh. And they had, I think they had Pasha and Rome. Right. Whereas PlayStation didn't have those until much later. Not during, I think it was during Zen 2 that those finally became available on PlayStation. And then they also had a couple of other tables that I couldn't tell you what they are because they never updated them after that and never bothered making them again. so I always that's why I always consider these though the kind of the first like them cutting their teeth you really get serious about it but if you look at Eldorado just an example everything blends into itself the raised plastics if you will are the exact same color as the playfield and so sometimes you can't even tell what is a lane what isn't a lane especially on the right hand side of the play field there is a lane that you can shoot on the right hand that basically goes through pop bumpers but the insert isn't centered on the lane that you shoot it's like a red pitchfork it's to the left so if you aimed it so the ball went directly over the top of it you'd hit a post so it's like what are you doing? No, why center that stuff up?
    19:32
    The inserts themselves have text written on them that don't match what is being called out. Oh, really? See, I didn't look at any of that because for me, it was just like, they are just arrows. I didn't even realize there was text on them. Oh, except for tomb. There's tomb, and I should make that out. Right. It says tomb on one, but there's two tombs. I forget what the other one specifically says. At one point, the guy was making some point about go to the airfield. I'm like, airfield? There's nothing labeled on here that is the airfield. That's the scoop. It's the U-turn, what they call the U-turn. Right. I was like, well, then call it the U-turn because that's what pops up when you actually hit the shot. That's what pops up on the DMD. It says U-turn. There's nothing labeled in front of it that says anything about air. It was just like a plane insert. For example, this is like a red sort of a strike thing. Right. Which I was like, what is that? A ribbon? I don't know. I don't know what that is. I have no clue what that is.
    20:39
    There's, there's this wheel in the center that has all these symbols on it. Yeah. What are they? I have no idea. I have no clue what the symbols are, what they mean, how you light them. Once they are lit, I don't know where the mode, I think it's the U-turn, is what starts a mode, but I couldn't understand that.
    21:00
    I literally have no clue. There's one lane, because I'm loathe to call them orbits, because they don't really orbit around the table, they just orbit to a different area. But the orbit to the left, you can excavate with, I think. and then if a treasure is available that's when you shoot the lane between the pop bumpers on the right which sends the ball up into a habitrail on the right hand side yeah that's the golden bridge or whatever there is a saw blade mechanism on the back of the table that I could not tell you I've gotten to it before but I couldn't tell you what steps I took to get there there's also a tilting playfield that makes you go ooh it's like Indiana Jones except for, again, how the hell do you get there? I don't know. It has something to do with the upper left mid-playfield flipper. But the problem is you can't tell where you're flipping to because it's completely blocked by this upper playfield thing. Yeah. There's a hole under there somewhere. But the hit for it is an absolute nightmare. And that's the problem with the entire table. You just are – even after reading the instructions, I couldn't figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing. None of it makes sense to me. It's visually just painful. And I wish that, and this applies to, again, these first four tables in general. I wish Xen would go through and fix the rules. They did this with Mars. Now, Mars was a table that was originally on Xbox before it came over to PlayStation. but if you play Mars in FX2 they've changed the rules in FX3 ever so slightly but it improves the table and so I would love for them to go back to these tables and not necessarily completely sweep the rules and change them but change how you start things because the mode start holes on some of these are cryptic and impossible. So take Tesla as a good example of that. It is the mode hole that you start everything with is the upper left flipper. And you are shooting it sideways, but the problem is there's a lane, there's a hole, and there is something else. And aiming is an utter pain in the butt with that flipper, because you can't. You've got to do it on the fly. But this is how you start the main mode hole, the main modes. I didn't even discover that there was actual modes on that table for months. Oh, really? I don't think I did either.
    23:51
    Well, it relates to there's a big dial in the middle of the play field, and whatever the arrow is pointing to, that's what mode you'll start. And you can light all of them, too.
    24:04
    Good luck. Okay. It's nigh impossible to do this. and then once you do get a mode started it becomes all about hitting one of these one shot that gets you to the upper habit trail I don't know, it's one of these things where it's like, oh great, I started the mode, oh crap, now I gotta finish the mode and it's timed and very difficult to complete and get going and it's such a stress case getting it that you just eventually just go toss it. I'm not dealing with this table anymore.
    24:46
    It's too much. Yeah, and the thing is Tesla, I think, is a fantastic looking table. Again, they went a little too heavy on the bronze or the brass look of the table because there's no clear definition contrast for your eyes to focus on. I bet it looks fantastic in 3D, but how many people are paying it in 3D. Not many. Not enough. Well, nobody on the PS4 is playing it in 3D. I doubt anybody on the PC is playing it in 3D. If you had it on PS3, you could play it in 3D. Right.
    25:26
    I remember for a very short time, on Android, they accidentally enabled 3D on Final Effects 2. And for those TVs who supported it, wow, it looked good. like wow and then they turned it off because I told them about it whoops because it was really bad performing on Android as you can imagine it was not happy even on a really powerful tablet well you know somebody had pointed out that they were angry at Zen why they were never going to buy anything from them again because they had tables disappear from them yeah that's sort of like what tables are you talking about that disappeared you know I was thinking maybe it was license issues like Plants vs. Zombies for example right They mentioned this one, and it was Zen's first attempt at a table on iOS.
    26:16
    It wasn't even published by Zen or Microsoft. It was some other publishing company. And you look at it, and you're like, wow, that is so not what Zen is today. But the only cool factor about it was, depending on how you tilted your phone, you could get full 3D. It was full 3D. Oh, that's cool. Like you could see the side of the cabinet if you tilted your phone to the side and it was going with the intervalometer that's in there, basically.
    26:47
    I thought, well, that's kind of interesting. But if you look at the physics that were going on, you're like, but it doesn't look like it would be fun to play. No, it's lovely to look at. It's lovely to look at. But you take a table like V12, which is my absolute least favorite table of the Zens. Yeah, that's not too bad. It's a pinball table cut in half because you have a front portion of a playfield and then you have a back playfield.
    27:15
    It does not tell you at all what you're to be shooting for. The shots are very difficult. They don't flow. It is a mess of a layout with next to no instruction on the table itself. it's one that you have to go deep dive go read sure you can's table guide to even come close to figuring out what the heck you're supposed to be doing on the stupid thing exactly I think if I remember correctly shaman is the closest to a table that makes sense like you can understand the table as you're playing it but it's a visual mess also because it's just red all over the place. Yeah, so I have a hard time looking at that. Like, it's tough, really tough. Well, during the same period, Zen produced some PS3-only tables. One of them was Street Fighter II, and the other one was Ninja Gaiden. And Ninja Gaiden in particular is just flat red everywhere. Right. I never played that one.
    28:31
    Just look up a video of it. I never owned it. I went over to somebody house that did own it and I tried playing it I was just like forget this This is a mess Look at a video and it is just brutally difficult to see what is going on because it just so flat red And red is such a hard color to see detail with. Yes, it is. It kind of washes everything out. Yeah.
    28:56
    So that's what I just... I would love Zen to go through and... Fine, don't mess with the layouts. You don't have to mess with the layouts, but maybe change where your mode start holes actually are.
    29:13
    Go in and make the inserts, label them differently, make them more clear, clearly defined. You know, even go in with your lighting and fix your lighting so that it's more prominent, guides you to what you need to be doing better.
    29:29
    Because those four tables I just have a hard time with. Yeah, I guess from my perspective, having never ever played this table before until a tournament,
    29:42
    I thought the first time I saw it, I went, oh, yeah, it's Sten's version of Indiana Jones. It's got the idol. It's got the mini play field.
    29:51
    And it's got kind of like even the whole concept of dropping the drop targets before you shoot it into the idol's mouth. Like that was just, it's so blatantly Indiana Jones. It was lovely, actually. I thought I like it a lot that they've taken such homage from that title and put it into this pin. But then I went to try and not – with going in dry, basically, and not reading any of the rules, I got in there and I started to play the thing and using my actual, like, plays up to try and do it because I didn't, like, have it practiced before. I just went, all right, a tournament, I guess. Let's go and play this thing. Right. Go ahead and do it. So I thought, okay, so really what I got out of it to summarize is just start multi-ball and just do that. Multi-ball, shoot the tombs. He's trying to get your score.
    30:46
    And then if you get bored doing that, you try and light that right ramp to get the sort of like a mystery score up there sometimes. Yeah. sometimes also a mode like that golden bridge mode which I would have tried five times I have no idea how to get past the golden bridge on that I don't understand what I'm supposed to do to get past the buzzsaw it makes no sense so I'd love to get past it but I just wish they made that the path of adventure and like you shoot that ramp basically you shoot that ramp to enter the path of adventure that they've got up there and And the Path of Adventure worked well. Like, when I played it, it was fun. Like, it actually went, oh, yeah, this is Indy Jones. It's fine.
    31:39
    But I don't know how to do those weird modes in the middle. I had no idea how to start them. Well, there is one mode that it becomes kind of a hurry-up thing, but stand-up targets pop up in the middle of the playfield. Oh, yeah, I saw those. Which is, hey, great. I always like that. The problem is they're not the standard width of a regular drop target. And they're, again, the same color as the play field. Everything else. The only way I even knew where one was was because there was a light in front of it. Yeah. An insert light. But by the time I discovered where it was, I timed out. And then the thing dropped back down.
    32:22
    Yeah, I had the same problem. I was going, where am I shooting? Right. And of course, the dot matrix animations are terrible. Yeah. Like, you cannot, like, even if there's a mode happening, it's like, and the text is going like powering past. Yeah. Like, at barely readable speed. And you just go, I don't know what you want me to do. This is terrible. I'm sorry.
    32:48
    It's no good. Now, after those four tables, and I might be getting my timeline all wrong, but it's just how I remember them coming to me on the PlayStation, was then I came out with Biolab and Earth Defense. Earth Defense, yeah. And Earth Defense is one of those that I think looks really cool.
    33:12
    They definitely upped their game in terms of being a more friendly play field to look at. But it is just as cryptic as those other tables as to what it's supposed to do. It's a massive robot in the top right-hand corner that I don't really get. Like, there's a lot of cool stuff looping around it, which sort of indicates that you're battling it, like an aircraft flying around it and shooting it, which is fine. But it's another one that doesn't have satisfying ramps either. Like, they just don't feel fun to shoot. No. and again it's the rule set that you really have to just understand to like you have to read Shuriken Jiru Jin's guides and that one literally has no text on the play field either shoot the symbols which just I guess you just do classic stern gameplay and shoot all the flashing lights I've tried that it doesn't work of course it doesn't Well, especially when you realize that it's... You're having to combo some of the things. But how do you know that you're supposed to combo it when you have multiple things flashing? I'm like shooting the same ramp over and over and over again and going, why am I not scoring? Well, you're not scoring because after you shoot that ramp, you have to hit this other area first. Oh, thanks for telling me. Yeah, thanks for that. you know yeah um biolab is one where you can start to kind of figure it out um it talks you through it a little bit better it has got one of the funkiest flipper positionings for your for the flippers that are on the upper portion of the the play field they're so bizarre they're not where any table you ever would play out in the wild would have flippers. Yes. That's right. Yeah, they're really strangely placed. Yeah.
    35:11
    And also, if I remember correctly, they're kind of hidden in a lot of cases. Well, that's just it. Yeah, you can't necessarily see them at first go.
    35:21
    So that's what... I don't know how Zen would go about correcting that particular table, because again, I'm not asking them to mess with the play fields other than maybe doing some art passes. Yeah. You know, changing up some coloring. But that one's going to be funky no matter which way you shake it. And, I mean, truth be told, that was also when they started making some of the Marvel tables. And some of those first Marvel tables have equally strange flipper placements. Yeah.
    35:50
    You know, that was when they were really kind of starting to experiment with the, hey we're digital we can do whatever the hell we want and we will where all of a sudden ramps just magically appear and then they disappear out of thin air and you're like we're okay and then I think they've well and truly got away from that design trait in their later tables like all the pinball machines you're seeing now they could technically be done in real life with probably a lot of very expensive sub-assemblies, but you could actually do them in real life. There would be a $15,000 machine, but you could do them.
    36:35
    But I mean, it's like, take for example, if you would, imagine if Zen was making No Good Gophers. Now, No Good Gophers is, even in person, it's a bit of a visual mess. It is. Because of the Plexi, the shoot in the cart and the hole in one thing. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of... I say it's only kind of in person because you get it really quickly. The second you throw it into digital, though, it becomes, whoa, what am I looking at? This is really kind of hard to wrap my head around and there's a lot going on. Yeah. Especially if you're playing on a platform that doesn't do transparencies very well, like Android. Right. It doesn't actually have the lighting to help you understand what's going on. Yeah. So imagine if Zen was doing no good gophers back then, right? If this was a Zen original and they were doing no good gophers, well, all the plexi in the clear would be just like not there normally until you hit a ramp and then suddenly... They would magically appear. Yeah. And then a gopher would come up and actually physically grab your ball and start juggling it. And, you know, it's probably scampering about on the play field. And you're like, wait, do I shoot the gopher or do I just let him roam around? I'm not positive. Yeah, exactly.
    38:00
    Yeah, it would be very, very bizarre is what it would be. Yeah. I mean, I imagine if they and again, if they did it today, same theme. well then i would think that they would it would be like what you said um closer to being able to do yeah what is done in real life um i mean they might do a cheat here and there or whatever but it would be mostly recreatable yeah most of it would be there on the play field the entire time as a solid object yeah if the only thing that might be different is the way that the animated characters interact with the ball exactly like a little bit think of like deadpool when you have for the animated characters when he's got the haters. I mean, the haters running towards him, and you've got to shoot a combo shot to get him to chuck the hater around the place. You're actually not. You're still shooting pinball shots to make that happen. It's just after you've actually completed the shot, the animation happens. So that's how they would probably do that today. They enhance with animations. so yeah very interesting the evolution of game design in a company like that that actually has a long history in digital pinball it's interesting to analyze isn't it? Yeah it is and like I said knowing that they changed and I don't know what other tables they changed in FX3 I know they went back and they kind of altered a couple of tables but I know Mars for sure is one of them What do they do to Mars?
    39:41
    There is a different way of selecting the modes, basically. Different parameters that are required to start getting them going.
    39:56
    I always found them really confusing in FX2. And in FX3, it makes a lot more sense to me now. it makes sense the progression of how you do things because it's to me again the first time I ever played that game was on this platform because I never had it on Android and to me it was like this is a really interesting take on pinball because it's all like it looks a little bit similar to like that the pinball tournaments app table. It looks pretty spacey, but done in a way that actually looks really quite cool. Yeah. And the fact that everything is really reflective, and it's got lots of wire, not wireframe, it's got all the... Vector graphics. Yeah, all the graphics are sort of vector-like and stuff. It actually looks really cool.
    40:56
    Well, where I, truth be told, where I noticed the difference was I was... Zen has a skills app also. And the two tables that you can play in that are Epic Quest or Mars.
    41:09
    After I'd spent a week playing Mars, I was like, hey, you know what? I'm going to try out my skills on that and play. Well, it's the old rules version of Mars. And that's where I went, wait a second. That's different. That's very different. I'm doing all the things I'm doing in FX3 and they're not working.
    41:28
    So that's why I say I would love for them to go back and just make some alterations to those tables so that they'd be more enjoyable.
    41:40
    There's a couple of marble tables I'd like them to do the same thing with just because, again, for a while there, where their mission start holds were being placed were just completely unfriendly to the player. Yeah, that's right. You should be able to hit them with your bottom flippers. And that was not what the case was. It was, nope, you absolutely cannot hit them with your bottom flippers. It has to be a running gun shot. That's right. That's just mean. Yeah, that's no fair. That's dirty pool. Dirty pool.
    42:14
    Speaking of the Pinball Tournaments app, I have successfully navigated my way to $40 now. Hey, $40? $40. Wow. I might be able to cash out at some point now. so obviously you're getting more matchups and you're getting the big league play well no i'm still matched up with only the same two people over and over again um but what there's now and then they actually if you place top three there's an additional money bonus and the last two times i managed to get into that bonus so one time i won i think one dollar and this last time I won So that helps But the part of the reason why I won the I noticed it was the same regular three that I played against We were all battling for top spot And all of a sudden, we got bumped down. I was like, wait, who the heck bumped us down? Because nobody played against me. And I look at the person's score, and they had scored 15. I went, ah, they're playing the $5 and $10 match. so I tightened the sphincter and played the $10 match and I won and that propelled me to the front and nobody else could catch me then because nobody else was playing the $10 matches so that once I get enough money backing me up I'll start playing the more high dollar tables the problem is that you lose a couple of those in a row and you plummet fast as opposed to when you were playing the dollar matches, you don't plummet very far. You can come back from those pretty easy. You can come back from those pretty easily. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, just plug it away. So I encourage everybody, you know, jump in. Oh, and, and on top of that, uh, I'd mentioned that the app was crashing on me now and then. Well, I was, there was a, you can report crashes and I was requesting that my, uh, entry fee would be refunded and they were doing that. Until I got a message sent from them. They go, you've requested one too many of these. All right. And I went, okay. And they go, we need you to submit crash logs. I said, I'll send you every single crash log I have to get this problem fixed.
    44:37
    And so I've been submitting those, and they've been very grateful and went ahead and refunded my entry fees for the latest. But hopefully this is information that they can take to Farsight and be like, hey, you're specifically coming off of the app. What's causing the crash? Yeah, definitely. That's the idea with crash logs. Yep. They should be sent back to the developer. Usually if an Android app crashes and it's a game and I'm helping them out, I always submit crash log in Android. Because it does, it goes back into their dev console that they use to manage the game. They can see all the crash logs that you send in. It's very useful for them. Because they'll start to see a trend with all the different crash messages that are coming through. That helps them. Well, the tricky part was I had to first plug my phone into the computer and then that and leave it plugged in. And then I had to navigate to wherever all the crash logs actually are, copy and paste those in an email to send to them. And once I did that, they asked me for one other thing, which they gave me this cool little. OK, we need you to while the app is open, do this sequence with your volume button. It was like up, down, up, down, up, up, down, down, up, down. and then all of a sudden a little Konami code. I was like, yes! It lives in lives. This little window popped up that had all sorts of information that only they understand and they had me do a screenshot of that and send that to them. Wow, there you go.
    46:06
    That's cool. Skills people working with me. I like it. Collaborating. Collaboration. Hey Jared, have you been getting messages asking about what version of the Kinect camera people should be tracking down. Oh, yeah. I've seen those coming through.
    46:28
    What's it? Well, I mean, it's related to, obviously, to the Arcuda software. Yeah. For when you get your cabinet, you're going to want to have the Kinect camera, obviously.
    46:40
    And so I'm completely in the dark on this. I guess there's the Kinect camera, and then there's the Kinect camera version 2, which I think was for the Xbox 1. Does one of them have a power supply? It's not powered by the USB or something? Right. And that's why I don't know what the connector itself is, if it's a USB connector, but they were saying that the version 2 comes with an adapter. To which I'm now wondering, we should probably make a request to Arcuda and say, so is it not plug and play, or do you need this adapter? Or is the adapter, like, is the power supply from the internal like CUDA cabinets like, because you know how sometimes they might route 12 volts, whatever it is up to the... Yeah, they said it's a 12 volt powering thing. They might just have like a plug already done in the cabinet that allows you to plug it in. But hang on a sec, no one's got cabinets yet. No.
    47:43
    So why... You mean, why are people wondering about this? Yeah. Shh. Next topic. The secret handshake is... Oh, next topic. Next topic. So how about that sports ball?
    48:05
    How about that Lakers offseason? Jared you made mention of a pinball tournament a real pinball tournament happening near you yeah with actual pinballs yeah and it's a big one it's now the biggest pinball tournament in Australia on the tournament calendar and that is the 2018 Brisbane Masters so at the moment people have been I think it actually started on Friday Actually, Thursday was the first event that was related to it, which was a bit of pin golf, and that started at 4 p.m. And then Friday we had a three strikes comp, which again started at 7 p.m. so all the workers could get to it. But, boy, they went late. It was like 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. for the Friday event, which is like a struggle if you've actually got to get public transport home because you're basically cutting it super fine.
    49:02
    The trains here stop about 11.30 or 12. so yeah you've got to really play your well you know that's of course when they're having their best game ever of course yeah exactly oh my god I'm doing so good but I really need to drain do I drain the ball or do I drain and train or do I play and sleep like a hobo somewhere because I don't have anywhere to sleep so yeah that's the balance that's the problem the struggle is real so So the Saturday one is the big tournament. So there's a six-round qualifier for Brisbane Masters.
    49:42
    And then at 8 p.m., you have a three-hour Flip Frenzy event. Now, I don't know if Flip Frenzy is done anywhere outside of Brisbane because I'm pretty sure that the guys who run Netherworld actually have a software package that allows you to run Flip Frenzy. But I think what they did, though, is Jimmy Nails or James Angliss, as his actual real name is, who owns Netherworld, went over to one of the sister barcades over in the US and actually bought the software with him. And they did a flip frenzy over there. And I forget where it was held. But the idea is that if you go into these flip frenzies, which will quite literally sell out in two hours here because you have to buy tickets for them. but the premise is you basically go there and you're just playing game after game, after game, after game for two hours or three hours. And the idea is to turn your games around as fast as possible because the, the more wins you have that determines who actually wins the flip frenzy. So the idea is to have quick games, not long games. Ah, yeah. Very interesting format. I still, I'm yet to get to one because usually when they announce it, people literally will get onto the Eventbrite site and try and get a ticket within the first two hours and it sells out very fast. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. So a very popular event. So that was on Saturday at 8. And then today, which is Sunday the 22nd of July when we're recording, they've got a bit of a social warm-up happening at 9 a.m. So that's probably just about the start because it's now 8.49 here when we're recording. And that's just a Teams challenge just to get you in the mood. And then we have the finals for the Brisbane Masters, which start at 10.30 a.m. today. And it's a five-round final. And then to round out the evening or the afternoon, it's a three-hour flip frenzy event from 5 p.m. And I think basically all the tickets are sold out for that at this stage. But that's a lot of pinball happening over the course of the four-day period. so it was actually being held at a hotel here in Brisbane it's a Ridges Fortitude Valley and they are a pretty new hotel here in the valley but they've got this really nice sort of conference room they've graciously left open for the Brisbane Pinball Club and for Netherworld to help set up and there's streaming there's like if you go to Twitch now you'll be able to see all the finals action happening on the stream. They've done a really good job with the stream this year, so check it out if you are watching this on YouTube. Probably by the time we get it out, it will be over.
    52:26
    But you probably could go back and watch the streams after it's been done. They do archive them right on Twitch. Yeah, so if you want to check it out, check out some Aussie Pinball action, you can go and have a look at the Netherworld, I think it's the Netherworld Twitch TV stream, and they'll have it all up in there.
    52:44
    I know here stateside, I believe ReplayFX is happening pretty soon. I don't know the exact date. PinballWiz45B keeps on messaging me, and I keep on telling him, I'm not going, so I don't care.
    52:59
    That being said, he is going to be playing in Pimberg this year. He's entering the big tournament. Oh, wow. He's going to put his money where his mouth is. Yeah. Nice. Well, good luck. Good luck to him. Yeah. we got anything else to bloviate about I don't think so we managed to fill up an hour pretty well when we didn't really have anything to talk about at the beginning when we were trying to plan out this episode so yeah we've done pretty well I think you know whoever scientific games if you have any kind of announcement to make anytime soon do us a favor just tell us will you You know, be a friend of the show.
    53:45
    Even if you want to come on and have a chat to us, we'll let you come on. And you can talk to us. Just us. There'll only be us. No one else. It's real easy to get a hold of us. You can drop us an email, blahblahblockade at gmail.com. Yes. You can go visit our website and check out our episodes and all the timing notes and all the links that get put up and go, you know what? That's a damn fine podcast. I think we should go on there. They know their stuff when it comes to digital pinball.
    54:22
    And that site is really easy to find. It's blockadepinball.com slash episodes. Yeah. You could follow us on Twitter and send us a message. You can message the show at Blockade. You can message myself. I am at ShutYourTraps and Jared is at JaredMorgz.
    54:42
    Easy peasy to get a hold of us. If you want to spill, just let us know some things so that we can fill an hour of the show very easily.
    54:55
    That'd be really good. Yeah. Just saying. Do it with a solid. All right. Hey, folks, are you interested in another run of T-shirts by any chance? We've been discussing it. We have this logo that we've had now for a little while that we would do a new shirt with. Just give us a heads up if that's not a commitment, just a simple, hey, you know what, that'd be pretty cool. We'd be down for that. let's know because we might fire up the old interwebs and get something going for that to be a thing again we've been doing a bit of investigation in the background I think we found a service that won't gouge you for shipping exactly regardless of where you are in the world like it's one of those distributed companies that will just print in your area so you really don't have to pay local shipping and that particular one you wouldn't even have to get a t-shirt we can you can slap the logo on whatever the heck you want.
    55:57
    You want a mug in the morning? Hey, there you go. You want a phone case? There you go. It's really easy. Yeah.
    56:04
    But yeah, we're just curious. So drop us a line. Let us know what you think. All right. How does an Aussie say a proper goodbye?
    56:15
    See you later, mate. Oh, well, uneventful. You've been saying that every week. How come I'm not paying attention? Or maybe Cheerio Copper. That I like. Cheerio Copper. So until next week, folks, Cheerio Copper. Not Copper. Cobber. C-O-B-B-E-R. Okay. Cheerio Copper.
    56:41
    It just sounds wrong. Bye-bye. WizardAmusement.com. The site to visit for custom pinball shooter odds. Easy to install, totally unique. Mention Blockade Podcast for 10% off your order. It was Remusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization.
    57:05
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blockade is delivered to. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some pinball.