Hello, loyal Wedgehead podcast listeners. It's your normal host of the show, Alan, here to introduce a new and possibly reoccurring bonus series of episodes of the show for y'all to enjoy. As loyal listeners already know, we recently dropped our release schedule from every single week, which we did for two whole years straight down to every other week instead. Boy, oh boy, did I hear from so many of y'all who were bummed out that you weren't going to get a fresh new episode every week anymore. and since we were chopping it up in our private discord server like we always do with our most hardcore fans and supporters of the show i basically said hey if there's anyone of you here that wants to write record and edit your own episode of the show and if it met my criteria for a quality piece of audio entertainment then i would be happy to release it on our channel in between the release of our normal episodes to fill that gap with some hot and fresh bonus content i pitched an idea that i had in my notes for a long time which was essentially a series where instead of defending a bad game, quote unquote, like we have done since the beginning of our Die on this Hill series, what if we just asked someone to passionately articulate why they thought that their favorite pinball machine might actually be the best pinball machine of all time? If you have always wanted to talk in a room alone to yourself about your favorite game of all time, and then edit it, and then share it to a whole world of internet strangers, well, look no further. Go to ko-fi.com slash Wedgehead Podcast, throw us a few bucks of support and you will receive your link to our private discord server automatically then you can come and discuss with us what game you'd want to do yourself we can give some helpful tips on what equipment we would use to record slash edit and examples of our previous episode outlines that we wrote for the show to help you make your own and if it comes out good then yours can be released in future episode too but without further ado it's my pleasure to introduce Paul Michael Melio's best game ever episode, Jaws. King Kong ain't got shit on me. Sometimes my genius is, it's almost frankly. And that's the bottom line, the stone cold tipso. I am the greatest one in the whole world. Well, Dick, here's the deal. I'm the best there is, plain and simple. I mean, I wake up in the morning, I piss excellence. Such a thing would be greater than all the magic and all the treasures in all the world. I am the greatest intercontinental heavyweight champion that ever lived, and I am the greatest professional wrestler that ever lived. Perfection being measured by its own relentless logic. But I'll say one thing. I am, for one very, very good reason. The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be. Hope you're holding up, and welcome back to the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. And now for something completely different. My name is Paul Michael Melio, and the Wedgehead Podcast is taking go at a new type of segment. One that is a genuine examination, as well as a nice little optimistic dive into why exactly some of our favorite games are as good as they are, and where exactly they went right. These are not games anyone has to defend, simply a look into the all-time greats. The segment is fittingly called Best Game Ever, and good lord am I thrilled to kick it off with my personal favorite, Jaws. Before we begin or do anything else, you're here for the same reason I'm here. So cheers to over 100 episodes of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. Let's keep that going. Let's keep dying on hills. Let's keep bringing on shockingly good guests. Because what? A cup of coffee is like $20 now? So for the measly cost of just one $20 cup of coffee, you too can say that you gave two Portland men your money. Oh yes. Actually, just give them like $5 or whatever. There's no lower limit, so go nuts. But send something to ko-fi-wedgeheadpodcast and you'll get the opportunity to join the most annoyingly time-consuming Discord I ever did see, where you can see the insights of operators and industry professionals alike. And hear me rant about Jaws and Shack Attack to no one in particular late into the hours of the night. Let's begin. Released in 1995, Shack Attack was designed by industry veteran Jon Norris, whose work on such games as Deadly Weapon directly influenced prolific designer Keith Elwin, who went on to release Jaws Pinball in January of 2024 as his sixth Table with Stern. Featuring artwork by Michael Michael Barnard, whose additional work you may recognize from Rush, mechs fantastically implemented by Mr. Harris Drake, and the dynamic co-team of Elwynn's longtime programmer Rick Nagel, as well as newcomer at the time Elizabeth Elizabeth Gieske, who went on to work alongside absolute legend Dwight Sullivan on Dungeons & Dragons. The team additionally managed to bring Jaws actor Richard Richard Dreyfuss himself, reprising his role as Matt Hooper for the game's callouts. And as is tradition when it comes to Pinside.com, I think nothing of the ratings until I agree with them. So I'm more than happy to report that this table is currently ranked a well-earned spot of number 5 of greatest of all time. And those numbers don't lie, until I decide they do. That being said, yes, Pinsight is wrong. It's wrong because any game being near the top requires reviewers to lie that it deserves a perfect, perfect score. Which, of course, it never does. And Jaws will be no exception, as I'll make sure to dig into some of its flaws as well. Also, something I don't want to do here is simply list off a feature Jaws has and go, Whoa, that's awesome, followed by another feature and whoa, that's awesome again. no, I'm going to discuss my own experiences with the pin and how those experiences showed me how multifaceted and interesting this game truly is. Because let's not bullshit ourselves here, your experiences inherently bleed into why your favorite is your favorite. If your dog fucking dies while you're playing Shack Attack, you will have a besmirched view of Shack Attack. The positives of the game kept me coming back, and through my time on Jaws learned that it was a versatile, non-linear game that holds tight to risk and reward philosophy while not only catering to a variety of skill levels, but to a variety of play styles as well. Now let's begin the story exactly where you'd expect the story of Jaws to begin, which is naturally Stockholm, Sweden. Uh, no. So we moved to Stockholm, my wife and I, which is a wild thing to convince a Peruvian to do, and that was right before the winter of 23 when I got work there as a game designer. But in that rather Arctic winter, when the sun just sort of fucks off at about 2 p.m., you need something to keep you sane. You need something bright, something flashing, and you know where I'm going with this. So we found Rok in Odinplan after a few months. Truly a huge shout out. I need to take a moment for this to all the spots in Stockholm, honestly. I and you should fully appreciate that there's extra hurdles in operating machines abroad. but they kept it in great enough condition that we'd trudge 30 minutes through the snow happily and they made her first experience great because yes we got out of the snow and there was a jaws pro in all of its glory and her first reaction man my new favorite thing now is getting new players into pinball because of it i am chasing that goddamn high because i'm jealous of new players. I'm openly jealous. I had played pinball agnostically throughout my life, a bit of time at 82 in my 20s. But it's hard when you're deep in a community. It's hard to step back disassociate and realize good God it come this far to take the type of ah pinball they still make those things folks and i guess they imagine pinball to be a carnival ass pop bumpers digging lit by tungsten lights but instead the t-rex eats the fucking ball and you get to see the reaction to that and i'm so happy she went for jaws because it has something that's not only solid for the game as a whole But it has something that's particularly and wildly great for newcomers. But before I get into that, though, I did fuck up. Majorly. In falling in love with bringing in new players, in this case it was the fine denizens of Sweden, I had no idea how precise the science is to pick out a good pin for newcomers. And it's not, oh, is this easy to play? I stupidly, stupidly would try to bring them in with, come, pick your favorite theme. Ah, what do you like? And these lovely idiots would choose Black Knight's sort of rage as their first game ever. Absolutely hate it, of course, being like, flipperspiel are dumpt. And walk off to their snow and their healthcare. And it took many, many players to discover these key elements that were needed. The name of one of the first major design elements was coined by Ty Ueda, co-owner of Pops Pinball, which of course, if you're in New Robert Englunds, absolutely go check out. Please go play on location. And Ty had coined the phrase, um, woohoo moments when he was defending Data East's Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. now your opinions of rocky and bullwinkle aside you already know what a woohoo moment is you know that it's grand prix spinners it's whitewater's waterfall it's the pathing in uncanny x-men it's most papaduke ramps honestly it's the snick shot it's showtime woohoo is the question does the kinetic energy of the game inspire a fun experience for players? And that is a valid question, because if we're not enjoying ourselves, what the hell are we doing here? On Jaws, you can feel it, particularly comparative to Elwynn's earlier games. It redirects pathing on both horizontal spinners as well as vertical flipbacks, absolutely whips the ball, God bless it. But when it comes to the actual toys, on the record, Elwynn stated that he designed the whitewood around the toys themselves. Honestly, a decision that paid off in full. Not only do you feel such toys as the shark fin or the shark mech front and center, but the geometry feels bespoke to these showstoppers. an opinion i strongly hold is that jaws does events perfectly and what i mean by that is this unlike say championship pub great game where a state-changing event does stop the game or similar with video modes which are the devil any fin popping out of the water or sharp popping out of the water. A lot of things pop out of the water. This and the single-use upper all weave seamlessly into the game's flow without holding your playtime hostage. And even though the toys in-game may not have the razzle-dazzle of some of the showstopper toys on par with, say, a talking dragon that spits multi-balls or a sentinel that's ripping through the board, what it does have is elements seamlessly fitting to the flow of gameplay. Thank God that it's not for show. It's not some giant monkey dancing in the back, not really doing anything. Everything that's in-game is for the game. Vaguely related, that's actually why I really do appreciate Eric Meunier's approach to toys, is that they're pinball first. Anyway, the woohoo moments have to be kinetic, as no one leaves the theater humming the lights. Crucially, too, is that all of them are the most dangerous shots in-game, as nearly every other lane in some form returns to the in-lanes. The upper has a fail condition that can easily drain, as do the shark and the fin, which is fucking great design. The more exciting the moment is in-game, the more thrilling and the more high-scoring, the more directly it has higher risk and reward, and that just feels seamless. Anyway, Sophia made her first plunge. I think it was Jerry Thompson who did the audio for Jaws as he crafted the perfect fishing reel sound as you start off. It Pavloves you into loving that game, getting excited. And her ball whipped around that first horizontal spinner, the reel... Okay, she didn't go woohoo, but I swear, I swear she at least went whoa. and from there Swedish winters were for the sharks and I mean Christmas markets and happiness but for the sake of this podcast yes I confess I do associate Sweden with hunting sharks no so we move to Chicago and it's time for an absolute shout out to the Logan Arcade which kind of set the bar annoyingly high for us true shout out though to playing on location the way the good lord intended so if you're unfortunate to find yourself in portland at least try to make things better by heading over to wedgehead pinball for a damn good selection of games and an equally damn good vibe also free play mode which best way to play in my dumb opinion really lets you uh play to your heart's content if you're in chicago though logan it's uh it's year-round halloween there literally uh it felt like home after a certain point to go in and get greeted by the little vampire and wolf man dolls. Twice a week, we'd go to Logan and relax. I mean, I needed to relax because I was still employed by the Swedes, which meant I had to wake up at 3 a.m., which is a bit of an off way to live. But we'd go to Logan, we'd relax, and we played Jaws to Relax. Jaws to Relax for a very specific reason, and bear with me on this as to why. So George Gomez is easily, easily, easily one of my favorite designers, and I'm paraphrasing him vaguely, but he said in an interview, the ball should still do something interesting, even on a miss. For those unaware of Jaws' board, between, I think, every lane is a stand-up target. They're called shark towers, and in-game they close the beaches. What that translates to in gameplay, though, is you're always progressing. Always, even on a flop, when Sophie and I would inevitably miss a lane, we'd say, oh, well, at least we're closing the beaches, which is wild because there is not one goddamn ounce of fat on Jaws on almost the entire board. There really isn't. It's all cartilage. Ha ha ha ha. But no, you feel a playfield intentionally covered with what could be interpreted as not failures, but as various degrees of success. and what was taught to me early early as a designer is that you could punish the hell out of players in short bursts think classic arcade games or for a pinball reference uh the fantastic tna however various degrees of success and the constant progression allow for a longer playing game to feel substantially less repetitive and less redundant as a do or die for an easy example of this imagine you're playing dungeons and dragons um by that i mean actual dungeons dragons and not brian eddy's dungeon dragons and your dm just throws in rewards at the end of these great long quests that give you absolutely nothing just empty chests if this is a 60 hour campaign that makes you the player hyper aware of wasted time and wasted chances i'm not saying you have to give them all the points all the time all the wins no What I am addressing though is the time investment is something any player is keenly aware of and robbing them of that is the difference between something that is challenging and something that is frustrating. To clarify, I'm not saying Jaws only accomplishes this because of the clear-the-beach stand-ups. No, no, the shark bounties as well are varied enough and diverse enough with the requirements that you will stumble into a bit of completion on them regardless. time is a currency in this game, and you can feel it. I know that I should probably save the follow-up point for the end, but it seems like a fitting time to throw this one out there, and one of the more important reasons why Jaws is so exceptional. On low and medium level play, I have never seen a player walk away from a game either surprised with how little or how high their score was. And I know that sounds trivial to some people listening, but that is a wild achievement for code and rules to feel so fair that players unanimously accept it. Example, quite recently, I was playing Venom, and I looked up to find that I had like an extra like 30, 40 million points. I had no idea what I did to earn it, but now that's my high score. And I hate that that's my high score because I feel like other games I've played and tried in Venom, I feel like I've earned better. Also, Insider Connect was down, so it's like this phantom-ass high score that's haunting me. But the point is this, and any coders listening will know this, you know how this works. If you do everything right, no one will know you've done anything at all. So absolute shout out to the often overlooked aspect of development, the programmers. Phenomenal job, Elizabeth Geiske and Rick Niggle. Because when you play Jaws, you're not frustrated. You get to enjoy Jaws. Too much Jaws. Just way too much. Okay, I have to address a problem here. If you've played it, you know it. You know the problem. The video clips are eerily long. Everyone says this, this isn't some kind of new revelation, and there's nothing more I could say about it except it stops the game dead sometimes. I can say I don't think Jersey Jack's tables get enough credit for them getting it down to kind of a science. The recent games in particular have the movie cues or the music clips punctuate instead of show and I think that should be an industry standard. Punctuate because nobody's watching the screen and nobody wants to look up for that damn long. I promise you I have seen Jaws. I am not playing to see Jaws. Anyways, though, with the clips, we did become Jaws fanatics from the table. We came from watching the table. We watched, went back to the movie because of it. We played more. We actually got a better sense of Elwynn's games by playing it throughout Logan. Donate to Wedgehead so you can hop onto the Discord because the host, Alan Wedgehead, yes, the Alan Wedgehead, shit, I have his last name here somewhere, said something that actually really caught my attention on the Discord, which is that he compared who Elowen was as a designer vaguely to the work of Quentin Tarantino. What he meant by that is this. Elowen is an exceptionally skilled player with decades worth of familiarity with tables from the past. And what he does similar to Tarantino is renovate designs to modern work without it's losing its feel or appeal. And this is an absolute hell of a skill to be able to do, is take an older design to understand it fully and know exactly how and where to expand on it. And you can see his strong influences. Hell, bits of Jon Norris's deadly weapon are on Jaws. It's the in-lane return behind the drops, which functions in Jaws as the harpoon quickshot. I had a blast studying its flow, because at this point I've been working for a few months on a homebrew. quick shout out to Trident Pinball Trident Pinball if you dear listener ever look at a table and think ha I could do that why not spend thousands of dollars to be proven wrong no but it's one of the most fun things I've done in ages gotten some incredible assistance from some truly talented and supportive people and with Mark Ritchie easily being one of my favorite designers they've helped me construct a foundation for a pin that aims to capture his left right weave and that always fun crossover flow because that is inherently healthy for a game. In my opinion, you've seen it when it's done poorly, when the ball keeps coming back to that one damn flipper and you feel like half of the playfield is wasted. Borg actually handles this pretty well. I don't really have a follow-up to this, so I'm just going to keep moving on, but Borg does handle it well. This flow is prominent in Jaws, and by god does it help with shot variety. It really does. If you take a second to examine the board, backhands aside, the fishing reel spinner shoots left, returns right. Quint's shack shoots left, returns right. The center ramp shoots right, returns left. And the spinner shoots right, returns left. And then the orca returns every which way because it's damn undervalued. I'll get back to that later. but by god though this makes the shot variety so nicely consistent which is so damn hydrating for a long playing game take time to watch higher levels of play if you disagree with me the ball does not park it's great to see every little woohoo in this game being fully utilized in the case that you disagree with me and just like hate jaws just hate it i'm gonna be a nice guy and i'm going to give you something you can easily dismiss me with and write me off as absolutely insane and that's to me the level of crossover flow in this game has it makes this game fish tales the adventure to me um i don't know what to say i'm loading up fishing reels before starting a video mode involving harpoons and hunting fish i think sharks are fish dolphins aren't fish but no thinking about it now they both have fish fighter they both have feeding frenzy wait what the fuck this bit start kind of as a joke but yeah a high risk centered captive ball there's some legitimate uh mark ritchie's fishtails similarities or i guess long playing shark tails i guess anyway uh give fishtails a go some may argue it is one of the better pinball machines about lying about fishing anyway anyway the point is yes longer games uh have become more common partially so newcomers to the game do get more bang for their buck and just does everything that these longer gate playing games should be doing the shot variety demanded from shark hunts are given seamlessly to the left right flow forcing the player away from chopping wood the shark and fin as priority bash maintain a high level of risk and reward, all while crucially being within the bozo zone. So lower and mid-level skilled players who matter just as much as you can hit them consistently and regularly while having a satisfying match. Expanding on that super quick, it's lovely that so many of the mechs are in the bozo zone and that newcomers can walk away with their own sense of victory. It's seamless and consistent for them to at least say, oh, wow, I got a shark. Oh, I got a fin. Comparable is, very recently, Sophie and I discovered a medieval madness. She had never played it before. She got the trolls. She got the castle. To her, that was a win for the very first time ever touching it. And that keeps players coming back. Back to Jaws, the shark towers as well seamlessly blend into long-playing games, allowing a nice trickle of progress, even during rejects, but adding an incredibly satisfying and rewarding hurry-up when completed, or simply if you're going for the sort of sprinting Hasselhoff strategy at a higher level of play. Relaxing is not the right word to use but we play we feel our scores were fair with a nice variety to the gameplay and when we missed at least we closed some beaches There is a shot I need to address though and I do think it a legitimate issue for the game I mean, objectively, it is, when I bring up my love for Jaws with players, they do frequently respond with this one damn shot. The Wave Ramp. and on paper the shot is just incredible it weaves behind 180s up to an upper play field and what's fascinating about it is that if the ramp rejects it plops the ball directly down onto the habit rail from quince shack again highlighting jaws design technique of different levels of failure and it's done wrong damn near everybody online or in person uh that i've discussed this with has accused the shot to the single-use upper playfield of being rattly, of being shaky, or just off. And what's wild about this is I would have assumed with how difficult it was that it was a spacing issue. Shout-out to Colosta on the Discord. Huge shout-out, honestly, because they had access to both Jaws and Whitewater. And went in and measured both for me, because Whitewater's spine chiller ramp is absolutely flawless. But no, both entrances are exactly two inches. The actual upper for Jaws, when you could actually get up through those rattling guides, is genuinely interesting. And not just interesting because you can path to any of the three flippers from it, no. It's also interesting because you can flat-out drain from a failed shot. I strongly believe the upper should have been harder. Risk-reward and all that jazz. But getting to there should have been easier, if not almost easy. Smooth. Because it's wild to have a risky upper that gives bonuses from two shots and plants you anywhere around the board. I mean, hell, that's Dennis Nordman's Whitewater. But getting up to the upper should not be an ordeal. and rattly geometry excites a grand total of no players. This is quintessentially an idea that works better in theory. If anyone was waiting for it, no, I am not really going to talk about Jaws eating the ball. Somebody had asked me about it. No, no. For those unaware, there's a complaint online, very common, where people legitimately take seriously Seriously, that the game is wrong in some ways because the shark doesn't eat the ball. Keith Elwin very literally explained in the making of video as to why this doesn't work. And the short answer is that the reposition of an open bottom mouth not only looked utterly bizarre and silly, but it would also function awkwardly as well. And that's game design. I can tell you that it's a craft for working within your capabilities and limitations. So it does personally frustrate me to see that this is still treated as an issue. Look, if you absolutely need to have the shark-eating balls, just tie an IKEA bluehay to your stranger things and go nuts. No, so we moved to Miami. And Miami's Miami. It's like a poorly modded Grand Theft Auto. And life's life. Humber is going to take forever. There's a few Jaws in Miami, because of course there's a few Jaws in Miami. And for now, it's just us taking our time to climb to one billion, you know? Maybe we'll find once or twice a week to play. We play a larger selection now, mind you. For some reason, Miami's weirdly into Jersey Jacks. I honestly don't know why. Ellie's as well. But we always, always find time to play at least one Jaws. And maybe you have this. I hope you have this, because it's a really cool feeling. to have a pin that's just kind of yours your life pin whatever you'd call it like it more than clicks it's the one that you just keep coming back to you it watches you raise your kids i don't know it's i view it as home base and i hope you find that one too um and no crazy enough uh after the release of the jaws 50th anniversary it was sophia who flat out told me we're going to get this And we are. I mean, no one box 50th couldn't be more excited. Because yes, go out, go play on location. Go play on location. Bring your friends. And when you do, trust me, start them on Stranger Things. But sometimes you just need more Jaws. Sometimes you need Jaws and to come home with it. And for it to be part of your home. Because unrelated, that's also my defense of toppers. I mean, it's like the Big Lebowski. It ties the room together, man. And if you've got like an evil dead zombie seller lady, at least it's a conversation piece. Shark Pinball is also a hell of a conversation piece. It's a life piece. Newcomers can come and at least take a whack at it, and then we're there in the afternoon. I struggle justifying this game to my accountant. But I can easily, no, I can effortlessly justify having this game to myself. because it's a game, a machine, yes, frankly, a piece of art that was our Stockholm winters and the start of our marriage. It brought me back to pinball after quite a few years. And we always will show it off to friends because in the end, it was that consistently good. It was always there. And it was well-made enough that I haven't even started to get bored of it. We'll be there for our first billion. And hey, when the bad days come, at least we'll hit the beaches. and that is my defense of jaws i want to thank you actually thank you for taking the time to listen uh it's been genuinely fun to record and i hope you have a pleasant rest of your day wait wait wait super fucking quick uh so it is now one week after initial recording right after expo and just needed to set the record straight on a few little things uh first just want to say that one of you bastards got me sick, which is why my voice sounds great, actually. I like it like this. And second, just wanted to clarify during my initial point on Gottlieb's 1990 Deadly Weapon that while, yes, Norse was the designer, it was Trudeau's initial layout, so credit where credit is due. Third, yes, we went ahead and we bought a Jaws, or at least put a down payment for the 50th, so I'll pretend that that counts. And fourth and finally, fuck, the team at Stern is weirdly friendly. At Expo, that is. Unbelievably open to questions and gushed a lot about a certain shark game. Got to talk to quite a few people on the team, which was a reminder that, well, yes, for us, it's easier for us to say, oh, John Papadiuk's Voltaire, Nortonbin's Elvira, or in this case, Elwynn's Jaws, that is always just a convenient shortening of names as these are just wonderful machines that require countless amounts of love and labor from a wide amount of people that truly care. And that is the optimistic bullshit that I'll end with. That with a truly wonderful game like Jaws, you'll see all these ideas and all these iterations on full display, ending with a game that really is for everyone. A game that an operator can put on the floor for players of all ages, of all skill sets, and they'll gather around endlessly and it'll earn on location. And that operator will be really glad they did, Alan. All right, time for me to sleep. Take care. © BF-WATCH TV 2021